American Indian Studies Research Articles

Coyote's Way: Missy Whiteman's Indigenous New Media

Coyote’s WayMissy Whiteman’s Indigenous New Media Angelica Lawson (bio) Shortly after accepting a position as an assistant professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota, I was invited to meet with a dozen international professors as part of a panel on Indigenous film. I was happy to be a part of this panel of Indigenous filmmakers, since I had just moved to the Twin Cities and was looking forward to meeting other Native Americans involved in film. We met with the international professors for over two hours, and what struck me most about this exchange was the assumption on the part of the professors that the young up-and-coming American Indian filmmakers would want to eventually work in Hollywood or in mainstream film. There was a lot of murmuring at the table as the women were shaking their heads. Finally, Arapaho-Kickapoo media artist Missy Whiteman spoke up and explained that this was generally not a goal. No one at the table wanted to work in Hollywood, and in fact they saw themselves as working against the decades of stereotypical Native American representation Hollywood had produced. The women filmmakers’ main point of resistance was feeling they would have to give up their autonomy to work in Hollywood. As Joanna Hearne points out in the introduction to this special issue, “The structures of traditional film production are notoriously discriminatory, overwhelmingly organizing men into positions of creative control . . . [whereas] digital platforms for aesthetic production and activism . . . are far more open to Indigenous women.” All present at this meeting claimed to prefer to work in new media in order to reach larger audiences and in Whiteman’s case specifically to reach Native youth through this medium. The Indigenous women’s articulation of the importance of media sovereignty became the topic of conversation. Included in this discussion was an emphasis on the importance of giving back to their [End Page 100] communities, educating and positively influencing Native youth, and expressing the values and ethics of Indigenous peoples through new media. The women highlighted the significance of new media in being able to achieve these goals, since new media is primarily digital and often made accessible online. Digital media is a much more affordable medium to work with, compared to traditional film, and can be made available through the Internet, circumventing the often prohibitive costs of traditional distribution, especially for independent artists. Affordability and accessibility are part of the appeal for Indigenous media makers like Missy Whiteman who in particular want to reach Native youth. Working in new media allows Indigenous media makers to be in complete control of their artistic productions. This control is the very definition of media sovereignty. According to Elise Marubbio and Eric Buffalohead in Native Americans on Film: Conversations, Teaching and Theory, “Both cinema of sovereignty and visual sovereignty are aspects of media sovereignty: the act of controlling the camera and refocusing the lens to promote indigenous agency in the media process and in their own image construction” (10). Indeed, definitions of media sovereignty began to form with Jolene Rickard’s essay on sovereignty and visual arts and has been expanded on by numerous scholars over the years to encompass “cultural sovereignty” as applied to Native filmmaking (Singer), representational cinema of sovereignty in documentary filmmaking (Lewis), and visual sovereignty (Raheja, Reservation Reelism). Self-representation in the media by Indigenous people the world over has been an exciting movement, empowering the people who have historically been rendered savage or invisible in most films and documentaries. With the surge in new media creation by Indigenous people we see not only more accurate historical and contemporary representation of the people but also counternarratives that intervene in colonial oppressive histories and serve as activist documents to be shared with audiences worldwide. New media provides an affordable and creative outlet for Indigenous artists to intervene in dominant national narratives and to exert visual sovereignty. As Michelle Raheja states, “The visual, particularly film, video, and new media, is a germinal and exciting site for exploring how sovereignty is a creative act of self-representation that has the potential to both undermine stereotypes of Indigenous peoples and to strengthen the ‘intellectual...

Teaching Indigenous Students: Honoring Place, Community, and Culture ed. by Jon Reyhner

Reviewed by: Teaching Indigenous Students: Honoring Place, Community, and Culture ed. by Jon Reyhner Linda LeGarde Grover Teaching Indigenous Students: Honoring Place, Community, and Culture. Edited by Jon Reyhner. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. vii + 219 pp. Illustrations, charts, references, index. $24.95 paper. This collection of essays edited by seasoned bicultural education expert Jon Reyhner includes contributions from scholars of indigenous education in America as well as in other parts of the world. The theme that emerges in all of the essays, that the valuing of the languages and cultures of indigenous students in classrooms results in improved retention and learning, is a principle of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Such a powerful concept, applied as pedagogical philosophy to varied subject areas, teaching practices, and physical settings, strengthens students, families, communities, and ultimately, the boots-on-the-ground teachers whose hearts' desire is to see learners thrive. Although much of the material in this book focuses upon American Indians, the histories of indigenous cultures in other parts of the world, and many of the authors themselves, come from diverse indigenous communities. The collection begins with a history of colonial impact and assimilationist history, particularly education policies inflicted upon indigenous communities worldwide. An overview of the suppression and destruction of cultures and beliefs, and the effects upon families and communities damaged through the schooling of their youngest members, provide an understanding of the herculean efforts in recent decades to reverse assimilation. The essays that follow are a necessarily diverse selection of curriculum development models, classroom and community dynamics, the integration of culture-based and culturally relevant curricula and teaching strategies. Essays that challenge current educational philosophies and strategies explain both research and practical application of the United Nations principle in the teaching of literacy, math, science, social studies, music, art, and physical education. In each subject are specific examples and strategies; the holistic philosophy of the collection creates an interesting read for educators, who will find parallels in the interdisciplinary pedagogy with the linking of teaching and learning to community and culture. The final essay examines the recent establishment of language immersion schools, which strengthen families and communities while revitalizing and increasing proficiency and use of the languages and cultural worldview, undoing damage created by decades of assimilationist education. It is heartening to see the number of indigenous authors in this collection. Their presence and voices are the essence of what this book is intended to address and are what sets this collection apart. All of the authors, both younger, emerging scholars whose voices bring new perspectives to the field, and the experienced, prolific scholars who broke tracks, have built upon their research and are now the elders of pedagogy, a position comparable to that of elders in many indigenous cultures. Educators indigenous and otherwise who work at all age and grade levels, from infant and early childhood education through advanced studies, as well as leaders and elders of indigenous communities, will find much that will enhance their own work and, most important, the success of their students. [End Page 65] Linda LeGarde Grover Department of American Indian Studies University of Minnesota–Duluth Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Legible Natives: Making Native Women Visible in the Literary Arts

