Conversations with LeAnne Howe ed. by Kirsten L. Squint (review)

as leanne howe remarks several times in the fourteen interviews that make up this fascinating volume, American Indians are often pushed to the margins in U.S. literary discourse: discussed in the past tense as haunting ghosts, asked to fit with tired (and tiresome) stereotypes, made out to be the solemn validators of the colonizer's identity. Perhaps for that reason, there are still far too few monographs dedicated to individual Native American writers. Books of published interviews centered on one writer are even rarer: as far as I can tell, the only examples are the previous volumes, also put out by University Press of Mississippi, centered on Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, N. Scott Momaday, and Leslie Marmon Silko. One could also count the volume Postindian Conversations, coedited by A. Robert Lee and Gerald Vizenor.

LeAnne Howe more than justifies such treatment. Choctaw by birth, adopted into an unstable and precarious situation with her Cherokee family, Howe has in the past decade increasingly been recognized as one of the foremost contemporary American Indian intellectuals. Her concept of tribalography, with its emphasis on the unification of genres rather than taxonomic division, stressing the central importance and power of tribal stories in the American narrative, has become a significant term of art in Native American literary studies. True to this mixed-genre sensibility—in one interview, she delights in Nathan Scott McNamara's description of her as a "genre chemist" (138)—she has created major interventions in multiple forms. One strand that runs through the interviews in the volume under review is the restlessness of her imagination, with multiple projects always on the go, always looking to overturn Euro-Western preconceptions and prioritize Native understandings, frequently in collaboration with others.

Kirstin L. Squint is one of those frequent collaborators, and we can see that collaboration deepening across the four interviews she has conducted with Howe. All of these are included in this book, but the 2019 interview really makes this collection essential reading. While Howe is never less than engaged, and frequently very funny, in the earlier interviews the reader definitely gets the sense that both interviewer and subject are meeting on quite professional terms: the questions are centered on theme and opinion, while the answers are somewhat guardedly professional, moving between academic discussion and activism. While a useful resource, then, these earlier interviews make for a slightly dry read. Certainly, reading through them, I had no particular impulse to take notes, trusting that the extensive index would help me find what I was looking for if I needed it. By contrast, the second half of my edition is bursting with bookmarks, as Howe begins to open up on a more personal level. My bookmark on Squint's final interview, previously unpublished, in which Howe talks about her childhood and its links to her work, reads "LeAnne. Pseudonym. Abuse. Autism spectrum. Family histories!" Even for people familiar with many of the facts from the work, this conversation is essential, even revelatory.

As Howe says in her discussion with Rebecca Macklin included here, her writing is "a form of activism […] a story changes the world" (94). The stories that have taken hold of her imagination are notably ones of American Indian agency and intervention: the Choctaw gift to Ireland, the spectral "Savage Indian" who appeared to Mary Todd Lincoln, Native missionaries in the Middle East, the Native origins of baseball, and—always central in her imagination—Nanih Waiya and the other Choctaw mounds. One interview that really stands out here is with C. A. Conrad for the Occult Poetry Radio podcast, where Howe goes into great detail about the supernatural and occult nature of her inspiration, discussing moments when she has seen and interacted with otherworldly entities: ghosts, spirits, animals, and visions such as the image of one of the nooses used in Lincoln's murderous "execution" of the Dakota 38, which floated toward her in a Las Vegas hotel bathroom before becoming a character in Savage Conversations. In the theater...