Trickster Academy

By Jenny L. Davis
University of Arizona press (2022)
80 pages

Review by Elizabeth A. Roastingear

What if Indigenous scholars left their corporate academic positions and returned to their homelands, their reservations, their local tribal colleges and universities? Now that the truth is out on the Land Grant colleges and universities, maybe our Indigenous scholars don’t have to leave their positions located on beautifully landscaped campuses like Yale, Harvard, and the University of Illinois—not to mention all those humongous endowments. Being inspired to learn more about the Chickasaw people after reading Trickster Academy, I found this statement in the Museum of the Cherokee Indian: “[Chickasaws] moved in relative comfort” over the Trail of Tears due to the sale of land in the East. Jenny L. Davis’ poems moved in relative comfort off the page made of trees, the talking leaves, if you will. The U.S. even helped clear Indian Territory (Oklahoma) of other tribal nations so the Chickasaws could settle “in relative comfort.”

For many tribal nations, there were stories where the word “comfort” never applied. With the opening of each book written by an Indigenous scholar, the truth pops up and our collective past emerges as we seek to enter, to be inspired, and to learn. What if we called them and they came, like Super Indians? What if they offered just one class via Zoom, MOODLE, Blackboard, or Canvas? Indigenous scholars have those and many other learning management systems at their fingertips. It is a new way to go home without leaving the comfort of the “Trickster Academy,” where many of our men and women and their families, reside. The notion of retirement also lures us back to the land of our birth, where the bones of our ancestors are laid layer upon layer beneath our feet.

It’s been six years since I first heard an Ivy League, non- Indigenous dean make a land acknowledgement statement. On May 23, 2016, the dean of the Yale School of Drama spoke words of sincere honor for the original peoples who first inhabited the land where Yale University now resides. Since then, I’ve heard more of these land acknowledgements, and I too have recited a couple. I read my alma mater’s land acknowledgement statement just this morning. What stuck out for me was the label “Native American” (I prefer “American Indian” for reasons I shall not mention in this review).

Let us comfort one another with the poetry of the birds, bears, wolves, deer, fish, flies, butterflies, trees, stones, and every waterway and blade of grass from whence they came to recharge, relocate, or simply to say “osiyo,” and our Indigenous scholars will return—return to the TCUs like Super Indian poets.

Elizabeth Anita Roastingear, MFA, is a Cherokee citizen (Wolf and Wild Potato clans), and a professor of new media at Navajo Technical University.