This volume illuminates how creative representations remain sites of ongoing struggles to engage with animals in indigenous epistemologies. Traditionally imagined in relation to spiritual realms and the occult, animals have always been more than primitive symbols of human relations. Whether as animist gods, familiars, conduits to ancestors, totems, talismans, or co-creators of multispecies cosmologies, animals act as vital players in the lives of cultures. From early days in colonial contact zones through contemporary expressions in art, film, and literature, the volume's unique emphasis on Southern Africa and North America - historical loci of the greatest ranges of species and linguistic diversity - help to situate how indigenous knowledges of human-animal relations are being adapted to modern conditions of life shared across species lines.

Wendy Woodward is the author of  The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives  (2008). She co-edited a special issue of  Journal of Literary Studies  entitled  Figuring the Animal in Post-apartheid South Africa  (2014) and has published three volumes of poetry.

Susan McHugh is the author of  Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines  (2011) as well as  Dog  (2004). She co-edited  The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies  (2014), and  Literary Animals Look , a special issue of  Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture  (2013).