Native American Literature Research Articles

From the Editors

From the Editors June Scudeler and Siobhan Senier tawaˆw (welcome) to our second double issue. We head to press shortly after learning that poet Janice Gould (Koyoonk'auwi) has passed away unexpectedly. The grief is being felt across the Indigenous literary studies community. In this issue, writers Ruth Salvaggio, Malea Powell, Dean Rader, Lisa Tatonetti, and Daniel Heath Justice pay tribute to her profound contributions. She is very much missed. In happier news, the twentieth annual Native American Literature Symposium, held earlier this year at Mystic Lake, recognized several recent SAIL publications: essays by Drew Lopenzina, Shannon Toll, and Anne Stewart were all nominated for the Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Essay. The winner was Shaawano Chad Uran for his essay "Policing Resource Extraction and Human Rights in The Land of the Dead," published last year by our friends at the journal Transmotion. Our warmest congratulations to everyone who was nominated and who won. We are so grateful for your good work. We've been gratified by our recent transition to a twice-a-year publication schedule. Double issues allow us to create more sustained conversations among submissions and to make more room for special sections. In the issue at hand, for instance, we enjoyed juxtaposing articles hailing from either side of the forty-ninth parallel. We are looking forward, too, to an upcoming double issue devoted entirely to papers from ASAIL's sister organization in Canada, the Indigenous Literary Studies Association (ILSA). Meanwhile, we are also delighted by the influx of submissions on Indigenous literatures of Mexico, Central America, and South America. The resurgence of Indigenous literature is truly hemispheric and global. Stay tuned and stay involved: let us know if you would like to review submissions, and keep sending us your good ideas for special sections. This issue begins with two theoretical articles representing First Nations and American Indian literatures and approaches. First up [End Page vii] is an essay by Pauline Wakeham, one of the foremost scholars on the Canadian project of reconciliation. In her contribution here, she looks specifically at the #IndigenousReads program, promoted in 2016 by Carolyn Bennett, minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. On the face of it, this formal extension of Indigenous literature to the public sphere is so welcome, yet, Wakeham finds, the project is largely constrained by the state project of reconciliation and "relationship." That in itself is perhaps not too surprising; what is fresh about Wakeham's study is her rigorous attention to how Canada's "symbolic reconciliatory gestures" in fact "hinge upon the appropriation and exploitation of Indigenous intellectual, creative, and testimonial resources and labor." It is a model essay—well-researched, compellingly argued, and respectful of Indigenous scholars and philosophers. Next, Matt Herman, a long-standing member of ASAIL, celebrates the twentieth anniversary of Linda Tuhiwai Smith's influential Decolonizing Methodologies. Taking her "Twenty-Five Indigenous Projects," he offers four more: continuing, reknowing, sociologizing, and valuing. In describing these projects, Herman ranges widely across canonical writers like Leslie Marmon Silko and Joy Harjo; lesser-discussed poets like Henry Real Bird and Kim Shuck; and visual arts, including the photography of Jolene Rickard and the documentary Place of the Falling Waters. This is exactly the kind of generous, dialogic reading for which SAIL has long been known. The next two essays turn to late twentieth-century Indigenous poetry. Daniel Coleman, a settler scholar who has written widely on Indigenous literature, non-Indigenous Canadian literature, refugees, masculinity studies, and whiteness studies offers a riveting read of double-columned poems by Peter Blue Cloud. In a way, his essay is an implicit response to the critique offered by Pauline Wakeham: it uses formal analysis, tribally specific history, and James (Sa'ke'j) Youngblood Henderson's theory of "trans-systemic" analysis not only to show how the poems themselves evoke Two Row Wampum philosophy and materiality but also to suggest how these epistemologies can "recalibrate relations between Indigenous and settler colonial regimes." An equally welcome essay on a poet who also deserves much more critical attention is offered by Crystal Veronie, who gives a timely rereading of Chrystos's address to violence against Indigenous women and to the...

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism

A Practical Proposal to Use Venuti’s ‘Minoritizing Translation’ for Native American Literature

In a recent article, I argued that Native American literature, as a minor literature according to Deleuze and Guattari, is a great candidate for being translated in a minoritizing way, as proposed by Venuti. Since this literature is very popular in Spain –13 translations published in the 2010s–, I analysed the most recent translations of Sherman Alexie’s, Louise Erdrich’s and N. Scott Momaday’s novels and concluded that they were aimed at entertainment, at linguistic and syntactic fluency, and at over-refined stylistics. This kind of translation means, hence, the erasure of indigenous cultural and literary aspects from the target texts and the hiding of the socio-political implications of the source texts. 
 In the present article, I insist on the idea that Venuti’s ‘minoritizing translation’ can be adapted to attend to the minor literature features of American Indian books and, consequently, to produce culturally and socio-politically engaged translations. After revising Venuti’s proposal and Tymoczko’s criticism on it, I present a brief description of the translations of works by Alexie, Erdrich, Momaday and Zitkala-Ša, all published during the 2010s. Then, I detail the precise strategies that would help to emphasize the specific characteristics of this literature, and I compare passages from the published translations with my alternative minoritizing translations.

