The NAIS Journal
NAIS publishes the best interdisciplinary scholarship in international Native American and Indigenous Studies. The journal provides an intellectually rigorous and ethically engaged forum for smart, provocative, and exciting scholarship while drawing on the extraordinary professional expertise of our ever-expanding membership in a process of double-anonymous peer review. NAIS provides a forum to place different kinds of research, intellectual traditions, and knowledge practices in conversation.
NAIS Journal Announces New Co-Editor Team
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We encourage all faculty, instructors, and students to download NAIS articles directly from your library’s online portal. Please do not provide or use shared PDF files. Each “click” through a library portal supports a journal financially, so please download from Project Muse (all issues available), JSTOR (volumes 1 through 8 only), and the like to access NAIS. UPDATE: As of January 2023, all NAISA membership purchases and renewals come with digital access to NAIS through Project MUSE. Previously, access to the digital version of NAIS was only available through academic institution library portals. This latest membership benefit allows independent scholars and unaffiliated community researchers access to not only the latest issue of NAIS, but the entire NAIS archive as well. Members will be emailed instructions on how to access digital NAIS at the beginning of the month following membership purchase or renewal.
NAIS publishes:
- Original scholarly manuscripts from all the areas encompassed within Indigenous Studies’ interdisciplinary range, including creative writing;
- Notes From the Field;
- Teaching Native American & Indigenous Studies;
- Reviews
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The editors’ goal is to extend understandings across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries and learn more about the important work going on in scores of different fields and regions. Studies grounded in Indigenous research methodologies are especially encouraged. All empirical studies must document: (1) the use of accepted ethical protocols for research with human subjects; and (2) site-specific approvals when required, including research and/or institutional review board approvals required by Native nations, tribes, or bands.
Co-Editors (2023): Gina Starblanket (Cree and Saulteaux and a member of the Star Blanket Cree Nation in Treaty 4 territory), University of Victoria, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), University of Victoria
Editorial Managers: Jessica L. Sánchez Flores and Adam Martinez, University of Texas at Austin
Founding Co-Editors (2013-2019): Jean M. O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe), University of Minnesota, and Robert Warrior (Osage), University of Kansas
The current issue of NAIS (Volume 10, Issue 1) contains two scholarly articles, one Notes From the Field article, and 41 reviews
All NAISA membership purchases and renewals come with digital access to the journal NAIS through Project MUSE. Previously, access to the digital version of NAIS was only available through academic institution library portals. This membership benefit allows independent scholars and unaffiliated community researchers access to not only the latest issue of NAIS, but the entire NAIS archive. Members will be emailed instructions on how to access digital NAIS at the beginning of the month following membership purchase or renewal.
Scholarly articles:
Sara Černe
Abstract: Memory, place, and Indigenous resistance are explored in two poems whose central metaphor is the Mississippi River and the landscape near its delta and its source, respectively: “New Orleans” (1983) by the former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Muscogee) and “Pre-Occupied” (2013) by the Minneapolis-based Heid E. Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) in its textual and collaborative video poem versions. I analyze these poems’ retheorizing of place by drawing on gender and Indigenous studies scholar Mishuana Goeman’s concept of “remapping,” arguing that the poems create an Indigenous Mississippi that replaces representations of the river as an icon of the U.S. empire and westward expansion. Both poets transcend regional and temporal boundaries, following the flow of the river to provide a broader definition of Indigenous homelands. Read together, “New Orleans” and “Pre-Occupied” traverse the three decades between their publication dates and the many miles that separate the Lower and the Upper Mississippi, demonstrating a riverine poetics that mimics the river’s flow to enact a relational cartography that defies colonial mapmaking. The poems rhetorically reclaim the historically significant Indigenous space of the Mississippi River Valley and embody on the page a space in which land and cultural memory can come together. In their remappings, both poets turn away from settler cities and their monuments toward rivers, presenting them as repositories of Native memories and suggesting that the health and future of Indigenous stories and waterways are closely linked.
Tereza M. Szeghi
Abstract: Alexander Posey (1873–1908) was a Creek humorist, journalist, editor, and poet who crafted his Fus Fixico letters to help fellow Creeks negotiate upheavals wrought by allotment, dissolution of their tribal government, and Oklahoma’s impending statehood (which ultimately incorporated Indian Territory). While validating his people’s varied perspectives with a culturally responsive approach to literary persuasion, Posey nudged readers toward positions he thought best for Creek cultural continuance and economic survival. The letters’ dialogic structure—inclusive of diverse political perspectives—validated his people’s community-oriented values and was more persuasive than prescriptive. Posey utilized four overlapping rhetorical strategies in his literary approach to political activism: satire and repetition to critique the delay of allotment deeds; illustrative logic to argue against U.S. assimilationism; and appeals to civic inclusion to protest settlers’ hobbling of Indigenous Peoples’ political agency and autonomy. Critical attention to Posey’s use of these strategies illuminates his vision for Creek futurity as engaging with a politics of recognition while grappling with its limitations.
Notes From the Field:
Phineas Kelly & Chris Caskey Russell
Northern Arapaho Language Revitalization with Virtual Reality
Abstract: In cooperation with elders of the Northern Arapaho Language and Culture Commission (NALCC), a language revitalization project using virtual reality is being developed, supported by a National Science Foundation grant. The origins of the project are explored, underlying methodologies examined, as well as the important role that the elders of the Northern Arapaho Language and Culture Commission play in guiding the goals of the grant: (a) exploring the potentials of virtual reality in language revitalization; (b) documenting spoken Arapaho language with an emphasis on hunting and animal migration stories and songs related to place names on the Wind River Indian Reservation and other locations in Wyoming and Colorado; and (c) developing virtual reality curricula units for Wind River Indian reservation K–12 schools. Difficulties in conducting research during the covid19 pandemic, especially with Indigenous communities that have been hit hard by the virus, impacted our methodology and project process. This project seeks to provide a blueprint for other scholars interested in working with tribes and grant agencies in using VR in language revitalization. The project engages the questions if and how VR and subsequent technologies can be used as decolonial tools to help reverse language loss and promote culture.
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NAIS is published twice a year by the University of Minnesota Press
NAISA membership is $25–$100 annually. Institutions: $116.
Members can choose the level of membership they can afford:
$25 (students and others), $50 (early career), $75 (mid-career), $100 (well established career), or $2,000 (Lifetime Member). Outside USA add $5.00 for each year’s subscription.
If you have questions about your membership/subscription to NAIS,
please contact the University of Minnesota Press at ump@umn.edu. To inquire about placing an ad in NAIS, please contact Anne Wrenn at the University of Minnesota Press awrenn@umn.edu.
*Shipping for Back Issues: Inside the U.S.: $6.00 for the first issue and $1.25 for each additional issue. Outside the U.S.: $9.50 for the first issue and $6.00 for each additional issue.
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Publishers and distributors can send queries, catalogs, or materials for review consideration to: journal@naisa.org
NAIS Reviews
The University of Texas at Austin
Department of Spanish and Portuguese / NAIS Journal Office
150 W. 21st Street, Stop B3700
Austin, TX 78712-1155