American Indian Studies Center Fortieth Anniversary

Abstract

I am glad to contribute some comments on the past, present, and future of the American Indian Studies Center (AISC). Little did I know when coming to UCLA in 1966 that within several years the seeds for AISC would be planted. But I was eager to participate, something of an activist inside and outside of my department. It did not surprise me that the Department of History offered no courses in Native American history (or in women’s history, African American history, Chicano history, or Asian American history). No major university listed such courses, and none had a PhD program in these fields. But while in graduate school at Princeton University I had admired the work of a few pioneers of Native American history such as Angie Debo’s And Still the Waters Run: The Removal of the Five Civilized Tribes (1940) and Randolph Downes’s Council Fires on the Upper Ohio: A Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio Valley until 1795 (1940). Both books were written during the Great Depression, and both had been published on the eve of World War II. In graduate school my interest in American Indian history had been kindled when Wesley Frank Craven asked me to give a seminar report on Douglas Leach’s Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War (1958). I do not remember my high school history book recounting this bloody conflict in 1675 and 1676, in which the casualties, proportionate to population, were greater than any war in US history. But now, I read it eagerly, all the more