Ands turn Comparative turn Trans-

Two large, related projects drive the critical study of contemporary Indigenous literatures written (primarily) in English around the globe. These can be named by broad terms: on the one hand, recovery, on the other, interpretation. Additional terms, in English and Indigenous languages, can serve equally as well; it is not the terms per se but the ongoing projects that are worth articulating, investigating, interrogating. In my effort to demonstrate the potential for literary reading through the mode of the trans-Indigenous, each of the five chapters in this book intersects both projects, and each attempts to make manifest the productive relationships and tensions between them.

The two chapters in part 1, “Recovery/Interpretation,” foreground the development of methodologies for reclaiming diverse Indigenous texts. As we enter the fourth decade of organized study of contemporary Indigenous literatures, we continue to locate our full archive and to recognize its possibilities; as important, we continue to legitimize our expanding archive for inclusion within formal scholarship. The chapters in part 1, therefore, demonstrate how the recovery of texts, discursive and representational practices, and contexts largely excluded from the scholarly conversation thus far necessarily refocus and redirect methods of literary interpretation. These chapters happen to center on recovering texts, practices, and contexts from the 1960s and 1970s, the early decades of the so-called Indigenous literary renaissance of the mid- to late twentieth century, a period that continues to be historicized and interpreted through investigations of a relatively narrow range of published texts, primarily longer works of prose fiction, especially when such studies center on writing by American Indians published in the United States.⁵ Similar to reclamations of Indigenous texts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the projects of mid-twentieth-century recovery in chapters 1 and 2 highlight not only unknown, lesser-known, or forgotten works in those genres that dominate orthodox literary studies—the novel, certain forms of memoir, certain forms of poetry, and, increasingly, narrative film—but also works of nonfiction, works engaging multiple genres and media, and other forms of Indigenous writing and artistic self-representation.⁶ More precisely, these chapters take up the challenge of recovering Indigenous texts and practices from within dominant discourses produced in the 1960s and 1970s that claimed either to adequately represent Indigenous identities and experiences through the limited archive of their sanctioned documents, as in the case of what I call the “settler survey,” or to fully subsume Indigenous identities and experiences through the limited repertoire of their sanctioned performances, as in the case of what I call the “settler celebration.”⁷ Reclamations of such texts, practices, and contexts from multiple traditions offer avenues for reassessing Native agency and self-representation that are trans-Indigenous. And they suggest the likely existence of additional archives within and outside dominant discourses that have yet to influence our work.

The three chapters in part 2, “Interpretation/Recovery,” then foreground the development of methodologies for the productive interpretation of a continually expanding body of contemporary literatures that place Indigenous histories and politics, cultures and worldviews, and multiple realities at their vital center. More precisely, chapters 3, 4, and 5 demonstrate methodologies for engaging Indigenous aesthetic systems and technologies in the interpretation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Indigenous literary texts.⁸ What can literary scholars learn from highly developed aesthetic systems for various “textual” arts, such as painting, weaving, and carving? And what can we learn from highly developed technologies that intersect with the particular practices of painting, weaving, and carving, as well as with a range of other “making,” “building,” and “moving” practices, such as architecture, engineering, mathematics, astronomy, mapping, and navigation? These related projects of critical engagement with Indigenous aesthetics and technologies aim neither to unduly reject nor to unduly rebuke orthodox methods for English-language literary interpretation. Rather, they aim to augment and significantly refocus those methods, not by simply centering the cultures immediately relevant to particular texts but by fully prioritizing the global Indigenous—including but not limited to the designations Native North American, New Zealand Māori, Hawaiian, Indigenous Australian, or other typical large-scale groupings—within Indigenous literary studies in English.⁹

The broad categories of literary recovery and interpretation are brought together in these chapters in order to engage the multiple connotations of each concept on its own and, simultaneously, their multiple interactions as a yoked set. All acts of literary recovery—the recognition, selection, and classification of texts as appropriate for the archive so that they can be presented for formal analysis—involve multiple (prior and simultaneous) acts of interpretation. Similarly, all acts of literary interpretation—explanation through extratextual resources, elucidation through textual analysis, assessment of significance through context or theory, evaluation through aesthetic system, cultural valence, or political efficacy—involve multiple (prior and simultaneous) recoveries (recognitions, selections, classifications) and, indeed, recoverings (when familiar texts are seen anew).