Legible Natives:Making Native Women Visible in the Literary Arts Penelope M. Kelsey This essay holds integral the assumption that any analysis of Native American women's literary traditions must consider intersections of the political and the literary, as before and since contact, stories have been the primary means of knowledge keeping and an important mode for asserting sovereignty. By itself the seemingly simple act of Native people telling stories, with its implicit insistence that those truths obtain, is political, because Native stories refuse to conform to benign narratives of settler colonialism that safely situate Natives in the past. In fact, Native people, especially Native women, must work continually to resist what Lisa Kahaleole Hall has termed "strategies of erasure" that work to conceal the Native and the female in imperial optics. This essay considers past and present Native women authors and storytellers who told their stories, insisted upon being made visible on the page, and made the Indigenous origins and underpinnings of those stories plainly evident. Following current practice in Native American and Indigenous studies, I use the term Native to include all indigenous peoples, whom I define as those whose traditional territories have been usurped by settler populations and who have remained disempowered, antagonistically educated, underfed, and pauperized in their own land via settler colonialisms that Patrick Wolfe has rightly identified as "structure" and not "event" (388). Throughout this essay, I will make conscious connections to important trends in areas not traditionally understood in American literary critical circles to be germane to American Indian studies scholarship; as I do, I will explain their relationships to the field and how their contributions apply to the literatures studied by readers of Legacy. Thus, while acknowledging the sovereigntist roots of many of these texts, [End Page 198] this essay engages the strategies of a transnational Native American studies, as defined by Hsinya Huang, Philip Deloria, Laura Furlan, and John Gamber, by connecting the Native American to the Native Hawaiian to the Alaska Native and so on (1–3). The term sovereigntist denotes those scholars (and their texts) who self-identify as nationalist with a core emphasis upon advancing Native sovereignty (that is, self-determination); this impulse constitutes a distinct and predominant strand in Native American literary criticism at present, as evident in work by Lisa Brooks, Daniel Justice, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, and many others. I am also alive to the fact that my translation of my field to Legacy readers reiterates a pattern, from contact to the present, of Native women writers and storytellers making legible their unique experiences and histories to non-Natives; these educative moments of translation are important for continually rendering the Native visible in a nation that imagines itself as possible only via Natives' disappearance. kellogg and bonnin: politics, networks, letters, and literature Literature shall be my life work, and its aim shall be to benefit my people. Laura Cornelius Kellogg, "One Indian Maiden: Her Literary Plans for the Uplifting of Her Race" (1903) As scholars have made clear since Native American literary studies emerged as a distinct field in the 1970s and 1980s, Native American women's writing is often inherently political, and attempts to enforce apoliticism would render it meaningless and extraneous. Native women write with a keen awareness of the unique history of Native American political structures of governance, the obfuscation of deep and rich intellectual traditions, the erasure of histories acknowledging the sacrifice of the indigene upon which the settler colonial state is predicated, and the necessity of organizing and speaking from the space of Indigenous political consciousness (that is, sovereignty and resurgence), whether based in traditional governance structures or in the non-Native governmental forms intentionally imposed upon Native peoples via and through the treaty and reservation confinement periods. A range of recently published works on Native American women writers highlights exactly these thematics of the political and the literary. Kristina Ackley and Cristina Stanciu's scholarly edition of Laura Cornelius Kellogg's Our Democracy and the American Indian and Other Works is one such volume, exploring an oft-overlooked but integral and arguably paramount figure in pre-1930 American Indian literary and political [End Page 199] circles. Born in 1880...

American Indian Studies Association Conference Presidential Address. Advocacy and Indigenous Resistance: The Ongoing Assault against Indigenous Sovereignty, Community, and Land

American Indian Studies Association Conference Presidential Address. Advocacy and Indigenous Resistance: The Ongoing Assault against Indigenous Sovereignty, Community, and Land

Whose War Was It?: African American Heritage Claims and the Second Seminole War

Whose War Was It?African American Heritage Claims and the Second Seminole War C. S. Monaco (bio) Clearly, blacks and Seminoles cooperated during the resistance, and some blacks acted as interpreters, messengers, and even advisors to Seminole leaders. From those facts, however, an unsupportable logical leap precedes the conclusion that interpreting, advising, carrying messages, and knowing about white men equate with ruling. Susan A. Miller, “Seminoles and Africans under Seminole Law”1 Contentious heritage claims based on rival notions of agency and empowerment during the Second Seminole War (1835–42) have surfaced from a group of scholars and from amateur historians who promote the unorthodox idea that African Americans, rather than Indigenous people, constituted the real “backbone” of military resistance.2 Competing claims often accompany memories of war, as victors and losers inevitably bring opposing versions of dramatic events that inflict death and suffering on a massive scale. In this case, however, rival assertions have arisen from the same side that fought and died together in the Florida wilderness in a long but ultimately ill-fated effort to thwart removal efforts by the United States Army. Historian Larry Rivers has recently inverted the standard paradigm of Seminole tragic heroes (Osceola being the most renowned) who led Indian warriors and their black allies into battle by reconfiguring the latter as the war’s principal leaders and by framing their motives as a slave rebellion, not an Indian war. In a fairly audacious move, Rivers even renamed the Second Seminole War as the “Black/Indian Rebellion,” thus rejecting the core concept that the war [End Page 31] was the second of three campaigns that were primarily aimed at Seminoles.3 Other authors, some without formal historical training, have espoused pricklier narratives; one has demanded that blacks reject history that has consigned them to the subservient role of playing “Tonto” to the Seminoles.4 High-end websites have also entered the picture and utilize new media to promote themes of African American volition in Florida.5 Various lectures, symposiums, and conferences, including one under the aegis of the National Park Service, additionally support the thesis of black empowerment and rebellion.6 All this has taken place despite the fact that leading historians of slavery and slave revolts, such as the late Eugene Genovese and Herbert Aptheker (both of whom would hardly have been deterred by controversy), are conspicuous by their omission of any such rebellion. Yet a romanticized freedom fighter motif—one that not only embodies the subaltern struggle against white oppression but also affirms a new power identity amid the Florida backwoods—continues to impact the memory of an extended seven-year conflict that has never been fully integrated into American history and is still poorly understood by nonspecialists. For this and myriad other reasons, such a radical retelling certainly warrants scrutiny. To date, only a single journal article by Seminole historian Susan A. Miller—a former professor of American Indian studies at Arizona State University—and a section in Miller’s book Coacoochee’s Bones have confronted the issue.7 In the former, Miller directed a blistering rebuke at those who “cast heroes of African resistance as stars, and made supporting players of the Seminole people.” Indeed, she declared that “Seminole place, identity and history” have been plundered “as raw materials for a triumphalist narrative celebrating the new thread in the history of [African American] people.”8 Despite such heated charges, the most characteristic reaction has been silence, a strong indication of the hazards awaiting historians who dare enter the fray—a veritable heritage minefield.9 At present the concept of black sovereignty appears oddly impervious to critique, and while some mainstream scholars have applauded Rivers, others—particularly military historians—have bypassed this perspective entirely while they continue to apply the standard narrative of Seminole leadership.10 Despite obvious obstacles, including the opposing claims of two groups who have long been oppressed and marginalized and whose historical traditions have been intensely politicized, this essay will nevertheless [End Page 32] attempt to place the notion of black sovereignty into much-needed critical context. Unlike Miller, who assumed a defensive posture in her article, focused on the period after removal, and aimed to...

