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To examine how light skin, especially among Indian women, has powerful social capital, this essay exhumes the politics of colorism and female identity that is palpably present in both cultural and literary discourses of the twentieth century. It aims to uphold three goals: one, by engaging with anthropological and historical readings, establish the prevalence of colorism in colonial and postcolonial India; two, by highlighting epidermal hierarchies within popular Indian culture, address how skin color has inevitably governed women's personal and professional lives; and three, by harnessing the subversive potential in select works of twentieth century Indian writers--Santa Chatterjee, Munshi Premchand, K. Saraswathi Amma, Kamala Markandaya, and Arundhati Roy--who hail from various cultural and geographic backgrounds, demonstrate how the supremacy of light skin is a pan-Indian phenomenon that needs to be resisted. Finally, this essay argues that the hegemony of light skin, which continues to adversely affect Indian women's self-esteem, must be both confronted and quashed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A peculiar dimension in the Native American writing is the documentation of the history of the Native Americans’ traditional lives before, during and after their encounter with the white settlers. It is a development that is essentially explicable within the purview of postcolonial discourse, given that, in some contexts, historical distortions from the perspective of the ‘other’ have been asserted as the rationale for such creative explorations on the part of the Native writers. In the context of this study, such a dimension, with particular reference to James Welch’s novels, is considered as, indeed, counter-discursive. Two of his novels, Fools Crow and Killing Custer, are selected with a view to assessing how the historical documentations in the texts translate to counter-discourses in the context of the Native Americans’ historical evolution. The study reveals that, while the Native American histories in the texts dovetail into each other, they are largely inspired by the Native Americans’ colonial experience vis-à-vis the need to represent their history from the perspective of ‘us’ as opposed to ‘other’. It concludes that the narratives have, in a significant way, performed the allegorical configuration function, as a counter-discourse strategy described by Slemon (1987). This holds in that they have conceivably assumed ‘readings’ and ‘contestations’ of the previously textualised colonial experience of the Native Americans from the perspective of the ‘other’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical responses to Tommy Orange's There There have largely focused on its relationship to other Native American works published over the last few decades. However, a juxtaposition of the novel with an Anglo-American counterpart, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, can prove particularly illuminating for exploring Orange's distinctiveness, along with the contemporary status of two fundamental concepts—irony and healing—in the broader Native American literary canon. For Orange, the wellspring of restorative belief can be found in an attenuated but still potent and promising form of a traditional Indigenous worldview—namely, an ideal of personal autonomy framed by the divine and emphasizing the self's subordination to and emancipation within a vivifying network of interdependent presences, both human and nonhuman. There There diagnoses pathologies afflicting contemporary Native communities with a keenly ironic eye, but it preserves, against corrosive skepticism, a robust confidence in possibilities for personal and collective recovery. What we ultimately discover in juxtaposing this work with Infinite Jest is a dramatic contrast between one tradition's lingering morbidity in the contemporary moment, and another's enduring vitality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conducts a textual analysis of Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Ten Little Indians, and The Summer of Black Widows to establish that Alexie disrupts discourses of both Eurocentricism and Native American tribalism through his art. Native American Literature is often studied in contexts of tribalism and modernity, but this paper showcases that Alexis blends the seemingly antagonistic demands of primitivism and modernization. He transports Native American subject from reservations to metropolitan settings and presents that actual Indian existence problematizes the textual stereotypes of 'manifest destiny' and 'vanishing Indian'. Alexie's art appears as resistance against every form of separatism that perpetuates the binary of superior white and inferior Indian subjects. He foregrounds tribe conscious metropolitanism as the viable mode of Indian survival, blends genres to articulate his dynamic vision, and employs irony to highlight the paradoxes of Native American existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces a long trajectory of hymnic placemaking within the Brothertown Indian Nation from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Since their tribe's inception, Brothertown people have repurposed the forms and rituals of Christian hymnody in order to maintain connections to ancestral homelands, navigate and interpret unfamiliar terrain, and construct and shape tribal spaces. Samson Occom's (Mohegan/Brothertown) A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs; Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians, of all Denominations (1774) cultivated this distinctive mode of placemaking within the Native community that formed at Brothertown, New York. Opening up several key moments