Indigenous Publishing, Scholarly Editing, and the Digital Future

In 1963, the Kiowa writer and scholar N. Scott Momaday began his first academic job as an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Momaday was fresh out of graduate school at Stanford, where his mentor was poet and critic Yvor Winters. The author’s photo on the back of Momaday’s 1969 novel House Made of Dawn was taken in a UCSB office he shared with fellow Americanist Martha Banta, who discussed it with me when we met in the 1990s.1 House Made of Dawn, of course, went on to win the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the first novel by a writer of color to win that award and a novel that is widely regarded as the most consequential in the history of Native American literature.

Momaday’s subsequent books featured various headshots of the now-famous Momaday that variously captured his expansive personality and larger than life manner.2 In the photo from his Santa Barbara faculty office, by contrast, Momaday sits at a desk, reading what appears to be a well-used paperback book with a cracked spine, his left hand holding it open while the right rests on the open pages as if following the text as he reads. The frames of his glasses are black plastic. He is clean-shaven, his dark hair short and tame. He wears a plain white or perhaps light-colored dress shirt and a dark cardigan. A brown drip-glaze ceramic mug sits on a file folder on the desk. Behind Momaday, where we might expect this professorial tableau to be completed with an overstuffed bookcase, hangs instead a wall-mounted weaving—almost certainly a Navajo rug—the book jacket’s only obvious signifier of the indigeneity of the novel or the novelist.

This jacket photo captures Momaday on the cusp of international distinction, renown, and a career not only as a writer but as a literary figure who has uniquely embodied modern Native literary presence and sensibility. For my purposes here, though, I want to focus on Momaday as we see him at that moment as he approaches the cusp, for the photo offers a glimpse of the oft-mentioned but mostly undiscussed life of literary scholarship Momaday would soon be leaving behind in the wake of the success of House Made of Dawn. That scholarly life for Momaday was defined up to that point by scholarly editing.

Like most literary scholars, Momaday won his job at Santa Barbara in large part on the strength of his doctoral dissertation, which in his case was an edition of the complete poems of the nineteenth-century American writer Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. Oxford University Press, in fact, published the edition in 1965 with an introduction by Winters.3 The Tuckerman edition was clearly connected to Winters’s broader agenda as both poet and critic to bolster the case for the importance of form, rhyme, and meter not only in the history of poetry, but also in his exacting vision of the poet’s vocation across all eras.4

Momaday’s Tuckerman edition is far from the only case in Native American studies of significant work coming from scholarly editors, and some of the others have shifted the field considerably.5 Vine Deloria Jr., the other towering Native American intellectual figure to emerge in the late 1960s, compiled (with Raymond DeMallie) the massive two-volume Documents of American Indian Policy, the first project pulling together treaties and other negotiated documents since Charles Kappler’s 1904 Indian Affairs, Laws, and Treaties.6

Literary studies of Native authors have generated significant textual editing projects. Though nothing so ambitious or comprehensive as the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers has ever been done for Native writers, volumes such as Barry O’Connell’s collected writings of William Apess, Joanna Brooks’s edition of Samson Occom’s writings, and Robert Dale Parker’s Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 and The Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft have been essential to establishing and contextualizing critically generated versions of Native-authored texts.7

Smaller forays into scholarly editing, often contained within larger projects, are scattered across Native and Indigenous literary studies, including, for example, an appendix I included in my book The People and the Word in which I sought to establish an authoritative version of the 1881 Osage constitution, one that provides an apparatus through which I was able to discuss variants and other textual issues involved in this political founding document.8

As is true of most areas of scholarship, the growth of digital archiving has brought tremendous changes to Native American and Indigenous studies. Projects like the Yale Indian Papers Project, the Indigenous Digital Archive, and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation Archives (Canada) are all examples of the robust work that is bringing Indigenous archival materials into public light. These projects reflect many of the preoccupations and ideals of Indigenous studies, especially in their responsiveness to the perceived needs of Native people to access their own histories.

