The Future of American Indian Studies in the Time of Global Warming

Abstract

The Future of American Indian Studies in the Time of Global Warming Michael Yellow Bird (bio) Good afternoon. I am honored and pleased to be here today participating with the esteemed members of this panel to discuss my views on what I believe the future of American Indian studies must be. I want to thank the members of the conference planning committee who invited me to be a part of this panel and the American Indian studies program at Arizona State University for hosting this conference and putting together an excellent program that features several notable American Indian studies scholars. I also, in advance, graciously thank the members of the audience for your participation, questions, suggestions, and comments over these next two days. I am a member of the Arikara and Hidatsa nations of the Three Affiliated Tribes in North Dakota. I grew up on our reservation for a good part my life and continue to keep a close association with my community by voting in tribal elections, attending ceremonies, and consulting with community members on the topics of health and well-being, the environment, youth, and tribal governance. In my academic life, I am the former director of the Center for Indigenous Nations Studies at the University of Kansas (2004–2006) and was one of the founding members (and innovators) of this program, which began in 1997. Our program at the University of Kansas is unique because we offer a master's degree that focuses on the issues and concerns confronting Indigenous peoples within and beyond the borders of the Americas. I believe we are the only global Indigenous studies graduate program in [End Page 91] this hemisphere. Indigenous peoples within the borders of the United States (American Indians) are one of our main areas of focus. I presently serve as a full-time associate professor on our faculty. My academic training is in the discipline of social work with an emphasis in American Indians, health, and quantitative research methods. Since becoming a faculty member in our program, I have investigated and published on a number of topics related to American Indians and Indigenous nations. I presently teach graduate courses in global and American Indian health, Native American oppression, resistance and liberation, research methods and Indigenous peoples, and applied Indigenous leadership. Like many of my colleagues in American Indian studies, I have spent a good part of my academic career theorizing and writing about the effects of colonialism upon our communities. More recently, many of us with an applied agenda have engaged in the study of the intricate, tricky processes of decolonization, which we believe will serve as antidotes to the various oppressions that confront our communities. I have enjoyed examining these topics and feel fortunate to have been able to contribute my humble works and opinions to this growing literature within our discipline. As for the future of my work, I am in the process of developing a research agenda that will enable me to operationalize several key variables embedded within these two topics to empirically verify the significance of their effects on our communities. I am anticipating that this second stage of work will lead to reliable and valid models that will enable our students and discipline to assist American Indian/Indigenous communities to implement validated decolonization strategies to enhance and ensure Indigenous nation-building and empowerment. Regarding the future of American Indian/Indigenous studies, I believe that concepts such as colonialism, empowerment, nation-building, sovereignty, and decolonization must be clearly laid out within testable parameters so we can institute curriculum to help our students harness the power and grasp the consequences of these concepts. I believe that while our scholarly theorizing on these topics has been important it has now reached its upper real limits and we are now badly in need of tangible, realistic solutions. Indeed, along with the imparting of knowledge must come the responsibility to take intelligent, informed, and effective action. To that end, as a social scientist who relies on quantitative, empirical methods to examine and test what is true and what is hyperbole, I am of the opinion that we (in American Indian/Indigenous studies) are more than a bit light...