Laura M. Furlan

“The Archival Turn in Native American Literature and Art” examines the ways contemporary Native writers and artists actively repurpose items from the colonial archive—historical photographs, documents, journals, ethnographers’ field notes, and heritage objects—in their written and visual texts. These acts of archival remediation serve to revise historical narratives about Indigenous people and disrupt the intentions of the archive. Simultaneously, they raise questions about archives and collecting more broadly, particularly questions concerning the holding and caretaking of Indigenous material items and knowledges. The authors and artists included in this study demonstrate new methods of reinterpreting archives using an Indigenous lens that considers relationality: how materials in the archive are sometimes very literally about their ancestors. By examining the production of each creative text, illuminating the ways in which it signifies on the archival process, and then tracing the materials being remediated back to their archival or institutional homes, this book ultimately demonstrates how archival critique, revision, and acts of assemblage in Native cultural productions advance Indigenous forms of archiving and knowledge production.