Clearly, a history of Indigenous scholarly editing awaits thoroughgoing recovery projects. However, these projects, as Phillip Round has argued, “will require a comprehensive theorization of the textual cultures of indigenous communities.”9 Rather than sketching more of what those projects might look like, I want to consider instead the history of Indigenous publication, which I see as an intriguing intersection that Indigenous scholarly editing helps to establish. In doing so, I am taking a cue from those, including Round, who have argued for the import and impact of material culture and textual studies on Indigenous research and writing, which is finding indigeneity as expanding our scholarly purview rather than sending us to the margins to find a small vein of knowledge that serves to add a little something to discussions at the discursive center.

For instance, Luis Cárcamo-Huechante argues: “Textualization is . . . a broader process, which can be grasped through the notion of ‘inscription.’ Practices of inscription, as a way to store information, have a long history in the Indigenous Americas.”10 Thinking in terms of inscription and information storage does more than proliferate materials and expand our archives. As Cárcamo-Huechante argues of codices and other New World forms of inscription, “even though they deploy the form and format of the book, many incorporate practices of textualization that exceed the framework of the Western book.”

This notion of exceeding is what I see happening at the intersection of scholarly editing and Indigenous publishing. To tease out what that means, I want to forgo narrating more of the events, figures, and dynamics that inform the intriguing narrative arc that passes through Momaday’s Tuckerman edition and discuss instead how that edition and publications adjacent to it show us some of the ways Indigenous forms and formats have, in fact, exceeded Western book history. As we figure indigeneity as a factor in that history, Matt Cohen has enjoined us to recognize that we are doing so while “once-familiar boundaries are blurring in productive ways. The rise of digital formats and delivery is a partial cause; the rise of forms of cultural inquiry that put pressure on the politics of media and archives is another. Both of these causes are parcel and part of larger geopolitical shifts.”11

My examples run the gamut from self-published books by Native authors to what are now full-scale Indigenous publishing operations that produce, among other things, printed and digital publications that require scholarly editing, or at least something a lot like it. Coupled with the ongoing history of Indigenous journalism, Indigenous literary history, and the burgeoning world of Indigenous digital media, the examples I will discuss are part of an even bigger world of Indigenous media that, to me at least, makes the most sense when considered as a broadly construed whole.

This essay contributes, then, to an array of critical work from the past two decades that has opened the way toward fundamentally reshaping how to understand Indigenous participation in print culture and its development to the present. As Kelly Wisecup’s recent book Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures so ably demonstrates, this reshaping has been going on for a long time, and one of the challenges I want to place before those of us who continue on the arc of this work is to learn to see the vital resonances and synchronicities across publications like the ones Wisecup discusses, recent digital projects, and many other examples in between.12

The compilers Wisecup focuses on the act in their own ways as scholarly editors, joining the many other Indigenous writers who make themselves into scholars, editors, publishers, printers, marketers, and designers as they have “worked on behalf of their communities and nations, whether by defending land rights with petitions and letters or by using copyright and their own printing presses to determine representations of their communities and histories.” Wisecup continues:

Native people made compilations out of documentary forms that were designed to standardize information—as well as more readerly forms like scrapbooks and commonplace books—and in the process they turned those information-storing and -stabilizing functions to other ends. Indigenous compilers assembled medicinal, political, poetic, linguistic, and historical materials within lists, recipes, albums, and scrapbooks, in this way gathering environmental and linguistic knowledge, sharing poetry and songs in English and Indigenous languages, and circulating stories.13

Then and now, people in the Indigenous world have looked to modern publishing not only as something they might eventually catch up to or that might reasonably accommodate their needs, but also as something that could be, has been, and continues to be exceeded.

I will start with Kenneth Jacob Jump, an Osage writer who, in the 1970s, self-published books about the Osage world. Jump is one of many Native authors who have published their own books over the past two centuries, going back at least as far as Apess, the Pequot writer whose five books were privately published between 1829 and 1835.14 Apess died in relative obscurity in 1839 only to be recovered as an important Indigenous voice 150 years later.15 But in fact, he was more widely known in his own time than any of the self-publishing or alternative-published Native authors who have followed a similar path after him.16 Because I have gotten to know something behind the story of Jump’s books that has mostly escaped critical or literary historical notice, I will offer a somewhat detailed, though still brief, account of this self-publishing Indigenous author.

