2010 NAISA Presidential Address: Practicing Native American and Indigenous Studies

Abstract

NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 2010 NAISA Presidential Address 3 ROBERT WARRIOR 2010 NAISA Presidential Address Practicing Native American and Indigenous Studies IN MAY 2007, I used this short, formal greeting in wazhashe i-e, or the Osage language, to open the plenary session that initiated the discussion of how or whether we should organize ourselves into what has become the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and I am pleased, standing here in the homelands of the O’odham people, to open my remarks this afternoon with this same greeting. I also want to dedicate these remarks today to everyone at the Osage Nation Language Program, especially the department ’s director, H. Mongrain Lookout, who taught me to say these words and many more.1 Many of you were part of that meeting in the Memorial Union at the University of Oklahoma, and I am gratified that you and so many others are here today. In greeting you in this way, I am gathering you all with a commitment of respect for who you are, where you come from, and what you have to contribute to our shared work. It also indicates my gratitude for your willingness to listen to what I have to say. I want to start with a quotation from Beatrice Medicine, a Dakota scholar whose work is familiar to many of you. As she said forty years ago about the Red Power movement that was sweeping North America, “The most critical and crucial component for Indian power might be termed, for lack of a better phrase, ‘intellectual’ power. . . . This portion of power would stem from wisdom and an awareness of the structure of power in the dominant society. Additionally, constant analysis, discussions, and weighing of the many fluctuating issues in the Indian world would seem essential.”2 Medicine said this four decades ago at the First Convocation of American I want to address everyone as friends and relatives I want to say a few words I am addressing you all. Robert Warrior NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 4 Indian Scholars at Princeton University here in the United States. That gathering was a remarkable event during a remarkable time, and many of the more than two hundred participants went on to make signal contributions to Indigenous life in the Americas and beyond. N. Scott Momaday and Vine Deloria Jr., who gave plenary addresses, are towering figures in Native studies in the United States. Alfonso Ortiz, who gave the third plenary and who taught then at Princeton, was a scholar of giant intellect . The published proceedings also include presentations by Cahuilla historian Rupert Costo, Luiseño painter Fritz Scholder, Diné educator and codetalker Samuel Billison, and Robert Bennett , the Oneida man who was the first Native person to run the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs since Ely Parker in the middle of the nineteenth century. The convocation was decidedly focused on American Indian people in the United States, but Cree songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie participated and Ojibway language teacher Harvey­ McCue, who was then at Trent University, showed up throughout the proceedings , representing what was happening then in Canadian institutions. Pare Hopa, the Cambridge-trained Maori anthropologist, was there as well. Each of these people contributed mightily in her or his own way to twentieth -century American Indian and Indigenous life.3 The gathering in Princeton deserves a much more prominent place among other meetings that have brought together scholars, writers, artists, and other intellectuals for the purpose of furthering Indigenous life, not just in the United States but throughout the world. Recalling it energizes me as someone who finds in such historical moments critical lessons as we tackle our own moment in history. The Princeton convocation, then, is one locus of our intellectual , scholarly, and artistic past. Several people who were there in 1970 are with us this afternoon at my invitation, and I would like you to join me in recognizing them for their myriad contributions to the work we now do.4 FIGURE 1. Beatrice Medicine (Lakota), pictured here later in her career. Although she wrote presciently and incisively about many issues crucial to the development of the field, her contributions to the...