Across the two parts of the book, the chapters demonstrate concretely rather than describe abstractly what recovery and interpretation through Indigenous-focused methodologies might look like for trans-Indigenous literary studies in English. These chapters enact, in other words, a series of distinct but related experiments. What holds the book together, beyond an attention to formal innovations and several recurrent themes, is a methodology of focused juxtapositions of distinct Indigenous texts, performances, and contexts. Where compare unites “together” (com-) with “equal” (par), juxtapose unites “close together” (Lat. juxta-) with “to place” (Fr. poser). Indigenous juxtapositions place diverse texts close together across genre and media, aesthetic systems and worldviews, technologies and practices, tribes and nations, the Indigenous–settler binary, and historical periods and geographical regions. This book asks: Which specific formats for purposeful Indigenous juxtapositions are productive within scholarship in the field of literary studies? How might the potential of specific juxtapositions to provoke readings across various categories enable interpretations of a broad range of texts and practices? And how might such juxtapositions contribute to calls not only for the intellectual and artistic sovereignty of specific nations but also for an Indigenous intellectual and artistic sovereignty global in its scope?¹⁰

Rather than attempt to balance recoveries and interpretations equally across settler nation-states, Indigenous groupings, historical periods, genres, or other categories, this book grounds its work, foremost, in mid-twentieth- through early twenty-first-century U.S. American Indian literatures. Although not always acknowledged, all scholarship is historically situated and, to some degree, influenced by the biography of the scholar. The series of purposeful Indigenous juxtapositions performed in the following chapters thus radiate outward from my intellectual home in American Indian literatures and cultures—where I have personal and genealogical connections, have received the most formal training, and have the most professional experience—to other Indigenous literary and cultural traditions represented (primarily) in English.¹¹ I turn most readily to Māori literature and culture, since these are areas to which I have devoted considerable study and in which I received relevant formal training—and, consequently, to which I now feel personally as well as professionally connected—and then to Hawaiian, Aboriginal Canadian, and Indigenous Australian literatures and cultures, areas in which I hold considerable interest but with which I have had more limited opportunities to develop high levels of expertise. Māori scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville articulates a similar approach to trans-Indigenous literary studies from her own subject position:

It is worth being very clear about this: comparative work does not (and indeed, given the attention Indigenous Studies pays to specific land and specific place, it must not) insist that a “fair” comparison needs to focus on the objects of comparison in exactly the same ways or to the same degree. When comparative methodologies insist that engagement must be “equal” they privilege the idea of an objective view in which the scholar’s job is to step back and survey things from afar. My comparative work with Indigenous texts from a number of contexts is conducted by myself as a Maori scholar (and indeed conducted here on Maori land) and this both guides and underpins my comparisons. So, I am doing Maori-centered comparative work. (25)

Through purposeful juxtapositions I work from my position in what is now the United States to develop a trans-Indigenous literary studies grounded in—but not confined to or by—American Indian literatures, cultures, and scholarship.

So much of the work of orthodox literary studies has been to limit the possibilities for reading and interpretation to a single track among the many parallel, perpendicular, and intersecting tracks of movement and engagement possible among written literatures and other representational arts. My goal in staging purposeful Indigenous juxtapositions is to develop a version of Indigenous literary studies that locates itself firmly in the specificity of the Indigenous local while remaining always cognizant of the complexity of the relevant Indigenous global. Over the course of this book, through an explicit process of experimentation with different forms of juxtaposition, the chapters return to a central question: What can we see or understand differently by juxtaposing distinct and diverse Indigenous texts, contexts, and traditions?

It is fair to state that this project began within contexts of both excitement and frustration. About the time I completed primary research and began revisions for my first book, Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (notice the work of the ands), two texts were published in the emerging international and interdisciplinary field of Indigenous studies that continue to influence and challenge its practitioners: Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999) and Creek and Cherokee scholar Craig Womack’s Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (1999). In the conclusion to Blood Narrative, published in 2002, I cite Smith and Womack to emphasize what appeared, at the turn of the new century, a blueprint for the primary work of Indigenous studies in the foreseeable future: centering Indigenous concerns and perspectives within academic research paradigms and localizing Indigenous theories and analytic methodologies.

