From the Editors

tawaˆw (welcome) to our second double issue. We head to press shortly after learning that poet Janice Gould (Koyoonk'auwi) has passed away unexpectedly. The grief is being felt across the Indigenous literary studies community. In this issue, writers Ruth Salvaggio, Malea Powell, Dean Rader, Lisa Tatonetti, and Daniel Heath Justice pay tribute to her profound contributions. She is very much missed.

In happier news, the twentieth annual Native American Literature Symposium, held earlier this year at Mystic Lake, recognized several recent SAIL publications: essays by Drew Lopenzina, Shannon Toll, and Anne Stewart were all nominated for the Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Essay. The winner was Shaawano Chad Uran for his essay "Policing Resource Extraction and Human Rights in The Land of the Dead," published last year by our friends at the journal Transmotion. Our warmest congratulations to everyone who was nominated and who won. We are so grateful for your good work.

We've been gratified by our recent transition to a twice-a-year publication schedule. Double issues allow us to create more sustained conversations among submissions and to make more room for special sections. In the issue at hand, for instance, we enjoyed juxtaposing articles hailing from either side of the forty-ninth parallel. We are looking forward, too, to an upcoming double issue devoted entirely to papers from ASAIL's sister organization in Canada, the Indigenous Literary Studies Association (ILSA). Meanwhile, we are also delighted by the influx of submissions on Indigenous literatures of Mexico, Central America, and South America. The resurgence of Indigenous literature is truly hemispheric and global. Stay tuned and stay involved: let us know if you would like to review submissions, and keep sending us your good ideas for special sections.

This issue begins with two theoretical articles representing First Nations and American Indian literatures and approaches. First up is an essay by Pauline Wakeham, one of the foremost scholars on the Canadian project of reconciliation. In her contribution here, she looks specifically at the #IndigenousReads program, promoted in 2016 by Carolyn Bennett, minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. On the face of it, this formal extension of Indigenous literature to the public sphere is so welcome, yet, Wakeham finds, the project is largely constrained by the state project of reconciliation and "relationship." That in itself is perhaps not too surprising; what is fresh about Wakeham's study is her rigorous attention to how Canada's "symbolic reconciliatory gestures" in fact "hinge upon the appropriation and exploitation of Indigenous intellectual, creative, and testimonial resources and labor." It is a model essay—well-researched, compellingly argued, and respectful of Indigenous scholars and philosophers.

Next, Matt Herman, a long-standing member of ASAIL, celebrates the twentieth anniversary of Linda Tuhiwai Smith's influential Decolonizing Methodologies. Taking her "Twenty-Five Indigenous Projects," he offers four more: continuing, reknowing, sociologizing, and valuing. In describing these projects, Herman ranges widely across canonical writers like Leslie Marmon Silko and Joy Harjo; lesser-discussed poets like Henry Real Bird and Kim Shuck; and visual arts, including the photography of Jolene Rickard and the documentary Place of the Falling Waters. This is exactly the kind of generous, dialogic reading for which SAIL has long been known.

The next two essays turn to late twentieth-century Indigenous poetry. Daniel Coleman, a settler scholar who has written widely on Indigenous literature, non-Indigenous Canadian literature, refugees, masculinity studies, and whiteness studies offers a riveting read of double-columned poems by Peter Blue Cloud. In a way, his essay is an implicit response to the critique offered by Pauline Wakeham: it uses formal analysis, tribally specific history, and James (Sa'ke'j) Youngblood Henderson's theory of "trans-systemic" analysis not only to show how the poems themselves evoke Two Row Wampum philosophy and materiality but also to suggest how these epistemologies can "recalibrate relations between Indigenous and settler colonial regimes." An equally welcome essay on a poet who also deserves much more critical attention is offered by Crystal Veronie, who gives a timely rereading of Chrystos's address to violence against Indigenous women and to the...