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  • From the EditorBones, Lands, Bodies
  • Chadwick Allen

This first issue of volume 27 of sail expands upon a familiar juxtaposition in Native American and Indigenous literary and cultural studies, namely, the persistently evocative triad of “blood,” “land” and “memory” or, put another way, the continually vexing issues of Indigenous identity, belonging, and history, and how these issues and their many variants play out in multiple contexts.

Karen M. Poremski opens the issue by engaging the largely understudied poetry of Heid Erdrich in order to investigate the potential impact of Native voices within the specific contexts of museum anthropology and evolving public and academic discourses on the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra). Looking in particular at the inclusion of Erdrich’s poetic voice within a 2010 anthropological retrospective of the effects of nagpra, Poremski argues that Erdrich’s poems, which give voice to bones, work to effect a change in readers’ attitudes toward the Indigenous sacred objects and human remains (still) held in museums. Next, Mark Rifkin engages John Joseph Mathews’s complex 1934 novel Sundown, offering a nuanced reading of the ways Mathews’s aesthetic strategies and subtle evocation of the protagonist’s “queerness” reveal his negotiation with contrasting US and Osage understandings of time and space during the era when the Osage were forced to grapple with the federal government’s imposed system of land allotment and the “modern” sensibility it was supposed to bring to the reservation. Rifkin thus helps us see how Mathews works to expose the ongoing co-presence of Indigenous experiences of time and ways of inhabiting space within the strictures of settler colonialism. Kerry Boland completes the volume’s first set of articles by engaging the multiple temporalities of Sherman Alexie’s 2007 novel Flight in order to argue [End Page vii] against early readings of this popular text that have located its power and impact within dominant paradigms of mainstream multiculturalism and within a universalist rhetoric of anti-violence. Focusing on the role of the protagonist’s specifically Indigenous body, Boland demonstrates how the novel can be read against the grain of these typical readings—including against the grain of Alexie’s own public statements about his “intentions” for the novel—to expose the potential of Flight to critique mainstream multiculturalism’s participation in the ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples. [End Page viii]

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