Self-Determined Stories: The Indigenous Reinvention of Young Adult Literature
A New Continent of Liberty: Eunomia in Native American Literature from Occom to Erdrich

Twenty years after the publication of Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (1999), in which Craig S. Womack maintains that European American and Native American literature have “two separate canons” (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 7), Suhr-Sytsma’s and Hamilton’s books demonstrate this assertion’s powerful and enduring influence in Native American literary studies. Suhr-Sytsma contrasts mainstream, non-Native young adult fiction with Indigenous YA, which “significantly revises the conventions” of the former (xvii), and Hamilton illuminates divergent European American and Native American literary histories from Thomas Jefferson to Don DeLillo and Samson Occom to Gerald Vizenor, respectively. Both authors utilize a similar set of verbs to carry the weight of their arguments about these separate canons. In Self-Determined Stories, Indigenous YA diverges from, challenges, troubles, and resists conventional YA literature and some of the critical ideas dominating the scholarship on YA fiction. Hamilton also draws significant distinctions between Indigenous and...