The Development of an Indigenous Health Curriculum for Medical Students.

Indigenous populations experience dramatic health disparities; yet, few medical schools equip students with the skills to address these inequities. At the University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth campus, a project to develop an Indigenous health curriculum began in September 2013. This project used collaborative and decolonizing methods to gather ideas and opinions from multiple stakeholders, including students, community members, faculty, and administration, to guide the process of adding Indigenous health content to the curriculum to prepare students to work effectively with Indigenous populations. A mixed-methods needs assessment was implemented to inform the instructional design of the curriculum. In June 2014, stakeholders were invited to attend a retreat and complete a survey to understand their opinions of what should be included in the curriculum and in what way. Retreat feedback and survey responses indicated that the most important topics to include were cultural humility, Indigenous culture, social/political/economic determinants of health, and successful tribal health interventions. Stakeholders also emphasized that this content should be taught by tribal members, medical school faculty, and faculty in complementary departments (e.g., American Indian Studies, Education, Social Work) in a way that incorporates experiential learning.Preliminary outcomes include the addition of a seven-hour block of Indigenous content for first-year students taught primarily by Indigenous faculty from several departments. To address the systemic barriers to health and well-being and provider bias that Indigenous patients experience, this project sought to gather data and opinions regarding the training of medical students through a process of Indigenizing research and education.

Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance

Cherokee Nation tribal citizen Clint Carroll examines Cherokee environmental governance from the late eighteenth century before removal from their homeland until the present. He argues that Indigenous environmental governance differs from state forms of environmental governance because it looks beyond resource-based environmental management to a relationship-based approach. Carroll uses a tribal ethnobotany project and elders’ meetings as examples of incorporating traditional knowledge into environmental governance. Carroll’s multidisciplinary methodology combines American Indian studies and political ecology, arguing that this methodological approach offers a more thorough analysis of Cherokee resource governance than either method alone. Roots of Our Renewal insightfully demonstrates alternate methods of tribal land resource management that look beyond profit maximization to incorporate more traditional methods that recognize the importance of human-land relationships.The first three chapters focus on Cherokee forms of government during a tumultuous period when Cherokees faced forced removal from their traditional homelands to Oklahoma. Before removal, Cherokee governance transitioned from a traditional kin-based decentralized system to a centralized state in order to deal with the social and environmental changes brought on by settler colonialism. Communal land ownership remained a way to preserve Cherokee traditional management practices. Carroll highlights Cherokee strength and resilience in their adoption of their new lands after removal. By using their existing knowledge and observing their surroundings, Cherokee people made connections and developed ties to the land and its resources. Tribal governance involved the reunification of opposing factions and the adoption of a strong central government that allowed the Cherokees to resist allotment policies for longer than most other tribes. Although federal Indian policy forced Cherokees to give up communal land ownership and redefined their relationship with the land, they developed new methods of self-governance by exerting their sovereignty and retaining subsistence practices. The current modern state form of governance complicates the relationship between land and resource management in the Cherokee nation and the desire to balance resource-based land management while still incorporating traditional relationship-based practices.The book’s remaining chapters focus on the implementation of alternate methods of resource management in a case study concerning ethnobotany and elder knowledge. Carroll worked as a researcher for the Cherokee Nation Natural Resources Department and collaborated with tribal elders on an ethnohistory project focused on preserving plant and medicinal knowledge. The incorporation of a relationship-based approach to resource management using Cherokee tribal knowledge and the input from elders provides an example that other tribes can adopt. A more traditional way of working with the land allows elders to voice their thoughts and opinions. The land and resources are accessed from a cultural perspective instead of purely an economic one.Carroll’s work on the ethnobotany project demonstrates the difficulty of working with tribal organizations. For Carroll, an outside researcher with limited time, establishing rapport and trust among elder tribal members and cultural bearers presented a challenge. Carroll also addresses the sensitive nature of tribal knowledge and the care that must be taken both when obtaining this information and in keeping tribal materials safe. Publishing sensitive tribal literature as a form of cultural preservation is complex, not only because of who will use this information but also because of how the knowledge will be used.Roots of Our Renewal provides critical insight into Indigenous resource management and the challenge of incorporating relationship-based approaches into a bureaucratic system focused on maximizing profits. Carroll suggests successful strategies for combining the two forms of governance. This work presents valuable insight for researchers intending to work with Indigenous tribal entities and acknowledges the potential challenges involved.

Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians. Edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens.

Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians . Edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xiii + 335 pp. Illustrations, maps, table, notes, bibliographical notes, index. $29.95, paper; $28.99, e-book.) This timely collection of essays by some of the leading scholars of American Indian history stems from a 2013 symposium held at the Newberry Library in Chicago under the auspices of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies. Following in the McNickle Center’s long-standing effort to enhance the teaching of American (Indian) history and point out the (still) major flaws in American history textbooks, this offering provides teachers and students brief and direct essays on a variety of topics. Indian history here is not merely a “contributions” …

Editor's Commentary: Honoring the Legacy of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Editor’s CommentaryHonoring the Legacy of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn James Riding In (bio) When Melanie K. Yazzie and Nick Estes approached me several years ago with the suggestion for a special issue of Wicazo Sa Review in honor of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s many accomplishments, I became ecstatic because these graduate students had recognized the significance of her intellectual contributions to our knowledge. Liz, as we call her, truly deserves such an acknowledgment of her accomplishments from the journal that she cofounded in 1985.1 Although now in her mid-eighties and living in the Black Hills near Rapid City, South Dakota, she continues to fiercely oppose the crippling effects of colonialism and anti-Indianism on Indian life and sovereignty. What should we expect? After all, she is legendary for her fervor to develop American Indian studies as a stand-alone academic discipline, criticism of academia for its flawed research methodologies and analyses pertaining to the history of Indian–white relations, scathing critiques of imperialistic U.S. Indian laws and policies, and promotion of Indian nationalism as a strategy of Indian survival as distinct, self-governing political entities. In this commentary, I will share a few of my memories about the role that Cook-Lynn played in the creation of the American Indian studies program at Arizona State University (ASU). I had the good fortune to meet her on February 8, 1993, at Scottsdale Community College on the Salt River Pima and Maricopa Indian Community in Arizona during a regional hearing of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs about amending the “toothless” American Indian Religious [End Page 5] Freedom Act of 1978. Dr. Beatrice Medicine,2 a mutual friend, introduced us. Of course, I did not realize then that Cook-Lynn and her writings would have such a lasting influence on my views about what American Indian studies should be.3 Cook-Lynn’s association with ASU started in the late 1990s. As Dr. Carol Chiago Lujan, I, and others began the work of developing an AIS program, we called on Cook-Lynn for her expertise and leadership in this area. She subsequently agreed to come to campus during several spring semesters in the capacity of a visiting professor. During meetings and one-on-one conversations, she spoke with eloquence and authority about the defensive, regulatory, and transformative roles of AIS while stressing that AIS must be grounded on the principles of sovereignty and indigenousness.4 With the support of the ASU administration and our allies, we have built a stand-alone program with its own paradigm, faculty, curriculum, methodologies, journal, conference, and undergraduate and graduate programs.5 Our curriculum has grown to include a rich array of course offerings about matters such as U.S. Indian law, U.S. policy, human rights, governance, repatriation and sacred place issues, colonization/decolonization, human rights, health, historical trauma, activism, leadership, economic development, intellectualism, and language. Our eight full-time faculty members, all citizens of various Indian nations, earned doctorates in AIS, history, philosophy, education, sociology, and social work.6 Adhering to a Cook-Lynn tenet,7 we faculty members view our research, teaching, and service as a “‘sacred’ responsibility to Indian nations undertaken for the sake of cultural survival.”8 Essentially then, the AIS model at ASU is tacitly grounded in the notion that being an AIS professor is substantially more than an eight-to-five job: it is a way of life that entails a willingness to make sacrifices for the common good. We strive to equip our students with a useful set of skills for success in various employment settings with practical and intellectual knowledge of Indian issues. Some of our undergraduate alumni have entered graduate studies and law school while others have found employment in the public and private sectors. Of particular note, Stephen Roe Lewis, a 2005 graduate, is now completing his first term as the governor of the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona.9 Graduates of our relatively new master’s program are finding similar opportunities. Over the years, ASU’s administrative support for AIS and other Indian-focused programs has grown. On August 31, 2015, President Michael M. Crow sent an...

17th Annual American Indian Studies Association Conference Presidential Address: American Indian Studies/Native American Studies in a Twenty-First Century World: Practices and Opportunities

17th Annual American Indian Studies Association Conference Presidential AddressAmerican Indian Studies/Native American Studies in a Twenty-First Century World: Practices and Opportunities Lloyd L. Lee (bio) Good morning. I am honored and pleased to be in Akimel O'odham territory participating with esteemed scholars, students, and community members at the 17th Annual American Indian Studies Association conference. I want to thank the members of the American Indian Studies Association Council (Myla Vicenti Carpio, Jeanette Haynes Writer, Elise Boxer, Richard Meyers, Larry Gross, Tennille Marley, Simon Ortiz, and Michael Yellow Bird), Elizabeth Martos, and the American Indian studies program here at Arizona State University for hosting this conference. I am a citizen of the Navajo Nation. My clans are Kinyaa'áanii (Towering House), born for Tł'ááschíí (Red Bottom). My maternal grandfather's clan is Áshįįhí (Salt), and my paternal grandfather's clan is Tábąąhá (Water's Edge). I grew up in Albuquerque, Naschitti, and Vanderwagon, New Mexico, and continue to keep a close association with my communities by voting in tribal elections; attending ceremonies, celebrations, funerals; and talking with community members on various topics related to education, politics, tribal governance, identity, leadership, environment, sports, and so forth. In my academic life, I am an associate professor of Native American studies at the University of New Mexico and the director of the Institute for American Indian Research. My academic training is in the discipline of American studies with an emphasis in Southwest studies, race, class, ethnicity, and American Indian history. My research focuses [End Page 5] are on American Indian identity, Navajo masculinities, Navajo philosophies, American Indian leadership, Navajo transformative research, and American Indian community building. I presently teach courses on identity, tribal governance, leadership, gender, research methods, community building, and worldviews. Like many of my colleagues in AIS/NAS, I have spent a good part of my academic career theorizing and writing about colonization, decolonization, identity, gender, philosophies, and Native nation building. My future research plans include an oral history project on the Navajo Special Program at Intermountain school in the 1950s and early 1960s, develop a clearinghouse for the Navajo boy's puberty ceremony, examine the concept of American Indian creativity and cultural production, and develop a praxis approach to decolonizing the Navajo Nation. I anticipate this second stage of my work will assist students and the discipline in American Indian community building and empowerment. I've worked in Native American studies officially for the past eight years; but, I've really been a part of it my whole life. I want to share with you my thoughts on the state of AIS/NAS and the opportunities our discipline faces this century. I will discuss several American Indian scholarly perspectives on the discipline, highlight four AIS/NAS departments and programs, and end with my views on five opportunities our discipline faces. I've examined various American Indian scholars on the state of AIS/NAS including Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Vine Deloria Jr., Clara Sue Kidwell, James Riding In, Michael Yellow Bird, Jace Weaver, Duane Champagne, Robert Warrior, Audra Simpson, Melissa K. Nelson, and Sidner Larson. All of these great minds project key thoughts about the history of American Indian studies/Native American studies (AIS/NAS) and what we need to do. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's "Who Stole Native American Studies?," published in Wicazo Sa Review in 1997, describes the first American Indian scholars' gathering in 1970 at Princeton University. The scholars at the gathering called on AIS/NAS to focus on indigenousness (culture, place, and philosophy) and sovereignty (history and law). They also supported research on Native-based practitioners and tenured professors would be expected to develop appropriate research designs, collect data, and publish.1 Jace Weaver's "More Light Than Heat: The Current State of Native American Studies," published in 2007, declares the AIS/NAS field a mess. He advocates the field needs to serve Native peoples, communities, and develop an academic association where colleges and universities respect the field. He believes the Native American Indigenous Studies Association is such an academic association although the American Indian Studies Association has been in existence longer and was envisioned and developed by AIS/NAS professors and...

