Introduction: Ghanaian and Indigenous American Literatures in Conversation

Reviewed by: Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island ed. by Sophie McCall et al. Michael P. Taylor Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island. Edited by Sophie McCall, Deanna Reder, David Gaertner, and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2017. v + 385 pp. Illustrations, works cited, notes. $31.19 paper. Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island is a collection of Indigenous American stories that is long overdue for the fields of Indigenous and North American literatures. As the first critical reader of its kind, Read, Listen, Tell brings together a [End Page 314] variety of Indigenous stories from across Turtle Island (North America) with an exceptionally accessible structure and tone that encourages readers to participate in the critical processes of Indigenous storytelling. In essence, Read, Listen, Tell invites more and better engagement with Indigenous literatures by teaching readers how to approach Indigenous stories through Indigenous ways of knowing and being. While the editors openly acknowledge how the collection challenges Eurocentric literary studies, canon formation, and their associated sociopolitical implications, Read, Listen, Tell maintains a noncombatant decolonial conversation that encourages non-Indigenous interactions with diverse Indigenous literary traditions and the broader cultural, historical, and theoretical contexts from which they emerge. In combination with this collection’s companion, Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures (2016), Read, Listen, Tell sets a new standard for expanding instructor and student engagement with Indigenous literatures at any level. The editors have organized Read, Listen, Tell into eight thematic clusters that reflect the central concepts of contemporary Indigenous literary studies: the power of stories, land and homeland, language, Indigenous knowledges, story cycles, community and self, shifting perspectives, and genres of Indigenous futures. Each section begins with an introduction that simultaneously invites readers to approach the respective concept through an Indigenous epistemological framework while modeling how individual stories within each section exemplify or broaden the conceptual significance of Indigenous stories. The stories placed in conversation within each section transcend time and space, disrupting Euro-settler chronologies, genres, and conceptual understandings. In all, the collection features the work of forty-five Indigenous American writers, representing more than thirty distinct tribal nations, from E. Pauline Johnson’s (Mohawk) “As It Was in the Beginning” (1899) to Sixto Canul’s (Maya) “The Son Who Came Back from the United States” (1992) to Daniel Heath Justice’s (Cherokee) “Tatterborn” (2017). For Great Plains scholars, the collection places the Indigenous stories of the Great Plains within their hemispheric Indigenous conceptual, historical, and literary contexts. Read, Listen, Tell is the beginning of a more student-centric approach to contextualizing, gathering, and telling Indigenous stories. As such, the editors leave the reader feeling the need to get involved in more reading, writing, and teaching Indigenous literatures. The editors recognize that they have left out much in terms of the diverse genres and traditions of Indigenous literatures but see it as an opportunity for the instructor, student, reader, and next anthology editor to connect this volume’s short stories and their respective contexts with their much broader generic, thematic, national, and trans-Indigenous relatives. Read, Listen, Tell is a starting point, an invitational foundation of simultaneously student- and community-centered literary engagement that will surely strengthen the roots and extend the branches of future Indigenous literary studies within the Great Plains and beyond. [End Page 315] Michael P. Taylor Department of English Brigham Young University Copyright © 2019 Center for Great Plains Studies