Re-Visioning American Literary Naturalism

Today, two characteristics define literary naturalism, and both are problematic. One is the emphasis on four male writers: Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Jack London. This focus emerged in the 1930s and stemmed from biases against white women and African Americans. The other defining trait is the temporal reach of naturalism. Extrapolating from traits in the works of Dreiser et al., this school now includes the “proletarian writers” of the 1930s and many recent authors. This article presents a new definition, one that emphasizes the distinct nature of the period from 1893 to 1913, when authors and social scientists believed that immutable “laws” of heredity and environment determined human behaviour. This approach broadens the naturalist canon during the classic era, 1893–1913, dethroning those four white males, and excludes most later works.

J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe

Gerald Kennedy’s book aims at bringing into view “the deformities that American literary nationalism tried to conceal” by “deconstructing the strangeness of nationalism itself and US cultural nation-building” (4, 11). By focusing on the period between the two great compromises of 1820 and 1850, the author illuminates the growing gap between nationalist illusions and sociohistorical realities. His juxtaposition of texts by little-known authors with writings of major writers, and his use of a w...

" 민족에서 세계로: 네이티브 아메리칸 문학 연구의 어제와 오늘"

" 민족에서 세계로: 네이티브 아메리칸 문학 연구의 어제와 오늘"

The Paradox of Native Americans in Black Elk Speaks

Black Elk Speaks is a book describing the spirituality and social life of Native Americans. It contains values of living in balance with nature and the respect towards the Great Spirit. Black Elk himself is a prominent figure believed by Native Americans or the Indian as having vision of the future. The book is the words of Black Elk as told through John G. Neihardt (Flamming Rainbow). By reading the book, we learn how Native Americans survive in the land that does not belong to their tribes. The pain and sorrow of watching relatives and family vanished in the war. Yet, the identity of Native Americans remains among the uproar of social changes in the history of America. The purification of mind and soul in viewing modern life is in line with the American individualism. Furthermore, the study of Native American literature will enrich the spiritual journey of individuals in interpreting life in a multicultural society. Here, I would like to explore the paradox of living in the Indian reservation and the facts faced by Native Americans as told in Black Elk Speaks. Keywords: Black Elk, vision, spirituality, paradox, Native Americans

Abby as Ally: An Argument for Culturally Disruptive Pedagogy

This article re-stories the navigation of one White female student, Abby, enrolled in a 12thgrade ethnic studies course titled Native American literature. Abby reveals tensions, disruptions, and self-discoveries within a course that recentered Indigenous histories and literacies while, concurrently, decentered dominant knowledge systems. Her story addresses this article’s central question: How does Whiteness operate in an ethnic studies course? Eleven vignettes trace Abby’s critical consciousness development within and beyond this course. Relying on Paris and Alim’s (2014, 2017) culturally sustaining pedagogy and McCarty and Lee’s (2014) culturally revitalizing pedagogy, I offer culturally disruptive pedagogy to argue that as educators, researchers, and community members seek ways to sustain and revitalize cultural practices, we must also consider the ways hegemonic norms—as perpetuated by ideologies of whiteness—require a needed disruption.

PREVOĐENJE ELEMENATA INDIJANSKE KULTURE U ROMANU DEVOJČICA SA OSTRVA DUHOVA LUIZ ERDRIČ

Prevođenje književnih dela koja se mogu sama po sebi posmatrati kao prevod predstavlja jedan od velikih izazova sa kojima se prevodioci susreću. Ovde se prvenstveno misli na multikulturalne tekstove, nastale u dve kulture i na dva jezika paralelno. Multikulturalnom književnošću se smatraju ostvarenja pisaca imigranata, ali i kolonizovanih starosedelaca, koji predstavljaju etničke manjine u okviru dominantnog društva. Multikulturalni pisci najčešće pišu na dominantnom jeziku, ali u svoja dela uključuju i reči, fraze, pa i čitave rečenice napisane na maternjem jeziku kako bi iskazali jedinstven kulturni sadržaj. Ovakve enkodirane poruke predstavljaju izazov za čitaoce, ali i prevodioce koji moraju taj sadržaj da prenesu na druge jezike. Problemi ove vrste prisutni su gotovo u svim delima indijanske književnosti. Luiz Erdrič, u romanu Devojčica sa Ostrva duhova koji piše na engleskom, oslikava kulturu, običaje i verovanja svog naroda, koristeći reči i izraze iz jezika Odžibve. Ovaj rad se bavi analizom prevoda ovog romana sa engleskog jezika na srpski Aleksandre Grubor. Posebna pažnja je posvećena strategijama koje prevoditeljka koristi kako bi prevela reči iz jezika plemena Odžibve, kao i reči iz engleskog jezika obojene kulturnim nasleđem plemena Odžibve.

