24 - Charting Comparative Indigenous Traditions

Summary

What might a truly comparative Native American and Indigenous literary studies look like? Building from an extended contextualization and “literary” analysis of a work of carving, painting, inlay, and assemblage, this essay suggests a range of possible approaches to comparative, global, and/or trans-Indigenous projects based in engagements with alphabetic literatures. Both the sculptural and alphabetic examples expose ways in which the work of contemporary artists and writers elucidates neither Indigenous stasis nor Indigenous isolation—as colonial stereotypes continue to assert—but rather Indigenous connections to wider worlds, often in multiple ways simultaneously, and often explicitly within processes of real and imagined travel. In these examples, artists and writers center the Indigenous in their works in terms of the cultures, histories, and aesthetics they reference and engage, but also in the very conceptions of space, place, movement, and time their works evoke and, indeed, enact.