This project analyzes eight novels which represent revolt or resistance by varied Native peoples against the European and Euro-American colonization of the Americas. I take a comparative approach to literatures of the Americas because of the dearth of research examining the literatures of both continents side by side, particularly literatures by and about Indigenous Americans. Chapter One introduces the theoretical bases for the project, including colonial and postcolonial theories, Native American literary theories, and aesthetic concerns specific to American Indian literatures. The second chapter is a comparative analysis of Miguel Angel Asturias’s Men of Maize and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. These novels explore revolutions by Indigenous Americans against a colonial superstructure, and both are rooted deeply in Mesoamerican cosmology. The novels’ revolutionary themes and their aesthetic approaches, which draw on both the oral and written traditions of Native American peoples, provide a foundation for my other chapters. This second chapter also demonstrates how Homi Bhabha’s third space operates as a model for the performance of hybridity through the linguistic act of divination. Chapter Three explores the application of Gerald Vizenor’s trickster hermeneutics in three trickster-narrated novels, Vizenor’s own Chancers, Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, and Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water. Each of these novels resists hegemonic Euro-American discursive tactics through their trickster narrators; my application of a trickster hermeneutics reveals another manifestation of the third space. Chapter Four is an analysis of James Welch’s Fools Crow, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, and LeAnne Howe’s Shell Shaker. These novels require their readers to participate in the Native spiritualities presented; through a third space, readers from both inside and outside those spiritualities can participate in the visions and ceremonies integral to the protagonists’ transformations. These transformations signify individual resistance to colonizing forces, a resistance that is doubled by the participating reader. Chapter Five, the conclusion, addresses the concerns of American Indian critics who disagree with the application of hybridity theory to Native literatures. I examine the performative and linguistic qualities of Bhabha’s third space to show its relevance for works that represent resistance to colonization in the Americas.

Drama, according to Jaye T. Darby, ”has always been an integral part of Native peoples' lives throughout history.” Despite the surging numbers of Native poets and novelists in American Literature, Native drama is still ignored and catches only little attention. Therefore, this essay examines ”Ghost Dance,” a play by Annette Arkeketa (Otoe-Missouria/Muscogee) in terms of the theory modified by a Native critic, Devon Abbott Mihesuah (Oklahoma Choctaw) in her indigenous American women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism to explore the four identity-quest phases of Hokti as an American Indian woman. From pre-encounter, encounter, immersion (emersion) to internalization, this essay would mainly interpret the construction of Hokti's subjectivity and the formation of Native identification in ”Ghost Dance” with the expectation of more studies/research on Native plays.

Six Hymns by Samson Occom Joanna Brooks (bio) Samson Occom (1723–1792) was a Mohegan tribal leader, an ordained Presbyterian minister, a major fund-raiser for what is now Dartmouth College, the leader of an intertribal revitalization and resettlement movement, and the first published Native American author. His Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772), the first English-language text written and published by a Native American author, appeared in more than a dozen editions and reprintings—including a Welsh-language translation —before 1820. This sermon and a short autobiographical narrative drafted by Occomin 1768 have been inducted into American literature anthologies and reintroduced to contemporary scholars of early American and Native American literatures. Yet it is not widely known that Occom also wrote and published in poetic forms and that he maintained a lifelong interest in hymnody. In 1774, he compiled, edited, and published the groundbreaking and widely popular A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs; Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians, of All Denominations; he also wrote at least six hymn-texts published in his Collection and elsewhere. On the merits of the Collection, leading musicologist Robert Stevenson has declared Occom "the first Native American published composer" ("First Composer").More than that, Occom was a leader in the movement to develop an indigenous American hymn tradition. Occom's original hymn-texts also distinguish him as the first Native American to publish poetry in English, and they establish the historical beginnings of Native English-language poetry in the eighteenth century. Occom's interest in hymnody arose from the intersection of Christian and Indian traditions in a context of social, cultural, and religious change. Song had long been an important element of community life and ritual among Occom's Mohegan and other southern New England tribes. During the eighteenth century, the continuity of tribal song traditions and tribal communities themselves came under tremendous threat. War, colonist population growth, poverty, land disputes, missionary colonialism, [End Page 67] disruption of traditional aqua- and agriculture, and other factors caused population reduction and community relocation among the tribes. Many young Indian men and women were indentured as household servants, laborers, and sailors; others were placed by well-meaning parents in boarding schools such as Wheelock's Moor's Indian Charity School (see Silverman). In all of these situations, removal from family, clan, and tribe meant reduced exposure to traditional languages, songs, and stories. The eighteenth century also brought great changes to American religious music, especially in New England where the Bay Psalm Book had long dominated congregational song. The advent of English hymnody and the introduction of works by Isaac Watts in the 1710s and 1720s challenged the dominance of psalmody and attracted adherents among New England clergy and elites. Cotton Mather admired Watts but nonetheless rejected his hymns for use in church worship; his nephew Mather Byles and other young New England poets emulated Watts as they did Alexander Pope. The 1720s also saw the rise of the regular singing movement, which advocated that the old practice of "lining out" psalms be abandoned for printed tunebooks. Thomas Walter, another nephew to Cotton Mather, helped lead the movement with his Grounds and Rules of Music Explained (1721) (see Beuchner). Colonial singing schools soon followed, as venues for instruction in new vocal techniques like fuguing and for the innovation of new tunes. The publication of American tunebooks such as James Lyon's Urania, or a Choice Collection of Psalm Tunes, Anthems, or Hymns (1762), Josiah Flagg's A Collection of the Best Psalm Tunes (1764), and William Billings's The New England Psalm Singer (1770) established this newly extensive tune repertoire. New Light partisans of the Great Awakening and later revivals disseminated and popularized these new developments in hymnody. More radical revivalists also promoted the use of American-composed hymn-texts, which were often paired with folk tunes. For example, the Separate Congregationalist James Davenport wrote his own hymns and led hymn-singing processions through the streets of New London, Connecticut.1 While Davenport's practices scandalized conservative clergy, they were well received among nearby Indian communities. In his autobiographical narrative, Samson Occom credited Davenport and other "Extraordinary Ministers" with effecting the...