Frontiers in Children's Literature ed. by Dorothy Clark and Linda Salem

Reviewed by: Frontiers in Children's Literature ed. by Dorothy Clark and Linda Salem Naomi Lesley (bio) Frontiers in Children's Literature. Edited by Dorothy Clark and Linda Salem. Foreword by Kenneth Kidd. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. This collection of essays grew out of a project by scholars in the Children's Literature Society of the American Literature Association to investigate the concept of the frontier in children's literature. Between 2009 and 2013, panels at the annual conference each addressed a different aspect of the frontier, with the resulting papers compiled into this volume. Dorothy Clark and Linda Salem, together with the contributors, define the frontier broadly and creatively, including such topics as negotiations with unfamiliar, traumatic, or potentially threatening historical knowledge; student resistance to uncomfortable texts; boundaries between humans and nonhumans; and explorations of new techniques in illustration, archiving, and genre. Scholars in a variety of areas will find individual essays or sections of interest; intersecting fields include trauma studies, posthumanism, fandom studies, illustration, and Native American and African American literature. Clark and Salem's thoughtful introduction offers a reflection on the many potential meanings of the frontier. They begin with the premise that "childhood [is] itself a kind of frontier" (1), necessitating exploration and encounters with the unfamiliar. Thus they focus less on how children's literature addresses the experiences of children situated at literal borders [End Page 214] between regions or nations and more on the metaphorical resonances of frontiers and borders—how Romantic models of childhood push up against conceptions of childhood that acknowledge trauma and harsh realities, how children's literature faces the new "territory" of digitized media, and how children's literature criticism continues to stretch boundaries by incorporating new methods of scholarship. In the remainder of the essay, Clark and Salem seek to provide readers with a guide through this wide-ranging volume by identifying three themes shared by essayists across the five sections. The first is a concern with moral vision and hope, in which narrative traditions carry readers across "boundaries of silence" or historical amnesia (3). The second is a shared conception of the experience of liminality as a border region of its own, one that can alter or transform existing hierarchies and realities. Finally, they point to frontiers as sites of trauma and suggest that the shattering encounter with trauma provides a kind of frontier as it edges readers into new ways of seeing. Part 1, "Frontiers in History, Immigration, Trauma, and Resilience," includes a trio of essays. Anastasia Ulanowicz writes about paratext and visual rhetoric in The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, and her essay offers a particularly interesting discussion of how state-sponsored nationalism depends upon citizens' "remember[ing] to forget" historical conflicts in the name of national unity (15). Oona Hatton's "Defying Definition" provides a timely and nuanced discussion of the contested nature of national borders and identities in the young adult play The Highest Heaven, which takes place during the Mexican repatriation of the 1930s; her essay is a beautiful contribution to scholarship about border control. Melanie Koss and Nance Wilson outline patterns of emotional survival in young adult literature as exemplified by Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls and Ellen Hopkins's Identical. Part 2, "Frontiers in African American Children's Literature," contains essays by Raphael Rogers, April Logan, Katharine Capshaw, and Kathleen Nigro. Rogers's and Nigro's essays address issues of representation in books about slavery and the Civil War, including questions of how to represent and acknowledge brutal violence without making spectacles of black bodies. Logan provides a fascinating interpretation of an 1890 novel by Mrs. A. E. Johnson that argues for linguistic diversity and African American signifying practices as a type of border zone in which skilled practitioners of more than one dialect can navigate between dominant and subordinate literacy practices. Capshaw's essay is another highlight of the collection, bringing attention to three plays from the 1930s and '40s about female heroes of the Haitian revolution. She points out how the plays ask readers not only to stretch the boundaries of gender, but also to consider the transnational frontiers of the long Civil Rights movement, as Haiti meant...

America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies by Antonio Barrenechea

Reviewed by: America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies by Antonio Barrenechea Charlotte Rogers Antonio Barrenechea. America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2016. xiv + 231 pp. In an era of multitasking and short attention spans, Antonio Barrenechea's critical analysis of the encyclopedic novel in the Americas is an outstanding model of the benefits of deeply studying long books. In America Unbound, Barrenechea examines four works of fiction that he calls "summa Americana," or great American novels of continental proportions (xi): Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Mexican Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra (1975), French Canadian Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues (1984), and Native American Leslie Maron Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991). Several thematic and formal [End Page 379] threads tie these works together: each novel explores the era before the American continent was separated by the imperial languages of Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese and divided into nations; each novel also features contemporary protagonists who critique the results of those divisions. Moreover, the works all have a "masterful performance inscribed within them" that self-consciously takes the entire American continent as its muse (10). The aim of Barrenechea's elegant and jargon-free book is to demonstrate how reading encyclopedic novels from different traditions reveals their shared American roots. Barrenechea takes as his theoretical point of departure the work of Herbert Eugene Bolton, an American historian whose 1932 "The Epic of Greater America" advocated for a continental rather than a national approach to American history. Bolton was undoubtedly a pioneer who wrote against the dominant paradigm of approaching US history without considering its inter-American aspects. Yet Bolton's ideas also had some fatal flaws: the Mexican historian Edmundo O'Gorman criticized him for practicing intellectual hegemony, and Barrenechea points out that Bolton was deeply Eurocentric and rarely considered the Amerindian or African experiences in the Americas. Barrenechea proposes to update Bolton's approach and enters into dialogue with more recent scholars who have spearheaded comparative American literary studies beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, including Vera Kutzinski, Earl Fitz, Lois Parkinson Zamora, and Gustavo Pérez Firmat. What makes Barrenechea's work new is his attention to the encyclopedic American novel, whose roots can be traced to colonial writings about the New World that attempted to enumerate and contain the marvelous abundance of the continent. His selected authors participate in this drive to create a compendium of the interrelated histories of peoples of the Americas, yet they do so in a critical postmodern fashion, demonstrating a "skepticism of totalizing projects" (32). The first work under consideration is Moby-Dick, a staple of the US literary canon that Barrenechea places in a broad continental setting. The rewards of this approach are immediately evident in his contextualization of the doubloon, a unit of Ecuadorian currency that circulated throughout the Americas in the nineteenth century. Melville, who could read Spanish and Portuguese, critiques US imperial ambitions by comparing the gold rush in California and its concomitant philosophy of manifest destiny to the Spanish legend of El Dorado. Ultimately, Barrenechea goes beyond canonical readings of Moby-Dick to show that the tale of the great white whale flourishes [End Page 380] "as an encyclopedic novel that recalls, and disrupts, imperial hemispheric legacies" (24). In Boltonian fashion, this first chapter reveals the deep connections between the United States and the Spanish Empire in the New World. In erudite discussions of the three twentieth-century novels, which make up the bulk of his study, Barrenechea delves deeply into the ways in which the authors depict the violent mestizaje that lies at the root of continental American history. They do so by inserting colonial texts directly into their encyclopedic novels. For example, the author shows how Fuentes mingles the content and form of imperial documents by Columbus and Cortés with contemporary characters in Terra Nostra to "deconstruct the temporal and spatial coordinates of established histories, languages, and nations" (60). While Fuentes is a canonical Spanish American writer, the other two authors discussed in Barrenechea's study occupy the traditionally marginalized intellectual spaces of Québécois and Native American literatures. In the Francophone Poulin's...