Jump, who died in 1980, includes this biographical note in his first book: “Kenneth Jacob Jump is an Osage Indian and a member of the Thunder Clan. Born and raised on the Osage Indian reservation, his Indian name is Shauⁿ-Gah^d-Lee, which means, ‘Something that strikes a tree.’ He is a former newspaper reporter and advertising sales manager.”17 In his second book, he includes that “he graduated from Pawhuska High School, [and] he attended Notre Dame University and Oklahoma State University,” Pawhuska being the seat of government of the Osage Nation.18 After he died suddenly on October 28, 1980, his relatives published a third book of his writings. An introductory note in it says that Jump was a World War II veteran of the U.S. armed forces who served in the Pacific.19 While in the U.S. military, he was involved in the battle for Iwo Jima, and a song honoring that service is sung every year at the Osage In-losh-ka dance in the Pawhuska district. As his niece Meredith Drent pointed out to me, the song speaks to Jump’s “role in the Osage community. . . . In his universe—in our universe—he has a place with us still.”20

I did not know Jump, but I am related to him, and for several years in the 1990s, I would sometimes stay in the garage apartment where he lived in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. His sister, Arita Jump, was a relative whom I got to know in the late 1980s when I was in graduate school. Arita and her daughter Flora Jo Quinata were kind and gracious in offering me the garage apartment on several occasions when I stayed with them.

The apartment was mostly a large room plus a bathroom and kitchenette. The first time I stayed there I was pleased to find a desk where I could organize the reading and writing that I had brought along with me, and soon I realized that the desk not only was where Jump wrote, but also must have been where he designed, proofread, and did the other work it took to publish his books. He took up publishing after retiring from his newspaper job in Ponca City, forty miles west of Pawhuska.

It seemed clear to me from sitting at Jump’s desk that he absorbed a lot of knowledge about publishing from working at the Ponca City News, and thus, as is often the case in the history of Indigenous writing, journalism played an important role in Jump’s efforts to become a published writer. Based on my experience in school papers and professional journalism, I recognized various pencils, rulers, templates, and other tools of printing and publishing that I found in Jump’s desk.

Jump’s family—his sister Arita, niece Flora, and Flora’s children Michael and Meredith Quinata—compiled a collection of his unpublished stories and poems after his death, and have arranged new printings of all three books as needed. Boxes of paperback and hardcover copies of the three books were stored in the apartment, and I recall seeing various mock-ups and early versions of cover art. When I would sit at his desk and read or write, I relished the opportunity to be in a quiet that was no doubt similar to the atmosphere he worked in, and I found inspiration from looking at the evidence of his success as a writer and publisher.

This was roughly the period during which I was developing the concept of intellectual sovereignty, and a fundamental aspect of that concept for me then was seeing how Native people have exercised Indigenous sovereignty and participated in promoting and strengthening it through engaging in intellectual work.21 Jump’s self-publishing is one of many examples of that aspect of what I was formulating. This is not to assert that Jump overtly addressed Osage politics in his published writings. He didn’t, but I always intended intellectual sovereignty to be more expansive and nuanced than a straightforward political definition could contain. The erasers, markers, rulers, and other tools, in other words, were not only the tools Jump used as an entrepreneur to publish his own work. They were also tools he used in exercising intellectual sovereignty.

For Jump, according to his niece Flora, the impulse behind publishing his own books was that they would offer visitors to our reservation something they could easily take home with them, by which I took her to mean something different from a keychain, coaster, figurine, tissue box cover, or ashtray, something more specifically Osage.