The astounding saga of an American sea captain and the New Guinean nobleman who became his stunned captive, then ally, and eventual friend Sailing in uncharted waters of the Pacific in 1830, Captain Benjamin Morrell of Connecticut became the first outsider to encounter the inhabitants of a small island off New Guinea. The contact quickly turned violent, fatal cannons were fired, and Morrell abducted young Dako, a hostage so shocked by the white complexions of his kidnappers that he believed he had been captured by the dead. This gripping book unveils for the first time the strange odyssey the two men shared in ensuing years. The account is uniquely told, as much from the captive’s perspective as from the American’s. Upon returning to New York, Morrell exhibited Dako as a “cannibal” in wildly popular shows performed on Broadway and along the east coast. The proceeds helped fund a return voyage to the South Pacific—the captain hoping to establish trade with Dako’s assistance, and Dako seizing his chance to return home with the only person who knew where his island was. Supported by rich, newly found archives, this wide-ranging volume traces the voyage to its extraordinary ends and en route decrypts Morrell’s ambiguous character, the mythic qualities of Dako’s life, and the two men’s infusion into American literature—as Melville’s Queequeg, for example, and in Poe’s Pym . The encounters confound indigenous peoples and Americans alike as both puzzle over what it is to be truly human and alive.

"The Erotics of Race Suicide" examines the frequent representation of suicide in Progressive Era American literature in light of a widely proclaimed socio-political concept of the time: “race suicide.” Coined by the sociologist Edward Ross, the term “race suicide” nominates a nativist fear over the racial enervation of indigenous white Americans. Ross and other commentators on race suicide, most notably Theodore Roosevelt, proclaimed that the diminution of the indigenous white Americans was caused by their unwillingness to breed, signaling the self-destructive, “suicidal” tendency of the race. Consequently, through such means as the enactment of immigration restrictions, the reinforcement of anti-miscegenation laws, and the policing of non-reproductive sexual behaviors, Progressive politics attempted to halt the metaphorical suicide of the “master race.” While the specter of race suicide haunted the nation, Progressive Era literature saw the rise of a literary trend: characters who terminate their lives. My dissertation explores this concurrence between the self-willed deaths of the collective body and the individual body. By attending to the literary depiction of suicidal characters’ difficult negotiation of the twin discourses of race and sexuality in such works as Henry James’s The Bostonian (1886), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), Jack London’s Martin Eden (1909), and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (completed in 1911, published in 1950), my dissertation argues that suicide in Progressive Era American literature forges a symptomatic resistance to Foucauldian biopower: the life administering power that sutures the individual into the “population” through the double discourses of race and sexuality. The vogue for suicide in Progressive Era American literature represents the desire to thwart the very pro-natal and nativist politics that the Progressive Era seeks to maintain. In other words, it forms a countercurrent against both the era’s calcification of what is now known as the object-choice system of sexuality and its biological conceptions of race as reproduced through heterosexual intercourse. By contending that suicides in literature of the Progressive Era exemplify an eroticism invested in the nullification not only of the object-choice system, but also of subject-object opposition, my dissertation poses a challenge to the dominant understandings of genitally-organized sexuality.

