Editors' Note

Abstract

Editors' Note Sarah H. Salter The editors at American Periodicals are thrilled to share this fall's issue with readers. This special issue on Indigenous Periodicals is one result of ongoing and generative collaborations across scholars, colonial nations, and Indigenous Nations. Our guest editors' "Introduction" describes how the essays collected in this special issue were initially drawn from a series of panels and symposia in what is now called Pennsylvania (Philadelphia or Lënapehòkink, the ancestral homelands of the Lenape People) and Germany. Working with these editors and our own editorial community at American Periodicals, we have together endeavored to present a range of essays studying aspects of Indigenous Periodical cultures throughout parts of Turtle Island, now more commonly known as the United States. As their introductory essay explains so well, the guest editors of this issue see many opportunities in the turn to Indigenous Periodicals, which are "complex media artifacts whose relation to the construction of sovereignty is articulated through periodicity, network, mediator, and archive. . . . [They] have served as distinct material carriers of Indigenous information and visual-graphic spaces of communication, knowledge production, and community-building" (100). Certainly, we at American Periodicals believe our pages represent a welcoming space to explore and unfurl those artifacts and their meanings, even though our title remains complicit in the settler colonialist work of non-Tribal governance. Since the editorial collective at American Periodicals is not replete with experts in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), this special issue offered a chance to learn more—indeed, very much—about how our editorial work and publication context might be leveraged as responsible, respectful, and responsive to the ethical and historical considerations of publishing works by and about Indigenous Peoples in what is now the United States ("America"). Our Editorial Board includes Jacqueline Emery, who has long done recovery, analytical, and editorial work with the newspaper archives of Native Boarding Schools; many scholars have been consulted and many texts read. Throughout the process, we have been gratified and humbled at the chance to learn from and the chance to feature work on Indigenous print cultures that may benefit readers within and beyond the Native Nations and communities invoked herein. In 2005, Devon Mihesuah called for "intelligent, complete works" that can help "teachers at all . . . levels . . . [to] educat[e] their students about the diversity of Native America and the contributions Natives have made to this country and to the world."1 It is our hope that [End Page v] the essays in this special issue will be useful to pedagogical communities as well as research ones for these very purposes. You will see that each essay includes a note about language choices particular to the essay. NAIS is in particular a field where language choices are highly contextualized, always in flux, and a regular source of debate and consideration. As an example of what Gregory Younging calls "allied academic literature," the AP collective has taken heart in his call to "plan on not getting it right. Make your best effort to make informed, mindful choices about terminology. . . . Find your way through, and show how you have found your way through."2 As each author has a different relation to the distinct Native Nations and Peoples they write about, each has made particular choices about the language they use. As general practice, the American Periodicals Style Guide suggests consistent use of specific names and terms whenever possible, or the use of Indigenous (capital letter as adjective) and Native (capital letter as adjective) for more general discussions. Our authors have followed these general guidelines and included reflections on word choice and purpose. Amongst others, we have been inspired by recent language summaries and reflections in Kathryn Walkiewicz's Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2023) and Kelly Wisecup's Assembled For Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021) as well as Daniel Radus's discussion of exonyms and autonyms specific to the "Oceti Sakowin Oyate, a confederation of seven Indigenous communities in the western Great Lakes and northern Plains" in "Pipestone Books: Indigenous Materialisms and...