Guest Editors' Introduction: Essentializing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Guest editors’ IntroductionEssentializing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn Melanie K. Yazzie (bio) and Nick Estes (bio) There are no two sides to this story. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Interview with Nick Estes Badger is always in Dakota stories and he is always asked many questions even though he is not important . . . But, he always has something to say . . . he always has an answer . . . Sometimes he is right but, just as often, he is wrong. Quite wrong. But what he does, you see, is . . . he keeps the plot moving . . . Without him, you see, the story would come to an early and unsatisfactory end. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn ON HISTORY In July 2013, we sat down with Elizabeth Cook-Lynn at a restaurant in downtown Rapid City, South Dakota. Nick got to know “Liz” (as she is known to colleagues and friends) through their mutual work to address pervasive anti-Indian racism in Rapid City. Until meeting her that day Melanie had never spoken with Liz, despite having written a [End Page 9] master’s thesis on Cook-Lynn’s role in shaping American Indian intellectual history. Even before fully understanding the profound impact she had on our maturation as scholars, activists, and committed Native nationalists, we were both long-time students of Cook-Lynn. We were extremely familiar with her foundational role in the development of American Indian studies and her unwavering commitment to the livelihood of Native people and nations. Between us, we had read, used, and cherished her entire oeuvre of fictional and nonfictional work. Our three-hour conversation with Liz on that humid summer afternoon in “the heart of everything that is,” He Sapa (the Black Hills), will endure as a high point for both of us in our careers as Native scholars. Even though we covered many topics, historical eras, and biographical details during our conversation with Liz, one particular comment of hers stood out. We were mocking the prevailing expectation that scholarship on Native history must maintain “objectivity” by counterbalancing Native perspectives with those advanced by a U.S. national narrative, though this expectation never operates the other way around. In the frank and eloquent style for which she is known, she stated, “There are no two sides to this story.” Although much has changed in academia and its treatment of Native peoples and their histories, it is still assumed that the notion of objectivity guides the social and hard sciences and history toward attaining “truth.” Objectivity, or the popular idiom that “there are always two sides to every story,” implies that disciplines like history exist in a politically and historically unbiased vacuum, untarnished by their imperial and colonial origins as instruments of power and domination. Cook-Lynn’s unequivocal proclamation that there is only one side to history forces the trope of objectivity out of the arena of assumption and places it as an object of critique within a long-standing and deeply rooted tradition of Native intellectual history that predates, endures, and challenges U.S. colonial occupation. In so doing, she forces scholars of history to contend with the prior and ongoing existence of Native people and political entities in the lands and histories of the United States that it has claimed as its own only through imperial conquest.1 Cook-Lynn noted during our conversation she has been dismissed as an “essentialist” by other scholars many times for proclamations like “there are no two sides to this story.” She chuckled about this. Anyone in the humanities who does what could be considered critical work knows that being labeled an essentialist can sometimes be seen as (and sometimes is) an academic death sentence. We observed how often the label of essentialism has tended to undermine the entire purpose of American Indian studies to emphatically and unapologetically defend and foster tribal survival. Cook-Lynn has long used the term “survival” to describe the purpose of American Indian studies. In New Indians, Old Wars, she offers one of her many meditations on survival, posing the [End Page 10] question, “How can a native people survive within and alongside their historical oppressors?” She goes on to state that this “is not a rhetorical question. It...

About This Issue

About This Issue David J. Endres We are pleased to offer these essays on the theme of pilgrimage and migration. U.S. Catholics have long been noted for being “on the move,” migrating from the Old World to the New, from the East to West, from rural to urban America, and from the urban core to the suburbs, among other transitions. These essays highlight their physical and spiritual journeys. We are grateful to our contributors. William S. Cossen is a doctoral candidate in history at The Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pennsylvania. David J. Endres, in addition to serving as editor of this journal, is academic dean and assistant professor of Church history at the Athenaeum of Ohio/Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. Adrienne Nock Ambrose is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio, Texas. Gráinne McEvoy is an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland post-doctoral fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. She is currently preparing a book-length manuscript titled God at the Gates: American Catholic Social Thought and Immigration, 1910–1965. Anita Casavantes Bradford is associate professor of history and Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California Irvine. Brett Hendrickson is assistant professor of religious studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Kellie Jean Hogue is a research associate at the American Indian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. [End Page i] Copyright © 2016 The Catholic University of America Press

The Case for Humanities Training: A Woman of Color Teaching Social Justice in a Predominantly White Institution