All three of Jump’s books were offset printed with black ink and measure 8.5 inches by 5.5 inches (a letter-size sheet folded in half). They have heavy-card-stock covers and stapled bindings. Illustrations, including many by Jump and some by another Osage, Pauline Allred, are all line drawings printed in black. Jump includes maps in the first two books, and photographs appear in all three. Along with these card-stock-cover versions, Jump produced library binding versions of the two books he completed, though the only place I have found them was in his apartment.22

Jump’s 1977 first book, The Legend of John Stink, or Roaring Thunder “Child of Nature,” is twenty-four pages (a single six-sheet block) with a card-stock cover; the block and cover were bound with two staples. The text recounts a true story of an Osage who rejected nearly all accoutrements of modern life, a choice all the more remarkable given the substantial oil wealth of Osages during the latter stages of Stink’s life. In contrast to common images of oil-rich Osages of the period dressed like characters from The Great Gatsby, Stink lived by himself as a recluse outside Pawhuska in a spartan camp.

For tourists, Stink was an object of fascination, and for visiting journalists, a great story: the Indian eccentric who chose a spare lifestyle on his own rather than the luxury he could have afforded. What impresses me about Jump’s version of the John Stink story is his thoughtful effort to dispel myths about Stink that had grown up over the years, especially his supposed resurrection after freezing to death.23 Insofar as Jump wanted his books to be something for people to take with them from their visit to the Osages, it seems he hoped to send them home with the most truthful version of John Stink’s story as he could offer. The Legend of John Stink, then, functions as a souvenir while at the same time seeking to set the record straight.

Jump’s second book, Osage Indian Poems and Short Stories, came out two years later, in 1979, the year before the author died suddenly of a heart attack. At seventy-six pages, it is over three times as long as his first. Along with Jump’s own hand-drawn Osage symbols, the book features five halftone photographs and two maps. The eight poems are formal in their rhyme scheme, their meter, and the length of stanzas.

The four short stories are notable for their range: nonfiction accounts of historical Osage migration and contemporary burial practices; a historically based fictional story about an Osage war party; and a story of a six-year-old Osage boy celebrating Christmas the year that Osages moved to our final reservation in 1873. The Christmas story is especially notable for its effective and imaginative telling of a story that seems particularly Osage that most readers would not expect.

The posthumous Osage Indian Anthology: Indian, Religious, General Poems is eighty-eight pages, demonstrating the significant amount of unpublished writing Jump left behind at the time of his death.

I was already a collector of first editions by Indigenous authors by the time I came to know Jump’s garage apartment, and in the years since, I have kept an eye out for other self-published books by Native American writers. This has been anything but a systematic effort, and not even close to a comprehensive one, though elusiveness is by and large a constitutive aspect of these sorts of books, so I am not sure what being systematic or comprehensive might mean. And so, the fifty or so items in my collection demonstrate something important, I want to argue, about some of the basic impulses that have often motivated Indigenous people not only to take up pen and paper, but to find the means to put their writings between two covers.

As I have already discussed, Jump’s work fits well into the concept of intellectual sovereignty that I formulated around the time I occasionally stayed in his garage apartment. Certainly Apess, as a foundational Pequot writer within the history of Indigenous self-publishing, evinced a clear commitment to the persistence and thriving of Indigenous peoples through the books he published. I would argue, though, that a much more practical concern has also been an important reason Native authors have had to become their own publishers: the lack of publishers interested in their work. This is certainly true of Native poets, who like most poets have scant opportunities to publish their work. Parker’s anthology of Native poetry from before 1935 includes dozens of examples of unpublished poems or obscurely published poems.

Self-publishings like Jump’s focus on distinctly local Native stories, but I would suggest that they also participate in broader currents in Indigenous intellectual life. Cohen has argued that “the objects we study are inherently furtive, more than local, beyond containment by any system or politics,”24 and many if not most of the books discussed here more or less match that description. I include among these publications collective efforts through which various combinations of people from education programs, tribal governments, and local communities have responded to local needs by creating books. The self in these cases is a community program or church group, rather than an individual, as in the example of a volume of Blackfeet ghost stories published by a local educational program or a recipe book put together by a group of Osage Quakers.25

In some cases, these sorts of efforts have grown in relation to larger projects, such as the Navajo Community College Press, which operated from the early 1970s through the late 1990s. Little written history exists about the press, but available information indicates that it supported the work of the college (which became Diné College in 1997) in various ways, including publishing course materials, histories of the Navajo people, and books by Navajo writers.26