Editor's Note

Editor’s Note Susan Tomlinson With this first 2018 issue I am delighted to announce Cari Carpenter’s appointment as our new book review editor. Cari is an associate professor of English at West Virginia University, where she specializes in nineteenth-century American and Native American literature. She is the author of Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians (Ohio State University Press, 2008). She also edited Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and Eugenics (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), and coedited with Carolyn Sorisio The Newspaper Warrior: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Campaign for American Indian Rights, 1864–1891 (University of Nebraska Press, 2015). We are thrilled that Cari has joined us and we can’t wait to see where she takes our book review section. As we welcome Cari to the masthead, we also announce Jean Lutes’s departure after three years as our book review editor. Jean joined Legacy in 2004 as a consultant and later served on our editorial board. The precision and generosity she brought to evaluating submissions made her an editor able not only to match each new publication with its ideal reader-reviewer but also to bring every review to its full critical expression. Her innovations, such as the web reviews in our last issue, have kept Legacy apace with new directions in scholarly publishing. We are delighted that Jean is staying on as an editorial consultant and that contributors to Legacy will continue to benefit from her insightful peer reviews. Our digital media coordinator, Amanda Stuckey, is updating the Legacy website’s portrait gallery, and last fall she built this project into one of her literature courses at York College of Pennsylvania, introducing undergraduates to recovery work and the digital humanities as integral parts of literary and textual analysis. Amanda has partnered with Women Writers Online, part of the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University. You can read her blog post about this exciting project at wwp.northeastern.edu/blog/digital-collections-interpretation/. [End Page vii] Susan Tomlinson Legacy Copyright © 2018 University of Nebraska Press

Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818–1823 ed. by Theresa Strouth Gaul

Reviewed by: Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818–1823 ed. by Theresa Strouth Gaul Michael P. Taylor (bio) Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818–1823 Edited by theresa strouth gaul Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014 289 pp. Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818–1823 offers to Americanists and Native Americanists alike a versatile collection of perhaps the earliest published Native American woman author in the United States. Until Theresa Strouth Gaul gathered and recontextualized Catharine Brown's (Cherokee) letters and diary alongside other nineteenth-century representations of Brown in Cherokee Sister, scholars had remembered Brown largely through an 1825 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions publication, Memoir of Catharine Brown, a Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation (1825). As its title suggests, Memoir narrates Brown as unilaterally assimilated into white Protestantism and celebrates her as a model Christian convert. As a result, contemporary scholarship has likewise often reduced Brown to narratives of isolated assimilation rather than placing her either within her specific Cherokee community or within broader conversations with such now-canonized contemporaries as William Apess (Pequot), Elias Boudinot (Cherokee), and Black Hawk (Sauk). By privileging Memoir's oversimplification of Brown over the inherent complexities and contexts of Brown's own writings, scholars have so far, albeit unintentionally, disconnected her from such critical contemporaneous and contemporary issues as Native American sovereignty, land, kinship, and the ongoing epidemic of sexual-colonial violence against Native American women. As Gaul suggests in her carefully constructed editor's introduction, Cherokee Sister responds to the ongoing reduction of Brown by "put[ting] the pen back in her hand" (2). By doing so, Cherokee Sister not only restores autonomy to Brown's [End Page 218] writings, it also reasserts Brown's articulate agency as an early Cherokee woman who interpreted, taught, exhorted, and wrote toward her stated goal to "be useful to [her] people" (73). Beyond republishing the writings of yet another important early Native American woman writer within the growing body of Native American literature, Cherokee Sister will prove valuable to a wide range of college classrooms. Brown's writings directly address issues central to American literary studies, Native American studies, Cherokee studies, religious studies, and gender studies. Gaul's collection also offers ample analytical opportunities for classroom studies of nineteenth-century biography, autobiography, epistolary writing, and diary writing. While Gaul gracefully places Cherokee Sister at the "nexus" of each of these disciplines, however, she places the responsibility onto teachers and students to construct the more comprehensive context(s) necessary in order to situate Brown in a more direct relationship with any one of these disciplinary frameworks (5). In terms of Brown's place within current discussions of Native American or Cherokee studies, for example, Gaul places Brown's writing in conversation with Cherokee scholars Daniel Heath Justice and Jace Weaver in order to emphasize her place within the Cherokee literary tradition. Yet Gaul has not fully reconstructed the relationships between Brown and such contemporaneous Cherokee women writing and community-specific literary activism as the 1817 Cherokee women's petition against Indian Removal. It is likewise up to the teacher or student to analyze Brown in conversation with such broader contemporary currents in indigenous feminism, indigenous literary nationalism, and transindigeneity. Although Gaul could have claimed a greater significance for Cherokee Sister by situating Brown's writing more overtly within the long tradition of Cherokee women writing or within specific branches of current Native American and indigenous studies, Cherokee Sister's ability to speak to so many interconnected contexts and issues will service a range of college classrooms toward a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of agency and adaptation in nineteenth-century Native American literatures. I am eager to work alongside my students to (re)connect Brown further to the intricate networks of early and contemporary Native American women writers as part of my indigenous and American literature classes. [End Page 219] Michael P. Taylor Brigham Young University Michael P. Taylor michael p. taylor is assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University. He teaches in the fields of indigenous studies, American studies, and nineteenth-century American literature. His scholarship focuses on indigenous literary...