in the hymnal's nearly two-hundred-and-fifty-year history, this article reads the Collection's figures of place in relation to the embodied engagements it has prompted over time, from the daily travel it motivated across the eighteenth-century town to the hollow square formation Brothertown Indians used in 2018 when performing hymns at Yale. By foregrounding the bodily orientations toward place that are promoted by sung hymn-texts and develop alongside their sustained use, the article demonstrates how sonic expressions continue to supply materials for Indigenous placemaking among Brothertown singers today. This hymn-singing tradition, tied to specific homelands and yet remarkably portable, illuminates the situatedness of Indigenous poetic practice under the conditions of settler colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article combines archival research at The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago with references to a blue beaded Dakota dress that Susan Power makes in both her fictional novel The Grass Dancer and her nonfiction essay "Museum Indians." In a close reading of Power's writing, the author traced the blue beaded dress as it moves from family history to the museum and, finally, ends up dancing on the moon. Power's novel articulates a Dakota object ontology that thwarts traditional understandings of space-time in order to strengthen and reinforce kinship ties. Power's depictions of the dress defy the typical view of such objects as stagnant, dependent entities, and Majhor argues that Power offers a view of Dakota materialism that positions the dress as a participatory and performative object-being. Taking Power's works together with an analysis Field Museum's Dakota holdings, the author argues that her writings offer imaginative liberation of object-beings like the dress and, ultimately, call for the material liberation and repatriation of such objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a summary of Canadian First Nations writing and publishing within the context of Native American literature, with references to the entire area of Western Hemisphere Native writing. Admittedly, some readers and scholars will notice the omission of certain writers and their works, but it is maintained that this is somewhat the essence of the article: Native writing in the Western Hemisphere is still in the process of being identified, read, and recognized as such. Thus this article underpins the notion that the work of recognizing and categorizing such work is a continuing, necessary, and wonderful endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from the pictographic traditions and interspecies relations of the Kiowa as well as from N. Scott Momaday’s own theories of language, vision, and the creative imagination, this article aims to broaden our understanding of the ­­­memoir The Way to Rainy Mountain as a verbal/visual collaboration between Kiowa painter Alfred Momaday and his son, N. Scott. The stories and images rendered in the book strongly establish the Kiowa in relation to a particular cultural landscape, to visual/oral forms of memory, and to the animals and more-than-human beings that endow them with meaning. To further understand these two sets of relations, the sacred interdependence between images/words and human/more-than-human beings in the Kiowa tradition, I first situate the revision of history, place, and ceremony carried out by the Momadays within a tribal-specific intellectual framework. To that end, I consider the visual modes and practices that were traditionally engaged by the Kiowa and which are reinserted by the Momadays in their text as a form of anti-colonial resurgence. Such strategies contributed to decolonizing textual spaces and tribal representation in the late 1960s through their blurring of Western disciplines and through the spiritual interconnection of human, more-than-humans and place at a time when Native American religions were banned. Words and images in The Way to Rainy Mountain are preeminently relational and place-based; they engage with the land and the multiple beings that dwell on it at material and spiritual levels that cannot be set apart. Shaped by traditional Kiowa epistemology and social practice, Rainy Mountain’s illustrations depict more-than-human beings and interspecies relations which, understood as both material and sacred experience, lead to creative vision and cultural resurgence in this groundbreaking text.

The current paper examines the Native American people's identity, especially the main female character's cultural identity in the short story entitled The Search Engine. Sherman Alexie, the author of the story, is a Native American writer who harnesses the Indian identity as one of the main topics. The identity presented in the main character, Corliss, shows the challenges of the stereotypes of Native American girls. For that reason, the paper aims at exploring the new Indian woman’s cultural identity represented in the main character, Corliss, in the short story The Search Engine. The study applies feminist literary criticism that enables the writers to deeply explore the issue of woman's identity among the American native people. The main character, Corliss, shows the new female image identity, in which she can challenge traditional stereotypes of Native American women. Corliss is represented as a highly literate woman, with a lot of reading on English literary works, and has concern on her Indian-ness, which is often incommensurable to her big family’s views. The main character shows the new female image of an Indian girl evidenced in her excellent literacy and attitude toward Indian and White people. She has new consciousness in seeing the Indian men and women and their relation to White people.

