Land and Literacy: The Textualities of Native Studies

Abstract

The title of this jointly authored essay is meant to evoke new strategies in Native literary studies: the reaching back across time from the contemporary present to the historical past, the examination of the relationship between the academic fields of early and contemporary Native literature, and the growing recognition of the importance of alternative textualities. These strategies are joined by a network of relationships: intellectual, geographical, and textual, all of which gesture toward land as the glue that binds Native communities. Our collaboration is similarly linked. As scholars, we are situated at opposite ends of the field of Native studies: temporally, Fitzgerald in the present, reaching back through the centuries to uncover Native voices and communities; Wyss situated in the early American period, recovering Native voices that for too long have been left out of contemporary literary histories. Spatially, we are situated differently as well, with Wyss working on New England material culture and Fitzgerald working on fiction from Louise Erdrich, Diane Glancy, and Sophia Alice Callahan. In this essay, we raise the following questions: How do we see each other at the edges of Native literary studies? Perhaps more importantly, where do we meet? How do these two subfields, early and contemporary, intersect, even while recognizing that increasingly, they are part and parcel of the same intellectual and textual moment? How do they inform each other, and what are the implications of this for the broader field and beyond? Scholars in contemporary Native studies draw a number of important connections between the past and the present through