A decade after the initial publication of these paradigm-shifting works, the realization of Smith’s and Womack’s calls for new forms of Indigenous scholarship remains largely at the level of potential rather than standard practice. This situation seems especially true within studies of literature and representation. Moreover, as time has passed and Smith, Womack, and scholars who embrace their ideals have been read in multiple contexts, a number of questions have been raised about the details of implementation for their suggested programs. How, for example, should scholars working within the text-based humanities and arts disciplines, including literary studies, appropriate Smith’s ideal “decolonizing” methodological practices, which were developed within the context of education and other sociologically based research, typically conducted on individual human subjects and in human communities? Although interviewing authors, their associates, their descendants, or their broader communities can be essential to biographical scholarship and to literary history, it is not always possible or practical, and it is not always a productive strategy for literary interpretation. Related issues apply to the idea of actively collaborating with authors, their associates, or their communities, who may or may not be interested in the kinds of work literary scholars undertake. Soliciting authors or their communities to set the research agenda for their own works—while potentially provocative—will not always produce the most useful or innovative scholarship. How do we harness the potential for the kind of collaborative and community-based research Smith advocates without limiting the possibilities of our field? Similarly, how should literary scholars who may or may not be enrolled citizens of Indigenous nations (terminology specific to the United States) emphasize the local in the form of the tribally specific, as Womack’s “working from within the nation” paradigm promotes, without sacrificing the interpretive power of intertribal, regional, national, international, and global contexts and approaches (12)? What might, say, a Māori-grounded or Indigenous Australian–grounded reading of American Indian works bring to the community-based critical conversation? Can we conceive a “politicized” discussion of aesthetics not exclusive to the “autonomy, self-determination, and sovereignty” of specific nations but expanded to the global Indigenous (11)?

This is not to dismiss the increasing number of articles, special issues of journals, monographs, collections, and academic events organized toward the ideals articulated by Smith, Womack, and other Native and non-Native scholars interested in issues of critical practice and scholarly methodology for Indigenous studies. The collective decision to form the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) at a preliminary conference in 2008 and, in 2009, NAISA’s successful inaugural meeting are but two examples of promising large-scale engagements with these and related issues.¹² That said, it is important to articulate that the coordinating conjunction at the center of the new association’s name—absent from its acronym—records historical and ongoing tensions over the attempt to bring a U.S.-based paradigm of Native American studies into productive dialogue with other situated paradigms for Native studies (such as Hawaiian studies, New Zealand Māori studies, or Australian Aboriginal studies) and with a more globally based paradigm of Indigenous studies. From a U.S. perspective, the name of the organization and its outreach to include Indigenous others through this coordinating and can appear progressive, suggesting outward-looking and expansive approaches to members’ objects of study and scholarly methods. From other positions on the globe, the same name can look more like business as usual, with U.S. power and the idea of a U.S. exceptionalism assuming an unmarked, primary position and the rest of the Indigenous world lumped together to be put in its secondary place. Trans-Indigenous locates its project within the very tension captured by the present-but-absent coordinating and in NAISA, one of several productive tensions likely to define trans-Indigenous literary studies for the near future.

Because the number of book-length works devoted to “comparative,” Indigenous-to-Indigenous literary studies is small, national and, especially, international scholarly events have been primary influences on the development of a practice of Indigenous juxtapositions and a still-emerging field of trans-Indigenous literary studies. Presentations, workshops, conferences, staged dialogues, and symposia—even collaborative projects in writing and editing, conducted in person or across vast distances over the Internet—demonstrate in immediate and concrete terms the situated nature of knowledge and the active role of context in all forms of communication. Not simply who participates but the venue of conversation matters, and in ways both practical and profound.¹³ A challenge, then, for U.S.-based organizations like NAISA, and for all scholarly journals based in particular nation-states, is to be as inclusive as possible when deciding who gets invited into relevant conversations, where they are staged, and which of the many possible forms of collaboration they are allowed or encouraged to enact. Both explicit and implicit collaborations promote approaches to scholarship embracing multiple perspectives rather than a singular focus.¹⁴ Such multiperspectivism must be a hallmark of trans-Indigenous literary studies, even when particular works are singly rather than collaboratively authored.

One of the multiperspectivist strategies of Trans-Indigenous is to place contemporary Indigenous literature in dialogue with other Indigenous arts and aesthetics. Scholars have long looked to oral traditions as significant contexts and possible antecedents for written works. Few have considered, however, the potential relevance of other arts practices to the analysis of literature or how literary studies might benefit from explicit conversation with scholarship on arts and media. Strikingly, this is not true of Indigenous writers and artists, who often work in multiple media and who often juxtapose genres and forms, such as a written poem and a drawing, painting, sculpture, carving, textile, basket, photograph, moving image, or live performance. In the United States, the writer-artists N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa/Cherokee), Wendy Rose (Hopi/Miwok), Peter Blue Cloud (Mohawk), Gail Tremblay (Onondaga/Micmac), Nora Naranjo-Morse (Santa Clara), and Eric Gansworth (Onondaga) come immediately to mind, as does the writer-musician Joy Harjo (Creek) and the writer-filmmakers Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene) and Diane Glancy (Cherokee).¹⁵ Other writers collaborate with visual or media artists on particular projects. When we conceive written literatures within a more expansive, inclusive context of Indigenous arts, the alphabetic text becomes simply one option within a larger field of self-representation. Literary scholars, I argue, ought to join writers, artists, and arts scholars to engage in Indigenous-centered conversations across the boundaries of traditional disciplines.¹⁶