My entrance into instruction began as a graduate assistant at a tiny state university. I was thrown in head-first as teacher-of-record for a 20-student Composition and Rhetoric course, which served primarily as a freshman service course. The college campus is situated in the third most populous town in a state that is over 90% white, and most resident students come from smaller towns around the state. When I was receiving teacher training for my Composition and Rhetoric course, I was warned that many of my students would come from conservative backgrounds, and would resent and resist any intrusions that had the look or feel of liberal ideology. My training prepared me to temper any politicized discussion topics with a redirection towards the content of the evidence, and the structure of the argument. This training, I realized, was suggested as a self-preserving measure, and was meant to insure against student resistance and, thus, obstacles to effective teaching.THEORYWhen I received the chance to teach for the Women's Studies department, with a course entitled Justice in the 21st Century, I was prepared to eschew the politics-avoidance that had made up my composition teaching experience. Surely, the students who would sign up for such a course would be prepared to tackle all the attendant issues and discomforts surrounding the topic of social justice. I structured the course with ambitious feminist pedagogical strategies, such as group work, self-directed response papers, service-learning, and a review of course material through class discussion rather than lecture. Facilitating a dynamic and engaging classroom discussion was something I planned to rely heavily on, since it was one of the strongest skills I had developed as a beginning instructor. My classroom manner in composition classes had a highly-charged and fast-paced style of delivery, and it tended to produce a similar student response, indicative of excitement and idea production about the topic at hand. While there were shyer students who preferred to remain quiet in class, it seemed that I was almost always able to achieve a majority participation when discussing reading material and class concepts. I wanted to maintain this participation yield in my Social Justice course, but with added concern for the underrepresented voices in the classroom. My goal for teaching the class was to enable discussion-led knowledge-production in a space that was limited in prejudice, resistance, or unconscious bias that may harm those at the receiving end of stereotypes.When faced with my students on the first day of class, I found that I had greatly mis-prepared in my areas of pedagogical theory and praxis. That my course had been cross-listed in five different departments (African-American Studies, American Indian Studies, American Studies, Chicano Studies, and Women's Studies) led me to expect a greater diversity in students than I had experienced in my composition class. I was excitedly anxious to see what kind of voices would contribute to the narrative of the class and respond to the concepts introduced by the course material. I wanted to maintain awareness of classroom dynamics, and foster a special atmosphere inside the classroom that would transcend into the students' lives outside of the classroom. When I met the eyes of each student when taking attendance on the first day of class, I felt my preconceptions about teaching the class being shattered student by student. Despite being geared towards freshmen, the class was only about half freshmen, and when answering my first-day-of-class questionnaire, most students answered that they were placed in the class by advisors looking to fulfill a diversity requirement. My image of a classroom filled with nascent critics of social issues was replaced by the reality of thirty students who needed to fill a gap in their schedules. Not only did a majority of the students lack a pre-existing interest in social justice, most were completely uninitiated in the fundamental concepts at the heart of social justice. …

Family at the Heart of Chickasaw Language Reclamation

Family at the Heart of Chickasaw Language Reclamation Kari A. B. Chew (bio) Located in south- central Oklahoma, the Chickasaw Nation faces unprecedented language loss. Because of colonization and forced assimilation, the intergenerational transmission of the Chickasaw language—Chikashshanompa’—has been interrupted in families, leading to devastating and rapid language decline. In 1994 there were an estimated one thousand Chikashshanompa’ speakers.1 Currently, there are about seventy remaining speakers, all of whom are elders.2 While a small but increasing number of second-language learners speak the language at a level of conversational fluency, new generations do not speak Chikashshanompa’ as a first language.3 As a result, community members are growing increasingly aware of the urgency surrounding language loss and the necessity for language reclamation. Currently, a small group of dedicated Chickasaw citizens and allies are working to restore Chikashshanompa’ as a healthy and vibrant language of the community. Significantly, family has emerged as being at the heart of their efforts. This article examines intergenerational perspectives on the importance of Chikashshanompa’ to Chickasaw families. I begin with an autoethnographic account of my own efforts to learn Chikashshanompa’ and the responsibility I have in ensuring its continuance. Next, a brief historical account of language loss in the community demonstrates the impact of this historical trauma on Chickasaw families. A discussion of contemporary Chickasaw language work situated within the theoretical concepts of language reclamation, survivance, and linguistic responsibility follows. Culturally grounded research methods frame my analysis of emerging themes, including (1) elders’ desire to ensure Chickasaw survivance through the language, (2) parents’ responsibility to pass the [End Page 154] language to their children, and (3) young people’s yearning to speak Chikashshanompa’ and developing consciousness of Chickasaw identity. “chikashsha saya” My Chickasaw ancestors spoke Chikashshanompa’ in southeastern homelands given to them by Aba’binni’li’, the One Who Sits Above. While first European contact imposed unprecedented change on Chickasaw society, my ancestors continued to speak Chikashshanompa’. By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the federal government had grown increasingly hostile toward American Indian peoples as the United States pursued its vision of Manifest Destiny and the taking of Indigenous lands. In the late 1830s, my great- great-great-grandparents were forcibly removed from their homelands to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Their children, who attended boarding schools in Indian Territory, were among the last generation in my family to speak Chikashshanompa’. Raised outside of the Chickasaw Nation, I did not hear my heritage language spoken as a child. My interest in learning Chikashshanompa’ developed as I entered young adulthood. As an undergraduate, I gravitated toward American Indian studies because it was a space on campus that affirmed and allowed me to develop my identity as a Chickasaw person. Reading Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places, about Western Apache language and place making, kindled my interest in Indigenous languages and inspired me to seek my own language.4 To this end, I participated in a summer internship through the Chickasaw Nation. My position with the Division of History and Culture afforded me opportunities to research Chikashshanompa’ and, importantly, take language classes. Sitting in a small room with a group of elder fluent speakers and other language learners, I heard my heritage language spoken for the first time. As we practiced saying words and phrases, I became increasingly conscious of the vital role of language in the continuance of Chickasaw culture and identity. Early in my Chikashshanompa’ class, I learned to say the phrase, “Chikashsha saya” (I am Chickasaw). While I had spoken these words many times in English, my life was forever changed when I said them in the language of my ancestors. I realized that my identity as a Chickasaw person was not adequately expressed through English. The far-reaching impact of colonization and the enduring pressures of assimilation [End Page 155] had prevented me from knowing my language and, thus, fully knowing myself. Reclaiming this ability became a driving force behind my desire to learn my heritage language and pursue language reclamation as both a field of academic study and a potential career. As a Chickasaw person and language learner, my experiences are inseparable from my research about Chikashshanompa...

