I feel very lucky to have my short essay on “Indigenizing Wikipedia” included in a new book-in-progress: Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning. This is a collection of essays about using online writing in liberal arts education, and it was fun to write about what happened when my students wrote…Read More
Issues/Articles
Can the Digital Humanities Be Decolonized?
I was recently party to a debate, conducted mainly on blogs and Twitter, about an online journal’s decision to put a cluster of essays through an extra round of editing. If that sounds arcane, it is, kind of; but readers of this blog should care about it, because it points to some very old problems…Read More
Days of DH at Northeastern University, March 18, 2013
Here are the slides and text for the “lightning talk” I’m to give tomorrow at Northeastern for their “Days of Digital Humanities” fest: I’m a literary historian by training, and as a scholar of Native American literature, I am most interested in creating accessibility to the kinds of writing that Native American people have historically…Read More
Indigenizing Wikipedia
Today there is an international feminist takeover of Wikipedia; you can follow it on Twitter using #tooFEW. It was a project proposed by Moya Bailey, who notes a profound deficit of women’s history and perspectives on the encyclopedia, on which only about 12 percent of content producers are women. I’m still looking for an accounting…Read More
The Boston Children’s Museum as a Native Literary Hub
This is the paper I’ll present tomorrow at MLA in Boston. You can see my slides here. Sovereignty and Sustainability: The Boston Children’s Museum as Native Literary Hub Today I’ll be discussing an unlikely but powerful hub of local Native literary production: the Boston Children’s Museum. Children’s museums and “children’s literature” shelves can infantilize…Read More
A Dawnland Voices Wordle
My colleague James Finley produced this word cloud by running the entire manuscript for Dawnland Voices–the 600-page anthology of regional Native writing I’ve just finished editing–through a tool called Voyant. (Click “Voyant” for a clearer picture.) Like the tag cloud at the left (which shows only how often I have tagged particular topics on this…Read More
Digitizing Tribal Newsletters
As I look forward to the third Indigenous New England Conference tomorrow at UNH, I’m especially interested in speaking with Paul Pouliot, Sagamo of the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook Abenaki people, based in Alton, NH. From 1993 until quite recently, the band was regularly (i.e., quarterly) publishing Aln8bak (Abenaki Indian) News. Like many community…Read More
Mihku Paul’s first chapbook
It’s a beautiful thing that Bowman Books is now publishing regional Native titles faster than I can review them. I had been eagerly awaiting Mihku Paul’s first book of poetry, and it’s now out: 20th Century PowWow Playland. You can order it here. Paul is Maliseet, an enrolled member of the Kingsclear First Nation in…Read More
A New Digital Anthology of Regional Native Writing
This is a fairly academic (but short!) piece I wrote for an NEH Institute of Digital Humanities, which I attended last summer at the University of Denver. It serves as an introduction to the digital anthology that my students, some Native collaborators and I have started. The anthology will always be a work in progress,…Read More
Trace DeMeyer and Blue Hand Books
Trace DeMeyer, who lives in western Massachusetts, has been an important figure in the regional Native literary scene. In the late 90s and early 2000s she was an editor at The Pequot Times, the excellent paper published out of Mashantucket. She still freelances for News from Indian Country, keeps several blogs of her own (linked…Read More
UNH Conference
DAWNLAND VOICES: A CELEBRATION SATURDAY, NOV. 1, 2014 in Holloway Commons at UNH This year, in lieu of the annual Indigenous New England Conference, we will be holding a dinner celebration in honor of the tribal editors and authors who contributed to Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England. The book…Read More
A Penobscot Musical in the Making
Last Monday, May 21, I was lucky enough to get up to Orono to see a staged reading of Donna Loring’s musical play, The Glooskape Chronicles: Creation and the Venetian Basket. I love visiting that UMaine campus: between its proximity to Indian Island and its strong Wabanaki Center, it has a vibrant local indigenous presence,…Read More
Deacon and Lewy Sockbason, early Passamaquoddy writers
Last night, at the Windows on Maine site, I ran across this early-19th-century penmanship sample from a 15-year-old Passamaquoddy student, Lewy Sockbason: The sample is tucked into an 1828 report from the Reverend Elijah Kellogg, a Protestant missionary who ran a school on the Pleasant Point reservation for six years. Kellogg was much enamored of…Read More
An open bibliography of regional literature
Here is a link to my bibliography of regional Native American literature, on which I’m eager to entertain comments and suggestions! I have been building this bibliography in Zotero, a tool I really can’t praise enough. Designed by the geniuses at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, it is a free, open-source…Read More
Early Native Writers on the Web
I’ve been absent from this blog for a couple of months, because I have been absorbed in a new class on early Native American writers. My students and I are reading much of this work online where we can find it, because one goal of the class is to start assembling a digital archive of…Read More
Carol Bachofner’s new book is here
Abenaki poet Carol Bachofner’s new book is out!–thanks to the inimitable Joe and Jesse Bruchac (Abenaki), and their publishing venture, Bowman Books. This is Carol’s fourth book, and in many ways the most overtly “Native” (raising the whole question, of course, of what makes poetry “Indian.” I have heard Carol say that if she wrote…Read More
Nov. 24: National Day of Mourning
What the United States calls “Thanksgiving,” indigenous people call the National Day of Mourning. In 1970, when the state of Massachusetts invited Frank James/Wamsutta (Mashpee Wampanoag) to speak, he hit them with this: It is with mixed emotion that I stand here to share my thoughts. This is a time of celebration for you –…Read More
John Christian Hopkins and Trace DeMayer: 11-11-11 e-launch!
With a wink to today’s Mayan Apocalypse, John Christian Hopkins (Narragansett) and Trace DeMeyer (Shawnee/Cherokee) are launching an indigenous e-publishing effort. DeMeyer’s new company, Blue Hand Books, is unveiling Hopkins’s latest novel, Twilight of the Gods, in electronic format. Get it on your Kindle, or read it on your computer in Adobe. Both journalists, Trace…Read More