The Emergence, Renaissance, and Transformation of Multicultural American Literature from the 1960s to the Early 2000s

The Emergence, Renaissance, and Transformation of Multicultural American Literature from the 1960s to the Early 2000s W. Lawrence Hogue (bio) Writers of color in the U.S. have been producing novels, poetry, and essays in American letters since the eighteenth century, particularly African American writers.1 But before the social, cultural, and political movements and forces of the 1960s, very little literature by writers of color was institutionalized and/or in print. For example, before the 1970s, Three Negro Classics, comprising of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man, was the most visible text by African Americans readily available. Although Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1953) remained in print, the bulk of African American literature was out of print until the 1970s. Although American Indians had been writing fiction, which was also consistently out of print, since the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was the publication of N. Scott Momaday's (Kiowa) House Made of Dawn in 1968, which garnered the Pulitzer Prize for literature, Vine Deloria, Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins in 1969, and Dee Brown's best-selling revisionist historical account Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) that initiated a renaissance in Native American history and literature in the 1970s. And although there were scattered out-of-print literary and autobiographical texts by Asian American writers from the early and middle parts of the twentieth century such as Korean-American Younghill Kang's The Grass Roof (1931) and East Goes West (1937), Japanese-American John Okada's No-No Boy (1957), Chinese-American Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), and some autobiographies (Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, 1945, and Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter, 1953), Asian American literature becomes visible and begins to emerge as a legitimate field of inquiry with the publication of some ground-breaking anthologies and of Maxine Hong [End Page 173] Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976). The situation with Latino/a literature in print was equally as dismal. As the Hispanic Recovery Project informs us, there were unpublished and/or out-of-print Mexican/Mexican American testimonials at the turn of the twentieth century. But before the 1960s there were only a scattering of Latino/a texts in print such as Pocho (1959) by the Mexican American writer Jose Antonio Villareal. But with the transformative Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and early 1970s—including the Chicano movement and the groundbreaking work of the Chicano/a Arts movement, the Puerto Rican labor activist movement and the Nuyorican Arts movement, American Indian Movement (AIM) and the American Indian literary renaissance, the nationalist/Black Power and Black Arts movements, the Asian American movement, and the Women's movement, the 1970s and 1980s were renaissance periods for the literatures of American Indians, Latinos/as, African Americans, and Asian Americans. Thus, by the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s the literature of writers of color in the U.S. had grown and matured, successfully challenging and transforming American literature, which continues until today. The literatures that emerged from this period were further developed and institutionalized with the re-printing of pre-1960s literary texts, the establishment of ethnic studies programs and departments on the campuses of American colleges and universities, and the inclusion of ethnic literature in mainstream American literature courses, allowing the literatures to be taught, studied, assessed, written about, and therefore to remain in print. Although some of the literatures written by people of color in the 1960s and 1970s overtly protested institutional, legal, and de facto racism, and captured the experiences of oppression/victimization, of colonization, and of the pain and confusion of being caught between two cultures, by the 1980s and 1990s many writers of color had come to assume the centrality of their race or ethnicity in their literature. This shift allowed them to move beyond protest, the white gaze, and the various binaries that positioned them as lower halves of binary oppositions, to take on the literary styles and issues of modernity/post-modernity, to...

Faulkner and History ed. by Jay Watson et al.

