SUNY series, Native Traces

Argues that Indigenous hip hop is the latest and newest assertion of Indigenous sovereignty throughout Indigenous North America.

Expressive culture has always been an important part of the social, political, and economic lives of Indigenous people. More recently, Indigenous people have blended expressive cultures with hip hop culture, creating new sounds, aesthetics, movements, and ways of being Indigenous. This book documents recent developments among the Indigenous hip hop generation. Meeting at the nexus of hip hop studies, Indigenous studies, and critical ethnic studies, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes argues that Indigenous people use hip hop culture to assert their sovereignty and challenge settler colonialism. From rapping about land and water rights from Flint to Standing Rock, to remixing "traditional" beading with hip hop aesthetics, Indigenous people are using hip hop to challenge their ongoing dispossession, disrupt racist stereotypes and images of Indigenous people, contest white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, and reconstruct ideas of a progressive masculinity. In addition, this book carefully traces the idea of authenticity; that is, the common notion that, by engaging in a Black culture, Indigenous people are losing their "traditions." Indigenous hip hop artists navigate the muddy waters of the "politics of authenticity" by creating art that is not bound by narrow conceptions of what it means to be Indigenous; instead, they flip the notion of "tradition" and create alternative visions of what being Indigenous means today, and what that might look like going forward.

Explores a little-known history of exchange between Anishinaabe and American writers, showing how literature has long been an important venue for debates over settler colonial policy and indigenous rights.

For the Anishinaabeg-the indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes-literary writing has long been an important means of asserting their continued existence as a nation, with its own culture, history, and sovereignty. At the same time, literature has also offered American writers a way to make the Anishinaabe Nation disappear, often by relegating it to a distant past. In this book, Adam Spry puts these two traditions in conversation with one another, showing how novels, poetry, and drama have been the ground upon which Anishinaabeg and Americans have clashed as representatives of two nations contentiously occupying the same land. Focusing on moments of contact, appropriation, and exchange, Spry examines a diverse range of texts in order to reveal a complex historical network of Native and non-Native writers who read and adapted each other's work across the boundaries of nation, culture, and time.

By reconceiving the relationship between the United States and the Anishinaabeg as one of transnational exchange, Our War Paint Is Writers' Ink offers a new methodology for the study of Native American literatures, capable of addressing a long history of mutual cultural influence while simultaneously arguing for the legitimacy, and continued necessity, of indigenous nationhood. In addition, the author reexamines several critical assumptions-about authenticity, identity, and nationhood itself-that have become common wisdom in both Native American and US literary studies.

Advances critical conversations in Native American literary studies by situating its subject in global, transnational, and modernizing contexts.

Since the rise of the Native American Renaissance in literature and culture during the American civil rights period, a rich critical discourse has been developed to provide a range of interpretive frameworks for the study, recovery, and teaching of Native American literary and cultural production. For the past few decades the dominant framework has been nationalism, a critical perspective placing emphasis on specific tribal nations and nationalist concepts. While this nationalist intervention has produced important insights and questions regarding Native American literature, culture, and politics, it has not always attended to the important fact that Native texts and writers have also always been globalized. The World, the Text, and the Indian breaks from this framework by examining Native American literature not for its tribal-national significance but rather its connections to global, transnational, and cosmopolitan forces. Essays by leading scholars in the field assume that Native American literary and cultural production is global in character; even claims to sovereignty and self-determination are made in global contexts and influenced by global forces. Spanning from the nineteenth century to the present day, these analyses of theories, texts, and methods-from trans-indigenous to cosmopolitan, George Copway to Sherman Alexie, and indigenous feminism to book history-interrogate the dialects of global indigeneity and settler colonialism in literary and visual culture.

Traces the historical dimensions of Native North American drama using a critical perspective.

