From the Editor: Identities and Definitions

As I prepare this brief introduction, both the mainstream US press and various social media outlets remind me that we are participants in and witnesses to yet another period of heightened Indigenous activism across North America and around the planet. Most prominent in North America at this moment is the strong resistance organized by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their coalition of Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies to block completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatens to violate sacred ancestral lands and to pollute life-giving waters. As in so many instances of Native protest, at the glaring center of the current conflict stands the perennial issue of whether or not settler governments and powerful multinational corporations will recognize Native individuals, communities, and nations as relevant stakeholders with relevant concerns and points of view—on their own lands and in their own lives. Yet again, Native individuals, communities, and nations are being forced not only to reassert their basic political sovereignty but also to reargue their basic worth and humanity.

The four essays that complete volume 28 of sail are thus especially timely in that they similarly grapple with the ongoing struggles of Native American individuals and communities in the United States and Canada to influence how their identities are defined, represented, deployed, and (often) controlled within dominant political, legal, social, educational, commercial, and popular discourses. Two of the four essays analyze these struggles over identity and definition in Native writing explicitly intended for children and young adults and thus through an examination of literary texts explicitly tied not only to the realities of the authors’ Indigenous present but also to the possibilities of all our Indigenous futures. Emily Nagin opens the issue with an exploration of three popular Native American young adult (ya) texts that span more than a century of the complicated politics of commercial publishing, adoption for classroom use, and broader reception: Francis La Flesche’s The Middle Five, first published in 1900; Natachee Scott Momaday’s Owl in the Cedar Tree, published in 1964; and Sherman Alexie’s award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, published in 2007. Mandy Suhr-Sytsma then argues for including Jeannette Armstrong’s acclaimed but understudied novel Slash, published for a teen audience in Canada in 1985, within the ya category as well. Together, Nagin and Suhr-Sytsma explore how a range of Native writers actively innovate the conventions of the ya genre while interrogating the politics of ya publishing through the lens of Indigenous sovereignty.

The remaining two essays broaden this investigation beyond texts explicitly aimed at young adult readers. Jennifer Adese takes up the problematic issue of defining—and controlling—Métis identities (also referred to as Michif and Halfbreed identities) within Métis literary texts in Canada. She combines compelling personal criticism with a close reading of Herb Belcourt’s Walking in the Woods in order to develop a defiant argument against the persistent and persistently racialized discourse of Métis identity an “mixed.” Helen Makhdoumian then demonstrates how the celebrated Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan rewrites the 1987 legal case of United States v. James E. Billie in her 1998 novel Power in order to imagine and assert Indigenous control over Indigenous identities and definitions when they matter most—that is, when they intersect the dominant culture’s systems of political, juridical, and carceral power. Makhdoumian’s careful and compelling legal contextualization helps correct a tendency in recent scholarship to read Hogan’s works within universalist ecocritical frameworks that erase the author’s precise engagements with issues of Indigenous rights to land and resources, issues that are never independent of ongoing battles over Indigenous rights to definitional control.