Indigenous American Literature

Indigenous American Literature: The Inter-American Hemispheric Perspective

The phrase “son/s of the forest,” in relation to distinctive trees, was widely used in British periodicals throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the phrase began to appear in US periodicals in the early nineteenth century, however, a shift occurred as writers started applying “of the forest” specifically to Native Americans. This essay examines how the phrase is used with increasing frequency in American literature, mission reports, and government documents during the decades leading up to the 1830 Indian Removal Act. I argue that print culture was used to reimagine Indigenous Americans as commodities, such as trees, to justify their removal from the landscape. The article is framed by an examination of how William Apess used his works, namely A Son of the Forest , to resist the State-sponsored violence of Jacksonian policies and Indian Removals. (JU)

From the Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature (2014) to individual anthologies of Native American and Indigenous literatures, the current record of Alaska Native literature remains largely separated into two periods: contemporary—post-1960s—writers of fiction and poetry; and nineteenth-century translations of oral stories, songs, and traditions collected by non-Indigenous ethnographers and housed in the Bureau of American Ethnology. This essay engages the founding documents of the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood (ANB/ANS), organized in 1912 as the self-described “oldest known Indigenous persons’ civil rights organization in the world” (https://www.anbansgc.org" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">www.anbansgc.org/about-us/), to demonstrate how the writings of ANB/ANS bridge what is often represented as both a literary and ideological gap between pre- and post-modern Alaska Native identities. Rather than understanding modernity in Native Alaska as an era of unilateral assimilation, or to romanticize it as an era of radical resistance, the collectivist writings of ANB/ANS present a calculating, dialogic network of Alaska Native communities working together to protect and promote their own—as well as all Alaska Natives’—lands, waters, and peoples. Returning to the writings of the ANB/ANS rewrites modern Alaska as a period of literary activism that laid the foundation for the ongoing reclamation and resurgence of Alaska Native lands, languages, waters, and lives.

In a series of paintings instigated by the Columbus Quincentenary, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Confederated Salish and Kootenai) repeatedly reframes the map of the lower forty-eight United States through shifting, startling perspectives. One pair of paintings, entitled Tribal Map and Tribal Map II, replaces state names with the names of Indigenous nations in current “recognized” locations. The swath of states empty of Indigenous names, as well as the numerous names spilling across the borders of Oklahoma, invoke histories of forced removals and new homelands. At the same time, drips of paint that bleed the boundaries between states gesture toward the violent materiality of how those states were formed. Enlarging the frame to encompass hemispheric Indigenous presence, Smith includes text equations that compress histories of both continuance and containment: “Canada 2,250 reserves”; “American Indians Mexico 23.5 million”; “American Indians South America 20.4 million.” The names and numbers assert the hemispheric persistence of Indigenous peoples within geopolitical boundaries not of their own making. The dense narrative landscape of two other map paintings, Indian Map and Indian Country Today, papers the United States with newspaper clippings and photographs, illustrating the diversity and complexity of Indigenous experiences in the Americas.

