While a student in the 12th grade, Dr. John Miles read “House Made of Dawn,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Native American writer N. Scott Momaday. Miles was hooked. 
 
“I fell in love with it,” he says. “I hadn’t read anything like it before. I was fascinated by the cultural aspects of it and the writing.” 
 
The novel helped to set a course for Miles’ future. In his undergraduate years and later in his teaching career in high school and college, he built on his knowledge of Native American literature and culture. 
That interest continues today as an associate professor in the English department at Wofford and dean of institutional effectiveness and academic planning. He says Native American literature and history have been pushed to the back of the room but that recent scholarship has changed the direction. 
 
“For a long time, the definition of ‘American literature’ mostly meant a certain set of authors,” he says. “That has been continuously broken down by scholars. I always insert native people into their historical moments. I try to do justice to the historical timeline so that students can understand that Native American writing is not an add-on.” 
 
Miles said Native American writers were sharing their experiences in print more than 200 years ago but that their work often has been overlooked. 
 
“It’s always fascinated me how native people have had to deal with colonization and how that system has tried to eradicate them,” he says. “Native people were writing against that.” 
 
Miles grew up in North Carolina and received his doctorate from the University of New Mexico after undergraduate work at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and master’s work at North Carolina State University. He chose to attend New Mexico because of its connections with native peoples and culture. 
 
“I always looked at it from a scholarly approach, but when I got to New Mexico, it became personal. You see almost Third World conditions on some of the reservations. You see how the first inhabitants of a place have been reduced to living like that, while knowing that they’ve been writing about it and fighting it for a long time.”