Native American Periodicals: The Art and Politics of Early Twentieth Century Indigenous Printscapes

This essay explores Native American periodicals as a topic that is still understudied and suggests a model for investigating them as relational media objects in the context of settler-colonial and Native American printscapes. Drawing on a Deleuzian terminology, it reads Native American periodicals as assemblages and argues for analyzing periodicals as distinctive material-semiotic artifacts based on their properties, periodicity, mediality, and miscellaneity. It highlights the expansive Native American publishing business appearing in the early twentieth century in an atmosphere of assimilationist policies as inspired by Red Progressivism.

In doing so, the essay examines interactions between the so-called periodicalists (i. e., Native American editors, writers, contributors) and the periodical medium using as brief examples Cherokee editor Ora V. Eddleman and Muskogee writer Charles Gibson. It concludes with a call to interrogate Native American periodicals as an innovative form of print activism for creating and maintaining visions of Indigenous life-worlds.

“Native American Periodicals: The Art and Politics of Early Twentieth Century Indigenous Printscapes” in Amerikastudien/American Studies 69.2. (2024). Von Oliver Scheiding und Frank Newton. pp 111-132.