They intended to catch salmon, but they did not get anything [before] the flood-tide set in. They went home. Coyote was angry. He defecated and spoke to his excrements: ‘‘You are a liar.’’ They said to him: ‘‘You with your bandylegs. When people kill a salmon they do not jump over the net. You must not step over your net. When the fi rst salmon are killed, they are not cut until the afternoon.’’ ‘‘Oh,’’ said Coyote, ‘‘You told me enough.’’—‘‘Coyote—His Myth,’’ Chinook Texts One hundred four years after the anthropologist Franz Boas published his translation of ‘‘Itia ¯’lapas Ia ¯’kxanam,’’ a story he heard from Charles Cultee (Chinook) during field research along the Columbia River in 1890, ‘‘Coyote—His Myth’’ found a new textual home in The Norton Anthology of American Literature .P art of an ew section of Native American trickster stories added to the fifth edition (1998), Coyote’s interrogation of his feces in his attempts to fish for salmon resides in volume 1, along with Hawthorne’s musings in the Custom-House and Ahab’s fulminations on the quarterdeck. 1 As translated by Boas and printed in Chinook Texts (1894), a Bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Cultee’s story revolves around Coyote’s repeated attempts, sometimes with companions, to catch salmon. After failing, he defecates. His feces first insult him and then offer detailed instructions about the proper methods for catching and preparing salmon. Following this advice, Coyote is at first successful but then fails. He defecates again, only to hear from his feces that there are further rules and proscriptions, often for a particular geo

The Generative Refusal of Mixtape Narratives and Hybrid Monsters in Stephen Graham Jones's Mongrels Kathryn Walkiewicz (bio) In 2013, eve tuck (Unangaxˆ) and c. ree published "A Glossary of Haunting," the first in a series of collaborative texts written by Indigenous and Asian American feminists that theorize the decolonial potential of horror and haunting. tuck and ree's inaugural piece disrupts the standard form and genre of the "glossary" to problematize how a typical glossary visually and discursively taxonomizes knowledge production. The essay does so in the name of "righting (and sometimes wronging) wrongs; about hauntings, mercy, monsters, generational debt, horror films, and what they might mean for understanding settler colonialism, ceremony, revenge, and decolonization."1 Their mixed-media approach and use of horror to right (and sometimes wrong) wrongs is part [End Page 403] of a broader theoretical turn to horror and the monstrous by Indigenous scholars, writers, and artists who seek to upend the dialectical logics that hold settler colonialism in place. While billy-ray belcourt (Driftpile Cree), brendan hokowhitu (Ngāti Pūkenga), maile arvin (Kanaka Maoli [Native Hawaiian]), and jeff barnaby (Mi'kmaq) all engage the monstrous, the spectral, or other staples of horror in their scholarship, film, and poetry, Blackfeet writer stephen graham jones is arguably the most well-known and prolific twenty-first-century Indigenous horror writer to do so.2 jones has authored over a dozen novels and countless short stories. While much of his writing pokes and prods at the spaces where horror and Indigeneity brush up against one another, his 2016 novel Mongrels explicitly meditates on some of the same questions about monstrosity taken up by the previously mentioned writers and artists. More specifically, Mongrels interrogates how the werewolf of horror might interrupt the racializing capitalist project of settler colonialism. Scholars of Jones's extensive body of work have compellingly argued for the significance of his contributions to Native American literature and contemporary U.S. fiction, but my interests here lie slightly elsewhere.3 In this essay, I am interested in Mongrels as a case study to think through werewolves specifically and Indigenous horror writing more broadly as part of the "generative refusal" work that Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) and other Indigenous artists and theorists call for.4 Generative refusal invites acts of Indigenous resurgence that reject state recognition as necessary for self-determination. I argue that Indigenous speculative fiction, especially Jones's use of what I term "mixtape narratives," provides a fruitful way not only to refuse the call of hegemonic settler life but to work against it productively—if horror as a genre of cultural expression has scripted the radical Other, especially the Indigenous/Black Other, as monstrous, then contending with [End Page 404] the genre is not only helpful but necessary. Horror, which organizes fear, anxiety, and other bad feelings, can be wielded to redirect these negative affects back at white supremacy. Accompanying Jones's mixtape narrative style is the trope of the El Camino, the werewolf family car that functions as a mobile site of home and kinship. Like the werewolves of the novel, the El Camino is a shifty, hybrid, and aberrant mongrel that signals a paradoxical orientation to hegemonic U.S. life. Mongrels' use of the werewolf (and the El Camino) allows Jones to center questions about colonization, race, poverty, and movement while avoiding essentializing traps. It is not unique among Jones's writings in doing so, but I argue it is the novel that does so most successfully. In Mongrels, Jones brings together some of the more experimental structural and stylistic elements of his earlier writings with some of the more character-driven narratives of his recent work, like Mapping the Interior (2017) and The Only Good Indians (2020).5 Mongrels resists the discourse of inclusive multiculturalism that centers colonial and racializing power structures by emphasizing monstrous mongrels who reject divisions between the human and other-than-human. This essay begins with a brief overview of the monster as a hybrid figure. I then analyze monstrous depictions of Indigeneity and the rise of the Native werewolf in the first two decades of the twenty-first century to contextualize Jones's reworking...

