American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Welcome to the world, Issue 49:2!

An incredible collection of such diverse essays, just in time for the tail end of your summer reading!

We are excited to share the work of these scholars who collectively demonstrate the depth and breadth of Indigenous Studies.

In the second slide, we are pleased to present our newly formed Editorial Board, for the first time listed in our Front Matter.

Thank you to our twenty-seven authors in this issue, and to the communities they represent here.

Welcome to the world, Issue 49:2!

What a an incredible collection of such diverse essays. Just in time for the tail end of your summer reading!

We are excited to share the work of these scholars who collectively demonstrate the depth and breadth of Indigenous Studies.

In the second slide, we are pleased to present our newly formed Editorial Board, for the first time listed in our Front Matter.

Thank you to our twenty-seven authors in this issue, and to the communities they represent here.

AICRJ is happy to announce our most recent recipients of our Early Career Writing Award!

Created in 2023, this award is provided to one essay or authorial collective that has crafted an article deserving of editorial support. Along with a modest financial gift, the bulk of the prize is developmental editing. Working closely with our Editor in Chief and editorial team, the authors will be provided pre-submission editorial attention to help bring the essay to its highest quality. The award does not require the authors to submit their essay to AICRJ. We hope our work together helps early career scholars find their footing in the world of scholarly publishing in a supportive editorial relationship.

Congratulations to Dr. Burghart for leading our first authorial collective. Over the next six months, we will be working with them on their essay about inherent authority of tribal nations to regulate airspace within tribal lands.

Jessica Burghart (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation)
Dr. Jessica Burghart is a School of Business professor at Haskell Indian Nations University. She is also the Faculty Lead for the DHS Summer Research Team Program for MSI.  

Angelina Giago
Angelina is an Oglála Lakȟóta and Huŋkpáti Dakȟóta student at Haskell Indian Nations University. She is majoring in Environmental Science while pursuing a certificate in GIS Mapping, with interests in environmental policy and tribal sovereignty.”

Aziza S. Smith
Aziza Smith is a proud member of the Eastern Shoshone tribe from Fort Washakie, WY. She recently graduated from Haskell Indian Nations University and will begin working towards her master’s degree in public administration this Fall at the University of Kansas.

Aiyanna Spring Tanyan (Seminole Nation of Oklahoma)
Aiyanna is a recent graduate from the School of Business at Haskell Indian Nations University. She is continuing her studies in the Indigenous Studies graduate program at the University of Kansas this upcoming fall. 

Image: L to R: Angelina Giago, Aziza Smith, Aiyanna Tanyan, Dr. Jessica Burghart

ANGELINA GIAGO عزيزة - Aziza Aiyanna Tanyan 🌻

Our next issue, 49.2, comes out in two weeks!
And what an issue! In a single collection, we learn about
·      Indigenous Tlingit ethnographers,
·      South Dakota boarding school experiences,
·      using large-scale computerized approaches to studying “frontier” language in Indigenous Studies,
·      the revitalization of Indigenous plant dyes,
·      halting the erasure of both historic and continuing Indigenous communities across the Phoenix metropolitan area,
·      traditional knowledge making in Hawai’i schools,
·      and the relationship between tribal sovereignty and salmon aquaculture in British Columbia.

We work diligently to cover a wide range of Indigenous communities, issues, approaches, and Native-centered concerns. Inclusivity in Indigenous Studies means every field, discipline, and even anti-disciplinarily.

All without paywalls or subscriptions.

We are honored by authors choosing us to share their vital research.

Thank you for your readership.

From our colleague, Dr. Liza Black:

Call for Papers
I am writing to you to see if you might be interested in taking part in an anticipated collection. I am coediting
a volume tentatively titled, Infamous Violence and Settler Silence: Indigenous Struggles Against
Centuries of Sexual Violence in the Americas.
If you or someone you know has writing they are looking to publish related to this topic, please reach
out! I would also welcome recommendations for other scholars you know whose work might be a good
match for this volume.
Volume Abstract:
From early modern European invasions of the Americas onwards, sexual assault by the invaders has been a well-known and often-hidden part of the structure of colonialism. Colonizers’ attempts to white out the horrors of colonialism have often focused first and most on hiding these norms of sexual violence. Thus, for centuries, Indigenous fights for sovereignty have included struggles to maintain, defend, or regain bodily autonomy.
Using a variety of evidence from within and beyond archives, the scholars in this volume demonstrate
wide complicity in colonial sexual violence by invaders, particularly in the form of persistent norms of normalization, erasure, and minimization. And we show that Indigenous women, and Indigenous
communities more broadly, have for centuries used a range of tools to push back against sexual
violence, and attempted to prevent perpetrators from getting away with it. By taking a long durée
approach, we outline the historical breadth of the harms, but also the ways current movements build on
generations of struggle.

