Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	810.989 Ju	4-week checkout	Due 05-21-2024

Preface: Notes for the Long Rebellion -- Introduction: Stories that Wound, Stories That Heal -- How Do We Learn to Be Human? -- How Do We Behave as Good Relatives? -- How Do We Become Good Ancestors? -- How Do We Learn to Live Together? -- Reading the Ruptures -- Conclusion: Keeping a Fire -- Appendix: A Year of #HonouringIndigenousWriters -- Bibliographic Essay: Citational Relations.
"It's about Indigenous literatures and underscores their significance to Indigenous peoples in the realm of the political, the creative, and the intellectual. It challenges readers to examine their assumptions about Indigenous literatures and at the same time asserts the emotional connections of our shared humanity and the transformative power of story."-- Provided by publisher.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Table of Contents
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Stellar and accessible academic book submitted by redwood on July 2, 2023, 10:54am Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), a professor of Indigenous literatures, manages to not only execute his very ambitious project—outlining some of the ways that Indigenous literatures matter—but also to do it in a way that I suspect is accessible even to those coming from outside literary scholarship. Typically, I review academic books just to crystallize my own reading and share what I’m thinking about, but I would absolutely recommend giving this one a read.

Justice organizes each of the first four chapters around a question: “How Do We Learn to Be Human?” “How Do We Behave as Good Relatives?” “How Do We Become Good Ancestors?” “How Do We Learn to Live Together?” In these chapters, he tackles major concepts in Indigenous studies and literary studies, putting his own spin on the nuances of Indigenous relationality, resilience, and vitality. Some of the ideas aren’t new, but Justice summarizes and recasts them in valuable ways. The final chapter, “Reading the Ruptures,” focuses more on policy, maps, and Justice’s family.

Yet I liked the form of this book even more than its content. Structurally, more than any other book, it resembles the kind of academic book I want to write. It’s a big project, organized around big questions, and examines multiple literary texts per chapter, the analyses of which I found equally compelling whether or not I had read the text in question. I also added a lot to my TBR from this book, both from the chapter analyses and from the spectacular appendix that collects a list of Indigenous writers from Justice’s 2016 project of tweeting out one name per day (I have read 53 out of these 366 writers, and sometimes just a single poem from them—lots of reading to do!). And Justice incorporates insights from his personal and pedagogical experience seamlessly into his analysis. I am going to be closely studying the craft of this book to try and emulate Justice in my own work.