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While literary representations of indigenous peoples by non-Native writers now appear infrequently outside of popular genres, contemporary Native representations of Native orphan children have become common, which this study views as a literary trend growing out of widespread experiences of child removal and foster care, as well as of alternative child-rearing and kinship practices. In this chapter, key questions are posed to four works in which Native American orphan figures appear: Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees (1988) and Pigs in Heaven (1993), Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999). What “signifying capabilities” do Native American orphans have? What specific challenges to American and/or Native identity do authors respond to through their use of orphan figures? In what types of narrative or ideological processes are Native American orphans involved? The analysis suggests that authors use the figure of the orphan to interrogate the possibilities and limitations of American and Native nationhood, particularly in regard to their ability to accommodate, assimilate, or otherwise mediate difference. In the process, writers of fiction establish theoretical alliances or antipathies with multiculturalism as a model for American or Native social and political life.

In the world of Light in August, a cotton warehouse tank can look like the torso of a beheaded mastodon and an elderly couple "might have been two muskoxen strayed from the north pole, or two homeless and belated beasts from beyond the glacial period." Here and elsewhere in the novel, Faulkner's reach transforms characters and environs. While none of the major characters is native to Jefferson, let alone Indigenous, some are astonishingly non-native and most if not all become more non-native and more homeless as the novel unfolds. With these and other unsettlements in mind, the chapter places Light in August alongside Mongrels, a native southern werewolf novel by Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones. Tracking the monsters and the mongrel transformations in both novels, the chapter presents and argument for the transformative methodological value of native southern studies.

What does it mean to be Mohawk today—especially given that so many traditions (hunting, fishing, fur trapping, basketry) have been compromised by outside influences (polluting industries, the drug trade, human trafficking, the Internet)? Of Akwesasne’s 12,000 residents, only a thousand still speak their native language fluently. Most of them are elderly. This chapter investigates Mohawk efforts to revitalize their native language, including an immersive K-8 school called the Akwesasne Freedom School. The author also reflects upon the loss of her own mother tongue back in the South Texas public education system, where Tejano children were punished for their Mexican accents.

This chapter examines Hanna Yablonka's Children by the Book, Biography of a Generation: The First Native Israelis Born 1948–1955 (2018). This book is unique in that it is neither politically committed to nationalist political slogans that are thrown daily into the arena of Israeli politics in the days of Netanyahu nor connected to the one-dimensional, sweeping condemnation of critics of the Israeli enterprise on the Right and Left. Instead, it suggests to set aside, even if only for a moment, what Yablonka calls “the current Israeli discourse, which furiously shatters everything that has happened in the state since it was established, brutally erasing all the achievements of Little Israel.” Yabonka is guided by Karl Mannheim's concept of a “historical generation”: a group in which there is a shared historical consciousness derived from historical experience. She shows how the state educational system fashioned the image of the new Israeli, endowing children with a local, native identity and imbuing them with the consciousness of belonging both to the people and to the land.