Another example is the Indian Historian Press, which was an enterprise of the American Indian Historical Society (AIHS), a San Francisco Bay Area organization founded in 1964. AIHS worked to support and further Native American self-determination through advocating for accuracy in history writing and in school curriculum. Rupert Costo (Cahuilla) was the society’s founder, and it published a newspaper, and a journal.27

Communities in other parts of the global Indigenous world have also been sites of book publishing ventures, including Australia, Hawai’i, and Guatemala. Australia’s history of Indigenous publishing is perhaps the most comprehensively chronicled, with Wiradjuri scholar Anita M. Heiss having written an account of that history. Along with looking at examples of Indigenous Australian authors publishing with commercial and alternative presses, Heiss recounts the development of the Institute of Aboriginal Development Press, which is Indigenous-run, and Aboriginal Studies Press, which began in the 1960s with a focus on non-Indigenous scholars’ work on Indigenous topics. Heiss includes a brief account of a book of her own that she self-published. “Self-promotion and distribution does have its downfalls,” she writes, “the most obvious being having to carry a box of books with you everywhere you go. . . . If you want your book to be out there, to be read, reviewed, and appreciated, . . . then you have to do a lot more than just write it.”28

Hawaiian scholars have made significant use of a vast archive of Hawaiian-language newspapers that date back to the mid-nineteenth century, so the concomitant existence of a broad range of Hawaiian publishing is not a surprise.29 The work of Manuel Tzoc Bucup, a Mayan poet from Guatemala, offers an instructive example from the Americas south of the Rio Grande River of the sort of “exceeding of the framework of the western text” that Carcamo-Huechante advocated. As Rita Palacios writes, Tzoc “is one of the founders of Maleta Ilegal, . . . a small, independent and handmade publishing outfit that carries out limited print runs.”30 Tzoc has self-published his work and worked with small, independent presses, finding exceedingly original formats, including printing poems on compact discs and placing poems printed on tiny pages folded and rolled to fit into prescription medication capsules, then bound inside a medicine bottle. The formats, Palacios argues, “shorten . . . the distance between creator and public. . . . For the poet, . . . the experience of handling the poetic object [prompts] the reader . . . to reflect on the fetishization of the book, and, ultimately, the word.”

Before turning to some of the implications of this history of Indigenous publishing in considering the future of digital scholarly editing, the growing list of successful, sustained publishing efforts is worth a brief mention. This list is far from exhaustive, but hopefully provides a sense of the commitment Indigenous people have made to publishing the work of writers, artists, and scholars from their own communities. These Indigenous publishers include Theytus Books, founded as part of the En’owkin Center in Penticton, British Columbia.31 Theytus is an independent, Indigenous-owned and -run press that publishes a full range of books, including fiction, poetry, and children’s books. Another Indigenous publisher based in Canada is Kegedonce Press, founded in 1993 by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm.32

Robyn Rangihuia Bargh and her spouse Bryan Bargh cofounded Huia Publishers in 1996 in Aoteoroa / New Zealand to publish and promote books by Maori authors that reflect Maori worldviews.33 In over thirty years since its founding, Huia has published over one thousand books by hundreds of Maori authors and others, with genres ranging across fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, graphic novels, history, scholarly books, curricular works, and much more.34 They now integrate much of their work with digital resources.

The Chickasaw Press, which the Chickasaw Nation established in 2006, is an impressive example of an Indigenous government engaging in publishing. The press publishes books and other materials on Chickasaw language, history, culture, and other topics and has spun off a separate imprint for creative work through which Chickasaw writers publish fiction, poetry, and other genres. Like Huia, Theytus, and others, the Chickasaw Press publishes the kind of work that non-Indigenous publishers, including academic and other nonprofit publishers, regularly decide they cannot or will not pursue.

This is especially true of work that supports Indigenous language revitalization programs. Many academic presses support Indigenous language dictionary projects, but might balk at publishing a dictionary aimed primarily at a student population that numbers at best in the hundreds and is more likely to be a couple of dozen—or even smaller. Yet, every Indigenous language revitalization program faces the need to develop curricular and pedagogical materials that support the work of saving languages.

