Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island ed. by Sophie McCall et al.

Abstract

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