Faye Qiyu Lu’s paper, “Translating Indigenous Literatures Across (Post)Cold War Sinophone and American Contexts,” examines the translational movements of Indigenous-authored texts within and between Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the United States. Building on the critical insights of Shu-mei Shih, Iyko Day, and Colleen Lye, Lu maps how Indigenous writing participates in and reframes Asian American and Sinophone cultural politics, particularly through the prism of the Cold War and its aftermath. Her paper juxtaposes three works: My Dear Ak’i, Please Don’t Be Upset, a Tsou-language novel from Taiwan translated into English by a Han Taiwanese American scholar; Coming Home to Tibet, a memoir written in English by an Indian-born Tibetan-American author that operates as an act of self-translation; and Eagles Goodbye, authored by a Paiwan woman in Chinese and later translated by Lu herself. These case studies highlight a diversity of translational orientations: from Indigenous language texts mediated through dominant Sinophone discourses, to exilic authorship navigating global identity politics.
Maria Whittle’s paper, “People of Our/Their Shore: Transpacific Indigeneity in Yuri Rytkheu’s Beringia,” brings attention to the literary output of the Soviet Chukchi writer Yuri Rytkheu, a pioneering figure in Russophone Indigenous literature. While Rytkheu has been criticized for his assimilationist stance toward Soviet policies, Whittle focuses on his transpacific imagination and aesthetic strategies. Through a close reading of Rytkheu’s bilingual and genre-blending narrative practice, Whittle argues that his work constitutes a form of cultural translation aimed at global readers, particularly those shaped by colonial frameworks. For Rytkheu, the Bering Strait functions not merely as a geopolitical boundary but as a symbolic and imaginative space that enables Indigenous self-representation and solidarity beyond the nation-state.
James Kiselik’s paper, “Trickster Signatures, or Translated Rashomon Effects in Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi,” examines Gerald Vizenor’s novel as a transpacific experiment in narrative form and cultural translation. Centered around the Rashomon effect—a literary technique marked by conflicting narratives—the novel blends stories attributed to Ronin, a mixed-race Japanese orphan, and commentaries by a friend of Ronin’s Anishinaabe father. Kiselik shows how Vizenor’s use of the Rashomon effect, itself a layered intercultural borrowing, becomes a vehicle for what he terms “trickster signatures”: elusive narrative markers that foreground irony, absence, and play. Kiselik traces the genealogy of the Rashomon effect back to Akira Kurosawa’s film, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s fiction, and ultimately Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, popularized in Japan by Lafcadio Hearn—a figure who appears in Vizenor’s novel as Ronin’s "hafu muse." This dense intertextuality, Kiselik argues, destabilizes authorial origin and historical truth, aligning with Vizenor’s broader project of “survivance.”
Finally, Yiwen Liu’s paper, “Ethics of Negotiating Cultural Positionalities: Han Chinese, Evenki, and Anglophone Perspectives in Chi Zijian’s The Last Quarter of the Moon,” interrogates how Han Chinese authorship and Indigenous representation are entangled in the Sinophone literary sphere. Chi Zijian’s novel, based on her lived experience among the Evenki people in Northeast China, recounts the survival and struggles of an Evenki tribe across a century of imperial and national transformations. Liu problematizes the assumption of static ethnic positionalities by analyzing Chi’s own reflections on her Han background and her evolving relationship with Indigenous epistemologies—a reflection largely omitted in the publishing process of the English translation. Drawing on her own pedagogical encounters with the text in Canadian classrooms, Liu explores how cultural translation enables critical dialogue between Chinese and Canadian settler-colonial contexts. By placing Han-Indigenous dynamics in conversation with Canada’s native-migrant-settler triangulation, Liu challenges the essentialism of both state multiculturalism and transnational literary criticism.
Collectively, the panel offers a rich picture of perspectives on Indigenous literature in transpacific circulation.