From the Editors

A couple of years ago Daniel had the opportunity to visit with an extraordinary scholar from Australia who was working hard to make a space in her English department for Indigenous literature and looking to other English and Indigenous studies programs in the British Commonwealth, including Canada, for guidance. This scholar’s struggle was supported by local community members and many of her colleagues but made quite difficult by some people in the administrative levels of her institution, whose responses ranged from apathetic to hostile. The most memorable comment came from an administrator who very comfortably insisted that “Aborigines won’t have a real literature until they have a Shakespeare.”

While this statement might be more overtly obnoxious in its smug stupidity than we might prefer, the sentiments are not that unusual. How many of us who do work in this field, when we tell a new acquaintance what it is we study, are met with some variation of the questions “Really? I didn’t know that they had a literature?” or “So you’re talking about their myths and legends, right?” Sometimes those conversations end in the interlocutor learning something as we launch into a passionate affirmation of the rich and varied archive of Indigenous literary expression; sometimes, perhaps, we just sigh, shoulders drooping, and wonder how it is that, in the twenty-first century, there is still so much ignorance (sometimes willful, most often not) about Native peoples’ literature and artistry.

Part of our mandate at SAIL is to increase scholarly and public recognition of and engagement with Indigenous literatures, primarily of the United States and Canada but increasingly worldwide. While some essays are more theoretically dense than others, all are expected to be accessible to a broad readership, with invitational prose that challenges but never condescends to its readers. As a result, every issue is something that can be shared with astute readers, be they working in English departments, laboratories, restaurants, buses, ranches. . . . Anywhere there are readers, that is where SAIL belongs. Every issue offers testimony of the richness, the depth, and the complexity of Indigenous literary expression, and every issue offers a rebuttal to the idea that there is no Indigenous literature.

This issue is a perfect case in point. It begins with three critical essays that take up specific creative texts by three diverse Native writers. Melody Graulich’s study of Louis Owens’s The Sharpest Sight examines how the novel “unearths” Chumash presence and challenges the rhetorics of erasure that have mythologized the supposed vanishing of the Chumash people, thus opening up a heretofore underexamined aspect of a novel typically read for its Choctaw content. From there, we move to Steven Salaita’s provocative study of Sherman Alexie’s post-9/11 works Flight and Ten Little Indians, where he asks difficult questions about Alexie’s representation of Muslim characters, the legacies of U.S. colonial violence, and the problematic and recurring specter of terrorism in these works. Rounding out the critical essays is Dave Yost’s study of the “textual war” at the heart of David Treuer’s The Translation of Dr. Apelles and the ways in which Treuer’s narrative offers a significant challenge to culturalist readings of Native literature, as well as reader expectations of what that literature should or even can be.

As is something of a tradition in SAIL, the critical essays are joined by other works that offer a transnational snapshot of Indigenous writing. First, Sámi writer and editor Kirsti Paltto provides an important assessment of the history and current state of Sámi literature and publishing—a vibrant body of work deserving of far more attention by scholars in our field. The issue concludes with our regular book review section, led by Robert Dale Parker’s remarkable review essay of Salt Publishing’s Earthworks series and its sharing of Indigenous poetry with a global audience.

Together, the contributions to this issue articulate a sophisticated understanding of the depth, the range, and the diversity of Indigenous literature. So read it, and then share it. When somebody says, “I didn’t know...