Responding to an increasing need for critical perspectives and methodologies, this collection traces the historical dimensions of Native North American drama through overviews of major developments, individual playwrights' perspectives, and in-depth critical analyses. Bringing together writers and scholars from the United States, Canada, and Europe, Indigenous North American Drama provides the first comprehensive outline of this vibrant genre. It also acknowledges the wide diversity of styles and perspectives that have helped shape contemporary Native North American theater itself. This interdisciplinary introduction offers a basis for new readings of Native American and First Nations literature at large.

Entertaining and enlightening interviews with some of today's most important Native Americans.

In these lively and informative interviews, noted ethnohistorian and international consultant Joëlle Rostkowski brings to light major developments in the Native American experience over the last thirty years. Overcoming hardships they have experienced as the "forgotten" minority, often torn between two cultures, these prominent native writers, artists, journalists, activists, lawyers, and museum administrators each have made remarkable contributions towards the transformation of old stereotypes, the fight against discrimination, and the sharing of their heritage with mainstream society.

Theirs is a story not so much of success but of resilience, of survivance, with each interview subject having marked their time and eventually becoming the change they wanted in the world. The conversations in this volume reveal that the assertion of ethnic identity does not lead to bitterness and isolation, but rather an enthusiasm and drive toward greater visibility and recognition that at the same time aims at a greater understanding between different cultures. Conversations with Remarkable Native Americans rewards the reader with a deeper understanding of the Native American Renaissance.

Reexamines the writings of early indigenous authors in the northeastern United States.

The Native peoples of colonial New England were quick to grasp the practical functions of Western literacy. Their written literary output was composed to suit their own needs and expressed views often in resistance to the agendas of the European colonists they were confronted with. Red Ink is an engaging retelling of American colonial history, one that draws on documents that have received scant critical and scholarly attention to offer an important new interpretation grounded in indigenous contexts and perspectives. Author Drew Lopenzina reexamines a literature that has been compulsively "corrected" and overinscribed with the norms and expectations of the dominant culture, while simultaneously invoking the often violent tensions of "contact" and the processes of unwitnessing by which Native histories and accomplishments were effectively erased from the colonial record. In a compelling narrative arc, Lopenzina enables the reader to travel through a history that, however familiar, has never been fully appreciated or understood from a Native-centered perspective.

A survey of current critical perspectives on how North American indigenous peoples are viewed and represented transnationally.

An indispensable resource for readers, students, and scholars of Native literatures in North America, Native Authenticity offers a clear, comprehensive, and systematic look at the diversity of critical approaches to the idea of "Indian-ness." Some of the foremost transatlantic scholars of Native Studies in North America and Europe share their insights on this highly-charged aspect of the contemporary theoretical field of Native Studies. The issue of "authenticity" or "Indian-ness" generates a controversial debate in studies of indigenous American literatures. The articulation of Native identity through the prism of Euro-American attempts to confine "Indian" groups to essentialized spaces is resisted by some Native writers, while others recognize a need for essentialist categories as a key strategy in the struggle for social justice and a perpetually renewed sense of Native sovereignty. Pressure from neo-colonial essentializing practices is in conflict with a politics of cultural sovereignty, which demands a notion of "Indian" essence or "authenticity" as a foundation for community values, heritage, and social justice.

Contributors participate in a scholarly and pedagogical search for an intellectual paradigm for Native literary studies that is apart from, yet cognizant with, powerful colonial legacies. The complex politics of Polynesian authenticity versus Native indigeneity is engaged by Native Hawaiian writers as they negotiate conflicting demands upon personal and tribal identities. Related to this questioning is the authenticity debate in Canadian First Nations writing, where the claim to authenticity rests upon a claim to historical precedence; also related is the highly contentious claim by some Chicano/a writers to an indigenous heritage as a claim to authority and "American" authenticity. Essays in this volume are focused upon the diverse and sophisticated responses of Native writers and scholars, while offering comparative perspectives on Native Hawaiian, Chicano, and Canadian literatures.