Vi Hilbert, a fluent speaker of the Lushootseed language who died in 2008, worked for decades with other Lushootseed speakers to record stories and conversations, and she worked with credentialed linguists to develop grammatical materials and dictionaries. Eventually, she established Lushootseed Research, which published the results of her work and continues to make her books available.35 With a population of five hundred, the Upper Skagit people have nowhere near the resources of the Chickasaws, who are over seventy thousand strong and have casinos and other successful business operations.

Clearly, critical histories that need to exist of Indigenous publishing remain to be written. In concluding this essay, I want to suggest that spiraling out from the topic of what the Indigenous world brings to digital scholarly editing offers important insights that should be part of these as of yet unwritten histories. These insights are overlapping in lots of ways, but I have organized them into three points.

First and foremost, examples of projects involving scholarly editing or something very close to it run throughout the history I have sketched here. We can certainly see a history of editing across all these examples, and many of the works I have mentioned utilize methods and skills of scholarly and textual editing. The Indigenous language revitalization projects draw on specialized knowledge akin to that of textual editors.

Before getting further into the underbrush here, let me pivot to the shifts digital publishing brings to the discussion of indigeneity and scholarly publishing, which are considerable. Perhaps most importantly, digital publishing foregrounds the many collaborative, collective, and corporate conditions that have been part of modern publishing but have often remained obscure behind the focus on creative writing as best done by an individual, with the fetishization of single-author works remaining a strong current in the humanities. Thus, images often remain of writers as tortured geniuses crafting poems, novels, and other forms of creative writing.

Yet, the many people who typically take part in bringing the work of an individual poet, novelist, or scholar to a readership offer a reminder of the interpersonal worldliness of what we read and interpret. Even Jump and the other Indigenous self-published writers I have mentioned almost always of a necessity have involved others in producing a finished product, including illustrators, owners and workers of print shops, and booksellers and store owners who sell their books. Language, form, meter, and other elements of an author’s craft and imagination are constitutive of what about a text makes it beautiful or significant or otherwise captures our attention. The apparatuses of editing, production, distribution, and marketing, however, are also necessary for making a literary text available to readers.

Digital publishing brings print culture more closely into alignment with visual and audio media in explicitly crediting and acknowledging the many people whose labor goes into making that work available. This is an important development insofar as it reveals some of the complex realities of the publication process. I am not suggesting that we attend to those complex realities at the expense of the writerly aspects of Indigenous texts. These digital formats make the work of editors, designers, marketing people, compositors, animators, and others visible, impacting not only the way audiences can see these publications as more than the work of an author or authors, but potentially also the way an incipient author perceives what it means to be a writer and author who works within a matrix of creativity, technical knowledge, and various forms of expertise in bringing a publication to its audience.

In my 2006 book The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction, I wrote about the printer boys at American Indian boarding schools, students who learned to set type and print newsletters, student newspapers, and other materials as part of their training.36 Something that drew me to the work of those boys in the boarding school print shops was imagining them (or at least some of them) looking critically at the things they printed and imagining themselves writing something better and more honest than did their teachers who wrote most of what they printed, or their fellow Native students—the few who actually made their way into print usually being the favored ones who were “representative” of the goals of the teachers, administrators, and policy-makers behind the ideologies of the schools.

That possibility of printer boys or girls working in offices aspiring not only to reproduce the words of others, but also to write them, seems by and large unimagined by those who designed these schools. That’s all the more reason to realize now that those students could already begin to see something we are all still learning, which is that Indigenous presence is needed in all the jobs and at all the stages of the publication process. The goal, however, is not necessarily to demand that all those jobs at all those stages are filled by Indigenous workers, but to imagine Indigenous people in those roles and, further, to anticipate the time when that will be the case.