This article studies the cultural and historical critiques that the 2019 graphic novel Ghost River issues toward the dominant narrative and documentation of two colonial massacres of Conestoga Native Americans in 1763 Pennsylvania. The analysis pays close attention to the form and function of the graphic novel—a valuable and unique vehicle for cultural expression and historical revision. A particular focus is Ghost River's engagement with concepts of the archive: archival bias, archival access, archival inclusion and exclusion, and the lifecycles of archival documents. In these ways, the article illuminates the ability of the graphic novel to connect the distant past with ongoing cultural issues by reassessing, revising, and revitalizing culturally important archival documents that have long been at rest. Ultimately, this essay illustrates that, through its form, content, and intermediality—all of which individually and collectively manifest concepts of survivance, rhetorical sovereignty, and medial and archival authority—Ghost River revises the historical narrative and extant archival record of North American history and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared with his Red Progressive contemporaries, the Arapaho Episcopal priest and long-term president of the Society of American Indians, Sherman Coolidge (ca. 1860s–1932) has often been neglected in scholarly literature. This essay seeks to recover his important legacy as a thinker and intertribal activist through his writings, speeches, and statements while arguing against incomplete assessments of his work as assimilationist. A survey of his output from the 1880s to 1920s—which includes archival works never before discussed—instead reveals Coolidge’s transformation from a Christian proselytizer convinced of white society’s preeminence into a robust pluralist who forcefully defended Native cultures, values, religions, and heritage—and at times argued for their superiority. The presentation of this intellectual evolution is situated within Coolidge’s own personal history and an interpretive framework that distinguishes three key periods in his output as he developed his critique of Euro-American society and colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines Mary Brave Bird’s controversial as-told-to autobiographies Lakota Woman and Ohitika Woman and situates them within the rich catalog of Lakota activist literature. Like most texts in the Lakota as-told- to genre, Brave Bird’s books, co-authored with Richard Erdoes, have long been denigrated and dismissed by scholars because of their collaborative roots; many critics challenge their authenticity and the nature of the stories being told. The first section of this essay interrogates the validity of those critics’ complaints, and the latter half counters those complaints by offering an alternative, updated reading of the texts that deploys two reading strategies proposed by Channette Romero: orality and discursive characterization. Through those lenses, we find that Mary Brave Bird’s stories, though they may be mediated to some degree through Richard Erdoes, serve as crucial artifacts of conditions in the American settler state in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes that James Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974) considers what it might mean to perform interpretation in decrepit situations. To do this it traces various forms of lack in the novel and their conjunction with practices of reading or comprehension, but it especially focuses on the novel’s depiction of scarcity with regards to an important part of the Blackfeet/Gros Ventre diet: fish. The essay argues that the novel’s dearth of fish—among other destitute conditions—forces characters to interpret their situations through what I call the “hermeneutics of starvation.” I suggest that this form of reading, which I base on the statements of the book’s elder Yellow Calf, could characterize the literature of the Native American Renaissance more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the novels "The Plague of Doves" and "The Round House," both by Native American author Louise Erdich. Both books are grounded in the 1911 lynching of three Native Americans in Pluto, North Dakota for the alleged crime of murder, with the survivor a central character of both works. Topics include postmodernism in literature and criticism, historiography, and historical fiction, justice for Native American victims of crimes, especially women, and considerations of the novels' points of view.

The article discuses the importance of incorporating authentic Native American or Indigenous literature, written by Native authors, into school curricula. It discusses the significance of representation for Indigenous students and the need for non-Native students to engage with accurate portrayals of Native cultures, dispelling stereotypes and fostering understanding. Topics include challenges with misrepresented Native American stories, diverse stories, and recommended resources for educators.

