Gatherings: New Directions in Indigenous Book History (Material Texts)

The first edited collection devoted exclusively to the study of Indigenous book history

As the first edited collection devoted exclusively to the study of how Indigenous peoples in North America engage with the book as a material object, Gatherings represents a range of disciplines and includes work from scholars, students, and practitioners—Native and non-Native alike. Each chapter balances the volume’s wide-ranging chronological, geographical, and methodological scope with its contributor’s close attention to specific textual objects.

The volume identifies five major directions in Indigenous book history scholarship, inviting readers to linger in an unsettled space where conceptualizations of the book expand and contract to serve the social, cultural, and political needs of Indigenous communities. These directions are 1) a pressure against the definitional limits of the book; 2) the role of the book within larger networks of print culture and media studies; 3) an examination of overlooked formats and genres such as cookbooks, coffee table books, and scrapbooks; 4) the responsibilities of production and collection; and 5) a reconsideration of how the fundamental practices of bibliographical scholarship might change when applied to Indigenous books.

In book-making terms, a gathering is a group of printed sheets that have been folded into the size of a book, and a book itself is a bound collection of several gatherings. The essays gathered in this volume highlight the ways in which Indigenous books interact with other Indigenous forms of expression and attest to the importance of Indigenous books as powerful sites of preservation, contestation, and experimentation for Indigenous writers.

Contributors: Lawrence Aguilar, Ellen Barth, Rachel Brown, Angela Calcaterra, Travis Campbell, Agléška Cohen-Rencountre, Julie R. Enszer, Stephanie Fitzgerald, Susan Paterson Glover, Glenda Goodman, Matt Herman, Brian Johnson, Rhonda LeValdo, Samantha Majhor, Mark Alan Mattes, David Medina, Christen Mucher, Ben Pokross, Marie Balsley Taylor, David Titterington, Kiara Vigil, Robert E. Walls, Nathan Webster, Dan Wildcat, Kelly Wisecup, Caroline Wigginton, Breckin Younger.