ABSTRACT
The year 2014 marked the fifteenth publishing anniversary of Craig Womack’s Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism and its affirmation of Muskogee Creek-specific literary history; 2015 was the twentieth anniversary of “intellectual sovereignty” from Robert Warrior’s Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions, with Jace Weaver’s That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community and its notion of “communitism” celebrating its own twentieth anniversary in 2017. Although none of these is the first or last work in the critical mode now known as “Indigenous literary nationalism,” they arguably stand as the most prominent in both critical regard and controversy. This brief chapter considers the conversation around literary nationalism between these and other interpretive projects in the field, with attention to their continuing importance to the intellectual and ethical concerns of Indigenous literary studies.
