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A fascinating, multi-layered narrative, Empire of Wild was Indigo’s Best Book of 2019. Love story intersects with the reclamation of Indigenous sovereignty as a Métis woman in search of her lost husband gets in the way of neocolonialist interests. The article looks at how the novel uses the rogarou, a canine-human monster found in French-Canadian and Métis oral traditions, its meanings constructed in different discourses, to restore and ‘re-story’ the Métis in their homeland through the agency of Indigenous womanhood. In discussing the conflict between the main character, Joan, and the man who holds her husband in his power, I endeavor to demonstrate how the novel turns the colonialist discourse of Indigenous savagery on its head, exposes the dynamics of “settler memory” (Kevin Bruyneel), and engages in “re-solution” (Layli Long Soldier) as an act of meaning making from a Métis subject position. Joan’s dual otherness as a Métis (and a) woman reclaims Métis sovereignty through performing it, her (becoming) story—a process of Métis resistance and reemergence.

“Evolution is a beautiful thing. To witness something grow, change, and move forward—is sacred,” says Patty Stonefish in her introduction to Deer Woman: An Anthology, a 2017 comic book edited by Elizabeth LaPensée and Weshoyot Alvitre. The Native works discussed in this article re-contextualize Deer Woman, a spirit found in the oral traditions of many Native American nations. They use literature and “sequential art” (Lee Francis IV) as vehicles for retelling old stories in a contemporary setting, have myth live on, and keep tradition alive and valid, rather than lodged in the past, “adding new layers of growth […] just as living trees do” (Bruchac 8). Non-Native cultural products continue to display the tension between “fixity” and “repeatability” (Bhabha 94-95) in the monstrous representation of the “Indian,” a product of the “wétiko” (cannibalistic) impulse of colonialism and patriarchy (Forbes 22). Multiple Native voices “revision”/“re-vision” (Osborn 261) Deer Woman to articulate criticism of the colonially-rooted construction of the Indigenous and employ her tricksterism to subvert static meaning and reclaim sovereignty.

There There, Cheyenne and Arapaho writer Tommy Orange’s first novel, has been praised as "an astonishing literary debut" (Margaret Atwood), a "tense, prismatic book" (New York Times), a "breathtaking, haunting and gripping story" (Publishers Weekly), and has received multiple literary awards since its publication in 2018. This article explores Tommy Orange’s way of writing the Indian (back) into presence, in response to a “metaphorical,” as well as very “material” (Arif Dirlik) deletion of the “inconvenient Indian” (Thomas King) along centuries of American history. The discussion focuses on Tommy Orange’s understanding of storytelling as a way of continuing “Indian Wars” (E. Cook-Lynn) with the pen. Storytelling is a revisionist act in that it implicitly denies the stereotype of the vanishing race and re-places the Indigenous American not in a(n impossible) pre-colonial past, but in the land with which the Native has never ceased to remain connected. The characters’ stories, some in an autobiographical tone, others in the third person, narrate the Natives as “a present-tense people” (TT 141), grappling with a traumatic, far-from-romanticized past and present, but all the more alive for that.

This paper looks at Ojibwe writer Louise Erdrich’s National Book Award-winning The Round House as a novel that mixes and reworks genres from a Native American perspective to narrativize the “(post)colonial” (Cheyfitz) status of contemporary American Indian nations. An autobiographical story that can be read as a “postcolonial Bildungsroman” (Nayar), The Round House uses crime fiction as a pretext for writing Indian sovereignty. The legal is fully involved in the construction of the Indian colonized subject. Erdrich’s novel can be read as a confession to “a wrong thing that serves an ideal justice” (RH 306). The main character’s statement that “[t]he sentence was to endure” (RH 317) can be understood both in terms of his admitted moral guilt, and as a proclamation of “survivance” (G. Vizenor). The paper approaches the novel in light of the inseparability of U.S. federal Indian law and American Indian literature (Cheyfitz). My reading relies on Lyotard’s “différend” and on Agamben’s “state of exception” to discuss the plot and its dénouement as Erdrich’s way to wage a contemporary “Indian war” (E. Cook-Lynn).

Almanac of the Dead is concerned with Native American identity politic s as an act of “survivance” (Vizenor). Based on a fourth (and fictional) ancient Indian prophecy, the novel opens with a “five hundred year map” showing how space shapes and is shaped by subjects. The novel, like the map prefacing it, is a critique of Euro-American colonialist/capitalist view of space (as disconnected from people) and time (as linear, with a mandate to achieve progress). Maps are “ideological statements” (Anderson) in that they are representations of reality. Colonial maps and politics represent Indian land as terra incognita, to be discovered and brought into existence, with the “natural” sequence of the attempted cultural, as well as physical, erasure of Indians. The post- encounter experience of the first nations in the Americas is a traumatic one. Rather than an occurrence outside the norm, for the American Indian the norm itself is a “site of multiple traumas” (N. Van Styvendale). The identity quest in Almanac of the Dead unfolds along with reclaiming land in textual space, by rewriting history as (hi)story(-ies).

Although some critics do not even accept that Love Medicine is a novel at all, but a collection of short stories with the same characters telling the stories of their lives, it is clearly an identity narrative. This paper will focus on spaces of identity (re)construction in Love Medicine that reflect the tension between the mainstream white American culture and the Native American traditional one. The church, the pub, the car, the road, the bridge, or the reservation itself thus function as heterotopias, while the space of the autobiographical story functions as a utopia. The paper will discuss these spaces and their roles in the characters’ quest for identity.