In Sovereign Stories, Annette Angela Portillo examines Native American women’s autobiographical discourses and multiple-voiced life stories that resist generic conventional notions of first-person narrative. She argues that these “sovereign stories” and “blood memories” not only reveal the multilayered histories and identities shared by each author, but demonstrate how their narratives are grounded in ancestral memory and land. These autobiographies recall settler-colonialism, deterritorialization, and genocide as the writers and activist-scholars reclaim their voices across cultural, national, and digital boundaries. Portillo provides close readings of memoirs, life stories, oral histories, blogs, social media sites, and experimental multigenre narratives including those by Delfina Cuero, Ruby Modesto, Leslie Marmon Silko, Pretty-Shield, Zitkala-Sa, and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins.

Portillo analyzes traditional autobiographies and memoirs alongside interviews and social media to explore the intricacies of Native American women's voices and the stories that they share.

Nine years after Rom Sebastian was thrust into the most unlikely of circumstances as hero and bearer of an unimaginable secret, the alliance of his followers is in disarray. An epic battle with The Order has left them scattered and deeply divided both in strategy and resolve in their struggle to become truly alive and free. Only 49 truly alive followers remain loyal to Rom. This meager band must fight for survival as The Order is focused on their total annihilation. Misunderstood and despised, their journey will be one of desperation against a new, more intensely evil Order. As the hand of this evil is raised to strike and destroy them they must rely on their faith in the abiding power of love to overcome all and lead them to sovereignty. SOVEREIGN wonderfully continues the new testament allegory that was introduced in FORBIDDEN and continued in MORTAL.

Sovereign Stories examines contemporary Native American writers' engagement with various forms of cultural, political, and artistic sovereignty. The author considers literature's ability to initiate vital discussions about tribal autonomy in modern America and suggests that innovative literary styles are a compelling articulation of the connection between aesthetic and political concerns. In so doing, he concentrates on fictional and poetic forms, the structure and imagery of which comment on indigenous autonomy, selfdetermination, and artistic activism. Offering original selective analysis of the fiction and poetry of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Sherman Alexie, David Treuer, LeAnne Howe, Louise Erdrich, Greg Sarris, and Craig Womack, this book explores these tribal authors' concern with intellectual and creative sovereignty and deftly links those interests to the broader cultural and political issues faced by Native American communities today.

Critically Sovereign traces the ways in which gender is inextricably a part of Indigenous politics and U.S. and Canadian imperialism and colonialism. The contributors show how gender, sexuality, and feminism work as co-productive forces of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and epistemology. Several essays use a range of literary and legal texts to analyze the production of colonial space, the biopolitics of “Indianness,” and the collisions and collusions between queer theory and colonialism within Indigenous studies. Others address the U.S. government’s criminalization of traditional forms of Diné marriage and sexuality, the Iñupiat people's changing conceptions of masculinity as they embrace the processes of globalization, Hawai‘i’s same-sex marriage bill, and stories of Indigenous women falling in love with non-human beings such as animals, plants, and stars. Following the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism across these diverse historical and cultural contexts, the contributors question and reframe the thinking about Indigenous knowledge, nationhood, citizenship, history, identity, belonging, and the possibilities for a decolonial future. Contributors. Jodi A. Byrd, Joanne Barker, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Mishuana Goeman, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Melissa K. Nelson, Jessica Bissett Perea, Mark Rifkin

While Indigenous media have gained increasing prominence around the world, the vibrant Aboriginal media world on the Canadian West Coast has received little scholarly attention. As the first ethnography of the Aboriginal media community in Vancouver, Sovereign Screens reveals the various social forces shaping Aboriginal media production including community media organizations and avant-garde art centers, as well as the national spaces of cultural policy and media institutions. Kristin L. Dowell uses the concept of visual sovereignty to examine the practices, forms, and meanings through which Aboriginal filmmakers tell their individual stories and those of their Aboriginal nations and the intertribal urban communities in which they work. She explores the ongoing debates within the community about what constitutes Aboriginal media, how this work intervenes in the national Canadian mediascape, and how filmmakers use technology in a wide range of genres--including experimental media--to recuperate cultural traditions and reimagine Aboriginal kinship and sociality. Analyzing the interactive relations between this social community and the media forms it produces, Sovereign Screens offers new insights into the on-screen and off-screen impacts of Aboriginal media.