From the Editors

Daniel and I wanted to take this opportunity to encourage you to let us know what you have thought of our first three issues—with the themed cluster on Indigenous and Queer Studies, the review essays on the new collection Reasoning Together, and the articles on Linda Hogan, D’Arcy McNickle, Sherman Alexie, James Welch, and Charles Alexander Eastman. At the same time, we wanted to let you know about the content of upcoming issues. Issue 20.4 will include a tribute to Paula Gunn Allen by Annette Van Dyke and an essay on the legacy of House Made of Dawn by Jace Weaver to celebrate the novel’s fortieth anniversary. Essays on William Apess and Samson Occom and a commentary by Sam McKegney called “Strategies for Ethical Engagement: Non-Native Scholars in Native Literary Studies” will complete the issue.

We will also continue the practice of occasionally publishing a special issue. D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark will guest edit 21.3 on American Indian literary nationalism. We hope that you are as eager as we are to see these issues in print.

In addition to the book reviews, this issue includes three wonderful poems by Maurice Kenny and three essays that span the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Joseph L. Coulombe investigates the balance that James Welch establishes in his historical novels between showing the common humanity of Native and non-Native peoples while carefully depicting distinct tribal cultures, and Peter Bayers demonstrates Charles Alexander Eastman’s interest in drawing equivalences between Santee and upper middle-class white manhood in an effort to illustrate that Native men were prepared for U.S. citizenship. In her discussion of Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer, Janet Dean argues provocatively that the novel “is about acts of collection and re-collection, the meanings and identities they produce, and, more significantly, the losses they inflict.”

We hope you enjoy the issue.