Colonial Construction of Indian Country

Eric Cheyfitz is Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters in the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Cornell University. He is author of The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States.

"Through masterful readings, Eric Cheyfitz convincingly argues for federal Indian law as a necessary framework for understanding the political force of Native American literatures and their engagement with urgent issues such as land rights, sovereignty, and identity. A deeply informed and illuminating study, The Colonial Construction of Indian Country is essential reading for anyone interested in the connection between literature and society and the nature of Native resistance to ongoing settler colonialism."-Shari Huhndorf, University of California, Berkeley   "Eric Cheyfitz masterfully exposes the imbrication of Native American literatures and federal Indian law. In the process, he reveals not only the jurispathic nature of federal law in the lives of Native peoples but also the truth in the jurisgenerative power of storytelling. In the words of the Acoma Pueblo poet, Simon J. Ortiz, ‘because of the insistence to keep telling and creating stories, Indian life continues, and it is this resistance against loss that has made life possible.’"-N. Bruce Duthu, author of Shadow Nations: Tribal Sovereignty and the Limits of Legal Pluralism   "A core resource in Native studies, comparative literature, and American studies."-CHOICE   "The Colonial Construction of Indian Country is worthy scholarship in the tradition of law and literature."-The Western Historical Quarterly   "The present edition of this work simultaneously emphasizes the currency of its analytical approach while including valuable updates that extend one of its major contributions: to provide a broad survey of 200 years of Native American literary history while placing this important tradition in historical-legal context."-American Literary History