Redwashing: Sedgwick's Blood Moon, a Case Study

This essay looks at the recently published book Blood Moon by John Sedgwick.  The author and Colin Calloway were asked by the author and publisher to do readers reports on the book prior to publication.  This essay discusses that process and the refusal of the author to make changes pointed out by the readers, including factual errors and negative stereotypes, all the while thanking the reviewers profusely in his acknowledgments, suggesting they had vetted and endorse the book

The Inuit discovery of Europe? The Orkney Finnmen, preternatural objects and the re-enchantment of early-modern science.

The late-seventeenth century saw a peak in accounts of supposed encounters with ‘Finnmen’ in Orkney. These accounts have shaped the folklore of the Northern Isles. Scholars linked to the Royal Society suggested the accounts represented encounters with Inuit. Subsequent explanations included autonomous travel by Inuit groups and abduction and abandonment. These accounts should be understood as part of a European scientific tradition of preternatural philosophy, occupied with the deviations and errors of nature. Far from indicating the presence of Inuit individuals in Orkney waters, they provide evidence of the narrative instability of early-modern science and its habit of ‘thinking with things’. Captivated by Inuit artefacts, the natural philosophers and virtuosi of the Royal Society imagined Orkney as a site of reverse contact with the ‘primitive’. Nineteenth-century antiquarians and folklorists reliant on these texts failed to understand the extent to which objectivity was not an epistemic virtue in early-modern science

Review of \u3ci\u3eNotebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn\u3c/i\u3e By Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

In the preface to this new edited volume, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn notes that while she learned to read and write English as a small child growing up on South Dakota\u27s Crow Creek reservation, it took many decades for her to learn to use the language efficiently. She writes, I published nothing until I was forty. That would have been 1970, barely two years into what has become known as the Native American Literary Renaissance. The Dakota writer and scholar certainly made up for lost time. In the ensuing decades, she has produced a formidable corpus of work, both in terms of quantity and variety. One of the founding figures of Native American Studies, she has published novels, literary ~riticism, and essay collections on a wide range of topics related to the indigenes of the hemisphere. She is one of Native America\u27s best poets. Now well into her seventies, her pace seems quickening rather than abating. Volumes like Why I Can\u27t Read Wallace Stegner (1996) and Anti-Indianism in America (2001) mark her as one of the most important and consistent indigenous scholarly voices working today. This current collection (a quick followup to New Indians, Old Wars [2007]) is a bit of a grab bag, as one would expect when a writer clears his or her notebooks. There are poems here, ranging from the touching and lovely to the stilettopointed. Cook-Lynn is never one to shirk from freighted issues, as her poems Who Owns the Past? and Who Are You, Tim McVeigh? remind us. The prose ranges from longer essays like Whatever Happened to D\u27Arcy McNickle? (a critique of fiction by Louise Erdrich and the late James Welch) and Irony\u27s Blade (a meditation on the use of that particular tool in art and scholarship) to very brief thoughts or reflections. Yet even the briefest of Cook-Lynn\u27s pieces can inform, surprise, or delight. Her single paragraph analysis of the Leonard Peltier case ( Great Literary Events ) is the most honest and accurate statement about that tawdry affair and its continuing consequences I have seen in print in years