Frankly, my point here almost becomes moot when the category of the digital comes into play, insofar as digital publishing tends to follow the example of film, television, and video in revealing the scaffolding that supports its work through explicit credits that acknowledge the many people who play a hand in bringing work to publication. The differences I am highlighting here are the explicit ways in which the scaffold of labor that goes into film is typically available to a viewer or user of a digital resource, while books have traditionally not made that scaffolding nearly so visible.

Illustrating the significance of this first point becomes more straightforward by connecting it to my second point, which is that the fundamental Indigenous political concepts of sovereignty, autonomy, and self-determination hover over the Indigenous history of publication that I am imagining. The Chickasaw Press, for instance, directly invokes not just sovereignty, but “intellectual sovereignty,” the term I developed in my earliest theoretical work as a way of articulating Indigenous intellectual work as an expression of Indigenous sovereignty. The press’s goal

is to preserve, perpetuate, and provide an awareness of Chickasaw history and culture. We accomplish this by generating and publishing research and scholarship about Chickasaw history and culture, making such scholarship accessible to Chickasaw people, exercising “cultural and intellectual sovereignty” by adhering to ethical and culturally appropriate research and publication practices, and providing an outlet for Chickasaw authors, scholars, and culture bearers.37

This articulation focuses on the Chickasaws as a people, as subjects of their own history and practitioners of their own culture, as an audience for scholarship about them, as judges of the appropriateness of what the press publishes, and as authors and producers of what the press publishes. Yet, the statement does not say that the press seeks only a Chickasaw audience or to publish only the work of Chickasaws. Plenty of non-Chickasaw authors are among those the press has published, and of course the Chickasaws benefit from non-Chickasaw people being able to access books and other materials that Chickasaw editors and publishers see as reflective of who they are.

My third and final, concluding point has to do with how everyone involved in publishing Indigenous projects navigates the professional demands of their work in light of history. I have mostly recounted this history in a positive, forward-looking way, focusing on the good work that Native writers, self-publishers, editors, and publication companies have done and are doing—and in recognition of the long history involving many non-Indigenous editors, publishers, and others who have supported their work in various ways. That history of work deserves to be understood, however, as also participating in a reparative process that addresses literally centuries during which Indigenous people were not considered able to speak for ourselves through writing, much less edit or publish that writing without the intervention of white people. The vast majority of non-Indigenous books, publishers, editors, and writers have represented the Indigenous world in tremendously damaging ways. In writing this essay, in fact, I have often felt haunted by awful examples of non-Indigenous editing such as Lucullus McWhorter’s infamous torturous alterations to Mourning Dove’s novel Cogewea: The Half-Blood.38

This difficult history, though, does not and should not change the basic responsibility of editors and publishers in considering Indigenous texts. That is, every author who publishes work focused on Indigenous peoples increases the possibility of producing meaningful and significant work by working with good editors and publishers. Indeed, I would suggest that the best response to that troubled history is helping to build a sustainable infrastructure for Indigenous publishing.

The starting place for most publishers in doing so has been and will most likely continue to be working with Indigenous authors. Non-Indigenous editors who have worked with Indigenous authors have written thoughtfully about how they have approached that work. Robin Freeman, a white Australian editor with experience working with Indigenous authors, argues that the differences Indigenous publishing highlights exist “against a background of some uncertainty, where [non-Indigenous editors] must be open to challenging the basis of their education and self-belief and their Eurocentric view of ‘history,’ that . . . engagement with Indigenous texts may appear to be a daunting and intimidating task.”39

Margaret McDonnell, another non-Indigenous Australian editor, calls that daunting task “consultation,” by which she means the basic process of learning through conversation, research, and dialogue what issues will or might arise in a particular Indigenous project. That process “may not be easy; seeking out the appropriate person or people in a community can be difficult and time-consuming. The [editor] needs to be very clear about the processes involved and the implications of, for example, publication (in that sensitive or sacred material may become public knowledge) and copyright. Sufficient time must be allowed for consultation, and it must be remembered that the collaborator’s priorities may not be those of the Indigenous community.”40