Particularly instructive for the development of methods for Indigenous juxtapositions has been the analysis of overtly trans-Indigenous works of art. Consider, for instance, the mixed-media sculpture Whakamutunga (Metamorphosis) by the Māori artist Fred Graham, part of the trans-Indigenous exhibit Manawa—Pacific Heartbeat: A Celebration of Contemporary Maori and Northwest Coast Art staged at the Spirit Wrestler Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 2006. (I return to this exhibit in chapter 3.) Graham’s sculpture is composed of a three-dimensional figure of a diving whale, carved from New Zealand swamp kauri and inlaid with pāua shell, set against a two-dimensional background of an ocean horizon fashioned from stainless steel.¹⁷ The upper end of the diving whale (the tail and fins) is carved and decorated in a distinctly American Indian style from the Northwest Coast known as formline, while the lower end of the whale (the head) is carved and decorated in a distinctly Māori style of interlocking koru (spirals). As is typical of classic Northwest Coast design, the primary color of the sculpture is black, with red used as a secondary color to emphasize details carved in shallow relief. In Graham’s piece, red emphasizes carving primarily on the whale’s tail and fins, which might be expected in Northwest Coast style, but also emphasizes the whale’s tongue, an important feature of Māori carving, among the interlocking spirals of the whale’s head. Luminescent pāua is inlaid between these interlocking spirals, emphasizing their three-dimensional and dynamic qualities.¹⁸

The stainless steel background behind the diving whale is decorated with a repeating triangle design in variations of black and white accented with red, colors that evoke Māori artistic traditions, such as the kowhaiwhai scroll painting often seen on the interior rafters of wharenui (meeting houses). Moreover, the use of subtle and progressive color variation within the background’s regular geometric patterning is evocative of the Māori tradition of taniko weaving. More overtly, this variation of color creates an explicit, permeable horizon and equator for Graham’s sculpture, a zone of contact between sky and sea and between north and south that coincides with the zone of transformation in the figure of the whale, where its Northwest Coast body intersects its Māori head. The horizon line/equator suggests, too, in the single plane, a demarcation between (bright) daylight in the upper, northern half of the stainless steel background and (darker) evening or night in the lower, southern half. This effect is accentuated with additional details of a red circle situated in the upper half that suggests the midday sun and a red band spread across the lower half that suggests the setting sun reflected in the sea.

Graham explains this symbolism in an artist’s statement in the exhibit catalog:

The whale is a frequent traveler between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. In my sculpture, as the whale crosses the equator it changes both in shape and in body design, from Northwest Coast Indian to Maori. Day changes to night. The visits of the whales “down under” remind me of the visits of Northwest Coast Indian artists to Aotearoa, where they become one of us: tangata whenua—people of the land. In 1992, [the Northwest Coast artist] George David stayed with my wife, Norma, and me. Earlier this year, his brother [the artist] Joe David stayed with us for a few days. He drew the Northwest Coast design for me, and I hope my sculpture does his drawing justice. (105)

Multiple trans-Indigenous connections and collaborations are evident here, as are multiple kinds of trans-Indigenous travel.

At first glance, Graham’s bilingual title for his mixed-media sculpture appears to contain an error, possibly a misspelling or transposition of letters. Whakamutunga is not a Māori translation for the English word metamorphosis. Depending on context, whakamutunga typically is translated into English as either “conclusion” or “youngest child” (mutu = “brought to an end”; mutunga = “end,” “conclusion,” “terminus”; “youngest”). The English word metamorphosis typically is translated into Māori as “whakaumutanga” (whakaumu = “to transform”). On the page, whakamutunga and whakaumutanga look similar enough to suggest a misprint, especially to the untrained eye. Closer examination, however, combined with contemplation of the specifically Māori orientation of the sculpture, suggests other possibilities. Graham’s dynamic figure depicts an artistic transformation in a particular direction, from Northwest Coast Indian to Māori styles of carving and decoration; similarly, his artist’s statement indicates an intention for the figure to function as a directional symbol for First Nations artists who journey from the West Coast of North America southwest to Aotearoa, for the diving whale to function, that is, as a sign literally in transit between northern and southern hemispheres of an Indigenous Pacific. It is notable that the stainless steel background projects a distinctly Māori style in its chromatic similarity to kowhaiwhai painting traditions and in its geometric similarity to taniko weaving designs. And it is notable that the bilingual title places the Māori term, whakamutunga, in the primary and unmarked position and the English term, metamorphosis, in the secondary and marked position. The English term is not simply set apart but contained by the mirrored arcs of parentheses. Rather than a direct translation, the English sign (metamorphosis) can be read as a commentary on the Māori sign whakamutunga—or vise versa.

