Editors' Remarks

Abstract

Editors' Remarks K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Kelly McDonough we write these remarks in March 2023 as we near the end of our four-year term as NAIS journal coeditors; you will read these remarks when volume 10, no. 2 is published in the fall, after the journal's editorial offices have moved from the University of Texas at Austin to the University of Victoria in British Columbia. We are thrilled that the journal is moving into the capable hands of coeditors Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark and Gina Starblanket. We are confident that the journal will continue to excel and innovate under their exemplary leadership. It has been an honor and a joy to help guide the journal through the last four years, from volume 7, no. 1 (2020) through volume 10, no. 2 (2023). We are grateful to the many committed members of the journal's editorial board who have supported and enhanced the work of the journal. Two developments in our term were sparked by editorial board conversations and could not have been accomplished without their labor. The first project was to revise the journal's peer review guidelines to reflect and embody Indigenous values of collegiality, kindness, generosity, and constructive encouragement to reach the highest levels of intellectual integrity and analysis. The second project began with conversations about how to support and encourage emerging and early-career scholars to publish and resulted in the establishment in 2021 of the journal's Writing Fellowship (see https://naisa.org/journal-nais/nais-fellowship/). Editorial board members oversee the application and selection process and work with the coeditors to recruit mentors for four to seven writing projects to support. Fellows are paired with mentors from the NAIS editorial board or NAISA membership, with whom they work for an academic year to move their writing project toward submission for publication. The coeditors arrange (virtual) gatherings to discuss issues such as vetting journals, submission guidelines, the peer-review process, and the journey of a manuscript through the editorial process from submission to publication. Our editorial term was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the movement of NAISA annual meetings to an online platform for two years, but it is the intention of the program to bring fellows and mentors together annually at the NAISA meeting. [End Page 1] During our term at the journal, we added the section "Teaching Native American and Indigenous Studies." This teaching category joins the journal's other categories of research articles: "Notes from the Field," "Intervention," and "Reviews." Whereas "Teaching" and "Notes from the Field" manuscripts are submitted by authors for consideration, "Intervention" consists of invited manuscripts, or sets of manuscripts, on issues of import to our readership. In volume 8, no. 1, working with prior NAIS editors Jean O'Brien and Robert Warrior, we recruited thirteen essays from a variety of perspectives for the "Intervention" section entitled "Indigenous Studies Reflections on the Land-Grab University Project" (for more on the project see https://www.landgrabu.org/ and https://github.com/HCN-Digital-Projects/landgrabu-data). In the same issue, as part of the transition from the editorial team of O'Brien and Warrior, they and we coauthored an editors' introduction, "NAIS Editorial Ethics, Principles, and Practices," to offer a brief history of the founding of the journal and to make transparent the journal's guiding ethical principles and editorial practices (see also: https://naisa.org/journal-nais/editorial-policies/). One of the editorial practices we introduced into the peer review process of submitted manuscripts is the practice of developmental feedback. If we feel a submitted manuscript has great promise but is not ready to send out for peer review, we send a developmental feedback letter encouraging the author(s) to address issues—such as flow of narrative, technical aspects of the writing, methodology, theoretical framing, formatting, and so on—in the hopes of expediting the peer review process. We find this feedback has more productive results than a "decline with encouragement" letter, which—however encouraging—is still a decline. Two of the great joys of working as NAIS editors are to learn from the manuscripts submitted to the journal and to see how humane and constructive excellent...