Stephanie J. Fitzgerald’s Native Women and Land implicitly challenges literary nationalist approaches to Native literary studies by calling for a conversation among Native studies, gender studies, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism. In particular, Fitzgerald asks how ecocriticism would change if it centered on Native studies. While not claiming to offer a simple answer, she notes that foregrounding Native peoples in the discussion requires us to reconsider what we mean by terms like “nature” or “the environment.” She goes beyond articulating sovereignty and dispossession in terms of control or loss of land, focusing instead on the ability to articulate and theorize these categories. Fitzgerald argues that environmental degradation can be seen as another form of Indigenous dispossession. An Indigenous-centered ecocriticism makes it possible to intervene in the narrative that enables environmental dispossession.
In each chapter, Fitzgerald uses a variety of texts to look at different forms of environmental dispossession. In the first...
