Introduction: Indigenous Conversations about Biography

Rather than being focused on Indigenous biographies as such, this special issue of Biography was conceived by Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori), Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), and Noelani Arista (Kanaka Maoli) as a wide-ranging conversation among Indigenous scholars, writers, artists, and filmmakers about the ethics, relations, practices, and considerations of representing Indigenous lives. The introduction by Te Punga Somerville and Justice offers observations about the process of bringing together a large community of Indigenous thinkers from a wide range of geographic, ancestral, and disciplinary contexts to this topic, and how this discursive approach shifted their understanding—individually and collectively—of the power and possibility of Indigenous biography.