Reasoning Together: An Introduction

In June 2002 we asked tribally affiliated scholars who taught Native literature to "describe an ethical Native literary criticism." The conversation had actually begun the previous year, and we had tried to identify every Native person who taught the literature. Inevitably we missed a few people, and we apologize, yet we aimed toward inclusivity and those whose views were as often divergent, as much as convergent, with ours. While we certainly invited senior folks just as inclusively, we felt it vital to the collective, in avoiding the status quo, to concentrate on young scholars too, who, at least during that time, were not yet well known, some still in graduate programs. The resulting book, Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, intervenes in the history of SAIL conservatism by urging the journal further toward its mission of becoming the study of American Indian literatures rather than the study of American Indian identities, especially through Reasoning's celebration of some alternatives to ethnographic analysis and protagonist studies. We need to also credit SAIL for its own efforts at breaking out of these molds as well as to encourage further deviance. As sacred as anything in the book we published is the fact that each of the twelve people who wrote is its author, not its contributor, and each writer is in dialogue with fellow authors in an interactive format by citing fellow essayists in the collective.

In order to launch our book, we have called on two important writers—one north and one south of a problematic border, the one between Canada and the United States—to weigh in on the result in this issue of SAIL. We appreciate the possibility of a different angle of vision than our own that is provided here by Kristina Fagan and James Cox, who were chosen especially because they are not in the collective. We hope the collective will generate debate of a particular kind rooted in the citation of scholarly publications rather than in public venting with few references to ideas, and certainly the work of Kristina and James has demonstrated a commitment to working through controversies. The collective itself is not only passionate about its views—in its best moments it is outrageously compassionate. We invite you to join us by reading Reasoning Together—as well as by closely following the insights of these two thoughtful scholars who have important things to say about our attempts to envision a literature in relation to the ethics that might best serve it.