From the Editor: Crossing Genre, Media, Form

So much of the vitality of contemporary Native American and Indigenous literatures derives from movements across genre, media, and form. This statement holds true not only for innovative works of poetry and prose or drama and performance but also for film, video, and digital media and for graphic and multimedia texts. Crossings are happening in Indigenous self- representation in multiple directions, with multiple results and to multiple effects. But the statement holds true as well for Native American and Indigenous literary studies. The four essays presented in issue 27.3 demonstrate the analytic power of similar crossings of formal and disciplinary boundaries in works of scholarship and critical response.

In the opening essay, Susan Bernardin analyzes the complex interplay of literary and visual genres in the “gag cartoon” and mixed- media work of California- based artist and activist L. Frank. Through a process of multiple contextualization and close visual and literary analysis, Bernardin builds an argument for broadening our understandings of a contemporary Indigenous aesthetics conceived within multiple, simultaneous, and often collaborative frames. With Bernardin’s assistance, we are fortunate to present one of L. Frank’s signature pieces, featuring Coyote in a starring role, on our cover for this issue of sail.

The second essay, by Chris LaLonde, attempts to engage Stephen Graham Jones’s highly allusive (and elusive) 2006 novel-as-screenplay Demon Theory on its own terms. Demon Theory demands—and rewards—a devoted fan’s detailed knowledge of 1980s popular music and film, and it deploys no fewer than 703 footnotes to assist readers in becoming better-informed fans of the novel’s soundtrack. In his performative analysis of Jones’s interrelated techniques, LaLonde mimics Jones’s deconstructive format of gripping, filmic narrative leading to explanatory note, which itself leads to further layers of explication embedded in subnotes. In this way, LaLonde pays homage to Jones’s provocations of form, popular media, and literary theory and excavates Jones’s expansive message about the parameters of Indigenous self-representation across genres and cultures.

The third essay, by Natalie Eppelsheimer, continues a focus on the multiple forms of interplay between musical and literary genres in the evocation of complex cultural and national identities. Eppelsheimer investigates the roles of German poetry and German music at play in Louise Erdrich’s 2003 novel The Master Butchers Singing Club in order to analyze the complexity of Erdrich’s representation of a postcontact Anishinaabe American community.

Finally, in the fourth essay, Allison Hargreaves brings us back to the visual with her analysis of the 2006 film documentary Finding Dawn by Métis filmmaker Christine Welsh. Hargreaves reads Finding Dawn within and against the context of the current epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada but also in terms of the documentary’s multiple appeals and multiple pedagogies. Hargreaves argues that Welsh’s techniques move beyond simply reporting the horrific details and traumatic effects of the contemporary crisis to actively instruct viewers in Indigenous feminist research methodologies. These methodologies, Hargreaves demonstrates, are vital not only for remembering and honoring the missing but for critiquing the dominant politics of representation and creating new forms of Indigenous communal knowledge.