Important Dates:
We’re hoping for drafts from authors by the end of 2026 with a publication in either late 2027 or 2028.
Looking forward to hearing from you and wishing everyone a restful summer!

Contact Info:
Liza Black: [email protected]
Marc Carpenter: [email protected]
Joanne Jahnke-Wegner: [email protected]

In our latest issue✨This Indigenous research embodies the history, dreams, and hopes of a group of people creating a sense of meaning, belonging, and place in the world by reclaiming and recultivating Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara varieties of corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and watermelon.

FROM OUR LATEST ISSUE✨Jennifer R. O’Neal (enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde) argues that the foundational activist work of Indigenous activists fighting to bring awareness of Indigenous information rights has paved the way for the contemporary work within repositories and that Indigenous transnational alliances highlight the importance of collaborating on a global scale to assert Indigenous radical resurgence and political sovereignty.

REMINDER - CALL FOR PAPERS! This special issue, Attending to Indigenous Environmental Studies and Sciences in Place, aims to bring together cross-disciplinary voices within Indigenous studies to establish place as the necessary starting point for Indigenous Environmental Studies and Sciences (IESS). At a moment when IESS is gaining institutional recognition yet risks being absorbed into Western environmental frameworks, this collection insists on place-based Indigenous knowledge systems as irreducible starting points. Place—sometimes termed as land or territory—evokes notions of home within Indigenous studies, extending beyond the physical landscape (Goeman 2008; see also Dorries & Daigle 2024, Dumbarton Oaks LandBack edited collection) to encompass relationships, responsibilities, and sovereignties. This special issue would evoke place differently in each of their contributions and ultimately return to the question “what makes place meaningful?” The special issue we propose seeks to give these topics greater visibility and analysis, bringing together sources and scholars of literature, law/policy, archives, futurity, tribal natural resource management, activism, language, culture, and more working to sketch out an understanding of IESS to build momentum around Indigenous knowledges that are situated in place, thus re-framing what it means to “do” and “theorize” environmental research (Evering et al. 2013; Kanngieser & Todd 2020; Hunt 2022).

WELCOME✨Mark Minch-de Leon is a member of the Susanville Indian Rancheria and currently an Associate Professor of English at UC Riverside where he also co-directs the California Center for Native Nations (CCNN). In the Fall, he is joining the Film and Media Department at UC Berkeley. A co-founding member of the California Indian Studies and Scholars Association (CISSA), Mark is the author of Indigenous Inhumanities: California Indian Studies After the Apocalypse, published by University of Minnesota Press as part of the Indigenous Americas series, and guest editor of the AICRJ special issue, Still Bad Indians.

James M. Hundley is a settler scholar and associate professor of anthropology at Rowan University in New Jersey. His current research examines policy formation across the Canada-US border and the ways different entities, including Indigenous nations, play a central role in the process.

He theorizes the processes of securitization to highlight the surreptitious ways settler colonialism is perpetuated by removing “the Indigenous” as a geopolitical entity. This article focuses primarily on the Coast Salish of Washington and British Columbia and their ongoing attempts to assert a transnational identity that spans the Canada/US border. Examining security changes at the international border demonstrates that securitization of the Canada/US border perpetuates the settler colonial framework by undermining Indigenous sovereignty – unsuccessfully in many cases. Nevertheless, First Nations and Tribes in the Pacific Northwest, and elsewhere across the continent, have collaborated and implemented innovative strategies that resist securitization. In the Pacific Northwest, this includes deploying a nationalism movement that spans the border. The data for this article derive primarily from ethnographic fieldwork with the Nooksack Tribal Nation, Stó:lō Nation, and other Coast Salish collaborators.