In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

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

In articles on Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Louise Erdrich, Sarah Winnemucca, and Eric Gansworth, this issue establishes multiple points of correspondence across diverse forms and performances —quilts and tableaux vivants, lectures and novels, oral stories and newspaper articles—and regions—the central valley of Mexico and Iroquoia, Minneapolis and Tetzcoco. The result is a rich tapestry of voices engaged in exciting conversation about American Indian literatures.

We begin with Carolyn Sorisio's discussion of how Sarah Winnemucca controlled newspaper representations of herself. Sorisio argues, "Creating and controlling news coverage was key to [Winnemucca's] political strategy; she recognized that newspapers were sites wherein resistance had to take place. She was politically astute, rhetorically sophisticated, and a savvy negotiator of the news media." Sorisio's thesis and the recovery of newspaper archives that illustrates it serve as a corrective to the overemphasis on Winnemucca's public self-representation as an Indian princess or an exemplary Indian performing an affirmation of civilization to audiences devoted to reform.

Sorisio's consideration of Winnemucca's multiple self-representational strategies in the service of specific political goals sets the stage for the articles that follow. Deborah Weagel assesses Eric Gansworth's Mending Skins as a novel that works, with a nod to Homi Bhabha, in an "interstitial space that mediates binaries such as Native/ non-Native, image/text, and oral/written." References to quilts [End Page vii] in the novel, Weagel explains, help readers to see a variety of complex, multidirectional personal and cultural relationships. Louise Erdrich's Nanapush is at the center of such social and political relationships in the Little No Horse novels, and it is, Summer Harrison argues, his self-conscious literariness in Four Souls that has the potential to transform them. Harrison asserts that the novel is metafiction, that it "theorizes storytelling" within an Ojibwe political context. Nanapush's narrative strategy "enable[s] empathetic relations between people who similarly reflect on their own constructions of places and identities."

Thomas Ward, in the issue's final article, considers "Mesoamerica's glaring absence in Western intellectual history" with a specific focus on the Nahua and Spanish historian Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl. This recovery of Nahua intellectual traditions leads to Ward's contention that Alva Ixtlilxochitl "creat[ed] an innovative strand of Renaissance thought that did not emanate from Europe." Ward's assertion suggests provocative new possibilities for how we might talk about the American Indian literary renaissance!

First and last, all this writing, and our consideration of it, would not have been possible, Ernestine Hayes reminds us, without Raven's gift of daylight. [End Page viii]

...

pdf

Share