Earthworks and Contemporary Indigenous American LiteratureFoundations and Futures Eric Gary Anderson (bio) This essay takes up one of the defining features of twenty-first-century Native American and Indigenous literatures: that American Indian writers working in a variety of genres are turning with increasing frequency to earthworks. Using both story and theory, these contemporary Native writers, primarily women, forge connections between built structures made of earth and built structures made of words. Earthworks hold political, historical, cultural, and personal significance not as relics of “lost” or dead pasts but as living texts that help activate, guide, and support Indigenous intellectual and artistic work now and into the future. Indigenous earthworks studies thus also questions settler narratives that erase or otherwise mystify the history of colonial land theft and dispossession. When they mention Indigenous people at all, these non-Native narratives often strike both elegiac and objectifying notes as they detail “mysterious” absences in historical records, absences of people and cultures, enigmas about how the people lived and how they actually built large earthworks, concerns about the physical degradation of the structures, and more. In sharp contrast, contemporary Native writers present earthworks as inhabitants of a relentlessly colonized but also grounded, centered, resilient Indigenous world that continues to see, hear, touch, speak, read, write, and otherwise sustain living relationships between the mounds and the people. As LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) writes, “I am interested in continuances rather than disappearances.”1 This interest leads her and other Indigenous writers and artists to understand earthworks not only as literary but also as literature. Indeed, Howe observes that she and Monique Mojica (Kuna/Rappahannock) have for the past several years been “studying the mounds as Indigenous [End Page 1] literature.”2 Other Indigenous writers, such as Allison Hedge Coke (Cherokee/Huron/Creek), construct Indigenous literature as mounds. In both ways, Native writers shift artistic energy and critical attention to earthworks as a way of moving away from an emphasis on deep pasts and devastating losses toward a twenty-first-century mix of deeply theorized critique and necessary replenishments and renewals of longstanding, living interrelationships. While these vital fusions can happen anywhere there are earthworks and Indian writers, one of the strongest centers of gravity for literary earthworks studies is the Native South. Trade, diplomatic, and other relations connect earthworks cultures in this area to earthworks cultures in a larger circum-Mississippian network and beyond; however, and similarly, contemporary Native discussions of earthworks range widely. Writing of the Newark Earthworks in Ohio, for example, Marti L. Chaatsmith (Comanche/Choctaw) observes that “the complex can be described, but its meaning cannot yet be accurately interpreted.”3 The “yet” is crucial. Conceptually, it counsels patience and does not mistake a current lack on our part for a lack on the moundbuilders’ part, let alone for a permanent obstacle. James Cox and Daniel Justice agree, pointing out in their introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature that “in some cases, the earliest texts still survive—on paper, stone, hide, string, shell, bark, or other media—although the understanding of these texts by those who inscribed them is sometimes unclear to contemporary audiences.”4 Yet, as Chaatsmith demonstrates, contemporary Indigenous thinking provides invaluable insight into what earthworks mean—not just what they meant (and not just, as Cox and Justice importantly affirm, that they mean) but what they mean and how they will help construct Indigenous forms of knowledge into the future, particularly for Indigenous people. Indeed, Chaatsmith observes that “until Choctaw writer and intellectual LeAnne Howe visited the earthworks . . . our tour narratives emphasized the sites themselves, as physical entities, rather than how the earthworks might have related to people’s lives. . . . Howe’s enthusiasm reinvigorated the narratives to include descriptions of gatherings infused with familiar Indian activities: feasts, singing, games, races, meetings, storytelling, and trading.”5 The enthusiasm and passionate regard Howe, Hedge Coke, and other contemporary Native writers give to earthworks unquestionably reinvigorate the narratives, primarily by emphasizing relationships [End Page 2] between mounds and people and by placing earthworks in a variety of contexts, building new layers of meaning onto existing structures. Howe’s definition of tribalography, which she first articulates in her 2002...

