Towards Relational Models of Publishing in Native and Indigenous Studies | Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies

As the director of a diamond open access press in the United States, I am constantly made aware of how relationships are key to the sustainability of our small and—at least in the US context—unique publishing model. Amherst College Press is not alone in this. As a community of publishers within the academy, we have at least begun the hard work of starting to grapple with longstanding power inequities in our field in order to work towards more equitable relational practices. One area we have yet to grapple with in any sort of systematic way is what constitutes ethical practices when publishing work by and about Native and Indigenous communities. We need to think more critically about those relationships in order to make them sustainable. Good work is being done in pockets of our field, but there hasn’t been a forum for people to contemplate, discuss, and share on this topic.