All of this advice is worth considering seriously, but only if, I want to argue, what results from engagement and consultation is a space in which an editor is better able to do the tough work of editing. However obvious that might sound, I say it out of concern that respecting Indigenous protocol and cultural difference becomes the end point rather than one leading toward the goal of the publication of more and better Indigenous books and other projects. Related to this, I find it telling that neither of these non-Indigenous editors indicates much of an awareness of the publishing history Heiss writes about, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to wonder why Freeman, publishing six years after Heiss’s book, doesn’t cite it alongside the many books and articles by Indigenous writers and scholars she does cite. Gregory Younging, author of Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing by and about Indigenous Peoples, a successful Cree author who devoted much of his career to developing the Indigenous publishing industry in Canada, describes that goal as creating “titles that reflect the highest levels of understanding, and authentic, meaningful stories, and truth telling.”41

Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a Goenpul writer and scholar, has done important work as an editor, including the 2004 volume Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Aboriginal Studies Press), which turns the tables on the assumed configuration of white editors and Indigenous writers as Moreton-Robinson takes on the role of Indigenous editor working with white scholars as they write about their own whiteness. Younging and Moreton-Robinson are important recent examples from a long history of Indigenous editors that complicate and complement the more familiar and expected configuration of white editors and Indigenous writers.

Thus, recognizing difference is a crucial step, but recognizing the power dynamics at play and changing them is important as well. Round has argued within this same set of issues, only when “our editorial practices and interpretive methodologies come to terms with this constellation of bibliographic ‘difference’ in Native texts may we embark on what John Bryant, in a recent volume of Textual Cultures has called, ‘the ethics of editing.’”42

In short, I want to argue in concluding for publication ethics that prepare an acquisitions editor meeting with an Indigenous scholar for discussion of an editing project to be ready for the next Momaday to show up for the meeting. That Indigenous scholar might not be working on an edition of an underappreciated nineteenth-century white poet from the United States, but could very well be bringing to their project a set of skills and perspectives that are just as important to recognize as whatever cultural or social differences they might be bringing too.

Cohen points toward this sort of preparation when he says that his book-history version of this work “is going to require both engaging tribal intellectual traditions and using bibliographical elbow grease.”43 Those who work in textual and scholarly editing are familiar with these values, of course. Who, after all, dedicates elbow grease to editions of unimportant, mediocre texts? Along with those shared values, I want to suggest that very often the work that remains is related to something Freeman, speaking of her work with Indigenous authors, highlights: “Editors work within an ambiguous space, balancing the needs of the writer, the publishing house and the reader against each other, though always supportive of the text to which they owe their professional expertise to ensure that it becomes the best book it can be.”44

Yet, while successful and experienced editors and publishers are always in need of coming to terms with various sorts of difference, they also need to continue being editors and publishers in the process. What this sort of engagement leads to, I think, is a recognition that the history of Indigenous publication is a prime example of how something from the Indigenous world can speak simultaneously to both the differences (cultural, linguistic) and the similarities (business, finance, technical expertise). As my examples of Heiss and Moreton-Robinson show, sometimes an Indigenous publisher (in Heiss’s case, a self-publisher) or editor has already traversed the editorial landscape; the more focused on cultural differences we are, the less likely we are to recognize and acknowledge the legacy of Indigenous intellectual work.

Indeed, a prime example of this sort of work to keep in mind comes from the United States in the person of Wowaus, the Nipmuck man who came to be known as James Printer, translator and typesetter for John Eliot in Massachusetts in the mid-seventeenth century. Printer brought not only who he was as a Nipmuck person to that work through his knowledge of his own language, but also through his knowledge of English and, crucially, his ability to set type.

So, I would suggest finally that some of that elbow grease Cohen urges us to use needs to be applied to the imagination, by which I mean this: those in the publishing world, including those who study it, need to imagine their corners of that world as places where people are learning to expect the unexpected, places where Indigenous people seeking to participate and share in the work of publishing that goes on there can roll up their sleeves and share in the application of elbow grease. In such a corner, perhaps the project the next Momaday I am imagining shows up to propose will be a digital edition of the collected works of Jump, or better yet an open-ended digital edition of self-published Indigenous authors. Wouldn’t that be something?