A Transnational Native American Studies? Why not studies that are trans-Indigenous?

Abstract

This essay questions both the Special Forum's invitation to chart a "Transnational Native American Studies" and its assertion, in the call for papers, that issues "surrounding place and mobility, aesthetics and politics, identity and community, and the tribal and global indigenous" have "emerged" from within "the larger frameworks of transnational American Studies." Through a series of critical and interpretive engagements with examples of contemporary Indigenous arts and literature from the US, Canada, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, the author offers an alternative rubric of the "trans-Indigenous" for future work in global Indigenous Studies.