Editorial
It's
quiet outside. My pyjamas are running to holes. The dog has run off with my
favourite slippers, and I'm completely out of Orlik Golden Sliced pipe tobacco.
But my family say they never know what to get me for Christmas. The year is
ending well, however, because I'm sitting here putting the finishing touches to
our 8th issue (well, 7th if you count the Vol 2 double
issue as a single) and reflecting on the 4th year of Transmotion's endeavours. It is an
incredible privilege editing this journal, spending so much time reading the
insightful work of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, catching glimpses of
the incredible new Indigenous writing happening out there, and feeling
awestruck—if also a little overwhelmed—at the sheer quantity of new
books that are sliding off the humming presses at a rate of knots. So. Much.
Talent. It is hard to keep up, as the delayed release date of this issue
testifies. To complicate matters, in the past year, two of the editors have
become department chairs, while one has moved institutions, leaving the fourth
with a whole lot of work to do! As a result, we have decided it is time to take
on more editorial assistants. Alla Holovina has continued to do excellent work
with our book reviews (how many, you ask? Why, only 27 this issue), and we will
be joined next issue by Bryn Skibo-Birney (University of Geneva), CMarie
Fuhrman (University of Idaho), and Ying-Wen Yu (University of Arizona). This input is invaluable and allows us to
continue taking in articles, reflective essays, fiction, and as many book
reviews on new fiction and scholarship as possible. In addition, the wonderful
Miriam Brown-Spiers (Kennesaw State University) has agreed to join us as a
fifth editor. We are both delighted and 100% confident that all of this new
input will keep the journal fresh, lively, and... on time.
This
just happens to be the fourth guest-curated/-edited issue we have produced, as
well, and we are deeply grateful to those who have sought to work with us. As
you know, open access is crucial to our mission, and it is gratifying to see
just how many others are drawn to the platform for the easy dissemination of
high quality scholarship and writing that will remain permanently free to the
end user. When we wrote the editorial to that double issue in 2016, we
celebrated the fact that we were able to make more of the online platform,
including various media. We continue that here with pieces that make strong use
of images and visualizations, and one that incorporates sound files. If you're
reading this in pdf... sorry. We can still do more, so if you're out there making
film, animation, doing audio work of any kind, seeking to do something
interactive, or simply want to use lots of great pictures, we have the capacity
and the will to make all of that work. We're not blowing our own
trumpets—we're just pinching ourselves that we have this opportunity.
So
to this issue. Our huge appreciation goes to Melissa Michal Slocum for both
suggesting and editing this special issue. She has worked with us very
carefully—and patiently—on a topic that will always be difficult,
and she has done so with commitment and passion, and openness to the Americas
more broadly. Her article opens the issue and also acts as a strong
introduction to the three articles that follow it by María Regina
Firmino-Castillo, Molly McGlennen, and Stephen Andrews. We're delighted to be
able to include in this issue a stand-alone article by AnnMarie De Mars and
Erich Longie from 7th Generation Games, a timely piece on
perseverance and the potential implicit in an apparently unusual combination:
Dakota Culture, video games, and mathematics. An insightful and deeply
engrossing explanation of their work on educational games among fourth and
fifth grade students in two reservation schools, their study supports the
proposition that "teaching
traditional values, particularly perseverance, can impact Native American
student achievement through increased effort."
The
reflective piece in this issue, Gary F. Dorr's "Mind, Memory and the
Five-Year-Old," is a moving contemplation on the experience of adoption, the
comfort of family, and the ambivalence of shame. Two fiction pieces complement
this: "the seed runner" by Jenny Davis and "Pretend Indian Exegesis" by Trevino
Brings Plenty. Davis's story places us in a dystopian future that echoes a
familiar past—of detention and State control—in which the
protagonist's running ability holds hope for the future. "Pretend Indian
Exegesis," meanwhile, showcases Brings Plenty's dry humour in this excoriating
critique of the Pretend Indian, "a formula. A phantom entity in the community."
The 27 (yes, 27!) reviews that follow tie up this issue with a real sense of
the astonishing depth and variety of contemporary Indigenous writing.
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Transmotion is open access, thanks to
the generous sponsorship of the University of Kent: all content is fully
available on the open internet with no paywall or institutional access
required, and it always will be. We are published under a Creative Commons 4.0
license, meaning in essence that any articles or reviews may be copied and
re-used provided that the source and author is acknowledged. We strongly
believe in this model, which makes research and academic insight available and
useable for the widest possible community. We also believe in keeping to the
highest academic standards: thus all articles are double-blind peer reviewed by
at least two reviewers, and each issue approved by an editorial board of senior
academics in the field (listed in the Front Matter of the full PDF and in the
online 'About' section).
David Stirrup December
2018
Theodore Van Alst
James Mackay
David Carlson