Our War Paint Is Writers Ink

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. Adam Spry is Assistant Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College.

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.

A celebration of Anishinaabe intellectual tradition. Enduring Critical Poses examines the stories, poems, plays, and histories centered in the Great Lakes region of North America, where the Anishinaabeg live in a space Basil Johnston referred to as "Maazikamikwe," a maternal earth. The Anishinaabeg are a confederacy of many communities, including the Odawa, Saulteaux, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Oji-Cree, and Algonquin peoples, who share cultural practices and related languages. Bringing together senior scholars and new voices on the Anishinaabe intellectual landscape, this volume specifically explores Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi culture, language, and literary heritage. Through a tribal-centric framework, the contributors connect various branches of Native American literary studies and celebrate Anishinaabe narrative diversity to offer a single, overarching story of Anishinaabe survival and endurance. Gordon Henry Jr. is an enrolled member of the White Earth Anishinaabe Nation in Minnesota and Professor of American Indian Literature, Creative Writing, and American Indian Studies at Michigan State University. His books include Afterlives of Indigenous Archives: Essays in Honor of the Occom Circle (coedited with Ivy Schweitzer) and The Light People. Margaret Noodin is Professor of English and American Indian Studies and Director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her books include Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature. David Stirrup is Professor of American Literature and Indigenous Studies at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. His books include Picturing Worlds: Visuality and Visual Sovereignty in Contemporary Anishinaabe Literature.

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.

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

Examines representations of the transborder Yaqui people as interpreted through the writing of Spanish, Mexican, and Chicana/o authors--Provided by publisher.

The years between Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and the 1971 reemergence of the Cherokee Nation are often seen as an intellectual, political, and literary “dark age” in Cherokee history. In Stoking the Fire, Kirby Brown brings to light a rich array of writing that counters this view. A critical reading of the work of several twentieth-century Cherokee writers, this book reveals the complicated ways their writings reimagined, enacted, and bore witness to Cherokee nationhood in the absence of a functioning Cherokee state. Historian Rachel Caroline Eaton (1869–1938), novelist John Milton Oskison (1874–1947), educator Ruth Muskrat Bronson (1897–1982), and playwright Rollie Lynn Riggs (1899–1954) are among the writers Brown considers within the Cherokee national and transnational contexts that informed their lives and work. Facing the devastating effects on Cherokee communities of allotment and assimilation policies that ultimately dissolved the Cherokee government, these writers turned to tribal histories and biographies, novels and plays, and editorials and public addresses as alternative sites for resistance, critique, and the ongoing cultivation of Cherokee nationhood. Stoking the Fire shows how these writers—through fiction, drama, historiography, or Cherokee diplomacy—inscribed a Cherokee national presence in the twentieth century within popular and academic discourses that have often understood the “Indian nation” as a contradiction in terms. Avoiding the pitfalls of both assimilationist resignation and accommodationist ambivalence, Stoking the Fire recovers this period as a rich archive of Cherokee national memory. More broadly, the book expands how we think today about Indigenous nationhood and identity, our relationships with writers and texts from previous eras, and the paradigms that shape the fields of American Indian and Indigenous studies.

“Spring 2021’s most compulsively readable biography-meets-memoir tells the story of two women, a century apart, discovering themselves and redefining beauty and success on their own terms.” In 1908, Florence Nightingale Graham moved from the suburbs of Toronto, Canada to Manhattan with dreams of becoming a self-made woman. Within two years, she opened her first beauty salon on Fifth Avenue. Adopting the same name as her company, Elizabeth Arden went on to pioneer the global beauty industry (valued at $532 billion today). At a time when women didn’t have the right to vote, Elizabeth became one of the wealthiest self-made women in the world and the first businesswoman to grace the cover of Time magazine. By the end of the 1930s, it was said “there are only three American names known in every single corner of the globe: Singer Sewing, Coca Cola, and Elizabeth Arden.” One hundred years later, in 2008, at the age of eighteen, Louise Johnson moved from the suburbs of Toronto, Canada to Manhattan to begin her dream internship at the cosmetic giant, Elizabeth Arden. She knew nothing about the beauty industry, but was fascinated by the woman behind the brand whose inspiring legacy was at risk of falling through the cracks of history. Although they lived a century apart, Elizabeth became Louise’s invisible guide as she tried her “successful” lifestyle on for size, with a big career in a big city—but behind the glitz and the glamour, they soon struggled to recognize their true selves. Who are we really behind the makeup we put on our faces? Behind the social media highlight reels? Behind the personas we (consciously and subconsciously) present to the world? This book brings you behind the red doors of Arden, while Louise’s story serves to highlight how much (or how little) has changed a century later. What began as a desire to preserve Elizabeth’s place in history, evolved into an examination of her coming-of-age in the beauty industry and a cultural excavation on a much larger thread that connects us all. Ultimately, this book is about identity and how we learn to navigate the world to find our best self, even if it’s on a different path than we originally anticipated.