Finding Empowerment through Writing and Reading, or Why Am I Doing This?: An Unpopular Writer's Comments about the State of American Indian Literary Criticism

Abstract

In late 1998 I became editor of the American Indian Quarterly. A year or so later I realized that unless I put a stop to repetitive and basically uninformative literature submissions, then I would continue to drown in paper. Destroying trees in order to print tiresome essays is one thing, but I also became worried that American Indian literary criticism threatened to take over the whole of Indigenous studies. Indeed, instead of scholars deciding to enter other crucial fields of policy, history, science, social work, environmental protection, and recovery of Indigenous knowledge, we now have hundreds of scholars earnestly studying the fiction works of Indigenous writers (or people who claim to be Indigenous; it appears that all a good writer has to do is claim to be a member of tribe x, Y, or z and everyone takes his or her word for it). Most of these students of Native literature either do not look for important messages of hope, empowerment strategies, and tribal unity and strength, or else their fave writers do not write about such things in the first place. After posting the new AIQ guidelines that stated the journal was no longer accepting submissions on those writers who Cherokee writer Daniel Heath Justice calls The Noble Nine, I received some commentary from disgruntled individuals who were angry that I had taken such a stance. On the other hand, I received even more support from dozens of Indigenous activist writers (and some study literature) who were enthusiastic that finally someone had made a statement about the questionable usefulness of the work of many scholars in the field. At the same time that I put a halt to accepting submissions on those writers in hopes of curtailing repetition, I also stated that AIQ was not accepting submissions about identity because far and away the majority of