While much has been made of Lucullus Virgil McWhorter's influence on Mourning Dove's novel Cogewea, very little mention has been made by scholars about the connections between Cogewea and Therese Broderick's The Brand. Scholars like Arnold Krupat and Victoria Lamont, for example, mention the scene in Cogewea in which the protagonist becomes disgusted enough with The Brand to toss it into the fireplace, but an actual side-by-side comparison has not been made. Broderick's novel overlaps with Mourning Dove's text in thematic ways that extend beyond one scene: the romance genre that both writers chose for their works; the appearance of protagonists who identify as both White and Native American; and the role of women in ranching. By executing this textual comparison using a Native American and Indigenous studies lens, it will become apparent that Mourning Dove's novel was more than an attempt to "write back" to Broderick's Eurocentric perspective. Rather, Mourning Dove's text demonstrates that Native Americans actively shaped literature, that they communicated via different forms of media, and that Native works exhibit tribally specific knowledge and chronology, the latter of which are outlined as the major tenets of Native American and Indigenous studies by Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup. To view this intertextual relationship through the lens of Native American and Indigenous studies will make possible a return to established topics like settler-Native conflict, blood quantum, and Native feminism using new points of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on French writer, Michel Butor's exploration of "America" in his literary works, particularly in "Mobile" and related writings. It highlights Butor's portrayal of America's diversity, people, and cultures, challenging singular representations. It emphasizes the significance of the "innombrable" (the countless) in capturing America's complexity through small epics and narratives of details and observations.

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.”

This interview was conceived and ran by Anne Garrait-Bourrier, Professor in Cultural Studies at Clermont-Auvergne University and Elisabeth Bouzonviller, Professor of American Literature at Jean Monnet University. This article contains an original interview of the Canadian writer Joseph Boyden, recorded on December 12, 2014, at the University Blaise-Pascal, in Clermont-Ferrand. Joseph Boyden was on an 18 month-European tour for the promotion of his latest novel, The Orenda. The French part of this long tour was organized by his French editor, Albin Michel and more specifically by Francis Geffard, the publishing director of the Terre d’Amérique collection, who was the person who discovered Boyden and imposed him in France, as stipulated in Boyden’s very grateful acknowledgements at the end of the Penguin edition of his first novel. The questions asked mainly deal with Boyden’s The Orenda, hence the necessity to introduce the author and his work and replace this novel in a broader literary context.

Mark Twain and Sherman Alexie are at once an unlikely and a likely duo. A vast gulf of time, culture, and heritage separates them. What likens them is their shared celebrity status and iconic, irreverent humor. This paper undertakes a comparison between Twain and Alexie, not to diminish the important and idiosyncratic role of Native American humor, but rather to bring it into conversation with white humor, perhaps approaching a multiplex American humor. A comparison of two of their early works, Roughing It for Twain and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven for Alexie, to illuminate the ways in which both authors eschew the physical terrain of the West, instead monumentalizing a cacophonous, comical verbal landscape. Both authors, as public figures, also raise questions of what it means to monumentalize authors, and this paper gestures toward that dual pitfall and potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the challenges of including Native American literature in the course on nineteenth century American literature. Survey literature courses often feature canonical works and exclude minority or contrarian voices. My literature survey course includes the creation stories of four Native American tribes originating from different parts of the U.S., together with the works of contemporary Native American writers reflecting on the pre-colonisation and colonisation periods of American history. The process of teaching the course foregrounded the tensions between the dominant white settler mentality and the political and social marginality of Native Americans, making my students aware of the importance of multivalent analyses of literary and historical texts. Throughout the course, we discussed prevalent stereotypes about Native Americans in American literature. The experience of teaching this course leads me to the conclusion that it is important to discuss various marginalised voices in the survey courses on nineteenth century American literature. These texts reflect themes related to race, gender, religion, and ownership of land that go beyond literature to include social, political and historical issues, helping our students develop a better understanding of American culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research offers a linguacultural analysis of the main ideas and goals of institutions for the preservation of the culture and language of the Indigenous peoples of America, through the publication of relevant research in thematic journals and popular books, to determine the relevance of the problem of the identity crisis in the worldview and literature of Native Americans. The authors used the thick description method to analyse the main goals of twenty-five Native American organisations, basing their research on articles published in the past few years in nine scientific journals on various topics (from culture to business) and books written by Indigenous authors. The authors reached their conclusions based on this research material. The results of the study, which focused on institutions that preserve the culture and heritage of the Indigenous peoples of America and their activities, found that one of the main challenges is the preservation of identity. Analysis of the articles of leading journals on literature, culture, politics, business, philosophy, as well as analysis of the content of the books written by Indigenous people, revealed that identity crisis is an urgent problem. Despite the prevailing opinion in American society, it is obvious that a crisis is inevitable. All 25 of the organisations, whose goals were studied in this article, support, preserve, broadcast, and transmit values, heritage, and spiritual culture, and, in one way or another, confront the identity crisis. After analysing more than 550 articles in nine scientific journals devoted to the culture of American Indians, it was found that the vast majority of materials directly or indirectly relate to the problem of the crisis. To count the exact number of articles in which this problem is raised, in our opinion, is impossible due to subjective views, but we argue that this percentage is very significant. Almost all materials in one way or another relate to the problem of an identity crisis.

