From the Editor

This special issue inaugurates what I hope—and predict—is only the very beginning of a much-needed conversation about the multiple points of intersection between the academic fields of Indigenous and animal studies. Our guest editors, Brian K. Hudson and Dustin Gray, have assembled an impressive team of scholars, storytellers, poets, and artists not only to examine the moral and philosophical complexities of the many kinds of connections that occur among Indigenous human and nonhuman animals, but also to engage the aesthetic possibilities of those same complex connections. Their works of literary analysis, ethical argument, engaged dialogue, and artistic exploration remind us, too, that the investigation and celebration of relationships among human and nonhuman animals, like the investigation and celebration of human and nonhuman relationships to land, water, and sky, have always been central to Native literatures and to Native literary studies.

This special issue inaugurates as well what I hope—and predict—i s only the beginning of a new trend for SAIL in securing a special work of art for the cover of a special issue. We are especially grateful to Cherokee artist Murv Jacob, interviewed in this issue, for allowing us to reprint his beautiful and evocative painting Animal Stomp. And we are grateful to University of Nebraska Press for making this special cover possible.