From the Editor: Scholarship Intersects Pedagogy

Since its beginnings in the 1970s, the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures has insisted that we keep issues related to pedagogy central in our promotion of the scholarly study of Native American and Indigenous literatures. Not simply which texts we choose to analyze matters for the ongoing development of the field, asail members have consistently argued, but also which texts we choose to include in our syllabi and, as important, how we choose to teach those texts in actual classrooms filled with actual students. As in our scholarship, so too in our pedagogy: context and method matter as much or more than specific content. Although only the opening article explicitly addresses the difficulty of adequately framing complex works within the undergraduate classroom—especially when that classroom includes students who identify as Indigenous—all four articles in this issue of sail engage critical issues that affect, inform, and challenge our approaches to teaching Native American and Indigenous literatures at all levels.

Issue 28.2 begins with Blake Hausman’s compelling account of his attempts to navigate the thorny ethical issues that erupt when teaching John Rollin Ridge’s 1854 The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, the text that is generally considered the first novel written by a Native American author. In classroom discussions, Hausman asks, how can instructors effectively contextualize Ridge’s problematic depictions of Indigenous characters, which his novel unequivocally marginalizes and unambiguously denigrates? Are standard biographical contextualization and historical explanations for Ridge’s rhetorical choices enough to (help) make sense of these disturbing nineteenth-century representations for twenty-first-century readers?

In the article that follows, Lisa Michelle King continues Hausman’s practical focus on questions of effective contextualization and adequate rhetorical framing for problematic or disturbing representations. In a fascinating investigation of the 2014 controversy over the repatriation of scalps held at the Karl May Museum in Germany—a museum devoted to celebrating and even perpetuating the stereotypical and denigrating nineteenth-century representations of American Indians created by the popular German writer Karl May—King demonstrates just how closely Indigenous activist efforts in the present remain tied to dominant stereotypes developed in the past.

Next, Lindsey Claire Smith and Trever Lee Holland argue the need for a critical (re)contextualization and a crucial rhetorical (re)framing for the acclaimed novels of contemporary Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan. Although Hogan’s Mean Spirit, Power, Solar Storms, and People of the Whale have been celebrated primarily for their broad appeal across multiple Native and non-Native communities and for their applicability within environmentalist and ecofeminist critical movements, Smith and Holland resituate these diverse works within specifically Chickasaw history and traditions and within specifically Chickasaw political and economic struggles with the U.S. settler states of Oklahoma and Texas. Smith and Holland demonstrate how Hogan’s works engage and explore the ongoing relationships of the Chickasaws and other southeastern peoples removed to what is now Oklahoma to significant resources of water and waterways and, importantly, how these Indigenous nations understand their ongoing battles over water rights.

Finally, issue 28.2 concludes with Brian K. Hudson’s evocative reframing of Native American novels written in the 1930s within the emerging critical field of animal studies and through the more specifically Indigenous theory of “first beings.” Continuing the important work he began in a 2013 special issue of sail devoted to animal studies, Hudson explicates the central crisis of Indigenous confinement in D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded and John Oskison’s Brothers Three in terms of these novels’ complex discourses on the domestication of nonhuman animals. Moreover, in order to better understand how McNickle and Oskison confront the settler politics of Indigenous confinement, Hudson urges us not to simply choose between figurative and literal readings of key scenes involving nonhuman animals, such as cattle and horses, but rather to combine these approaches to analysis. Similar to the other scholars featured in this issue, then, Hudson thus offers strategies for reading complex Native texts that will be useful both for future scholarship and for future classroom pedagogies.