From The Editors

From the Editors June Scudeler and Siobhan Senier tawâw (welcome) to our first double issue! In consultation with the Studies in American Indian Literatures editorial board, we’re now publishing two double issues a year. This new publication schedule streamlines some of our labor; more substantively, double issues give us an opportunity to create lengthier and richer conversations around Indigenous literatures, as well as to make room for more special sections. In this double issue, for instance, we begin with a special section on water edited by Hilary Wyss and Christina Boyles. The issue could not be more timely. Here in Vancouver, the Federal Court of Appeals recently decided to halt approval of the Kinder Morgan pipeline because of lack of consultation with Indigenous communities—particularly the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, whose territories would be devastated by an ocean spill—and the catastrophic effects of increased tanker traffic on the critically endangered resident orca population. Further, just as we are taking our essays to press, one of our collegial publications, the journal Decolonization, has dropped its own special issue on water. In the words of that issue’s editors, Melanie Yazzie and Cutcha Risling Baldy, “struggles over water figure centrally in concerns about self-determination, sovereignty, nationhood, autonomy, resistance, survival and futurity.” We find all these themes reflected in Indigenous literature and in the essays carefully curated by Wyss and Boyles. We’re also pleased to see that this issue’s other contributors engage with contemporary Indigenous literatures, something we have concertedly tried to encourage. It’s hard to keep up with all the new writing across Turtle Island, and we remain keenly interested in contributions that highlight the groundswell of new Indigenous writing, as well as those that bring to light texts in all genres that deserve more recognition. Lydia R. Cooper’s “Straight Talk: Two Spirit Erasure as the Price of Sovereignty in James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk,” for example, addresses the rape of Charging Elk, a Lakota member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show left behind in late nineteenth-century France. [End Page vii] Charging Elk is raped by gay chef Armand Breteuil, which Craig Womack (Muscogee) likens to an erasure of queer Indigenous/Two Spirit people. Cooper persuasively argues that Welch’s silence about the Lakota winkte upholds the settler state’s aim to enforce heteropatriarchy. In contrast, in “‘I Got This AB Original Soul/I Got This AB Original Flow’: Frank Waln, the Postmasculindian, and Hip Hop as Survivance,” Sarah Kent builds on Gerald Vizenor’s (Anishinaabe) concept of the “Indian” and Sam McKegney’s masculindian to come up with postmasculindian. Sicangu Lakota hip hop artist Frank Waln is postmasculindian because he “disrupts the toxicity of white heteropatriarchy by crafting, (re)inventing, and living viable modes of Indigenous masculinity.” Kent’s intervention is vital because it argues for an Indigenous masculinity based on kinship and care. Using witnessing as a framework in “‘This Story Needs a Witness’: The Imbrication of Witnessing, Storytelling, and Resilience in Lee Maracle’s Celia’s Song,” Laura Beard argues that Stó:lō writer Lee Maracle’s 2014 novel should be read alongside discourses of reconciliation, reminding readers to witness not only what is happening now but also what may happen in the future. Witnessing is not a passive act; rather, Celia, the shape-shifting Mink, and the reader are all implicated in witnessing. We conclude this double issue with Reginald Dyck’s “Revitalization Strategies in Gaspar Pedro González’s A Mayan Life.” González’s (Q’anjob’al Maya) novel, published in 1992, was actually completed in 1972 during the intensification of the Guatemalan civil war, in which Mayan peoples were targeted. Dyck provides vital contextual information for the protagonist, Lwin, and his village’s need for cultural revitalization and the fight for political rights. A Mayan Life is a key intervention in the Mayan Revitalization movement, helping non-Mayan readers achieve a better understanding of the similarities and differences in what is currently known as the Americas. work cited Yazzie, Melanie K., and Cutcha Risling Baldy. “Introduction: Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 7, no. 1...

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