Editorial

We pen our greeting to you on the day before that feasty, yeasty American November holiday of "horrorshow buffet," the one full of myths of friendship and sacrifice, of journeys, bounty, and loss, and of sanctuary and exile. Cathy Coevell Waegner leads us through an intense and welcome consumption of selected works of Vizenor and Stephen Graham Jones, a post-Halloween pre-Thanksgiving discussion of incarceration and interstates, complete with cannibals, clowns, and wiindigoo. In anticipation of the upcoming season, here read "blockbuster releases," we offer Olena McLaughlin's essay that looks at the influence of Star Wars in the works of a variety of artists from Susan Folwell to Ryan Singer and Andy Everson, among others, and focuses in particular on the Pop Art and insights of Bunky Echo-Hawk and Steven Paul Judd. Karen Poremski gifts us a careful consideration of a Trevino Brings Plenty poem from his collection Wakpá Wanáǧi. "Little, Cultural, Teapot Curio Exposes People" is a poem of woven creation and other containers, stained with blood and history and the theft of culture and celebration of conquest. Within a basket though, Brings Plenty reminds us is a weaving of links and DNA in other kinds of captivity, the ones no NAGPRA act can loosen. With those bonds unbound however, outside of laws and policy, Poremski shows family and relatives moving beyond the confines of museums.

Moving from notions of history to imagining ourselves into the future, Deborah Madsen provides an analysis of "Indigenously-determined" gaming and "the mechanics of survivance," eloquently building on what she sees as an oft-overlooked nuance of survivance, reminding us that is "not a static object or method but a dynamic, active condition of historical and cultural survival and also of political resistance." Her incisive read of Never Alone / Kisima Inŋitchuŋa through this particular lens of survivance and projection resonates in a quote she provides from Ishmael Angaluuk Hope, who "'remarks that the game story is about how to be the kind of person who can bring about a return to "true living in the community.'"

For a contribution to and as a community of scholars, we provide in this issue "Red Pens, White Paper: Wider Implications of Coulthard's Call to Sovereignty," a roundtable discussion of Glen S. Coulthard's Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, which descends from a plenary session at the Native American Literature Symposium in 2016. The membership of the panel, Carol Edelman Warrior, Brian Burkhart, Billy J. Stratton, David J. Carlson, and Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr. is made up of specialists in Literature, English, Philosophy, and Native American Studies, and provides a lively and multi-faceted discussion of this seminal work in Indigenous Political Science.

Finally, our creative section in this issue provides us with world views that move us through a cycle, and the incidental structure of this volume bookends itself in this regard. Echoing Coevell Waegner's initial work here and its use of carceral theory, David Groulx via praxis gives us a look at "the world" from the inside out, one set in a different kind of tomb; a sort of Easter yet concluded. Crisosto Apache writes of a world contained in "this specific moment and time / no different than the odious Big Bang," and we wonder at the mark made on the universe when that moment in an

"envelopment of toiling flame engulfing in

combustion"

meets ice and snow as winter in season (and increasingly in spirit) approaches. We are grateful that Carter Meland provides us with a critical reflection on Wiindigoo "presence" in the world even as we recognize winter's necessity, though we perhaps already wait for spring in season (and spirit) to return.

Until then, enjoy.

Theodore C. Van Alst November 2017

David J. Carlson

James Mackay

David Stirrup