How do Indigenous studies methodologies and concepts bear on nineteenth-century literary studies? How does Indigenous studies reconfigure accepted signposts of the field of nineteenth-century studies, from its temporal ending and beginning points, to scholarly objects of study? As much as these questions might seem to make the familiar scholarly move of asking what happens when we bring two fields together, we argue that Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) poses unique questions and directions to nineteenth-century studies. At the same time, we argue that engagement with Indigenous studies must go beyond simply reading works that feature or are written by Indigenous peoples to more substantively engaging with NAIS as a methodological orientation and field. We posit that NAIS contains methodologies for understanding not just Native American literatures but topics that have long been mainstays of nineteenth-century American literary studies, including dispossession, race, citizenship, language ideologies, and gender.

Recovering from the Civil War and facing the closing of the Western frontier, fin de siècle American society could be characterized as postapocalyptic. Americans were beginning to grapple with a geographically united but culturally divided country. Rural versus urban divisions, color lines, class lines, and gender conflict stratified everyday life. Religion, while still important, no longer provided social coherence because of the growing diversity of faiths. Apocalyptic form offered predominantly secular ways of engaging these conflicts, dramatizing resistance to violence and dehumanization while revealing the racist and classist ideologies underlying social demarcations, making it harder to ignore “how the other half lives.” Works such as Joseph Nicolar’s The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives addressed past and current cataclysms while still providing hope for a transformed future. Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, however, critiqued the “savage” class system of fin de siècle American society, offering harsh judgement without revelation. With the United States’s entry into World War I, apocalyptic rhetoric shifted from an isolationist focus on internal divisions to an awareness of external dangers to the nation.

As both the record of and rationale for a settler construct, “Native American literature” has always been uniquely embattled: a body of production marked by particularly divergent opinions about what constitutes “authenticity,” sovereignty, and even literature. As such, its texts announce a culture beset by paradox: simultaneously primordial and postmodern; oral and inscribed; outmoded and novel; quixotic and quotidian. Above all, its texts are a site of political struggle, shifting to meet expectations both external and internal. This Introduction sets out the plural, capricious, and contested character of both Indigenous texts and our habits of evaluating them.