E3W Literature | University of Texas

Indigenous Literatures

Edited by Miriam Schacht

Indigenous American literature is often subsumed under the label “postcolonial”—an erroneous label, for Indigenous nations are still colonized—or categorized as simply one of many American ethnic literatures, with little regard for the unique status of Native Americans as the first people of this land. This special section is composed of reviews that examine books from a critical framework that recognizes both the intellectual traditions of Native America and the complex legacy of Euroamerican colonialism (a legacy that, as Laura Stevens’s The Poor Indian suggests, shapes the present of all Americans). The books by Daniel Heath Justice and Robert Warrior explicitly foreground the pursuit of “intellectual sovereignty,” a concern also addressed in the interviews with Justice and Frances Washburn. Washburn points out the institutional constraints on intellectual sovereignty as universities facing budgetary constraints cut American Indian Studies programs—not to mention that only a fraction of universities offer such programs in the first place. In spite of such constraints, however, Indigenous literature and literary criticism remains strong; to borrow Justice’s phrase, we see here “evidence of the dynamic and adaptive heart of Indigenous nation¬hood.”