Reading #NativeTwitter

How can we think with Indigenous literary theorists and digital humanists to make sense of the literary contribution of Indigenous peoples on Twitter? Methods for how to read and make sense of the stories of Indigenous people online emerge by challenging traditional definitions of literature and locating Indigenous tweets as an emerging form of literary genre: Indigenous twitterature. Twitter's unique technology (including limited word count, hashtagging, and retweeting functions) helps Indigenous storytellers to craft and develop this emerging Indigenous literary genre. Through an iterative qualitative analysis, which utilizes a blend of coding and close reading of an archive of tweets focused on Indigenous language learning and survivance, we demonstrate this emerging genre of Indigenous twitteratures, which is thematically organized in terms of poetry, bite-sized teachings, Word of the Day twitteratures, bite-sized essays, and hypertextual relations. We describe these themes and elucidate the conceptual and ethical interventions Indigenous twitteratures make in Indigenous literary and digital studies—specifically, in navigating refusals against literary exclusion, in advocating for generous and inclusive Indigenous literary elsewheres, and in honoring and upholding place-based relations within online spaces

Archaeology · Art · Craft · Indigenous · Linguistics · Literature · Media studies · Sociology · Digital Storytelling and Education · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · History · Philosophy · Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media