Of Strangers and Relations: Native American Hospitality in Toni Jensen and Susan Power

Abstract

This article examines narrative articulations of Native American hospitality in the autobiographical essay “The Worry Lines” (2020), by Métis writer Toni Jensen, and the fictional chapter “Sacred Wilderness” (2014), by Standing Rock Sioux Tribe member Susan Power. In both texts, relevant connections to the Other are made outdoors by means of words, deriving in the lowering of walls—which both separate and connect—and calling for a reexamination of Indigenous peoples as strangers within the doors of the US settler colonial state. The result is a vindication of Indigenous sovereignty and literary activism through the epistemological and ethical value of relationality, as well as a contribution to hospitality studies more broadly through its vindication of the power of conversation and literature.