Uneasy Alliances: A Decade of Native American/Indigenous Studies and Environmental Humanities

Abstract

This essay seeks to flesh out the ways that the fields of NAIS and EH have and have not overlapped, intersected, and worked in community over the past ten years. To do so, I have taken a few approaches. First, I offer brief summaries of some of the most important/widely cited monographs and stand-alone essays in the field. These overwhelmingly come from Indigenous scholars, as is only appropriate. Next, I examine four journals: Studies in American Indian Literature (SAIL) and Transmotion (TM) as publications devoted to NAIS humanities scholarship and Environmental Humanities (EH) and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), the journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) as publications devoted to ecologically-minded humanities scholarship. I have examined every issue of these journals since (and slightly before in the case of three of them) the establishment of Transmotion to see how and how often each has published articles directly addressing the other field of inquiry—that is, how often SAIL and TM have published EH work and how often EH and ISLE have published NAIS work since 2012. To that end, I have compiled a list of what I consider to be each journal’s offerings in these fields and placed them into extensive endnotes and citations. My hope is that this archive will prove useful to future scholars and save some folks a lot of time. Alongside these examinations, I delve into special issues of these journals as well as PMLA at the intersections of the interdisciplines of NAIS and EH in the body of the essay.