A RE-POST FROM AMERICAN INDIAN QUARTERLY

American Indian Quarterly has earned its reputation as one of the dominant journals in American Indian studies by presenting the best and most thought-provoking scholarship in the field. AIQ is a forum for diverse voices and perspectives spanning a variety of academic disciplines. The common thread is AIQ’s commitment to publishing work that contributes to the development of American Indian studies as a field and to the sovereignty and continuance of American Indian nations and cultures. In addition to  peer-reviewed articles, AIQ features reviews of books, films, and exhibits.

AVAILABLE

Injichaag: My Soul in Story: Anishinaabe Poetics in Art and Words, Rene Meshake with Kim Anderson

Retelling Trickster in Nappi’s Language, Nimachia Howe

Ojibwe Activist Priest: The Life of Father Philip Bergin Gordon, Tibishkogijik, Tadeusz Lewandowski

These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598-1912, Maurice Crandall

Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State, Shannon Speed

Xurt’an: The End of the World and Other Myths, Songs, Charms, and Chants by the Northern Lacandones of Naha’, Suzanne Cook 

Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy: Transforming Nature in Early New England, Strother E. Roberts 

No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution, Rachel B. Herrmann

Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, Céline Carayon 

Akulmiut Neqait: Fish and Food of the Akulmiut, Ann Fienup-Riordan, Marie Meade, and Alice Rearden

Authorized Agents: Publication and Diplomacy in the Era of Indian Removal, Frank Kelderman

When I Remember I See Red: American Indian Art and Activism in California, Frank LaPena and Mark Dean Johnson, with Kristina Perea Gilmore

Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World, Eli Meyerhof

Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa, T.J. Tallie

How ‘Indians’ Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory, Gonzalo Lamana

Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy, Edited by Joe Lockard and A. Robert Lee

Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, Pekka Hamalainen

Starring Red Wing: The Incredible Career of Lilian M. St. Cyr, the First Native American Film Star, Linda M. Waggoner

When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence, Megan Burke

Divided Peoples: Policy, Activism, and Indigenous Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Border, Christina Leza

This Wound Is a World, Billy-Ray Belcourt

Oklahoma’s Atticus: An Innocent Man and the Lawyer Who Fought for Him, Hunter Howe Cates

Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon 

Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century, Brianna Theobald

Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School, edited by Sarah E. Cowie, Diane L. Teeman, and Christopher C. LeBlanc

A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History: American Wests, Global Wests, and Indian Wars, Carroll P. Kakel III

Bodies Built for Game: The Prairie School Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing, edited by Natalie Diaz and Hannah Ensor (Associate Editor)

The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, Matthew J. Clavin

Eatenonha: Native Roots of Modern Democracy, Georges Sioui

Rhetoric and Settler Inertia: Strategies of Canadian Decolonization, Patrick Belanger

Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge Protecting Environments and Regaining Health, edited by Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover

Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast, edited by Gregory A. Waselkov

Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology, Ed. by Jo-Ann Archibald, et al. 

Eastern Cherokee Stories: A Living Oral Tradition and Its Cultural Continuance, Sandra Muse Isaacs

The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, Tiffany Lethabo King

Black Indian: A Memoir, Shonda Buchanan 

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Adapted by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese 

Cultural Resource Management in the Great Basin, 1986-2016, edited by Alice M. Baldrica, Patricia A.  DeBunch, and Don D. Flower

Reclaiming the Reservation: Histories of Indian Sovereignty Suppressed and Renewed, Alexandra Harmon

Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, Pekka Hӓmӓlӓinen  

A Population History of the Missions of the Jesuit Province of Paraquaria, Robert H. Jackson

Clues to Lower Mississippi Valley Histories: Language, Archaeology, and Ethnography, David V. Kaufman

Essays on American Indian & Mormon History, edited by P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink

Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia, edited by Evelyn Flores and Emelihter Kihleng

Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement, David Martínez 

Native Provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity, Gerald Vizenor