National Narratives and the Colonial Politics of Historiography Rochelle Raineri Zuck (bio) Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel elizabeth fenton New York University Press, 2020 272 pp. Mourning the Nation to Come: Creole Nativism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature jillian j. sayre Louisiana State University Press, 2019 264 pp. Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing edward watts University of Virginia Press, 2020 292 pp. Many scholars have highlighted the role that literature plays in the development and maintenance of collective national identities. Benedict Anderson famously defined the nation as an "imagined political community," the rise of which was linked to the development of print capitalism, which allowed disparate individuals, separated by space and time, to see themselves simultaneously as part of such an imagined community (6).1 Important work in literary studies has since focused on the development of "national narratives" (to borrow Jonathan Arac's term) and how such narratives allowed individuals in what had been loosely confederated colonies to imagine themselves as citizens of the United States.2 Key examples include Priscilla Wald's Constituting Americans (Duke UP, 1995), David Waldstreicher's In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes (UNC P, 2012), Robert [End Page 907] Levine's Dislocating Race and Nation (UNC P, 2009), and Jonathan Arac's The Emergence of the American Literary Narrative (Harvard UP, 2005). Waldstreicher in particular attunes us to the way the ascendance of certain national narratives is predicated on the collective forgetting or active suppression of other stories: "The nation' is never just an idea or a thing; it is also a story, an encompassing narrative or set of narratives with the potential to crowd out other narratives that may have rather different political implications" (142). Throughout the process of nation-making in the "New World," some stories have gained traction while others have been "crowd[ed] out" or suppressed. A trio of recently published works—Jillian J. Sayre's Mourning the Nation to Come (2019), Edward Watts's Colonizing the Past (2020), and Elizabeth Fenton's Old Canaan in a New World (2020)—attends to these national narratives and, through their engagement with issues of temporality, reminds us that such stories exist in time and, particularly in the context of settler colonialism, participate in the creation of an organizing temporal logic that positions readers as national citizens in time. These three impressive works of scholarship not only engage important currents in the field such as the transnational and temporal "turns" but also model a hermeneutic that reveals how some of the most trenchant national narratives positioned readers as participants in an unfolding national temporality informed by both sacred and secular understandings of history. Mourning the Nation to Come, Colonizing the Past, and Old Canaan in a New World explore the ways European colonists and their descendants crafted national narratives through the retelling or co-optation of histories (sacred and secular) so as to advance their colonial aims and subvert the territorial sovereignty of Indigenous Americans. They attend to the stories that gained prominence as settler nations were formed in the Americas and those that were ignored, reconfigured, and/or suppressed. All three of these works, to varying degrees, engage Anderson's work as part of their explorations of collective fantasies that sought to resolve the tensions between the settler status of Europeans in the Americas and their desire to claim territorial sovereignty by presenting themselves as somehow "indigenous" to the lands they sought to colonize. These works offer fresh perspectives on literary expressions of the Vanishing Indian trope by emphasizing that the ways narratives of Indigenous "vanishing" circulated alongside (and were informed by) recovery projects that sought to produce histories [End Page 908] that could be put in service of the colonial project. In addition to the Vanishing Indian trope, there are other points of connection between these works, and, to an extent, they consider some of the same primary source materials, including the "Lost Tribe" theory of American Indian origins, the Mound Builders, the Book of Mormon and other Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) writings, historical romances like those of James Fenimore Cooper, and...