Making and Marking Transitions

This special issue on Indigenous New England marks the first published issue under my care as the new editor of SAIL. I want to begin by thanking my immediate predecessors, Daniel Justice and Jim Cox, for their careful shepherding of the journal over the past five years and for their guidance in helping me make the editorial transition. Their predecessors, too, deserve acknowledgment and gratitude, not only the several previous editors but also the early leaders of ASAIL, whose vision and hard work built the journal from nothing and continues to sustain us. I also want to thank the larger SAIL team: our highly organized and efficient book review editor, Lisa Tatonetti; our insightful editorial board, which includes continuing members Lisa Brooks, Robin Riley Fast, Susan Gardner, Patrice Hollrah, Molly McGlennen, Margaret Noori, Kenneth Roemer, Christopher Teuton, and Jace Weaver, and new member Jodi Byrd; our many expert reviewers (you know who you are); and our helpful contacts at the University of Nebraska Press, especially APM Project Manager Terence Smyre. The College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University has provided funding for a graduate editorial assistant, Anne Mai Yee Jansen, who is my very capable PhD. advisee. With this team on board, SAIL is in good hands.

Our editorial goals for the next five years are simple. We will pursue the standards set for the journal at the beginning: to encourage a diverse range of voices and ideas; to publish scholarship that is innovative in its objects of study, in its resources and methodologies, and in its presentation and style; to thus promote the production, study, and teaching of Native self-representation. SAIL remains the only journal dedicated to the study of American Indian literatures, and our central mission must always be to set the bar high and to help push the field forward. Since the 1970s, American Indian literary studies has broadened its view to include an ever wider range of authors, genres, historical periods, and media. It has also developed an increasingly diverse and generative array of research methodologies, analytic frameworks, and grounding theories about the complex workings of literature, culture, identity, history, and politics. Some of the most striking recent developments explicitly pursue, on the one hand, methods, frameworks, and theories that look to specific American Indian cultures, histories, and languages for content and inspiration, and, on the other hand, methods, frameworks, and theories that look beyond Native North America toward Indigenous cultures, histories, and languages around the globe. These simultaneous engagements with the Native American local and the Indigenous global have begun to create palpable tensions in the field that are already highly productive. In the years to come it will be exciting to see exactly how these tensions will continue to transform our scholarship.

This special issue begins that process. Margo Lukens and Siobhan Senier, our guest editors, have organized a terrific lineup of essays, dialogue, and autobiography to highlight the complexity of Indigenous New England, an area often simply left out of orthodox constructions of contemporary Native North America. The issue’s focus on a specific region, however, has national and global implications in its deft examinations of the networks Indigenous individuals and communities in what is now New England created in the past and continue to sustain in the present, as well as in its sophisticated challenges to any simple understanding of the very concept of region. We see Indigenous New England as an auspicious beginning for the next phase of SAIL. We hope you agree.