From the Editor: Material and Materialisms, Old and New

The four essays in this issue of SAIL expand our understanding of Leslie Marmon Silko’s extraordinary 1991 novel of activist revolution, Almanac of the Dead; Geronimo’s enigmatic 1906 as-told-to autobiography, Geronimo: His Own Story; and Gerald Vizenor’s sly 2012 novel of trickster liberation, Chair of Tears. What makes the essays especially congruent and timely is how each interrogates contemporary modes of literary and cultural analysis—from so-called new materialisms and material ecocriticism, to pairings of law and literature, to studies of genre and representation, to rhetorically, philosophically, and ontologically based close reading and contextualization—in the service of furthering our knowledge of specifically Indigenous texts and textuality. In particular, these thoughtful, compelling essays by Kyle Bladow, Jane Griffi th, Anita Huizar-Hernández, and Geoff Hamilton help articulate the ways Indigenous self-representation actively intervenes in dominant settler understandings of time, materiality, and human being in a living and interconnected world.

SAIL 29.2 also marks a personal milestone for me as editor: it is the twentieth issue of the journal under my guidance, and it will be the final issue I submit to the University of Nebraska Press and see through the process of production. I have thoroughly enjoyed editing Studies in American Indian Literatures, and, as they do in any period that is full and busy, the years have flown by. I took over the submissions process in autumn 2011. In addition to teaching, at the time I was serving as director of a large graduate program in English and coordinator of a small interdisciplinary program in American Indian studies at Ohio State University; I was being reviewed for promotion to full professor; and I was preparing to host the Society of American Indians Centennial Symposium on the OSU campus and in the broader environs of central Ohio. When heavy boxes of SAIL editorial files arrived at my office, I admit to experiencing a moment of panic. Had I taken on too much? By autumn 2012, however, when copies of SAIL 24.3 arrived in the mail—the first issue I had shepherded all the way to print—I felt like I had things more or less under control, or at least in balance. There is a rhythm to putting out four issues of a journal each year, and it is a highly collaborative dance involving serial negotiations with authors, reviewers, board members, book review editors, graduate editorial assistants, copyeditors, and production and marketing staff at the press. I am fortunate to have had terrific partners.

Indeed, there are many people to thank. I am grateful for the inspiration and mentoring provided by my immediate editorial predecessors, Daniel Justice and Jim Cox, as well as for the camaraderie of the two book review editors with whom I have shared SAIL duties these past nearly six years, my good friends Lisa Tatonetti and Meg Noodin. I am also grateful for the insights of our talented SAIL editorial board—Lisa Brooks, Jodi Byrd, Robin Riley Fast, Susan Gardner, Patrice Hollrah, Molly McGlennen, Kenneth Roemer, Christopher Teuton, and Jace Weaver—and for the support of the ASAIL leadership, perhaps especially recent president Jill Doerfler. Ken Roemer deserves a special shout-out in this group: along with LaVonne Ruoff, he was one of the senior scholars who encouraged me to become involved with ASAIL when I was still a graduate student, and he has been an unfailing advocate of my work as a scholar, as an ASAIL president, and as an editor of SAIL.

I need to thank the no fewer than 111 authors who collaborated with us to produce such a wide range of engaging, often innovative, sometimes truly groundbreaking scholarship published in SAIL between autumn 2012 and summer 2017, as well as the several visual artists who lent us beautiful and provocative works to grace the covers of our special issues and the many faculty, emeriti, independent scholars, and graduate students who wrote book reviews. Collaborating with guest editors and individual authors has been a highlight of this experience, although assisting graduate students and newly minted PhDs toward a first...