Introduction

WE ARE HONORED to present to you the very first Massachusetts Review issue focused on Native American writing. We are thankful to Associate Editor N. C. Christopher Couch and the rest of the MR team for dreaming up this issue and for asking us to be guest editors, and we are especially thankful to the writers and artists whose work we’ve chosen for this special issue. Their words and images are a gift.

This issue, as it was first imagined, was set to coincide with and push back against Massachusetts’s planned celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower voyage and the settlers’ arrival at Plymouth. Instead of commemorating the settler colonial narrative that surrounds the founding of Plymouth Colony, we sought instead to celebrate Indigenous narratives, not only from the Northeast but also from all of what is now the United States.

This issue emerges in a world much changed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the current administration’s failure to mitigate it, which is devastating to Native communities — places already impacted by environmental racism as well as underfunded and understaffed health services. We have lost and are losing our community members, some of them young and healthy and some who are tribal elders, keepers of languages and Indigenous knowledge. We mourn for these losses and for those to come. Indigenous people have endured many epidemics, including those brought four hundred years ago, which makes the current moment also a reminder of these past traumas and the erasures of those histories. As a reminder of the impact of the current pandemic on Native peoples, we have chosen to include some images from the “Protect Your Elders” series, a project that features public health posters designed by Indigenous artists and imagined by Lee Francis IV, founder of the comic book publishing house Native Realities.

Our world is simultaneously engaged in a struggle for racial and social justice, sparked by protests over the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The Black Lives Matter movement leads this national and international reckoning, the focus not just on extra-judicial police violence and abolition but also on the way we remember and symbolize the past. In the U.S., we have witnessed Confederate statues and Columbus statues fall (33 to date!), and we have finally seen the end of the Washington Football Team name — a harmful mascot that Native activists have been fighting for years to have retired. In Massachusetts, legislation has been passed by the state senate that promises to remove the “Indian” from the state flag, seal, and motto.

This powerful movement has been bolstered by a landmark win for tribal sovereignty: in July of this year the Supreme Court case McGirt v. Oklahoma confirmed that 47 percent of Oklahoma is still Native land, and that the reservations of the Five Southeastern Tribes (Muscogees, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles) were never disestablished. At question in this case is whether a crime committed by a Seminole man named Jimcy McGirt occurred on Muscogee Creek land — and was therefore a federal crime, not a state one. The 5–4 decision in favor of McGirt and the Muscogee Creek Nation is a powerful affirmation of Indigenous title, one that is already being cited in other land and jurisdiction cases.

Other struggles for sovereignty and the protection of Indigenous rights, lands, and waters continue. The Kumeyaay Nation in California and the Tohono O’odham in Arizona are currently fighting the construction of the border wall that is destroying burial sites and impeding access to cultural and ceremonial sites. Litigation continues over the Dakota Access pipeline that crosses Standing Rock Sioux tribal lands, desecrates burial sites, and threatens to pollute the Missouri River — though a district court ruled in July that the pipeline had to cease operations. The fate of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would cross Rosebud Sioux territory and the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation (home of Gros Ventre and Assiniboine peoples), is still to be determined — a lawsuit brought by these two communities against the current administration is pending. Legislation to reinstate the trust status of the Mashpee...