This chapter interrogates practices of biotechnology related to pregnancy and reproduction. Taking note of a recent proliferation of speculative texts about compromised fertility and draconian measures to control women’s reproductive freedoms, alongside continued legislative attempts to restrict access to abortion and other tools of family planning, this chapter asks what it means that we have become so obsessed with the life of the unborn fetus. Through an analysis of practices in the fertility industry, and especially the transnational market in surrogacy services, this chapter reads two speculative fiction works about changed fertility: Jane Rogers’ The Testament of Jessie Lamb and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God. It argues that increasingly restrictions that prevent those in the Global North from accessing surrogacy and related fertility services from those in the Global South speak to a perceived crisis in reproductive futurity. The plethora of narratives about a crisis in fertility, then, speak to a racialized anxiety about the scarce “supply” of reproductive capacity: whose fertility and family structures will be preserved into the future?

. This chapter provides a glimpse into some of the relationships with writers from different generations, countries, and backgrounds that animated Roth’s life and enriched his fiction. Fierce defender of his friends, when it came to literature he was also an incisive critic. He famously withheld praise from his dying mentor Bernard Malamud, in whose eulogy he quoted William Blake: “Opposition is true friendship.”

In “Cannibal Spirits and Sacred Seeds,” I describe Indigenous food practices as historical and contemporary forms of decolonial care. The chapter remembers the starvation regimes imposed by settler colonial governments as modes of subjugation. In this context, the writings of Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Band) and Winona LaDuke (Mississippi Band) focus on the significance of food sovereignty to Indigenous resistance. Erdrich’s novel Tracks, set in the early twentieth century, centers resistance to colonization and dispossession, depicting the construction of hunger and the destruction of Indigenous foodways. LaDuke’s collection of essays, All Our Relations, offers case studies of protection of land and struggles under ongoing settler colonialism. LaDuke describes land seizure and toxic pollution but continues into the present with the reclamation of food sovereignty. Through these works the ongoing impacts of settler colonialism on Indigenous bodies, communities, and practices are made visible. But these writers also depict Indigenous foodways as centers of knowledge, life, and continuance. Food sovereignty is central to ongoing resistance in the context of climate disruption, visible in the kitchens of pipeline blockades, where Indigenous peoples oppose the most recent forms of dispossession and hunger. Daily acts of cooking, in these communities, are practices of decolonial care.

This chapter explains how particular Native writers in the US have come to serve as reference points and to receive widespread recognition, while others, equally worthy, have not. In particular, I focus on N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), and Sherman Alexie (Spokane-Coeur d'Alene) as the four Native authors who have been most frequently singled out for attention and "canonized" within mainstream American culture. I identify factors that created a favorable reception for their works, and most importantly, I explore what it means for these authors to be "marginally mainstream." On the one hand, to be "marginally mainstream" is to be deemed worthy of recognition by the critical establishment, which often entails overemphasizing "universal" literary qualities to the detriment of tribally specific elements. At the same time, however, to be "marginally mainstream" suggests that these texts continue to speak eloquently to Native audiences in meaningful ways.

Louise Erdrich’s 2010 novel Shadow Tag, a story about an artist who obsessively paints his Native wife, emphasizes the connections among gender, colonialism, and representation at the heart of indigenous feminism. In the novel, this essay argues, the relationship between Gil and Irene, along with the ways that Gil paints Irene’s body, underscores the centrality of gender in colonialism, the ways that patriarchy has served as both instrument and rationale for colonial processes that carry particular consequences for indigenous women. The novel thus gestures towards the consequent necessity of feminism in anticolonial projects and scrutinizes the role of representation in colonial power and Native resistance. In Erdrich’s story, contests over power and possession unfold in part as contests over representation, and by illustrating the ways that representation is bound up with social power, Shadow Tag ultimately reflects on the political possibilities of Native American literature itself.