5. Native American literary studies

Abstract

During the time of the Red Power movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, Native American students brought their visions of justice to college campuses to create what they began to describe as “Native American Studies.” Pressuring universities to accept a more diverse student body, Native scholars demanded that universities allow the production of knowledge by and for Native Americans. To succeed Native American Studies had to tear free of the “salvage anthropology” that shaped the European study of indigenous people from the first moments of contact. Native scholars accomplished an imaginative shift in self-conception: Native Americans are not helpless victims of colonial devastation, but instead the shrewd protectors of indigenous thought.