Reviewed by: Faulkner and History ed. by Jay Watson et al. Christopher Metress Faulkner and History. Edited by Jay Watson and James G. Thomas Jr. Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Pp. xxviii, 245. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-0997-1.) In his introduction to Faulkner and History, Jay Watson reminds readers that "William Faulkner was, and remains, a historian's writer" (p. ix). Noting that such famous practitioners of the craft as Leon F. Litwack and Joel Williamson [End Page 785] assigned Faulkner in their southern history courses and that the era's preeminent southern historian, C. Vann Woodward, kept a portrait of Faulkner in his Yale University study, Watson alerts us to the fact that Faulkner's relationship to the discipline was and remains shifting and multivalent. Embraced by some as a "fellow historian" and by others as more of "a dramatist of the fraught epistemological enterprise of doing history," Faulkner was also a "historical figure himself," who, especially in the years after winning the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, emerged "as a sometimes reluctant, sometimes not-reluctant-enough public intellectual" (p. ix). The fifteen essays in this volume, delivered in 2014 at the forty-first annual "Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha" conference, present this historian's writer in rich complexity, deepening our appreciation of how a novelist whose works rarely seek to give an accurate picture of the past has contributed so much to our understanding of history, particularly how the past is always in the making and is never truly the past. Each essay in this collection illuminates the reciprocal relationship between Faulkner and history and is attuned to how his work simultaneously remakes and is being remade by our understanding of history. In the opening essay, Wai Chee Dimock remaps Faulkner via "a new set of geographical coordinates" that allow him to be "an intensely local author with a sustained global outreach" (pp. 3, 6). The result is a provocative essay that improvises some new connections for Faulkner scholars. Alert to "low-bar networks" that affiliate groups in "weak" but "not to be dismissed" ways, Dimock suggests that an "affective network" of loss and humiliation gives Faulkner's work a "trans-Pacific regionalism" that produces "fault lines as well as lines of filiation" between the post–Civil War South and post–World War II Japan, as well as between Faulkner's fiction and contemporary Native American literature (all three groups "fought for something and fought in vain") (pp. 6, 8, 3). Weak networks may offer only "a connectivity of sorts," but this connectivity is rich because it identifies not only a "new set of historical references" for Faulkner's work but also a "transregional arc [that] might turn out to be one of the most enduring aspects of Faulkner's thinking about history" (pp. 15, 3). The collection's best essays, not all of which can be discussed here, find equally inventive ways of networking Faulkner to intriguing historical questions. For instance, Colin Dayan explores how Faulkner's The Hamlet (1940), in both form and content, repeatedly blurs the line between the human and the animal and "dissolves distinctions so that all kinds of things, living and dead, persons and property, are put into relation," compelling "us to risk losing ourselves in what is beyond our ken" (p. 25). This loss prompts "an attentiveness that is crucial to his ethics, and to the kind of historical response that it demands": compassion for the "neglected or abhorred" who exist "beyond the reach of customary written history" (pp. 22, 33, 32). In a timely essay, Andrew B. Leiter revisits the presence of Nathan Bedford Forrest and Civil War memory in three of Faulkner's stories. Approaching these works as "Lost Cause literary monuments that establish southern history as the domain of patriarchal white memory," Leiter argues that Forrest's uneasy presence in these tales "highlight[s] Faulkner's alternately romantic and condemnatory treatments of southern history" (p. 86). Although he acknowledges Faulkner's "imaginative ties to the romantic tradition," Leiter also uncovers "occasional rents" in these fictional [End Page 786] monuments to the Lost Cause and "odd, incongruous moments and subtexts" that reveal Faulkner's...

Mapping the Transnational in Contemporary Native American Fiction: Silko and Welch

Author(s): Merish, Lori | Abstract: Revisiting the terrain of the 2012 JTAS Special Forum, “Charting Transnational Native American Studies,” this essay argues both that the transnational is a valuable, productive lens for understanding Native American literature, and that a consideration of Native American texts is indispensable to the “transnational turn” in Americanist literary scholarship. The essay argues that Native American literary texts engage the transnational in three ways: affirming “America” as transnational cultural space from its inception by staging ways Native cultures “dis-identif[y] with the nation”; affirming the transnational complexity of Native cultures; and registering Pan-Indian and indigenous transnationalisms vitally alive in the present. The essay advances these claims through readings of two recent historical novels by major Native American authors: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens of the Dunes (2000), and James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2001). Both novels are set in the late nineteenth century, a critical period in Native American history, especially in the American West; and both novels map complex itineraries for Native American characters who travel abroad, scripting transnationalism in diasporic terms. The essay argues that Silko’s novel portrays transnational encounter as global transindigeneity, casting the transnational as a vehicle to awaken and activate feminist and especially ecofeminist transindigenous solidarities, while Welch employs the form of the transnational bildungsroman to make visible tribal processes of cultural adaptation and transnational dimensions of tribal cultures at “home.”

