Reclamation and Return

A central concern of contemporary Native American and Indigenous literary studies is the ongoing effort to expand our archive: to rediscover and reclaim lost, forgotten, or previously unknown authors and texts; to engage authors and texts not only across borders of tribe and nation, but also across borders of gender, sexuality, ability, and citizenship; to open our methods of inquiry and analysis to diverse genre and media and to multiple modes of representation and performance. An equally central concern of our field, however, is the need to continually return critical attention—with its ever-evolving understandings of relevant contexts for reading and productive methodologies for analysis—to authors and texts assumed to be well known and thus assumed to be fully understood and appreciated, whether such authors and texts have in the past been considered “central” to the field or “marginal.” The addition of new authors and texts and the development of new understandings of relevant contexts and productive methodologies potentially change how we read, interpret, and understand the familiar and the obscure alike.

The four highly accomplished essays in this issue of sail invite us to turn our attention to both familiar and obscure authors and texts and to consider each within new contexts and from new critical perspectives. Lincoln Faller opens the issue by reconsidering James Welch’s much-discussed but ever-elusive 1979 novel The Death of Jim Loney. Faller revisits past assessments of the novel’s provocative and ambiguous ending, and he develops new readings of its central scenes by exploring aspects of the novel’s literary structure and system of historical and cultural allusions that are especially occulted and difficult to interpret—or even to recognize. The result, appropriately, is an expanded appreciation for the novel’s mystery and for Welch’s considerable literary skill, rather than an assertion of an exhaustive or definitive account. Elizabeth Wilkinson then reconsiders Gertrude Bonnin’s complex rhetorical strategies from the early twentieth century, especially her strategic use of her own narrative silences, her depictions of the silence and silencing of others, and her deployment of delayed discourse. Wilkinson’s strategy of pairing Bonnin’s lesser-known 1924 report Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes—Legalized Robbery with her better-known trilogy of essays about the Indian boarding school experience published between 1900 and 1902 in the Atlantic Monthly is especially fruitful and persuasive; it provides a useful model for future studies. Next, Sophie McCall considers the contemporary political issue of Indigenous-settler reconciliation, especially as it is being debated in Canada, and the contemporary literary-critical issue of the merits of “nationalist” versus “postcolonial” approaches to reading and interpretation, through a different kind of critical pairing, the close comparison of Tomson Highway’s 1998 novel Kiss of the Fur Queen and Joseph Boyden’s 2005 novel Three Day Road. McCall focuses her wide-ranging comparative analysis through Highway’s and Boyden’s evocative representations of the Cree figures Weetigo (a cannibal spirit) and Weesageechak (a trickster), which allows her to frame the broader political issues she raises in distinctly Indigenous terms. Finally, Christina Roberts invites reconsideration of Betty Louise Bell’s moving but under-studied 1994 novel Faces in the Moon. Roberts examines the complexity of the novel’s narrative voice and the potential relationships of that narrative voice to Bell’s nonfiction writing by focusing, in particular, on Bell’s unflinching representation of the abject figure of the detribalized Indigenous woman and on Bell’s commitment to creating a narrative of healing. Similar to Faller’s reconsideration of Welch, Roberts’s reconsideration of Bell concludes not with an assertion of mastery over this nuanced text but rather with an appreciation for its subtlety and power.