American Indian women's writing presents a quandary when one attempts to provide an historical overview. Within the larger nationalistic framing of an “American canon,” the whos, whats, and wheres of American Indian women's writing are often informed by colonialist ethnographies, national borders, and anthropological categorizations when they are not lumped into a single ethnicity or generic “Indian” racialization to parallel other ethnic literatures. And then there is the question of when to start. Does it include those pre- and post-contact oral traditions about women's roles in creation stories, in the bringing of corn to the people, or perhaps the Cherokee story of the seven menstruating women who stopped Stone Man? Even if those stories were not necessarily created or even told by women? If one prefers to prioritize “early American” writing, does one start with captivity narratives, and the white colonial serial pathologies and desires that produced Mary Rowlandson and the mass-murdering Hannah Dustan? Does one include Mary Jemison and Eunice Williams and their accounts of becoming Indian? Which borders does one use to identify American Indian women's writing? Does it include Canada, Mexico, or Peru? Which US borders at which historical moment? And what of treaties and the borders produced and maintained by indigenous nations? Is writing produced in Indian Territory in the 1890s, before Oklahoma became a state in 1907, necessarily US literature? And then there is the problem of language.