From the Editors: <em>SAIL</em>: Fortieth Anniversary Issue

From the EditorsSAIL: Fortieth Anniversary Issue June Scudeler and Siobhan Senier It's been a wildly busy first year for us since Siobhan came on as SAIL general editor in 2016—first with Michelle Raheja, now with June Scudeler—and started building a dynamic group of new (and old) associate editors and editorial assistants. So the journal's fortieth anniversary in 2017 very nearly caught us unawares. But here we are, four decades into publication of the flagship journal for Native American and Indigenous literary studies. Like other editors before us, we feel the need to take some stock of how things have developed and where we hope our ever-diverse and ever-burgeoning field might go. Since 2003 ASAIL, our host association, whose newsletter became SAIL in 1997, has met annually under the generous hospitality of the Native American Literature Symposium (if you haven't caught up with Clan Mother LeAnne Howe's history of that symposium, it's a must-read). In 2013 we also welcomed the arrival of an exciting new sister organization, the Indigenous Literary Studies Association (ILSA). It was founded by the late Jo-Ann Episkenew (Métis) and Renate Eigenbrod along with Kristina Bidwell (NunatuKavut [Labrador]), Keavy Martin, Sam McKegney, Rick Monture (Mohawk), Deanna Reder (Cree-Métis), and Armand Ruffo (Anishinaabe), as well as one of our predecessors, former SAIL editor Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee). ILSA provides a home for scholarship on Indigenous literatures produced within the territories claimed by the Canadian state. Some of the most cutting-edge work in Indigenous literary studies today is being produced by ILSA and its members, and we are eager to create more sustained dialogues and partnerships between our two groups. Our focus in this issue—on women writers on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel—t hus reflects our editorial makeup and aspirations, as well as developments in our larger field. Indigenous women have been newly visible, and newly empowered, in recent battles against the imperial, gendered, and environmental violence of both the Canadian and [End Page vii] American settler states. They have demanded greater visibility for the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women; they have fought for and won changes to the Violence Against Women Act. They have been at the heart of the Idle No More movement, as well as the Dakota Pipeline protests. And Indigenous women have been writing, with energy like never before. Longtime readers of this journal may recall that, in its first decades, it was rather heavily bibliographic, as scholars including Karl Kroeber and LaVonne Ruoff labored to identify and build the canon. Paula Gunn Allen was one of our first editors, and women writers have been a subject of interest since the very beginning: Leslie Marmon Silko, Mourning Dove, and Virginia Beavert (Yakima) were all mentioned in SAIL's first year. Today, it's almost impossible to keep up with all the great writing being published by Indigenous women. In Canada they have produced groundbreaking collections, like the 1993 volumes Writing as Witness, edited by Beth Brant (Bay of Quinte Mohawk), and The Colour of Resistance, edited by Connie Fife (Cree). Both of these Two-Spirited editors and authors died within the last couple of years without the full recognition we feel they deserve; but things may be changing for the better. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (Anishinaabe), for example, founder of Kegedonce Press, is well-known for publishing Indigenous erotica and other path-clearing work, including the brave and beautiful Passages, by self-described Two-Spirited trans poet Gwen Benaway (Anishinaabe/Métis). We have also watched with pleasure as First Nations women have begun racking up awards and accolades for their work, including Cherie Dimaline's thought-provoking and beautifully written young adult novel, The Marrow Thieves; Carleigh Baker's (Métis) wonderfully strange short story collection Bad Endings; and Eden Robinson's (Haisla/Heiltsuk) Trickster Shift, the first of a trilogy. In the territories claimed by the United States, Native women have been just as prolific and successful. Poets like Natalie Diaz (Mojave) and Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota) are getting recognition far beyond Indigenous and ethnic studies. Native American writers are also actively...

Red Bird, Red Power: The Life and Legacy of Zitkala-Ša by Tadeusz Lewandowski

Reviewed by: Red Bird, Red Power: The Life and Legacy of Zitkala-Ša by Tadeusz Lewandowski Julianne Newmark Tadeusz Lewandowski, Red Bird, Red Power: The Life and Legacy of Zitkala-Ša. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2016. 288 pp. Cloth, $29.95. Since the late 1970s scholars have been increasingly attending to the multidimensional life of Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), focusing intently on her autobiographical essays concerning the Yankton Agency, on her Sun Dance Opera, and, increasingly, on her role as a pan-Indian activist within the Society of American Indians and in her later organization, the National Council of American Indians. Yet, despite how often Zitkala-Ša's writing has been studied by scholars and students of Native American literature, Western American literature, and by Americanists broadly conceived, until now she has received no single, sustained biographical study. Tadeusz Lewandowski's Red Bird, Red Power fills this gap. Throughout Red Bird, Red Power Lewandowski supports an approach to Zitkala-Ša's life story established in the text's prologue: Zitkala-Ša's vision, employment experiences, textual record, and activist agenda can be conceived of as having a "proto-Red Power grand vision," rather than the "liminal" and "assimilationist" labels some critics have assigned them (16). Lewandowski's presentation of Zitkala-Ša strives to reveal the largely consistent quality of her pan-Indian vision of empowerment, though he does acknowledge the circumstances in which her articulations, self-presentation, and political affiliations attracted definitions of her as persistently troubled by the "complex and harrowing limbo of disrupted identity" (11). Though this phrase is Lewandowski's own, he does fault readers who single-mindedly focus on this kind of "liminality." Lewandowski also cautions against the critical temptation to cast her antipeyote stance and later Catholicism as unilaterally assimilationist qualities. Instead, he urges readers to recognize her "task" as one of "complex negotiation," limited by "historical circumstances" (14–15). Yes, Zitkala-Ša herself states in "The School Days of an Indian Girl" that in adolescence she felt as if she were "hang[ing] in the heart of chaos" between her home community and the world of her European American education. And, yes, she contributed Congressional testimony in 1918 against peyote usage in Native religious rituals on reservations and has been criticized [End Page 257] for thus opposing Indigenous religious sovereignty. Lewandowski addresses these complexities, arguing that these biographical facts should not destabilize readers' understanding of essential consistencies of her life story, that she was a woman who "fought the dispossession of Indians with every tool of white society she had mastered," whose overarching work (despite episodic variances) aimed to preserve "indigenous values, virtues, and religious beliefs," and who believed in the "democratic right of tribal self determination" (194–95). Lewandowski illuminates Zitkala-Ša's repeated reinforcement of these convictions and, consequently, presents her as a "forerunner of Red Power" (195). Lewandowski's text is chronological, dividing Zitkala-Ša's life into chapters organized by experiences recognizable to those familiar with her biography. The thirteen central chapters—roughly fifteen pages each, plus a prologue and conclusion, each chapter focusing on a distinct period—might be read independently as "capsules" to help one better understand the years surrounding particular texts. For example, her years in Boston, studying violin and entering the domain of the Boston literati who would support her short story and autobiography writing, are described in chapter 2, "Carlisle and The Atlantic Monthly," establishing the context for Zitkala-Ša's emergence in print, explaining the impact of her time teaching at Richard Henry Pratt's Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and tracing the clear physical and emotional paths of her evolution as a writer and activist. Chapter 12, "Princess Zitkala-Ša and the National Council of American Indians," offers a sketch of her activities as founder, with her husband Raymond, of the National Council of American Indians in 1926. Here, Lewandowski summarizes Zitkala-Ša's tactics in "petitioning Congress to enforce recently codified rights," opposing the "corrupt BIA," and "support[ing] meaningful exercise of citizenship rights" by tribespeople throughout the United States (176, 179). Lewandowski crafts the chapter as a coherent period, but at ten pages it is too short to do justice...

The Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones: A Critical Companion ed. by Billy J. Stratton

Reviewed by: The Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones: A Critical Companion ed. by Billy J. Stratton Eric Gary Anderson Billy J. Stratton, ed., The Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones: A Critical Companion. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2016. 456 pp. Cloth, $65. This, the first collection of critical essays dedicated to the fictions of contemporary Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones, considers a body of work both quite recent and so fast growing that the word "prolific" borders on understatement. "Can't seem to stop," [End Page 456] he writes on his website, Demon Theory. Guided by Billy Stratton's steady editorial hand, this volume maps that seemingly unstoppable force, throwing down markers that empower further work on stories and novels both known and (as yet) unknown. Neophytes to Jones's work and confirmed fans alike will find here a refreshingly enthusiastic and generally helpful gathering of starting points for thinking about his achievement—which, this book demonstrates convincingly, is significant and, particularly with regard to Native American and Indigenous studies, provocatively complex. I would want to own this book for its opening piece alone: Jones's "Letter to a Just-Starting-Out Indian Writer—And Maybe to Myself." His advice is on point, as in, "Go on, get out there, traffic in the genres typically denied to Indians" (xii) and "Don't be an elf" (xi), an injunction that goes to trenchant, challenging, and deeply useful larger points about coming to terms with the labels and categories that all too often burden Indian writers and their readers. For example, "just assume the Indianness. Of everything. Overwrite the world with us. Because we are everywhere. We're in the soil, yes, but we're in the future, too. Insist upon that" (xvi). The "Dialogues" between Jones and Stratton are terrific, too; these conversations open up space for Jones to reflect on the shadow selves "that could have been" him (21) and that haunt and drive his writing, as well as on how he gauges his success as a writer, how his fiction riffs on The Wizard of Oz, George W. Bush, Marty Robbins's song "El Paso," and much more. In addition to the above chapters, the volume includes an editor's introduction by Stratton, fourteen essays, a brief but nicely turned afterword by Paul Tremblay, and three linked appendices presented as "A Cartographic Note on the Archives of Stephen Graham Jones." The sampling of photographs of annotated manuscript pages culled from Jones's files and the preview of his forthcoming graphic novel, Demon Theory: A Very Graphic Novel, are intriguing, but this section of the book could be more fully annotated—more metatextual—in its own right. Some of the fourteen chapters are more fully fledged and more critically and theoretically up-to-date than others. Considering the "cartographic note" not only as an appendix but also as a methodology [End Page 457] and a goal for the book as a whole, though, I can say that each chapter contributes in some way to the project of mapping Jones's work. Some of the essays, inspired by the smooth, daring, agile, and subtle workings of Jones's own prose, refreshingly uncramp a variety of academic conventions. Stratton notes in his introduction a desire to be "free from the influence of, or even the dependency on, preconceived structures of meaning and interpretation that were never formulated to address how [Jones's] varied work intersects with the complex and interrelated processes central to Native American literature and contemporary writing" (3). To the extent that the book dynamites these "preconceived structures," it clears space for risk-taking as well as for good thinking about how Jones honors, wrangles, and inside-outs other kinds of preconceived structures whenever he builds on the bones of familiar western (and other) locations (the Dakotas, West Texas) and available genres (the zombie story, the werewolf story, the captivity narrative, and so on). As Stratton implies, it could also be time to develop entirely new methods. This all raises a question for me about the strong presence of Gerald Vizenor throughout much of the collection, an homage to Vizenor's enormously influential work as well as a strategy...