Associate Professor, Native American Studies Faculty
About
Adam Spry (White Earth Anishinaabe, descendant) is a scholar of Indigenous literatures with a focus on Anishinaabe literary history. His research and teaching focuses on the Native American/Alaska Native literatures, global Indigenous studies, the history of the Upper Midwest, and literary/aesthetic theory.
Spry is the author of Our War Paint is Writers' Ink: Anishinaabe Literary Transnationalism (SUNY Press, 2018), which examines the work of Anishinaabe writers such as Obabaamwewe-giizhigokwe (Jane Johnston Schoolcraft), Louise Erdrich, George Kabaosa, and Gerald Vizenor as part of a transnational literary network. Situating Anishinaabe literature as both responding to and participating in U.S. settler discourses around Indianness, Spry argues that literary writing has been an critical venue for the articulation of Anishinaabe nationhood over the past two centuries.
His current research focuses on Native writing, film, and art that draws upon the traditions of the avant garde. Theorizing this corpus of work as a response to the rapidly changing political economy of Indian Country since the advent of the Self-Determination policies of the late 20th century, Spry's current work endevours to reveal how the recent experimental turn has been driven by an increasing awareness of, and resistance to, capitalism's effects on Indigenous communities.
Spry previously taught at Emerson College, Florida Atlantic Univerisity, and was a Henry Roe Cloud Fellow in American Indian and Indigenous Studies at Yale. He was raised on the Flathead Reservation of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana.
Selected Publications:
Our War Paint is Writers’ Ink: Anishinaabe Literary Transnationalism, State University of New York Press, 2018.
“False Idols: Totemism, Reification, and Anishinaabe Culture in Modernist Thought,” Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms, eds. Kirby Brown, Stephen Ross, & Alana Sayers. Routledge, 2023. pp. 231-43.
“Decolonial Eschatologies of Native American Literatures,” Apocalypse and American Literature and Culture, ed. John Hay. Cambridge University Press, 2020. pp. 55-68.
“'It may be revolutionary in character...' The Progress, A New Tribal Hermeneutics, and the Literary Reexpression of the Anishinaabe Oral Tradition in Summer in the Spring.” Gerald Vizenor: Poetry and Poetics. ed. Deborah Madsen. University of New Mexico Press, 2012. pp. 23-42
Affiliations:
Core Faculty in the Program of Native American Studies (NAS)