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A publisher and author discuss Heartdrum, a HarperCollins Children's Books imprint focusing on the work of Native and First Nations authors and illustrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides essay on Native American literature dating ninth century. Topics discussed include creation of record of Native American by Battiste Good (Wapostang) which presents ancient Indigenous American pictographic and oral narrative traditions, adaption of these books to European media like the bound book, and the researched done by Garrick Mallery on Native literature at Bureau of American Ethnology.

This essay juxtaposes two stories of Indigenous-settler "first contact" in the twenty-first century. One describes an event of community-based research in coastal Maine in summer 2000; the other describes an event of community-based confrontation at the Serpent Mound earthworks site in Ohio on the winter solstice 2020. The stories overlap and intersect in surprising ways, and they prompt unresolved questions about the function of "American" literary criticism at the present time: What actually happens when Indigenous voices enter the structures of the settler academy? Who benefits, and whose interests are ultimately served? Within current conventions, is it possible to center Indigenous knowledges and research agendas, to address the pressing concerns of Indigenous communities? And what does it mean to pursue scholarship ostensibly focused on aspects of Indigenous cultures within social and political contexts that continue to allow or even to promote the settler erasure of Indigenous claims—not only to distant or recent histories but to ongoing presence? Is it enough for academic institutions to assume a neutral stance on such issues? Or are "Americanist" scholars obligated to pursue more rigorous forms of disrupting settler business as usual? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"I Can't Breathe, 2020: The Arts and Sciences of Oxygen" proposes a literary criticism responsive to the existential crises of our time, working at the intersection of the linguistic, the physiological, and the atmospheric. Bringing together disciplines usually kept apart, this crisis-responsive genre remaps the input networks of literature, highlighting human agency on opposing ends of the spectrum. Both senses of the anthropogenic are at work here. Human causation is harm-mitigating as well as harm-bearing. Native American literature and pandemic responses provide a compelling archive for this approach. Often discussed only in terms of harm, this body of evidence in fact also shows harm partly alleviated, suggesting that reparative agency is possible, and that diversifying our investigative lens might be one way to begin. Joy Harjo—poet, musician, and former premed major—is a salient test case. "For Alva Benson" and "Ah, Ah," like her blog posts, and like her saxophone playing, dwell on the respiratory chemistry of the human body as our precarious common ground. This chemistry integrates the arts and sciences of oxygen as physiological need, survival baseline, and expressive medium, speaking to the burden of the past, and holding out the perils and promise of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces new evidence concerning how the very earliest Chinese translations of Buddhist texts were read in early medieval China: a Turfan manuscript first made public in 2005 of an otherwise unknown interlinear commentary to the oldest Chinese translation of the Vimalakīrti Sutra. I show that the earliest (pre- ca. 350 CE) translations of Indian Buddhist texts, well known for their problematic literary forms that frequently make them very difficult to understand, sometimes circulated with interlinear commentaries that explained how to manipulate their often tortuous syntax into a more normal Chinese idiom. The earliest readers of Indian Buddhist literature in China did not always approach these texts as purely "Chinese" documents, as it has sometimes been thought. Even though few such readers were themselves learned in Indian languages, the linguistic alterity of Indian Buddhist literature was nevertheless available to them to some degree. Résumé: Cet article présente une nouvelle source concernant la façon dont les toutes premières traductions chinoises de textes bouddhiques étaient lues au début de l' époque médiévale : un manuscrit de Turfan, rendu public pour la première fois en 2005, qui contient un commentaire interlinéaire, par ailleurs inconnu, de la plus ancienne traduction chinoise du Vimalakīrti Sutra. Je montre que les premières traductions (jusque vers 350) de textes bouddhiques indiens, bien connus pour leurs formes littéraires problématiques qui les rendent souvent très difficiles à comprendre, circulaient parfois avec des commentaires interlinéaires qui expliquaient comment manipuler leur syntaxe souvent tortueuse dans un idiome chinois plus habituel. Les premiers lecteurs de la littérature bouddhique indienne en Chine n' ont pas toujours abordé ces textes comme des documents purement « chinois », comme on l' a parfois pensé. Même si ces lecteurs étaient peu nombreux à connaître les langues indiennes, l' altérité linguistique de la littérature bouddhique indienne leur était néanmoins accessible dans une certaine mesure. 