Jamake Highwater began writing at a time when Americans were beginning to realize that "literature" existed on the North American continent before the coming of the Europeans and that many non-Europeans had contributed to the development of literature in the United States. In 1969, N. Scott Momaday received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel House Made of Dawn.

Then, in 1970, the American Indian Historical Society hosted the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars at Princeton University. Along with African-American literature, Native American literature was beginning to receive the attention it deserved.

In 1977, drawing on the work of a variety of scholars of Native American literature and the research that he did when writing Indian America (1975), Highwater combined a wide range of traditional Native American tales and legends from many tribes into the book Anpao. While others had previously collected Native American legends, Highwater was the...