The Past, Present, and Possible Futures of American Indian Literary Studies

SAIL has now celebrated its thirtieth anniversary publishing scholars and creative writers in the field of American Indian literary studies. The celebration and reflection in which many of us participated at the 2007 MLA annual convention in Chicago was part of a recent, much broader discussion of where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going. In her 2005 PMLA article "Literature and the Politics of Native American Studies," Shari Huhndorf takes the occasion of a panel with Robert Warrior, Philip Deloria, and Jean O'Brien at the 2002 American Studies Association conference to reflect on the field since the 1960s and to assess its current state. Huhndorf traces the history through which the field has traveled to this contemporary moment characterized by an explicit political commitment to Native communities and the urgent issues of sovereignty, land reform, civil rights, health, and poverty, for example.¹ More recently, Scott Lyons has commented on the current historical moment in Native American literary studies in "Battle of the Bookworms" in the August 10, 2007, issue of Indian Country Today. At this "crucial historical moment," in which an "important and contentious debate" is occurring, Lyons finds hope for the field in the tribally specific literary critical practice of Craig Womack's Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (1999) and in David Treuer's plea for aesthetic or formalist rather than cultural analyses of Native literatures in Native American Fiction: A User's Manual (2006).² This debate, which Lisa Brooks also identifies as occurring at "a critical juncture in our discipline" (Reasoning Together 234), is currently shaping much of the intellectual work in our communities and classrooms, at conferences, and in the articles, books, and anthologies that we write and edit.³

Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (2008), edited by Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton, is an exciting and provocative contribution to the particular scholarly, political, and historical moment scrutinized in two of the many spaces where discussions about Native literary production and analysis are now occurring: in a newspaper owned and published by the Oneida Nation of New York and a scholarly journal published by one of the largest academic organizations in the United States.4 The book has thirteen chapters by the twelve coauthors: Janice Acoose, Lisa Brooks, Tol Foster, LeAnne Howe, Daniel Heath Justice, Phillip Carroll Morgan, Kimberly Roppolo, Cheryl Suzack, Christopher B. Teuton, Sean Teuton, Robert Warrior, and Craig S. Womack, who contributes two of the essays. The chapters contain a wide range of historical, generic, and theoretical focuses that will give readers a deeply satisfying sense of the breadth and depth of the field. While each chapter warrants an extended review of its own, space constraints require a less ambitious approach. The reflections that follow, therefore, will focus on the way that the coauthors' consistent attention to Native histories, social realities in contemporary American Indian communities, and Native storytelling traditions establishes a mode of critical inquiry that challenges scholars to be rigorously and simultaneously responsible to all three.

Womack's opening essay introduces the collection's critical orientation to specific tribal and intertribal contexts and intellectual histories. While he considers the recent intellectual history that informs Reasoning Together in "A Single Decade: Book Length Native Literary Criticism between 1986 and 1997," Womack also makes transparent the more specific production history of the collection and the methodology that shaped the book. The collection originated in 2002 when a non-Native scholar asked Womack to contribute to an anthology of Native literary criticism. After declining to participate in a project that would be marketed on the fame of its contributors, Womack began a conversation about an anthology in which all of the contributors would be both "unfamous" and Native: "The idea that Native literary criticism is criticism authored by Native people was to serve as a baseline for the essays" (95). Indeed, Womack explains, the collection is a celebration of the opportunity that we now have to fill a syllabus for a course in American Indian literary criticism exclusively...