Vol. 28, No. 3: Inheritance

Vol. 28, No. 3: Inheritance

Guest edited by Malinda Maynor Lowery

The Inheritance Issue explores what we have inherited, how, and from whom, reflecting on what we bring forward and what we must leave behind; what we have reckoned with and the consequences of failing to reckon. The lived experience of Indigenous people in the American and global Souths is crucial to the issue’s reflections on place, identity, and origin and to the discussions of solidarity, allyship, identity, and belonging that must precede collaboration and reconciliation.

Several Places at Once

by Malinda Maynor Lowery

"There is no recipe to follow for historical reckoning. Some of us spend our entire lives trying to find the instructions.”

My Inheritance

by Esther Oganda Ohito

“my lament begins / where the bodies are buried / beside each other . . . ”

Talk One Thing

by Kendra Taira Field

“This was genealogy as survival, genealogy with land and livelihood on the line.”

Stories We Tell

by Ryan E. Emanuel, Karen Dial Bird

“Like many Lumbees, we know what it is to have our community’s expertise dismissed and diminished on matters related to our own identity.”

Loves and Secrets

by Jodi A. Byrd

“I remain haunted by what I can never know or speak of.”

Frankenstein’s Monster

by Theodora H. H. Light

“Understanding the persistence of colonial power structures reveals the ways in which our pasts can so monstrously echo our present.”

Removal, Labor, and Reckoning in the Black Native South

by Nakia D. Parker

“Chattel slavery and Indian Removal have bequeathed us a ‘hard history’ indeed.”

In a Shallow Boat

by Zachary Faircloth

“This chorus forgets. It elides place and time. It forgets that Spivey is not the originator of a method of aquatic travel in the border country of the eastern Carolinas.”

At the Intersection of Chickasaw Identity and Black Enslavement

by Alaina E. Roberts

“Betsy Love’s life experiences stand in for a broader historical phenomenon: the complex and exploitative relationships between people of color.”

“Necessary Contemplation”

by Lauren Frances Adams, Jason Patterson

“The tree that blooms outside your window in spring is the same tree, or elicits the same feeling from the tree, that my ancestor may have experienced two hundred years ago.”

Narratives of Dispossession and Anticolonial Art in Urban Spaces

by Kyle T. Mays

“Today’s settlers are not planting a flag; they are buying up buildings and using media to construct Detroit as a vacant space needing ‘civilizing’ settlement.”

Back Porch: Inheritance

by Marcie Cohen Ferris

“My civil engineer grandfather and father dealt with the ill-fated consequences of government programs to control and contain the Mississippi River in their lifetimes.”

Jackson Village Road

by Marlanda Dekine

“You grew from your granddaddy’s dirt / and evergreen spaces . . .”