{"title":"Performing Justice in Recent Native American Women’s Theater: Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty and Manahatta","authors":"C. Waegner","doi":"10.1353/ail.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ail.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Lawyer-dramatist Mary Kathryn Nagle’s plays and engagement are significant in the twenty-first century movement to transform received modes of perceiving and staging Native America, particularly through Indigenous women’s theater emphasizing the continuing capitalistic “rape culture” of colonization and the resurgence of Indigenous approaches. This article analyzes Nagle’s plays Sovereignty and Manahatta, with their experimental past/present dialectic, focus on strong women, and unblinking treatment of painful intratribal clashes arising from the imposition of Western-based hegemonic postulates. Chronological and geo-cultural telescoping, crossfading between scenes, character twinning, dialogic immediacy, parallel or cross-language, and enactment of judicial documents or treaties are among the dramatic techniques Nagle employs. This article examines theories of active, performative sovereignty from the individual body to the political that support linkage among the “restored acts” of performance theory, performing (in)justice on stage, and the participatory audience’s virtual experience of collusion and reparation.","PeriodicalId":53988,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Indian Literatures","volume":"26 1","pages":"124 - 152"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85433303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From the Floodland: Countering Extraction, Remembering Relations in Eeyou Istchee","authors":"Isabella Huberman","doi":"10.1353/ail.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ail.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article, I attend to two stories from the floodland of Eeyou Istchee/James Bay, where in the mid-2000s the massive infrastructure of Hydro-Québec’s Eastmain-Rupert project flooded a portion of Eeyouch ancestral lands, submerging Eeyouch grave sites and places of meaning and memory. Reading across literature and public art, and engaging with ghosts and other-than-human presences, I analyse two works rooted in Eeyouch territory and this shared event of colonial resource extraction. The novel Ourse bleue (2007) by Cree-Métis writer Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau and the large-scale sculpture Iiyiyiu-Iinuu (2008) by Cree artist Tim Whiskeychan conjure place-based connections to the departed that contend with the recent history of Hydro in Eeyou Istchee. Both pieces model a form of storying in the wake that refuses the smooth passage of Hydro over the dead and suggests that these are relationships to nourish in the present.","PeriodicalId":53988,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Indian Literatures","volume":"349 1","pages":"27 - 49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77414046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From the Editor","authors":"Kiara M. Vigil","doi":"10.1353/ail.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ail.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53988,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Indian Literatures","volume":"1 1","pages":"vii - x"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81341523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Claiming Oral Sovereignty Over Literariness: The Arrowmaker According to N. Scott Momaday","authors":"Kyle Garton-Gundling","doi":"10.1353/ail.2022.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ail.2022.0024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Recent scholarship on American Indian literatures has shifted away from emphasizing the theoretical relationship between oral traditions and writing toward a greater focus on sovereignty. If sovereignty is one’s concern, there are worthwhile reasons not to get caught up in tired questions of oral traditions and writing. But what if oral-written dynamics can bear importance for the sovereignty turn in American Indian literary studies after all? I explore this possibility by taking a new look at a key series of essays by N. Scott Momaday. By analyzing Momaday’s commentaries on the traditional Kiowa story of the arrowmaker, we can see a way of re-exploring the relation between oral traditions and writing that affirms, rather than erodes, Indian sovereignty. For Momaday, the arrow-maker serves to undo Western thought’s subordination of oral traditions to written literature, ultimately reestablishing oral traditions rather than writing as the primal source of literariness.","PeriodicalId":53988,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Indian Literatures","volume":"1 1","pages":"173 - 193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89071588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Home Is Where the Heartsong Is: X-Marks and Manifest Domesticity in The Heartsong of Charging Elk","authors":"Thomas W. Krause","doi":"10.1353/ail.2022.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ail.2022.0023","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay encourages critics to take a new look at what “home” is and means in James Welch’s novel The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000). It argues that home should be critiqued less for its geographic place in the historical transatlantic world of the novel, and more for the domestic processes that give it meaning and structure. Indeed, home in Heartsong is more the stuff of “who” and “how” than it is of “where.” The ways in which Charging Elk fails and succeeds in making a home for himself on two continents during the assimilation era depend not so much on where he is, but in large part on the company he keeps and how he keeps it. Scott Richard Lyons’s metaphor of the x-mark and Amy Kaplan’s concept of manifest domesticity inform a reading that explores home in Heartsong as a domestic and domesticated space constructed for and by Charging Elk. Subject and object to domestication, Charging Elk manages the oppressive political realities and social currents over which he has little charge but some command as he attempts to build a life and home for himself in France. Never exclusively one thing or another or easily and neatly bifurcated, home in Heartsong is a primary site in the struggle against US imperialism for control of Indigenous lives in the United States and abroad during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.","PeriodicalId":53988,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Indian Literatures","volume":"113 1","pages":"153 - 172"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79395955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Decolonial Ch’owen Across Abiayala and Turtle Island: Calixta Gabriel Xiquín’s Poetic Invocations of Kaqchikel Spirituality, the Cardinal Points, and Trans-Indigenous Grandmothers","authors":"Tiffany D. Creegan Miller","doi":"10.1353/ail.2022.