An Indigenous Jesus: Methodological and Theoretical Intersections in the Comparative Study of Religion

Indigeneity is a relational category that is predominantly, albeit not exclusively, applicable to Indigenous peoples. As a central theoretical site of discourse in Native Studies, indigeneity tends to be characterized by politicized relationships and provides powerful rhetorical strategies and counter-narratives. Facilitating decolonization as well as illuminating the structural and systemic relationships between the indigenous and the colonial, Indigenous theory recognizes the often complex inter-relationships attending the delineation of ethnic, social, and religious identity. The historical Black Elk, for example, illustrates how Lakota and Catholic religious identities co-exist in an ongoing site of discursive tension. This article argues that the historical figure of Jesus can be re-cognized as an indigenous Judean, complicating contemporary efforts in which the quest for the historical Jesus occurs in a predominantly Christian discursive context.

Hawai'i Is My Haven

Hawaiʻi Is My Haven maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged antiBlack racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, nonWhite multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to “breathe” that offers the possibility of becoming local. Sharma's analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in “paradise.”

The Trade

This poem explores Canadian history, specifically Indigenous relations with North American colonizers. Originally a Native Studies 201 Winter 2020 creative assignment, this poem describes the advent and settling of European colonizers. The Trade discusses these events from a uniquely personal immigrant perspective and attempts to detail them. Finally, the poem explores the relevance of this history to the author’s own personal history and future experiences by looking back at history for an important quest: looking forward. Hopefully, this poem will inspire readers to reflect on their own identities in relationship to the past as well.

Black Critical and Cultural Theory

This chapter reviews black critical and cultural theory under the following headings: 1. Introduction; 2. Cultural Studies (Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures, Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, and Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies); 3. History and Sociology (Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, and Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code); 4. Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (Therí Alyce Pickens, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness).

The Urgent Need for Anticolonial Media Literacy

In this article, we advocate for anticolonial media literacy as an important complement to critical race media literacy. Given the pervasive misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in media, teachers must explicitly learn to challenge colonizing and dehumanizing representations of Indigenous life and help their students to do the same. By outlining several Native studies theories, we forward anticolonial media literacy to help teachers detect and interrupt colonial logics. After modeling anticolonial medial literacy in practice, we draw from Nambé Pueblo scholar Debbie Reese’s framework of “critical Indigenous literacies” to support teachers in including and creating respectful alternatives.

Continuing the Intervention: Past, Present, and Future Pathways for Native Studies and Early American History

David Silverman offers a critical appraisal of two prizewinning works in Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS), Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, by Lisa Brooks, and Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, by Christine M. DeLucia. Silverman’s review treats the methodology associated with NAIS with some skepticism, offering the opportunity for a lively discussion about the merits and perils of community-engaged history scholarship. Four scholars of Native American history, including DeLucia, respond, defending new approaches to Indigenous history represented by these recent works.