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  • From the Editors
  • Daniel Heath Justice and James H. Cox

The creative and scholarly contributions to this issue exemplify the strong health of contemporary Indigenous literary studies and the energetic conversations between diverse communities, texts, eras, ideas, and methods. The two critical essays take up canonical texts in the field—Linda Hogan's Power and D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded—and locate them not only in the rich critical discourses of Native literature but also in relation to broader social and literary movements. Virginia Kennedy's interview with Ojibwe writer David Treuer follows on this theme and serves as a provocative extension of ongoing debates in the field about the relationship between culture and the arts of literary expression. Three poems by Scott Andrews (Cherokee) provide a creative complement to these texts and thoughtfully gesture toward some of the more compelling questions raised in the essays and interview.

In addition to our attempt to build stronger coalitions among literary scholars in our field in Canada and the United States, we are introducing in this issue a feature that we hope to use with some frequency: review essays of publications that we believe will have substantial impact on our work. This issue features two review essays—one from a U.S. scholar, the other from a scholar in Canada—on Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, which has just been published by the University of Oklahoma Press. The collection's twelve coauthors have devoted their energies over the course of several years to contemplating what constitutes an ethical American Indian literary criticism. We look forward to [End Page vii] your thoughts on the review essays and our conversations about Reasoning Together, and we hope that you will keep us informed about other forthcoming texts that would be well served by such a forum.

We also wanted to mention the publication of a relatively new journal of American Indian writing called Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art and Thought. Four issues of the journal have been published by Southwest Minnesota State University, and each one includes an astonishing group of Indigenous writers. We wish the journal success and hope to hear and see discussions about it at conferences and in the pages of SAIL. [End Page viii]

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