摘要: 本文就中古中國早期的讀者如何閱讀佛教文獻問題向學界介紹一份新的材料：於2005年首次面世的一份吐魯番寫本，其中包含了支謙譯《維摩詰經》的雙行夾註。文章表明：最早的（約公元350年前）中譯佛經偶爾以夾註的形式流傳，而這些夾註指導讀者如何將迂折的句法轉化為更為常見的中文表達。與我們有時的認識所不同，印度佛教文本的第一批中國讀者並不總是把它們當做純粹的 "中文" 文檔來處理。即便這批讀者中鮮有人對印度語言有所習得，印度佛教文本的語言他異性對他們來說也是能夠感知到的。 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes strategies of representation through the image in the indigenista poetry of Ernesto Cardenal. It proposes a link with the imagistic or vorticist conceptions by Ezra Pound. Likewise, I emphasize certain cinematic uses that lead to rethinking mythical or community and political aspects. These strategies oscillate between the displacement or supplantation of the indigenous visuality and the incorporation into planes of equality through the use of color, as happens in the ethnographic approach to the Kuna indian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Louise Erdrich's latest novel Future Home of the Living God (2017) in the light of the current conversation about the attacks on women's reproductive rights and the devastating effects of climate change. Erdrich's speculative novel describes an unspecified future where evolution has reversed itself and human reproduction is under threat, as a response to which a Puritan authoritarian government takes control of women of childbearing age to try to sustain procreation. The article contends that, using the dystopian mode--and more specifically, a theorization of uncertainty as characteristic of the present situation of many people--Erdrich addresses persisting, historical unresolved grief, making current feminist and Native vindications visible. She also continues the challenging of the whitestream idea of progress and the subversion of stereotypes that characterize her oeuvre. Most significantly, the article reads the novel as representative of both Indigenous resurgence and the global transmodern paradigm insofar as it articulates a relational understanding of language and identity as our best hope for the future. The article concludes that Erdrich's use of the future perfect tense is best interpreted as a ritual of proleptic mourning that connects this novel to Native American literary activism. Keywords: Louise Erdrich; Native dystopia; Native American resurgence; transmodernity; relationality; proleptic mourning Este articulo ofrece un analisis de la novela mas reciente de Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God (2017), desde el punto de vista de su relevancia en la conversacion actual sobre los ataques a los derechos reproductivos de las mujeres y los efectos devastadores del cambio climatico. Esta novela especulativa describe un futuro indeterminado en el que la evolucion ha comenzado a dar marcha atras y la reproduccion humana se ve amenazada, como respuesta a lo cual un gobierno de corte autoritario y puritano toma el control de las mujeres en edad fertil para intentar sostener la procreacion. El articulo argumenta que, partiendo de la idea central de la distopia--y mas concretamente, de una teoria de la incertidumbre como caracteristica de la situacion actual de multitud de personas--Erdrich da cuenta del dolor historico sin resolver persistente en nuestra era, visibilizando reivindicaciones feministas y nativas actuales. Tambien contribuye al cuestionamiento de la idea dominante blanca del progreso y a la subversion de estereotipos, dos temas habituales en la obra de Erdrich. El articulo destaca la concepcion relacional del lenguaje y la identidad, fundamentales en la novela y esenciales en la vision esperanzada del futuro que ofrece la autora. Dicha relacionalidad conecta el texto tanto con el movimiento de resurgencia indigena como con el paradigma global transmoderno. El articulo concluye que, mediante el uso del futuro perfecto, Erdrich ofrece un ritual de duelo proleptico que conecta esta obra con el activismo literario nativo estadounidense. Palabras clave: Louise Erdrich; distopia nativa; resurgencia nativa estadounidense; transmodernidad; relacionalidad; duelo proleptico, Future Home of the Living God, de Louise Erdrich: Incertidumbre, duelo proleptico y relacionalidad en la distopia native 1. INTRODUCTION According to American historian and critic Jill Lepore, the abundance [...]

