Indigenous authors have been telling stories and writing books for young audiences for a very long time. From oral literatures that enthralled Indigenous youths gathered around the fire, to early written work by Charles Alexander Eastman, Zitkála-Šá, Francis La Flesche, and Luther Standing Bear, to more recent YA texts including Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House, Stephen Graham Jones’s Mapping the Interior, Dawn Quigley’s Apple in the Middle, Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Night Wanderer, and Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel’s Wabanaki Blues, Indigenous authors have captivated young and adult audiences alike with stories that feature young protagonists, coming-of-age plots, and crucial insights about being and becoming in an often hostile world. Publications including Mandy Suhr-Sytsma’s Self-Determined Stories (2019) and Dr. Debbie Reese’s “American Indians in Children’s Literature”—a website devoted since 2006 to the critical analysis of Indigenous people in children’s and YA literature and to the promotion of Indigenous-authored YA texts—have highlighted the long-standing significance of Native YA literatures for Indigenous communities. Despite this important work, however, scholarship largely has not kept up with the proliferation of Indigenous YA literature in the past few decades in particular. With this panel, we seek a timely intervention with presentations that examine Indigenous YA novels both in their own right and in conversation with the conventions of settler YA fiction more broadly. In particular, we ask, how does Indigenous Young Adult fiction address sovereignty, community, resistance, futurity, desire, fear, dreams? How do Indigenous authors engage and/or revise settler YA conventions? Papers for this panel are also under consideration for a special issue of Studies in the Novel to be published in Summer of 2022.

The four panelists will each speak for no more than 15 minutes, leaving at least 15 minutes for discussion time. The participants cover a range of YA novels and topics essential to the field of Indigenous Studies more broadly, including language revitalization, dreams and futurist visions, models of kinship and community, and gender and sexuality. Namrata Dey Roy analyzes Indigenous language as code in Joseph Bruchac’s Code Talker: A Novel about the Navajo Marines of World War Two (2005). She argues that the novel demonstrates how the reclamation of one’s native language during a historical moment stands as a narrative of resistance against the hegemony of the state. Applying the postcolonial language theories, Dey Roy considers Code Talker as a significant narrative of emancipation of Indigenous language from the oppression of state apparatuses. Ruth Gehrmann argues that Indigenous futurist texts for adolescents prominently present their protagonists’ unconscious thoughts, particularly in the forms of dreams and visions, which both reveal and shape their individual growth. She considers the role of dreams and visions as both reconciliatory power and resistance. By engaging with contemporary Indigenous futurist novels for adolescents, such as Ambelin Kwaymullina’s The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2014) and Darcie Little Badger's Elatsoe (2020), Gehrmann considers the protagonists’ inner landscapes as sites of engagement with colonial power. Kaylee Jangula Mootz focuses on how Indigenous YA texts center heroic kin rather than teen heroes as essential for survival in the dystopian future. Surveying texts such as The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (Metis), Oracles by Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel (Mohegan), and Take Us To Your Chief by Drew Hayden Taylor (Ojibway), Mootz analyzes the common theme of kin-making in each text as an alternative to the individualistic heroes and romance of white YA. Ultimately, this paper argues that queer and/or chosen families center kinship and community as essential to survival, resistance, and decolonial futurity. Finally, Mandy Suhr-Sytsma explores Muscogee (Creek) Nation writer Cynthia Leitich Smith's representation of Indigenous girl power in Hearts Unbroken (2018), analyzing the novel in the context of Smith's larger body of writing, which features characters that challenge intersectional oppression. Suhr-Sytsma considers the relationship between representational and erotic empowerment in this novel; she analyzes the high school senior Muscogee protagonist, Lou's, ongoing romantic and sexually-charged relationship with a Lebanese American boy, Joey, as a fresh contribution to rich, long-running conversations among Indigenous women (including Beth Brant, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, and Deborah Miranda) about the relationship between self-representation and positive, empowering sexual experiences.