Native North American Studies in the Journal of American Folklore During the 2000s and 2010s

Carrying forward from the previous post on the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) during the 1980s and 1990s, my focus here is the presence and absence of Native North American and First Nations scholarship (and scholars) in JAF during the 2000s and 2010s. Later posts will circle bask to look at the annual meetings of the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.

I have no special interest stories for the 2000s. The first table here presents the data for this decade. Keep in mind what I have noted previously for the post-1940s world. A significant proportion of the (now) small number of the Native North American studies items published in JAF during this period are smaller notes and not full articles. Also in this broader period, I am counting obituaries, including them in the Native North American count when the scholar remembered was wholly or mainly a scholar of Native North American matters. These factors inflate a count that here, in the 2010s, reaches a new low-water mark of 4% of JAF content. No JAF authors for the 2000s are known to me to have been enrolled citizens of federally recognized Native North American/First Nations nations. I welcome corrections if this understanding is in error.

The 2010s are presented in the next table, below. Here we see, as began to happen occasionally in the 1960s, runs of multiple years of JAF without publication of Native North American studies works occur. The most notable thing to happen in this decades, related to my topic, is the publication in 2013 of a special issue of JAF focused on Native North American studies. That is how the out of the ordinary count of four items and 22% came about. I happen to be one of those four authors. In the year in which the 500th number of the journal would be published, the editors recruited authors for a series of theme issues. In recognition of the historical importance of Native North American studies within the society and in the journal and, I think, recognizing the decline that my posts are tracking, they cultivated this special issue. I was honored to participate in it. It created a retro moment and provided a historical reminder of how things once were, but you will note that the three following years saw no cognate content, thus the four items in 2013 could have been spread out between 2013 and 2016 to produce a very typical looking table for the recent period. From 4% in the 2000s we move to 3% in the 2010s, despite the publication of a dedicated issue on Native North American folklore studies.

To the best of my current knowledge, no JAF author publishing in the 2010s is a member of a federally recognized Native North American nation. I welcome correction on this point.

Just to round out the available data, here is a final table for the first year of the 2020s, our own dreaded present moment. In the 2010s, it was more common for a year to feature no Native North American studies content than to include such content. This default setting zero pattern has occurred again this year, as shown below.