Released in 2019, the final report on the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) terms the high rates of murder and disappearance an ongoing genocide. The connected forms of violence that Native American women in the United States experience, however, remain largely unacknowledged. This essay considers how two contemporary cultural narratives attempt to render violence against Native American women speakable, through a focus on the film Wind River (2017) directed by Taylor Sheridan and the novel The Round House (2012) by Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich. By analyzing these texts, this essay examines how cultural narratives mediate the boundaries of human life, emphasizing the extent to which such borders are framed by racial and gendered experience. Placing Mel Y. Chen's understanding of animacy hierarchies into dialogue with Judith Butler's work on ungrievability, I argue that animalistic associations can alternately work to reproduce or disrupt normative conceptualizations of the human. I contrast the dehumanizing rhetoric that is produced in Wind River with The Round House, which I argue disrupts the boundaries between human and nonhuman through the recovery of Ojibwe ontologies. Through this comparison, I locate the pervasiveness of a discourse that de-animates Indigenous women in the public sphere, as well as consider the potential for cultural narratives to disrupt this violent logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The search for identity is the cornerstone of modern literature and it emerges as a major concern not only in the mainstream Indian literature but also in the Northeast literature. Another aspect of Northeast literature is the search for roots and it becomes an overriding concern in the Northeast literature of postcolonial India. Northeast, still suffering from colonial hangover and ethnicity crisis, has always been swamped by the mainstream Indian politics and governance. This political dominance has forced the Northeast writers to explore their distinctive identity and give shape in their writing. Suresh Chakravarty delves deep into the hearts of Northeast people and digs out some of the most intensive crises of modern times and thus constructs each of his short stories depicting specific human sufferings and problems. He shows how the people of modern Northeast society are struggling with their dismantled identities fractured by the colonial legacy and mainstream political domination and how they are searching for their distinctive identities. The present essay discusses the above-mentioned concerns and explores how the writer successfully cultivates some of the most valid issues of modern Northeast people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research offers a linguacultural analysis of the main ideas and goals of institutions for the preservation of the culture and language of the Indigenous peoples of America, through the publication of relevant research in thematic journals and popular books, to determine the relevance of the problem of the identity crisis in the worldview and literature of Native Americans. The authors used the thick description method to analyse the main goals of twenty-five Native American organisations, basing their research on articles published in the past few years in nine scientific journals on various topics (from culture to business) and books written by Indigenous authors. The authors reached their conclusions based on this research material. The results of the study, which focused on institutions that preserve the culture and heritage of the Indigenous peoples of America and their activities, found that one of the main challenges is the preservation of identity. Analysis of the articles of leading journals on literature, culture, politics, business, philosophy, as well as analysis of the content of the books written by Indigenous people, revealed that identity crisis is an urgent problem. Despite the prevailing opinion in American society, it is obvious that a crisis is inevitable. All 25 of the organisations, whose goals were studied in this article, support, preserve, broadcast, and transmit values, heritage, and spiritual culture, and, in one way or another, confront the identity crisis. After analysing more than 550 articles in nine scientific journals devoted to the culture of American Indians, it was found that the vast majority of materials directly or indirectly relate to the problem of the crisis. To count the exact number of articles in which this problem is raised, in our opinion, is impossible due to subjective views, but we argue that this percentage is very significant. Almost all materials in one way or another relate to the problem of an identity crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the Native American graphic fiction "Soldiers Unknown," by author Chag Lowry and illustrated by Rahsan Ekedal. The author discusses Lowry's Yurok, Maidu, and Achumawi heritage and explores the work through a textual medicinal bundle lens highlighted in the work of author Catherine Rainwater.

