From the Editor: Disrupting Expectations

It has become standard within Native American literary studies to assert or conclude that Native authors and their works disrupt the expectations of their audiences, even though disruption itself—rhetorical, discursive, and/or political—has become a standard expectation within our field. The hyperbole points to its own irony: Can an author or work disrupt expectations when disruption is the expected norm? Less commonly stated is the observation, more subtle than the hyperbole, that Native authors often appear to have anticipated the diverse expectations of multiple audiences and thus appear to have crafted their works to resonate across distances—of language and culture, of genre and form, of gender and ethnicity, of time and space—rather than to have focused their efforts exclusively on the needs or desires of any audience in particular. As a result, more often it is the expectations of scholars, who tend to read works of Native literature in particular contexts, with particular sets of critical tools, and from particular points of view, that these works seem most to disrupt. The four pieces gathered in the current issue of sail begin precisely from this humble observation that the disruption of the scholar’s own expectations about a Native author or Native work was the impetus for investigation and analysis.

Issue 26.3 opens with a demonstration of how accessing new archives can disrupt our expectations for familiar figures. Cari M. Carpenter’s essay revisits the rhetorical strategies deployed by the nineteenth-century Paiute tribal activist Sarah Winnemucca by shifting focus away from Winnemucca’s much-studied narrative Life among the Piutes, published in 1883, and onto the large body of Winnemucca’s public lectures, which have received relatively little critical attention. Carpenter investigates the surprisingly nuanced record of these live performances—and, crucially, of their effects on audiences—in the literally hundreds of newspaper articles written about Winnemucca between 1864 and 1891. In striking detail, this rich archive reveals a Winnemucca who is not only highly accomplished at deploying tropes of sentimentality in order to appeal to white women reformers in the East, as numerous scholars have documented in their readings of Life among the Piutes, but a Winnemucca who is equally accomplished at deploying variations of gendered, region-specific, and embodied humor in order to make her activist appeal to a broad range of non- Native audiences, male as well as female, situated in both the East and the West.

Next, Julie Tharp follows a similar investigative impulse in her reading of The Round House, the award- winning novel by acclaimed Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich published in 2012. Tharp turns to recent newspaper opinion pieces written by Erdrich, and to recent magazine and broadcast interviews conducted with her, in order to better understand how and why this disturbing novel about sexual violence against Native women disrupts readers’—and perhaps especially scholars’—expectations for Erdrich’s typically lyrical prose style. The more overtly activist tone of The Round House has already garnered a great deal of attention for its unflinching examination of the all- too- common crime of rape in reservation communities and for its detailed exploration of the complexities of competing federal, state, and tribal jurisdictions that impede the prosecution of non- Native perpetrators. Erdrich’s straightforward activist discourse in newspapers and magazines and on the public airwaves, Tharp argues, helps to contextualize her seeming departure from her literary norm and helps to explain its broad appeal.

In the issue’s final essay, Miriam Brown Spiers turns our attention to a different archive in her examination of the graphic text Red, the Haida manga published by the Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas in 2009. Spiers’s fascinating analysis of how Yahgulanaas manipulates the defining frame of sequential comics or other graphic texts to function similarly to the formline in Haida art reveals how Red disrupts expectations about the mechanics of appropriation and the aesthetics of popular forms. What at first appears to be a “mash-up” of US and Japanese conventions for the graphic novel, Spiers argues, is actually a sophisticated adaptation of traditional Haida art techniques and philosophy that appropriates US and Japanese conventions...