How, then, might we understand these terms, whakamutunga and (metamorphosis), as neither substitutable “equivalents” across languages nor markers of asymmetrical status within a (colonial) hierarchy, but rather as complementary components within a more complex, Indigenous-to-Indigenous idea? In what way or ways might the stylistic transformation of the figure of the diving whale and the symbolic shift from day to night be understood as the conclusion to a process of trans-Indigenous travel? How might we understand a diving, transforming whale framed by a diving, transforming sun? Is the whale not demonstrative of a mobile syntax for becoming tangata whenua, for becoming “people of the land,” set outside a settler–Indigenous binary opposition? Is the central, permeable line of the horizon and equator—the least visually distinct element of the sculpture’s background and yet the most conceptually important element in the demonstration of Indigenous-to-Indigenous artistic connection—not evocative of a cyclical, ongoing process of cross-cultural exchange (set) free of the colonial and transnational relations of center and margin?

Is Graham’s sculpture not an inscription of Indigenous-to-Indigenous survivals and renewals? In the exhibit titled Manawa (which can be translated from Māori into English as “heart,” “breath,” “mind,” and related concepts), such resurgence occurs neither in an idealized Indigenous past nor in a hoped-for Indigenous future, but in our own contemporary and, indeed, ordinary era. Gallery space and exhibit catalog become a different kind of “border” or “contact” zone. Not the frontier site of “cultures in conflict,” not the colonial site of assimilation or conversion, not the postcolonial site of reaction or rejection, but rather a site of travel, exchange, and collaborative production explicitly marked trans-Indigenous.

Inspired by the possibilities of such trans-Indigenous figures, the chapters that follow experiment with reclamations, connections, and analyses across media, genre, and form. Chapter 1, “‘Being’ Indigenous ‘Now’: Resettling ‘The Indian Today’ within and beyond the U.S. 1960s,” begins the process of recovery/interpretation by situating the 1965 special issue of the Midcontinent American Studies Journal (MASJ), “The Indian Today,” within multiple configurations of relevant companion texts. All of these works relate to the special issue through a similarity of (ambiguous) title, descriptive focus, and predominantly nonfiction genre. Chapter 1 organizes its multiple sets of juxtapositions first synchronically and globally (related texts from similar times but different places) and then nationally and diachronically (related texts from similar places but different times) in order to demonstrate the degree to which distinct contexts and analytical situations affect literary reading, analysis, and interpretation. The 1965 special issue produces distinct types of meaning and raises distinct types of questions depending on its proximity to other texts. Although it was promoted and largely read in its original context of a continental-focused U.S. American studies as an unorthodox, “hip” assessment of the lives of contemporary Native Americans, the special issue reads differently when placed in critical conversation with similar overview texts of contemporary Indigenous status and aspirations also produced in English in the mid-1960s but in the recently incorporated extracontinental U.S. state of Hawai’i and in the (primarily) Anglophone settler nation-states of Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. The special issue reads differently, as well, when placed in critical conversation with similar surveys produced across the twentieth century within the continental United States by a diverse group of Native and non-Native public intellectuals, academic scholars, and government employees.

The juxtapositions staged in chapter 1 help defamiliarize and refocus the all-too-familiar story of non-Indigenous researchers, writers, scholars, and editors dominating the production of “authoritative” nonfiction discourses about the contemporary status and aspirations of American Indians, whether in the mid-1960s or across the century. Although a large number of Native intellectuals produced nonfiction texts in the 1960s, these Indigenous voices too often went unheard outside their local contexts.¹⁹ They were all but overwhelmed by the settler survey—a vast sea of non-Native voices offering “comprehensive” coverage and “expert” opinions—and they often remain unremembered, unacknowledged, and unstudied within contemporary scholarship. By displacing U.S. isolation and its implicit discourse of exception, Indigenous juxtapositions reveal the context of ongoing colonialism operative in the production of the 1965 special issue. And they reveal that there were, in fact, other options for representing “The Indian Today,” not only outside but also within the conventions of the settler survey.