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ail.2022.0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Kaqchikel intellectual and ajq’ij (spiritual guide, daykeeper) Calixta Gabriel Xiquín connects Kaqchikel Mayas with other Indigenous activist initiatives throughout the hemisphere through her explicit references to the cardinal points in La cosmovisión maya y las mujeres (2008). As Gabriel Xiquín engages other Indigenous women in Turtle Island and Abiayala, she incorporates Pan-Maya references from the Popol Wuj and invokes female Indigenous spiritual beliefs from other Native American communities, namely the Sioux legend of the White Buffalo Calf Woman. Grounding her work in Kaqchikel Maya spirituality, Gabriel Xiquín denounces the oppression of Indigenous peoples and their cultures throughout Abiayala and Turtle Island in this decolonial project. The Kaqchikel poet and ajq’ij joins other Native voices in cross-cultural exchanges across the hemisphere, as she looks to the cardinal points to reimagine trans-Indigenous possibilities for ch’owen (dialogue).","PeriodicalId":53988,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Indian Literatures","volume":"136 1","pages":"50 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79622814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lands, Bodies, and the Meaning(s) of Consent in Recent Writing by Indigenous Women and Two-Spirit Authors","authors":"Jenny Kerber","doi":"10.1353/ail.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ail.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the concept of consent and its uses in global contexts such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and in local contexts specific to contemporary Canada. It examines how consent has often been wielded to serve settler interests to the detriment of Indigenous people, particularly concerning resource extraction and land theft. It then considers some of the ways discourses of consent related to environmental and sexual violence overlap in Indigenous writing. I argue that taking a closer look at fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Indigenous Women and Two-Spirit authors Helen Knott, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Tunchai (T’áncháy) Redvers reveals useful ways to challenge settler ideas of consent premised on capitalist accumulation. In turn, these writers’ works present reformulations of consent that might better protect Indigenous lives and lands through strengthening kinship and governance, and by entrenching resistance to external encroachment when necessary.","PeriodicalId":53988,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Indian Literatures","volume":"72 1","pages":"101 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86221122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Land Acknowledgement: Surviving Displacement through Reclamation of Querencia in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Short Stories “Sugar Babies” and “Ghost Sickness” published in her collection Sabrina & Corina (2019)","authors":"Shelli Rottschafer","doi":"10.1353/ail.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ail.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s writing affirms her Land Acknowledgement because she honors her querencia, place of origin, and elders. Her collection of short stories Sabrina & Corina (2019) gives voice to Chicana-Amerindian women and girls whose lives are affected by displacement, cyclical poverty, and the challenge to reclaim traditional knowledges. Fajardo-Anstine confronts her people’s trauma through writing strong female characters who inspire others and create a path for seven generations to come. Specifically in her inaugural story “Sugar Babies,” it is the younger generation who reconnects with their multicultural heritages where their parents’ generation suffers the susto of displacement. Whereas “Ghost Sickness,” the closing story of the collection, addresses the consequences of displacement but chooses to lift up life rather than fall into the abyss caused by multigenerational trauma.The analysis herein considers place-based querencia as a means to reclaim what was lost due to trauma caused by displacement. I use querencia as defined in the anthology Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland (2020), as well as Raúl Homero Villa’s Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture on the effects of displacement, and Priscilla Solis Ybarra’s Writing the Good Life: Mexican American Literature and the Environment (2016), which explains the importance of Chicana-Amerindian writing as a means of emphasizing multicultural heritages and connection to the land. Hence, Fajardo-Anstine’s work embodies the intent of stressing Land Acknowledgement as a means to honor traditional teachings, one’s elders, and origin.","PeriodicalId":53988,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Indian Literatures","volume":"28 25 1","pages":"1 - 26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79264872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Teaching Indigenous Graphic Novels: English / Indigenous Studies 360","authors":"Sophie Mccall","doi":"10.1353/ail.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ail.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53988,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Indian Literatures","volume":"23 1","pages":"111 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81009077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Embodiment in an Indigenous Lit Classroom: Why I'm Over Discussion but Can't Get Enough of Research-Creation","authors":"Keavy Martin","doi":"10.1353/ail.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ail.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This article reflects on a course, ENGL 309: Indigenous Literatures (Literary Movements), taught at the University of Alberta in Treaty 6/ Métis Nation (Region 4) in 2018. My focus here is on the particular challenges brought about by the diverse identities and needs of the students— and by the core problem that the learning process of some at times renders the classroom uninhabitable for others. Over the years, this has led me to question whether dialogue and discussion, those core features of a liberal education, benefit everyone equally. Instead, I turn increasingly to creative research methods (also known in Canada as researchcreation1) as ways for students to respond to texts and to work through the issues that they raise.","PeriodicalId":53988,"journal":{"name":"Studies in American Indian Literatures","volume":"19 1","pages":"16 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75197996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}