George Galphin’s Intimate Empire: The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America, Bryan C. Rindfleisch

Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation in America, Hayes Peter Mauro

The Life & Art of Joseph Henry Sharp, Peter H. Hassrick 

The Legacy of Rulership in Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Historia de la nación chichimeca, Leisa A. Kauffmann

Chipped Stone Technological Organization: Central Place Foraging and Exchange on the Northern Great Plains, Craig M. Johnson

Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representation in the Américas, Quynh Nhu Le

Native American Mystery Writing: Indigenous Investigations, Mary Stoecklein

Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves

Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhόta Oyáte, Christopher Pexa

Life at Swift Water Place (Northwest Alaska at the Threshold of European Contact), Douglas D. Anderson and Wanni W. Anderson 

Painting Culture, Painting Nature: Stephen Mopope, Oscar Jacobson, and the Development of Indian Art in Oklahoma, Gunlög Fur

Spirals to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity, Laura Harjo

Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, Jeffrey Ostler

Understanding Northwest Coast Indigenous Jewelry, Alexander Dawkins

Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty, Courtney Lewis

In Defense of Loose Translations: An Indian Life in an Academic World, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Crime and Social Justice in Indian Country. Eds Marianne O. Nielsen and Karen Jarratt-Snider

A New Continent of Liberty: Eunomia in Native American Literature from Occom to Erdrich, by Geoff Hamilton

Challenging Colonial Narratives: Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes Archaeology, by Matthew A. Beaudoin

Fighting Invisible Enemies: Health and Medical Transitions among Southern California Indians, Clifford E. Trafzer

In the Night of Memory: A Novel, by Linda LeGarde Grover

Transcontinental Dialogues: Activist Alliances with Indigenous Peoples of Canada, Mexico, and Australia, edited by R. Aída Hernández Castillo, Suzi Hutchings, and Brian Noble

The Continuous Path: Pueblo Movement and the Archaeology of Becoming, ed. by Samuel Duwe and Robert W. Preucel

Coming Full Circle: The Seneca Nation of Indians, 1848-1934, Laurence M. Hauptman

Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier, Ian Saxine

Waterlogged: Examples and Procedures for Northwest Coast Archaeologists, Kathryn Bernick

Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation, by Martha Louise Hipp

The End of the Myth: From Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, Greg Grandin

Living on the Land: Indigenous Women’s Understanding of Place. Kermoal and Altamirano-Jimenez.

Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism Across Indigenous Nations and Latinx America. Ed Frances Negron-Muntaner

WAIT WAIT! SAY THAT AGAIN!

Scientists tell us that we moved beyond Neanderthals in the sense of evolving skills because of new developments in the ability to make art and tell stories.  Most creatures can make war or reproduce, etc., but it is art, music, dance, and stories that make us humans.  

We know that there are differences among groups of humans and try to treat them as differences between species, or nations, or religious bodies.  In fact, the culture-making capacities are often what separate us, creating differences and even conflict.  But culture making can also reconcile us.

In the past there have been two cultural thinking mistakes when it comes to the "surf" between the American indigenous people and the European indigenous people, who try to represent themselves as somehow Platonically (a line of thought that started with Plato) and abstractly definitive. Writing is supposed to be better and "higher" than talking.

This has been encouraged by some because writing has been a feature of the Eurasia culture, but the American culture has emphasized oral literature.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition

"Indeed, if these final decades of the millennium have taught us anything, it must be that oral tradition never was the other we accused it of being; it never was the primitive, preliminary technology of communication we thought it to be. Rather, if the whole truth is told, oral tradition stands out as the single most dominant communicative technology of our species as both a historical fact and, in many areas still, a contemporary reality."

— John Foley, "Signs of Orality"

These thinkers about "orality" distinguish between the oral traditions of a whole culture and the individual who tells stories, testifies to his or her experience, and so on.  The latter has been emphasized by anthropologists who come to settlements of oral people and write down what they say out loud, either to the recorder or to a group.  The oral people themselves may come to think that only the written record is what counts. Thoughts about the larger culture were neglected.