Chapter 2 then works to recover the largely forgotten history of American Indian responses to the 1976 American Revolution bicentennial observance. Titled “Unsettling the Spirit of ’76: American Indians Anticipate the U.S. Bicentennial,” chapter 2 juxtaposes this set of surprisingly diverse Indigenous texts and performances with the set of better-known responses of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander intellectuals, writers, and activists to Australia’s bicentennial observance in 1988. The relatively visible and well-documented responses of Indigenous Australians to the settler celebration down under, which were both event centered and discursive, provide an interpretive framework for focusing an initial study of how American Indians responded to the so-called Spirit of ’76. This Indigenous Australian framing helps to make more visible and more legible the diffusive and anticipatory nature of American Indian responses to the U.S. bicentennial, features that have rendered those responses invisible and illegible within contemporary scholarship. The majority of chapter 2 is devoted to reading reports of proceedings, journalism, essays, poems, and—most surprising—novels published in the early to mid-1970s that anticipate the 1976 U.S. settler celebration and that imagine possible Indigenous responses. In the case of the 1975 novel Indians’ Summer by Nasnaga (Remnant Band Shawnee), those responses include formal secession from the United States during the Independence Day holiday and the formation of a new, intertribal Indian Nation. The chapter’s juxtaposed readings thus resituate the better-known anticipatory fiction of Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) in his comic novel The Heirs of Columbus, published in 1991 but set during the Columbus quincentenary in 1992, as following in a particular tradition of American Indian activist writing. The chapter ends with a brief consideration of the different legacies of Indigenous Australian and American Indian responses to the spirits of ’88 and ’76.

Part 2, “Interpretation/Recovery,” is organized as a three-part meditation on the development of interpretive methodologies for trans-Indigenous literary studies that are radically “comparative” in practice (reading across and through texts “close together placed” rather than “together equal”) and that are situated in dialogue with scholarship on Indigenous arts and technologies. This meditation is conducted through concrete engagements with literary texts rather than through more abstract discussions of theory, and it enacts multiple formats of Indigenous juxtapositions.

The format of chapter 3, “Pictographic, Woven, Carved: Engaging N. Scott Momaday’s ‘Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919’ through Multiple Indigenous Aesthetics” relates to that of chapter 1 in its performance of multiple analyses of a central text. Chapter 3 stages three readings of Momaday’s brief poem “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919,” originally published in 1992, the year of the Columbus quincentenary. Each reading is grounded in a distinct worldview and system of aesthetics: Kiowa, with which Momaday identifies personally and genealogically and with which the specific content and overt themes of the poem can be aligned; Navajo, with which Momaday has extensive personal and professional experience and about which he has expressed a high regard;²⁰ and Māori, with which, as far as I am aware, Momaday has no personal or professional experience and in which he has no particular stake. More precisely, the first reading engages the conventions and highly developed aesthetics of Kiowa and other Plains Indian pictographic discourses, most often associated with “winter counts,” “ledger art,” and other mnemonic devices designed to aid in multimedia events of storytelling. The second reading engages the conventions and highly developed aesthetics of Navajo textile designs, which are based in a complex semiotic geometry, and connects this geometry back to Plains Indian traditions through the graphic forms of parfleche designs. And the third reading engages the conventions and highly developed aesthetics of Māori whakairo (carving in wood, stone, and bone), especially those forms meant to serve as conduits for contemporary contact with ancestors. The three readings thus move outward from a tribally specific approach to Indigenous literary reading and interpretation toward an intertribal or international approach and toward the possibility of a more global, trans-Indigenous approach. The chapter ends with a meta-analysis of the multiple sites and configurations of contemporary Indigenous literary studies, and it raises specific, ongoing challenges for the further development of such studies given the typical limitations of graduate training in departments of English.