First Nations and Native Souths on Both Sides of the 49<sup>th</sup> Parallel

In these three short essays, Sophie McCall, Deanna Reder, and Eric Gary Anderson discuss possibilities and limitations for building comparative platforms between their respective areas of research in Indigenous Studies in Canada and American Indian Studies in the US South. McCall, noting Canada’s recent political history of emphasizing “reconciliation” with Indigenous communities and apologizing for its 150-year legacy of forced Indian Residential Schools, asks what gets silenced, lost, and/or gained in comparative frameworks that attempt to identify new potential affiliations by rhetorically or intellectually remapping historic differences. Reder continues by describing the often fraught debates surrounding the application of postcolonial theory to Indigenous Studies in Canada, examining both the reticence many scholars feel against using approaches that “overdetermine[] the role of the nation and state” as well as a preference for models that privilege Indigenous cultural production and forms. Anderson, a US Native American Studies scholar, returns to the question of comparative frameworks with an analysis of regionalist and deep historical approaches as well as global comparative models, concluding that the kinds of Indigenous-centered approaches that are most needed are also the most difficult to employ due to limitations in resources and pedagogical training.

Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603-1832 ed. by Joshua David Bellin, Laura L. Mielke, and: Ceremony, Spirituality, and Ritual in Native American Performance: A Creative Notebook by Hanay Geiogamah (review)

Reviewed by: Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603-1832 ed. by Joshua David Bellin, Laura L. Mielke, and: Ceremony, Spirituality, and Ritual in Native American Performance: A Creative Notebook by Hanay Geiogamah Teresa Stankiewicz Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603–1832. Edited by Joshua David Bellin and Laura L. Mielke. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. pp. 333. $35.00 paper. Ceremony, Spirituality, and Ritual in Native American Performance: A Creative Notebook. By Hanay Geiogamah. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2011. pp. 144. $16.00 paper. Given the disappointing lack of books published each year on Native American drama, these two new works are prime considerations not only for literary review but also for use in cultural and performance studies. Both of these works speak to the “Indianness” of Native American performance and, perhaps more importantly, are written from a distinctly Native American perspective. Editor Laura L. Mielke’s explication of the terms “Indianness” and “performance” in her introduction to Native Acts, is relevant to both works: “When we refer to Indianness in this volume, we mean the acknowledged attribute of direct association with American Indian peoples and cultures; who identifies American Indian attributes determines the substance of Indianness at specific moments” (5). Mielke defines performance in three ways: to present to an audience, to carry out a command or particular action, and to participate in a formal public function or ritual (2). Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603–1832 includes ten insightful essays on the performance of being “Indian” that explore said performance from the perspective of the indigenous peoples. Mielke’s introduction is a superlative beginning that not only defines terms and explains the selection of essays but also [End Page 159] raises some pertinent questions about the performance of Indianness for the indigenous peoples of North America. She begins with an example of her own, the legend of Pocahontas, dissecting the various interpretations of the story and calling for an examination of the intent behind those who reported what has now become an American legend that perpetuates a romantic myth of indigenous peoples in North America. The chronologically organized essays first explore the essentialist attitudes of the Europeans who colonized America and the impact of those attitudes on the native people, concluding with the performance of Indianness in the early formation of the United States. As Mielke asserts, “In early North America, Europeans’ conceptions of Indianness were inextricable from the moral, religious, teleological, political, and economic justifications for their [European] presence” (5). The significance of this collection of essays lies in the deliberate intent to recognize the proprietorship of Native Americans, characterized by Mielke as “a critical intervention in the scholarship treating the performance of Indianness” that restores “Indian peoples to the intercultural matrix from which such performances arose” (10). The first four essays, by scholars Matt Cohen, Nan Goodman, John H. Pol-lack, and Olivia Bloechl, expose essentialist interpretations that pervade historical representations of Indians. All four scholars argue that specific essential-ist assumptions led to misrepresentations of the Native American peoples and the subsequent public attitudes that defined native and Euroamerican relationships during the colonial era. Each author also provides a brief historical background of the text or events that are being examined. In “Lying Inventions: Native Dissimulation in Early Colonial New England,” Cohen analyzes Native American acts of strategic simulation and dissimulation as challenges to perceptions of stable national identities. Goodman’s essay, “The Deer Island Indians and Common Law Performance,” examines the European attitudes that deprived Indians of legal status in common law. Bloechl’s essay, “Wendat Song and Carnival Noise in the Jesuit Relations,” reveals the Jesuits’ assessment of Wendat healing ceremonies as superstitious, a grave charge at the time. Pollack’s essay, “Native Performances of Diplomacy and Religion in Early New France,” focuses on the misinterpretation of native ritual of the Innu, Algonquin, and Maliseet as a negotiated treaty, documented by François Gravé Du Pont and Samuel de Champlain in Des Sauvages, ou, Voyage de Samuel Champlain in 1603. The French understood the oration of Anadabijou as a chief or king commanding his people to accept French settlement and military aid. Pollack explains, however, that allied tribes were not interested...

