When I began graduate school, I was a bit of a scourge at graduate student parties, because I was perennially asking others what exactly the utility of their research interests was to their larger community outside of academia. In a way this question could be construed as naive, as a misapplication of one discursive space upon another, or as just plain rude. Certainly in a room full of graduate students, not always the most self-assured people in the world, the question was considered hostile, so I began to keep it to myself, although it is a natural curiosity for Native American scholars, and indeed animates most of our work, despite heavy resistance from scholars based more in literary studies than in American Indian studies. Jace Weaver writes for most of us in noting that “when it comes to scholarship on indigenous cultures, there is no such thing ultimately as ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake’” (“Indigenousness” 230). In reviewing Weaver’s work, I wish not only to articulate why that is very much the case, but also to exhort my colleagues in the broader American studies to take up this question when bringing in indigenous materials, as well as to propagate attention toward the truly interdisciplinary work that Weaver has generated thus far. Instead of asking what a text does within its particular language game, Native scholars such as Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior are deploying methods from broader cultural studies and indigenous philosophies to place American Indian literary texts