The term Native American Renaissance has been criticized on a number of points. As James Ruppert writes, "Scholars hesitate to use the phrase because it might imply that Native writers were not producing significant work before that time, or that these writers sprang up without longstanding community and tribal roots. Indeed, if this was a rebirth, what was the original birth?"James Ruppert, "Fiction: 1968–Present". In The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature, ed. Kenneth M. Roemer and Joy Porter (CUP, 2005). Page 173 Other critics have described it as "a source of controversy".Craig Womack, "Book-Length Native Literary Criticism", in Reasoning Together by Janice Acoose, Lisa Brooks, Craig S. Womack, Tol Foster, Daniel Heath Justice, Christopher B Teuton (Oklahoma, 2008), page 15 Rebecca Tillett argues that "while the definition of the recent burgeoning of Native writing as a "renaissance" is highly accurate in its description of the sudden growth in the numbers of Native writers finding publication, it is also profoundly inaccurate in its tendency to obscure the often specifically political histories of Indian oratory and writings upon which many Native writers are drawing."Rebecca Tillett, "On the Cutting Edge," in Native American Renaissance: Literary Imagination and Achievement, p. 85