Chair of Tears by Gerald Vizenor (review)

Reviewed by: Chair of Tears by Gerald Vizenor Andy Meyer Gerald Vizenor, Chair of Tears. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012. 138 pp. $16.95. The tricky, rapid vignettes that comprise Chair of Tears, Gerald Vizenor’s novel of “native survivance,” create an unsettling narrative, rich in irony, inversion, and, veiled behind the twisted mantras of academic discourse, invective. The stories and character sketches are told by an unnamed cousin of the novel’s central figure, Captain Shammer, grandson of the legendary and mercurial Captain Eighty (nicknamed, indeed, for the atomic number of mercury), and Quiver, a “native maven of poker scenes” (1), who raised their family on a houseboat on Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota. Much of the novel’s activity, though, takes place in the almost farcical Department of Native American Indian Studies at a semifictionalized version of the University of Minnesota. Captain Shammer, having “never applied, auditioned, or petitioned for the position,” much less attended a university at all, is nevertheless appointed as the seventh department chair after six failed appointments in as many years (23). This endowed chair is the eponymous “Chair of Tears.” The novel proceeds to relate stories of Captain Shammer’s ironic—often hilarious—reforms of the department, ranging from [End Page 304] his arrival at the first faculty meeting dressed as General Custer (23); to the recasting of the research library as an “academic casino” (46); to raising a litter of “irony mongrels” (with names such as Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, and Nixon) who bark when they perceive the absence of irony (16–19); to establishing the Denivance Press, whose “ironic maxim” is “the absolute denial of manuscripts from the best and brightest authors” (99). Building up and then flipping and disrupting as it does the official codes and structures of the academy, the book shares certain ironic qualities with fellow Ojibwe novelist David Treuer’s The Translation of Dr. Apelles (2006) but quickly becomes a unique trickster testament to “native presence” in the university, as Vizenor extends, with characteristic wit, his ongoing resistance to reductive colonialist narratives of “absence” and “victimry”—all terms that, along with his coinage “survivance,” appear, reappear, and dance throughout the novel. Indeed, one of the novel’s hallmarks is the lyricism in its ironic academicism. Vizenor masterfully deploys a host of academic terms with panache, studied rhythm, and sonorous texture. At one point, for example, while the irony dogs are sounding their suspicion of religion, Vizenor writes, “the trusty mongrels persisted to bark and warn the world that the absence of irony is terminal and the treacherous end of civilization” (67). Assonant patterns like this one permeate the text and train the reader to look—almost too hard—for ironic twists and unsettling turns of phrase. For the non-Native reader like me the sense of disruptive irony is acute, and it is a potent reminder that despite its claims to the contrary, the academy, too, is ever a shade—or a Shammer—away from exactly the kind of reductive category hunting Vizenor’s tales of Native survivance actively resist. For this reason the laughter Chair of Tears can elicit, especially from the academic reader, is wonderfully and productively uncomfortable. [End Page 305] Andy Meyer The Northwest School, Seattle Copyright © 2014 Western Literature Association

Seeing Red: Hollywood's Pixeled Skins; American Indians and Film. American Indian Studies Series. Edited by LeAnne Howe , Harvey Markowitz , and Denise K. Cummings . (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013. xix + 225 pp. Illustrations, notes. $29.95, paper.)

<b><i>Seeing Red: Hollywood's Pixeled Skins; American Indians and Film</i></b>. American Indian Studies Series. Edited by LeAnne Howe , Harvey Markowitz , and Denise K. Cummings . (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013. xix + 225 pp. Illustrations, notes. $29.95, paper.)

Transgressions of the man on the moon: climate change, Indigenous expertise, and the posthumanist ethics of place and space

Indigenous peoples have been enrolled in climate change research for decades, participating in data-gathering, as writing collaborators, and serving as the symbolic “canary in the coal mine” for public outreach and policy-making. They have indeed experienced some of the most rapid environmental changes, but rather than emphasize their vulnerabilities, we argue their expertise is narrowly understood in formulating knowledge; the research on climate change has a limited understanding of what it might mean to be inter- or trans-disciplinary because research is formulated exclusively through the assumptions of Enlightenment thought, without sufficiently engaging non-Western subjectivities. Qualitative social sciences and “Indigenous methodologies” can be used to better achieve trans-disciplinarity; in this article we re-tell a story told by Native elders from tribes across Alaska about the “man on the moon.” While literally referring to the US moon landing, elders invoke this story when addressing climate change: it teaches the ethics of the human-nature relationship, developed from a “more-than-human” (or “posthuman”) philosophy. Our data comes from participant-observation and oral history; we draw upon poststructuralist theory, and frame our analysis through the literatures of critical geography, science studies, and American Indian studies. To ensure that Indigenous peoples are not used as props in Western policy agendas, researchers must engage with non-Enlightenment intellectual traditions. More than being a source of data or a symbol of humanity’s ruin, Indigenous wisdom can productively inform sustainable policy agendas to adapt to climate change. What can be learned, for example, is a more-than-human ethics of place and space.

Nimbiiskaabiimin Apane, and: We Are Returning Always

Nimbiiskaabiimin Apane, and: We Are Returning Always Margaret Noodin (bio) Nimbiiskaabiimin Apane Pii mooshkine aapkizidnaawiying odo’shkiinzhig okomisani-waabamowinzhooniyaabikwe mbikwaakwadoshki-nookaazhegiizhigong. Negweyab-aawanan babaamishimomisko-miin-aazhemiin-aazhebimide miinwaa bingwiinoshki’anoongkewaadoshki’aadisookewaad. Dibikibagoneyaa temigadbakaan bagodakamigkina gojinggaawiin ningojizaagigi, zaagakiiepiichi bangishimod. Gimbiiskaabiimin pii nagamoyingginebigog, goonmitigwaanan, miigwanagnibwaakaaying abinoojiwiyingnibaaying waaboowaningmashko’asabikeying. We Are Returning Always When the moon is fullthe center of grandmother’s eyebecomes a mirror,a ball of silver hair,the spot of new skinin the sky. The nebulae dance behind herraspberry lightblueberry lightgas and dustmaking new starsand new stories. A dark hole discernedis a different wildernesseverywhereand nowheregrowing, expandingwhile collapsing. And our song returns ussnakes and snowtwigs and twinewe are wise bright infantsasleep in a blanketspun of energy. [End Page 73] Margaret Noodin Margaret Noodin received an MFA in Writing and a PhD in English and Linguistics from the University of Minnesota. She is Assistant Professor in English and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her most recent book about Anishinaabe literature is Bwaajimo. Her poems can be heard at: www.ojibwe.net Copyright © 2014 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents