From the Editors

We write this introduction in the aftermath of the devastating not-guilty verdicts in the trials for the murders of twenty-two-year-old Colten Boushie (Cree) and fifteen-year-old Tina Fontaine (Anishinaabe). These verdicts, which so starkly show the racism in the Canadian judicial system and in the larger Canadian society, have prompted widespread protests, calls to action, and new reflection on the violence of settler colonialism and the possibilities for “reconciliation.” The vitriol hurled at Indigenous people in the wake of these verdicts on social media, particularly at Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people, further reveals the persistence of racism, sexism, and homophobia in Canada despite that nation’s self-congratulatory pride in being more “tolerant” than the United States. Niigaan Sinclair put it most bluntly: on both sides of the border, “[injustice] is too often a part of Indigenous lives.”

We also write in light of the allegations against Sherman Alexie of widespread sexual harassment and abuse. The Indigenous literary community, including us at SAIL, supports the women who are coming forward. Alexie’s preeminence as the Native American writer that mainstream America loved, aka the Joseph Boyden effect, highlights our need to bring greater attention to a much wider range of Indigenous writers, especially women and Two-Spirit people.

Indeed, all of this recent news simply underscores the importance of Indigenous control over Indigenous stories. One heartening response to the Alexie situation is the outpouring on Native Twitter of suggestions for other Indigenous authors to read from across Turtle Island. Although Indigenous people don’t recognize borders, the reality is that Indigenous literature from what is currently the United States and Canada is divided by the forty-ninth parallel. As readers and as editors, we encourage people not only to read more noncanonical Indigenous writers but also to use our literary skills to help bring these writers the attention they so richly deserve. These recent events are painful and all too common for Indigenous people, but the variety and sheer number of Indigenous authors represent a powerful resurgence. We have an obligation to reflect this resurgence and variety in the pages of SAIL.

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The essays in the issue at hand all consider, to some degree, the legacies of settler violence—on Indigenous landscapes, Indigenous bodies, and Indigenous stories—and they show how story and criticism can speak back to that violence. In our lead article, Drew Lopenzina considers the astonishing absence of any kind of historic marker commemorating William Apess in his birthplace of Colrain, Massachusetts. Lopenzina has begun piecing together Apess’s biography not only by reading the author’s corpus and searching existing archives but also by traveling to the places Apess has been. If, as Leanne Betasamoke Simpson often says, one of the most radical things that Indigenous people can do is “put our bodies on the land,” Lopenzina models how scholars, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, can honor “the imperative of acknowledging [Indigenous] presence [in a specific place], of claiming that ground, and somehow counteracting the profound unwitnessing that surrounds Indigenous existence.” Among the many prongs of this engaged scholarship, advocacy, and community building, Lopenzina has launched a campaign to put a marker in Colrain: https://apessblog.wordpress.com/.

Next, Kathleen Champlin seeks to recuperate Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead from ongoing critical controversy over its representations of queer characters. This controversy, Champlin suggests, has itself perpetuated a kind of violence on the text, shutting down some of the more emancipatory strains found both in that novel and in Two-Spirit criticism that have exhorted us to decolonize our analyses of gender and sexuality. While she concedes that Almanac is far from an homage to Two-Spirit traditions and people, Champlin argues that it does illustrate how homophobic violence is part and parcel of settler violence.

Another, quite different reading of Almanac appears in Anne Stewart’s contribution to this issue. Stewart offers a powerful formulation: “neoliberal earthworks,” or “massive developmental and extractive projects that grow by devouring on a planetary scale.” She finds a timeless response to such projects in Silko’s novel and in other epochal works, including Allison Adele...