Similarly, the format of chapter 4, “Indigenous Languaging: Empathy and Translation across Alphabetic, Aural, and Visual Texts,” relates to that of chapter 2, where multiple juxtapositions of texts related by content and theme provoke new questions, readings, and interpretations. Chapter 4 thus shifts from a format of juxtaposing three Indigenous-centered interpretive engagements with a single poem (one text, multiple approaches) to one of staging a series of juxtapositions of diverse Indigenous texts composed in a range of genre and media (multiple texts, multiple approaches related by a singular focus). The series begins with “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919,” the focus of chapter 3, but now situates Momaday’s poem among four similarly evocative texts: “Sad Joke on a Marae” by Māori poet Apirana Taylor, “Tangata Whenua” by Māori hip-hop group Upper Hutt Posse, “Blood Quantum” by Hawaiian poet Naomi Losch, and “When I of Fish Eat” by Māori poet Rowley Habib (Rore Hapipi) and illustrated by Māori visual artist Ralph Hotere. In the course of these juxtapositions, several additional texts are engaged as well, including the mixed-media basket Strawberry and Chocolate by American Indian poet and weaver Gail Tremblay, the music video produced to augment Upper Hutt Posse’s rap composition “Tangata Whenua,” a single sentence from the novel Potiki by Māori author Patricia Grace, and bilingual Māori–English signage produced for the National Library of New Zealand/Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa and for an exhibit on display at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Linking these diverse texts is the absence or presence of Indigenous language and the mobilization of literary and artistic strategies that spotlight the power of Indigenous “bilingual punning” and “bilanguaging.” The literary and cultural theorist Walter Mignolo defines the latter concept as not simply the grammatical act of translating from one distinct language to another but rather the political act of operating between two or more languages and cultural systems, actively engaging the politics of their asymmetry within (post)colonial relations.²¹ Also linking these texts is an engagement with the theory of “trans-customary” art proposed by Māori artist and art scholar Robert Jahnke, which he defines as contemporary Indigenous art that demonstrates “empathy” with customary arts practice.²² The chapter concludes by juxtaposing the several published versions of the 1987 novel The Whale Rider by acclaimed Māori author Witi Ihimaera, which was adapted as the international feature film Whale Rider in 2003. The multiple versions of Ihimaera’s story demonstrate one possible outcome of a process of translating an Indigenous literary text from the “local” to the self-consciously “global”; their trajectory offers a productive counter and something of a caution to chapter 3’s celebration of Momaday’s multiple literary returns to a single event of personal, familial, and communal significance.

Finally, chapter 5, “Siting Earthworks, Navigating Waka: Patterns of Indigenous Settlement in Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run and Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka,” enacts a third format of sustained juxtaposition of Indigenous literary works connected by genre and theme, each published near the turn of the twenty-first century and the new millennium: the book-length sequence of poems Blood Run by the American Indian poet Allison Hedge Coke (Cherokee/Huron/Creek) and the book-length sequence of poems Star Waka by the Māori poet Robert Sullivan. Blood Run explores the art, engineering, culture, and history associated with the Native American earthworks—often described as “mounds”—of the Blood Run site on what is now the South Dakota–Iowa border. Star Waka explores the multiple meanings of Polynesian waka, a term that indicates any kind of “vessel” but signifies, especially, large, ocean-voyaging “canoes.” The sustained juxtaposition of these book-length poetic works illuminates how each sequence of poems engages a specific, highly emblematic Indigenous technology not simply as a primary theme but also as a primary logic for its elaborate formal structures and multiple structural patterns. Each poet works to disrupt the dominant discourses that typically code Indigenous technologies as inferior to those of settlers, in part by actively demonstrating the efficacy of ancient, historical, and ongoing Indigenous technologies through her or his contemporary poetics. (Such demonstrations represent other instances of contemporary empathy with customary practice.) In a brief coda, the chapter concludes by resituating Hedge Coke’s and Sullivan’s sequences of poems within a broader framework of prior attempts, by the early to mid-twentieth-century intellectuals D’Arcy McNickle (Cree/Salish) and Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck, Māori), to reveal and celebrate the complex patterns of Indigenous technologies for exploration, migration, trade, and settlement.

Across the chapters, as in Blood Narrative, I engage English and Indigenous languages on equal terms, outside the binaries familiar/exotic or domestic/foreign. I do not italicize words and phrases from Māori, Hawaiian, Navajo, or other Indigenous languages except where italics are part of a quotation or will aid clarity or effect.

The juxtapositions of Hedge Coke and Sullivan with McNickle and Te Rangi Hiroa at the end of chapter 5 emphasize what is implicit in the preceding chapters: the wide range of Indigenous locations, allegiances, knowledges, and authorities extant and changing across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, within North America and around the globe. In different ways, each of these individuals contradicts and complicates any reductive assumption that “authentic” Indigenous writers worthy of scholarly attention are (only) those who are born into and then maintain unbroken affiliations with the Indigenous communities, languages, and cultures from which they are genealogically descended, or that, over the course of their lives and careers, “authentic” Indigenous writers represent and advocate on behalf of (only) those specific communities, languages, and cultures. Hedge Coke, Sullivan, McNickle, and Te Rangi Hiroa, like other writers and artists engaged in this study, embody in their persons and evoke in their works different kinds of access to and personal involvements with Indigenous communities, languages, and cultures—their own and others’. All four describe themselves as being of “mixed” descent, inheritance, and experience; all four led or lead lives of physical, intellectual, and artistic travel; all four have produced diverse and complex bodies of work. Similar to Graham’s three-dimensional sculpture, which documents metamorphosis as the end result of Indigenous movements and connections across fluid space and time, their multidimensional works in multiple genres evoke the transformative power of lived experience and imagined exploration across multiple categories of the local and global Indigenous.