Thus, if we consider oral "literature," the first "Nat lit" was first person stories told in the people's languages, perserved by machinery like tape or video.  One of the early problems in "reviving" the indigenous languages is that there's not much to read.  The technical work of inventing an alphabet of the sounds used by the people in question creates a representative code that has to be learned, and not easily.  Even then, one must learn a new way of holding the oral/pharyngeal cavity to make the right vowels and new ways of using tongue, teeth, lips, and even epiglottis to make the stops and hisses of the consonants.

Contemporary tribal people can "read" oral languages on video.  Once they are "translated" even into written accounts, the story changes according to word choices.  Sometimes there is no such concept in the written language as there is in the oral version or vice versa.  Translation of the oral language is complicated by the spoken words always having a "subtext" of gesture, facial expression, pauses, volume, and so on.  In the written versions we try to add footnotes, print differences, illustrations, spaces.  Oral and written are parallel but different art forms, as though one were sculpture and the other was painting.

Early "Nat Lit" literature might be Chief Pokagon speaking in his own language at the World Fair in Chicago just before the 20th century. The written version we have was translated by a woman of the Edwardian era who understood it all a slightly different way. This kind of collaboration happened often and accounts for the uplifting tone of NA oratory.  Much of what was written down to be read in an indigenous language was in homage to the power of certain Books that were thought to contain religious truth.  One whole religious denomination, Bahai, is based on all the various Books together.  The premise is that if it were written down and "true" all religious writing would agree.  

The modern concern about "Nat Lit" writing deals with none of that.  Instead it is at first drawn from anthropology notes, so that tribal people are reading "who they are" as filtered through someone visiting.  Then gradually those writing about tribes began to be tribal people themselves, but almost always educated by whites, which inevitably means assimilated at least enough to manage and be understood by white people.  

This had nothing to do with blood quantum, but more to do with managing and reconciling two systems of thought.  Ruth Beebe Hill claimed that she did this by translating "Hanta Yo!" out of English into Sioux with the help of a Sioux man, and then back to English again so she could sell the product. Since in the Sixties she was in the habit of coming to visit us in Browning instead of the Sioux, I had to think about this early on.  

Books are objects in a way that oral stories can only be on recordings, preferably video.  As far as I know, no one is selling CD's with spoken literature in an indigenous language.  Perhaps they ought to.  People could buy them for the prestige of it, even if they can't follow the talk -- they do that with books.  The tribes themselves haven't had access to early recordings until recent years because they were archived in academic or scientific institutions.  Now one can get some things on the Internet, including the free spoken language through radio like Canadian Windspeaker.  https://windspeaker.com/radio  (Thunder Radio is owned by Montana Blackfeet: KBWG-FM 107.5 MHz - Browning, MT.  Spoken mostly in English.)

But there is another element, which is the ecosystem and the ecopolitical system of the place that gave rise to the language.  If I say "sweetgrass" and you've never smelled it, you won't be able to think of it.  If I say Auntie in Blackfeet, it will mean something different than it means in English.  This sort of thing makes stories thin or even misleading when they are taken to a different culture.  Many traditional oral stories, as the Bible was drawn from by scribes, are moral, much more crucial to human life than the experiencing plants, though maybe as crucial as having proper aunts.  The difference in meaning is something like a rural person trying to explain life to an urban person.

Contemporary writers are identified as part of the Nat Lit selling commodity, either self-identified or having the role thrust upon them by publishers.  They justify their label by constructs claiming provenance, descendence unproven by DNA which shuffles the genes in each generation, or by the way people "look," creating the weird premise that all Native Americans look like the buffalo nickel.  The actual facts of the content or the genetics of the author get pushed aside by this stereotype, this genre.  Consequences can be major.

More to say later.