From the Editor

Abstract

From the Editor Kiara M. Vigil Haŋ mitakuyepi (Greetings, my relatives), It is an honor for me to guide the publication of SAIL as its new editor. Along with new interventions and insights, the articles in this issue represent a stylistic change as we are now asking authors to submit abstracts, keywords, and to follow the Chicago Manual of Style’s guidelines using endnotes. These changes reflect some of the best practices used by other leading journals that publish work primarily within Native American and Indigenous studies. The addition of abstracts and keywords will also make it easier for other researchers to connect with the work that is being published by SAIL. The articles in this issue represent topics and interdisciplinary methods that scholars of Indigenous literatures, broadly conceived, are using in arguments that engage deeply with Indigenous women’s writings, politics, and performance as well as bodies, lands, and topics that have transnational and hemispheric dimensions. From public art, to theater, to place-based storytellers and stories that include Abiayala and Canada as well as Turtle Island, many of the authors featured in this issue are engaging with questions and theories that concern experiences of trauma due to resource extraction, violence against women, and other forms of exploitation and oppression that are linked to ongoing colonial policies and practices. Despite this range and diversity, the arrangement of the articles in this issue aims to showcase powerful moments of intersection where these authors speak to one another, in relation to land and bodies, gender and performance, and also home and sovereignty. This curated constellation of scholarship offers readers an opportunity to appreciate each article on its own while also connecting these contributors to one another in new and impactful ways as they read the issue in its entirety. [End Page vii] The interdisciplinary methods that many of these authors use are worth highlighting as readers are tasked with thinking about literature in relation to art installations, in the case of Isabella Huberman’s “From the Floodland: Stories of Hydro in Eeyou Istchee,” which brings together two stories about water and land. These stories highlight the “hydro-colonial dispossession” that Huberman contends enable us to focus on the ongoing relationships with the dead. Bringing together literature and public art, Huberman’s analysis emphasizes the power of place-based connections to those who have been lost while attending to what these works share in regard to the histories and persistence of colonial resource extraction. Another powerful work that brings together law and drama through interpretations of two plays, by lawyer–dramatist Mary Kathryn Nagle, is Cathy Waegner’s “Performing Justice in Recent Native American Women’s Theater: Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty and Manahatta.” Waegner theorizes performative sovereignty and the power of restorative justice, noting how Nagle’s plays transform received modes of perceiving and staging Native America in the twenty-first century. Focusing on examples of Indigenous women’s theater, Waegner argues that Nagle’s Sovereignty and Manahatta provide experimental representations of time, focusing on the strength of women and the pain of Western-based hegemonic practices. Shelli Rottschafer’s analytical framework centers place-based querencia as a means to reclaim what was lost due to trauma caused by displacement, in her reading of Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short stories “Sugar Babies” and “Ghost Sickness.” Reclamations of traditional knowledges are made possible despite experiences of poverty and displacement, and as such, craft new spaces for healing and revitalization. Rottschafer’s work emphasizes the overlaps and productive edges of Indigenous and Chicanx community formations and identities with regard to how writers, like Fajardo-Anstine, are able to speak out against prejudice, institutionalized racism, and use their ‘querencia’ as a tool for social justice. Ultimately, Rottschafer’s article highlights reconciliation through storytelling and argues that both “Sugar Babies” and “Ghost Sickness” provide readers with traditional ecological knowledge and a more inclusive approach to understanding the past as well as the present of nation building. Like Rottschafer, Tiffany Miller’s “Decolonial Ch’owen across Abiayala and Turtle Island: Calixta Gabriel Xiquín’s Poetic Invocations of [End Page viii] Kaqchikel Spirituality, the Cardinal Points, and Trans-Indigenous Grandmothers” enables readers to engage with Indigenous...