Status Updates From Shapes of Native Nonfiction...

Technique is for craft essays. Coiling is for essays that appear seamless. Plaiting is for fragmented essays with a single source. Twining is for essays that bring together material from different sources.

Indigenous peoples understand that there is no difference between the telling and the material. They understand how we all, in fact, live inside and through the narratives we tell and that the importance in telling stories is inseparable from the identity, community, and history they compose and the spiritual, economic, and political realities on which they depend and which they subvert or preserve.