From the Editor

The timing for this special issue is especially opportune, given the recent publication of Choctalking on Other Realities, a collection of travel adventure stories by Choctaw writer and intellectual LeAnne Howe that continues her exploration of her concept “tribalography.” Early in the collection Howe writes: “Native stories have always been enormous in scope and in the telling of all creation, yet in a little over a century our stories have been pressed into the minuscule size of a grain of sand. A stereotype in feathers. So I hope to (re)complicate matters with international stories” (13). In the final piece Howe arrives at a well-earned conclusion: these highly personal, self-reflexive, humorous accounts of a contemporary Choctaw woman crossing various and multiple borders “show not only how one thing leads to another, but that movement across space and time, i.e., travel, transforms us into something more than we were” (173). The emphasis on unexpected relationships and significant transformations in these stories of Indigenous travel will surprise no one who is familiar with Howe’s work across genre and media, including not only her celebrated novels, Shell Shaker and Miko Kings, her poetry collected in Evidence of Red and elsewhere, and her dramatic and film work, but also her growing body of nonfiction, memoir, and Indigenous-centered scholarship.

Our guest editor, Joseph Bauerkemper, has brought together a terrific lineup of scholars to explore the unexpected relationships and transformations that are key elements of Howe’s theory of tribalography and to test the applicability of Howe’s theory within and across multiple contexts. The issue concludes with groundbreaking new work by Howe herself. And we are fortunate to have an example of the innovative work of Chickasaw artist Dustin Mater as a special cover for this special issue. Mater’s Life & Death in the Field of Time draws on artistic and intellectual traditions from southeastern mound- building cultures, one of the several nodes of intersection and inspiration for Howe’s evolving theory.