Framed by an interest in literature as "a form of public good," this article investigates how Hanay Geiogamah, one of the most important Native American playwrights, uses his media to interpellate the means by which white Americans disseminated and maintained the patterns that established them as superior and all others as necessarily inferior. In particular, this discussion will examine some of the textual devices Geiogamah employs to define and affirm his people's authentic cultural substance in order to subvert the identity imposed on them in the process of subjugation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Représenter les souffrances de la terre n'est pas aisé dans une culture occidentale qui s'est échinée à partitionner la réalité en sphères hermétiquement cloisonnées. Il y aurait un monde culturel, royaume des humains, et un monde naturel, peuplé de non-humains et de matière inerte et réifiée. Des paradigmes alternatifs, émanant de cultures ou d'ancrages spirituels différents, réfutent l'indépendance des deux sphères. A contrario, ils soulignent une relation d'interconnexion entre les humains et leur environnement, et illustrent le réenchantement de la nature, processus inverse du désenchantement provoqué selon Max Weber par la sécularisation du monde euro-américain à l'entrée dans l'ère industrielle. Notre article analyse la représentation du changement climatique dans deux romans états-uniens qui illustrent des ontologies de la nature et des spiritualités alternatives au modèle occidental moderne. Ceremony, publié par Leslie Marmon Silko en 1977, présente sous forme romanesque la mythologie des Pueblo Lagunas. The Fifth Sacred Thing, publié par Starhawk en 1993, constitue une mise en récit des principes philosophiques et spirituels du mouvement néo-païen. L'étude parallèle de ces romans met en lumière leur hybridité discursive commune : bien que les deux romans s'inscrivent dans des systèmes spirituels étrangers au christianisme, ils ont recours à la rhétorique apocalyptique, qu'ils conjuguent néanmoins à une reconnexion spirituelle de l'être humain avec l'environnement. Si cette hybridité révèle des épistémologies alternatives à la science pour mesurer le changement climatique, qui trouvent un terrain d'expression idéal dans la forme romanesque, elle induit néanmoins une complexité épistémologique et philosophique que nous tenterons ici de démêler.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the idea of the Indian identity and the Native American Dream in Sherman Alexie's short story "One Good Man." In this story, Alexie introduces the idea of the Indian constructed by the White Americans and attempts through his characters to redefine that concept by deconstructing all the different stereotypes created by the White American society. In order to do this, he also introduces the idea of the American Dream that he calls the "Native American Dream" to express the social inequality and hopeless existence of the Indian community always immersed in an ironic and comic discourse. In this sense, Alexie proposes a new definition of the Indian identity looking back to culture, tradition and the space of the reservation. He creates in his fiction a space of contestation and resistance opening a new voice for the Native American identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Trail of Lightning (2018), the first installment in the Sixth World series, Rebecca Roanhorse imagines the Navajo Nation after the "Big Water," a global flood created by an earthquake, a thermonuclear war, and the resulting climate change in a speculated near future. In Trail of Lightning and its sequel, Swarm of Locusts (2019), protagonist Magdalena "Maggie" Hoskie is a Navajo vigilante who hunts monsters and safeguards the Indigenous community of Dinétah, one of few landmasses still above sea level. Both plots center sovereignty, community, and family as loci of resistance through community and kinship. Similarly, Cherie Dimaline sets The Marrow Thieves (2017) in a near-future where the climate has warmed to an extent that most of Canada's land is uninhabitable bog. The remaining rainy wilderness is sparsely populated by groups of Indigenous characters hiding from Euroamerican settlers who, having already seized all arable land, now hunt Indigenous people for their bone marrow, which settler scientists hope to use to cure the pandemic of dreamlessness that is decimating the white population. This article centers critical perspectives drawn from Indigenous scholars like Jace Weaver, Gerald Vizenor, and Qwo-Li Driskill to produce an analysis of the ways that community and family bonds are forged and honored in the fiction through rejecting compulsory heterosexuality and embracing communitist coalition-building. In these three novels, Indigenous people in North America survive the catastrophes that destabilize paternalistic settler governments as a means of commenting upon the ongoing violence against Indigenous people. In their speculations, Indigenous peoples, nations, and cultures, not only survive, but begin to heal from the transgenerational trauma by building kinship structures and non-genetic familial attachments outside the heteropatriarchal, gender parity, nuclear familial structure imposed by settler colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Indigenous literature, focusing on federally recognized tribes in the U.S. and requiring a comprehensive understanding of culture, history, and politics. It suggests teachers should avoid assumptions and incorporate Indigenous literature into literary studies to appreciate their unique perspectives. It highlights that by overcoming limitations in traditional Western education, educators can better teach Native American literature to students.

The following excerpt comes from an interview conducted with Cheyenne author Tommy Orange during the 2019 National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (ncore) in Portland, Oregon. We [...]