Taken together, the lives and published works of the writers, artists, scholars, activists, and intellectuals engaged in Trans-Indigenous represent much of the “authentic” diversity of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Indigenous identities. Assessing the complexity of this diversity, in all its personal and political nuance—with all its potential for both affirmation and controversy—is beyond the scope of the present project, which is devoted to expanding the archive and exploring new methodologies for a global Indigenous literary studies in English. That said, it is important to state that, in the contemporary period, the vast majority—if not literally all—of the writers, artists, scholars, activists, and intellectuals who self-identify as Indigenous and/or who are claimed by Indigenous communities are similarly situated. Whether mourned as loss or celebrated as survivance, the realities of contemporary Indigenous identities describe multiple kinds of diversity and complexity; often, they describe seeming paradoxes of simultaneity, contradiction, coexistence.²³ These qualities are the contemporary Indigenous norm rather than its tragic exception.

In the chapters that follow, I employ conventional vocabulary for large-scale Indigenous groupings, and I mark specific Indigenous affiliations with the convenient shorthand of parenthetical notations of nations and tribes, fully aware of the limitations of these terms. They cannot situate individuals or communities within relevant history; nor can they convey degrees of active involvement, residency in traditional or relocated homelands, cultural or linguistic expertise, and so forth. Where it seems necessary for my analysis, I expand on these brief designations either in the text or in notes.

Given the diversity and complexity of Indigenous identities in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the immediate question is not how to define clear criteria for which writers and works can be legitimated for Indigenous scholarship—that is, how to newly articulate old regimes for the regulation of “authenticity”—but rather how to recognize, acknowledge, confront, and critically engage the effects of differential experiences and performances of Indigenous identities. The more important question, then, becomes not which writers and texts are (absolutely) in or out but rather how to train ourselves—and how to train the generation behind us—for the Indigenous scholarship of the future, when Indigenous identities will be only more and not less diverse and complex, and in ways we have yet to imagine. How do we harness this diversity for our own rather than others’ intellectual and political purposes? How do we control the discourses of an Indigenous-centered scholarship rather than allow rigid or fundamentalist versions of those discourses to control us? And how do we include in such scholarship the realities and representations of our own and others’ movements, connections, identities, and representations that are not simply tribal, intertribal, and inter- or transnational but significantly and increasingly trans-Indigenous?

The five chapters of this book develop processes for recovery and interpretation rather than fixed criteria for inclusion in the archive, and none asserts the inevitability of specific readings. As Thomas King comments in The Truth About Stories, “It’s lucky for [us] that literary analysis is not about proof, only persuasion” (115). I hope to persuade readers of the efficacy and productive potential of methodologies for literary reading marked as trans-Indigenous.

To conclude this introduction, then, I offer a final juxtaposition. In her essay “Speaking in a Language of Vital Signs” for the 2008 exhibition catalog Joe Feddersen: Vital Signs, Gail Tremblay describes how, through an innovative use of patterning, Okanagan print, textile, basket, and glass artist Joe Feddersen purposefully creates pieces that can be interpreted in different ways by different audiences. By employing multiple designs and multiple artistic processes within single pieces, Tremblay writes, Feddersen is able “to create visual relationships that sometimes cause the eye to read designs in multiple ways, shifting negative and positive space as the viewer focuses on shifts in value and color that reveal different ways of understanding their geometry based on traditional approaches to reading meaning in pattern” (43). Moreover, Tremblay writes that Feddersen often has chosen “not to copy traditional designs but to combine the mnemonic signs used by basket makers and layer them so that viewers [can] organize abstract visual patterns and shift the way they see designs when reading them” (43). She concludes, “Feddersen’s ability to innovate allows viewers with different levels of cultural knowledge to experience these works in relation to either tradition or modernity” (44). In the 2007 novel Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story by LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), the contemporary protagonist, an international journalist, describes an encounter with the ghost of a Choctaw ancestor from the turn of the twentieth century, Ezol Day, a theoretician of the interactions among language, time, and reality. The terms of Ezol’s theories of language resonate with Feddersen’s practice of pattern:

[Ezol] smiles. “Choctaw words are tools. They form equations, much the same as geometry,” she says confidently. “Geometry may be guided by facts, but those facts are ultimately the choice, or consent, of a specific group. Language, rules of grammar, and meaning are the agreement of a particular group based on their practiced experience. I theorized that Choctaws didn’t have the same experiences with time as those of Europeans because we speak differently. This is revealed in our vast differences in verb usage. What the Choctaws spoke of, they saw. Experienced.” (37)

Reading through Indigenous juxtapositions reveals the potential for these levels of complex patterning and theory within trans-Indigenous scholarship. There is much exciting work to be done.