Authoritative Texts, Collaborative Ethnography, and Native American Studies

Abstract

In the spirit of self-determination, Indian people should be the ones to write about Indian education. Karen Gayton Swisher, "Why Indian People Should be the Ones to Write About Indian Education" In my view, there is room for both Indian and non-Indian scholars within American Indian studies. Duane Champagne, "American Indian Studies Is for Everyone" Writing in the same volume, Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians, though from different angles, Swisher and Champagne both engage an important debate in American Indian studies; one that many Native American studies scholars feel very strongly about regardless of where they stand on the issue. 1 On the one hand, Swisher's call for Indians to write about Indian education echoes a more general concern voiced by Native American studies scholars about the limitations of non-Indian authored Native American studies literature. 2 This concern actually points to a larger critique of the conventional writing tradition that has emerged out of a Euro-American culture and worldview. Having its roots in the Western world, this writing tradition places the single author in a dominant relationship with the text's "subjects." This convention became ensconced within the milieu of a colonial experience whereby colonizers wrote about the colonized as distant, exotic, and silent Others. 3 Swisher's sentiments bear out the fact that this tradition continues to have hegemonic reverberations in contemporary writings about indigenous peoples. Consciously or unconsciously embracing this long-standing approach to writing about Others, authors who write about Native Americans who have been and [End Page 601] continue to be mostly non-Indians - routinely write about Indian Others without serious regard to their experiences, their perspectives, and (especially) their voices. Even when presuming to listen to and write Indian voices, the dominant writing tradition that the vast majority of authors embrace precludes any shift of authority away from the author's voice. Hence the lack of Indian voices in Native American studies literature is very real: one would be hard-pressed to argue with Swisher when she writes that "much research still is presented from an outsider's perspective." 4 Understood in this light, Swisher's call for more Indians to write about Indians - in this case Indian education - is reasonable and defensible. Indeed, Indian authors who challenge conventional ways of writing about Native people provide a voice that is too often missing in the Native American studies literature, regardless of subject. On the other hand, Champagne touches on another side of the issue, one which is equally reasonable and defensible. He directly responds to concerns voiced by Indian scholars, like Swisher, that recognize the lack of and need for Indian voices in the Native American studies literature. Champagne acknowledges that these scholars have indeed done much to change the voices heard in Native American studies. Importantly, they have forcefully shifted the perspective and direction of the discipline. But "to say that only Indians can study Indians," he writes, "goes too far toward excluding American Indian culture and history from the rest of human history and culture." 5 His argument, of course, engages a much broader philosophical question concerning the nature of academic scholarship. From this angle it is often suggested that an outsider's perspective, although different from the insider's, is just as valid to the production of knowledge about human society, history, and culture. Any and all perspectives, as the argument goes, help to strengthen - not weaken - the ultimate goal of understanding ourselves and others. "One does not have to be a member of a culture to understand what culture means or to interpret a culture in a meaningful way," writes Champagne. 6 As a non-Indian Native American studies scholar, I identify emotionally with Champagne's view but empathize intellectually with Swisher's. One would ideally encourage anyone to study and write in Native American studies; but realistically, a very clear division still remains between the texts written about Native America...