Published as the Foreword to American Indian
Studies:
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Contemporary Issues
This collection of essays, addressing contemporary Native American
issues and concerns, arrives at a crucial moment. More and more
students and faculty now exhibit a surge of genuine interest in
the classroom instruction of Native American topics. Yet, offering
Native American - or American Indian, if you wish - subject courses
and Native Studies programs ultimately involves questions about
the agendas and budgets of colleges and universities. Such programs
and courses, whether they already grant certificates or degrees
or are in the process of evolving from idea to proposal, are forced
to pursue building their own foundations and expansion at a time
when many institutions, including their hosts, want to downsize
curricular needs and reallocate intellectual and teaching energies
to other academic or administrative areas.
Under these conditions, students throughout the United States
and Canada clamor to enroll in the scattered, few, and momentary
Native subject courses that are available, often learning of them
at the last minute, as such offerings seem to be hidden in course
listings or are brand new additions. Student enthusiasm is strongest
when driven by their own predisposition to learn something valuable
and accurate about Native peoples. They respond with open minds
to issues affecting Native communities, for sooner or later they
realize that so much historical "American law," for instance,
deals with Indian treaties and land and resource rights issues
that may involve their own towns and their parents' properties.
Academic departments find the large enrollments encouraging,
and where there are no courses in Native literatures, histories,
and expressive traditions, requests for their installment persist.
Of course, critics at such institutions may target a particular
course to allege its lack of scholarly foundation and purpose.
They may disparage it for having no clear pedagogy except to allow
venting for and about the downtrodden while catering to a pot-boiler
mentality fomenting "political correctness." Although the integrity
of academic benefits and the scholarly worth of Native Studies
curricula may be under debate, Native students are the principal
group desiring to learn about their collective presence on their
own continent. Furthermore, they want others to appreciate how
they respond to the political construct of "America." They face
administrative obstacles less in outright resistance than primarily
in the ineffectual efforts of institutions of higher learning
to make a commitment to their academic and counseling needs. The
inert campus bureaucracy of fact-finding meetings, proposals and
revisions, more meetings, agenda delays, and senate approvals
before the implementation of a certificate or degree awarding
curricular structure can occur seems the norm for program developers.
Developing new courses and reformatting old ones (particularly
those in departments of Anthropology) continue to stimulate and
provoke everyone involved, even if some of the most sincere workers
fail to grasp the issues' historical and present-day ramifications.
The growing population of sympathetic non-Native students and
faculty wrestle with their own values and ethics regarding Native
peoples. More than any previous generation, they realize how their
own perceptions and expectations of Indians derive from stereotypes,
and they find just as painful their inability to articulate their
distress. As Americans and Canadians in the social mainstream,
they inherit a vast ignorance of conflicting images about Indians:
the contemporary perception of the non-existence of Native Americans
in favor of a romanticized portrayal as icons from long ago; that
all Indians are assimilated and therefore no longer are "real"
Indians; that Indians and their culture today are "so spiritual!"
with their ceremonies, pottery, and prophecies about ecological
disaster and how possibly to avert it; that Indians are lazy,
thieving drunkards, and that Indians live in the past because
they want whites to honor two hundred-year old treaties affecting
land acquisitions.
Even where budgetary fortunes permit and aggressive students
and faculty succeed - as in a course series of guest lecturers
from various Indian reservations, urban centers, and nations recognized
or not recognized by state or federal governments, offered at
the University of Massachusetts in Amherst during the spring of
l996 - the offerings may distress the naive by their differing
points of view, speakers' priorities about economic development
and sovereign nation status, and whether or not lecturers are
entitled to express their anger. Contemporary issues in Indian
Country stimulate students to think about important questions
and definitions, such as what and who is an Indian, a tribe, community,
band, nation; what is meant by sovereign nations and domestic
dependent nations; in Native expressive traditions, what is "art"
and what is artifact; what determines the sacred and the ceremonial;
why are Native stories not myths but embodiments of the spirituality
and history of the people who live by them; why is there such
emotion about graves, remains, collections of sacred objects believed
to be housed in the students' universities and museums; what does
it mean in modern stories for the characters to come home; and
what is a "Hollywood Indian" and what impact do films make on
the collective expectations about Native Americans? Such questions
may puzzle students at the beginning of a course, and thinking
about them enables those students to articulate better what they
do not know about Indians and Native cultures and histories. Students
also will be forced to think about their own communities, some
of whose place names identify them as derived from an indigenous
language and meaning and which are accompanied here and there
by advertising symbols and images they now realize are offensive
to many Native Americans.
Teachers of Native Studies find themselves accountable to the
Native communities they study with little room for the orthodoxies
of cultural debate. In unwitting association, the romantic feature
film, Dances with Wolves, and legislation such as the Native American
Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) produced some
encouraging results. Native Americans in the l990s renewed a modest
faith in the kinds of cultural integrity they realize the society
is (sometimes reluctantly) able to protect; and non-Natives began
reconsidering their attitudes about what Indians believe is appropriate
and important.
Written in response to this new era for introducing Native Studies
to academia, these essays prepare students to meet some of the
intellectual questions and ethical foundations in this holistic
discipline. As introductory discourses on education, spirituality,
literary expression, language, movies and legal history, just
to name a few, they offer a sophisticated approach to a sorely
needed fundamental appreciation of this subject area. I believe
the broad range of subjects these essays cover contributes to
ending the search for an elusive but substantive text geared to
introductory courses about contemporary American Indian concerns,
for it will encourage students to explore the various bibliographies
that buttress scholarly inquiry and encourage them to listen carefully
to the remarks spoken and in print from Native peoples.
Implicit in these essays are efforts to answer such questions
as, why we need Native Studies at all, and, is Native Studies
geared solely for Native students or for the general population?
They show that, certainly, a college or university that seeks
to increase Native enrollments can try to provide an environment
and services that not only encourage Native students to apply,
but even more so to maintain ties to home. Scholarships and intellectual
benefits aside, the idea of going away to school is daunting;
The experience reinforces in Native students the pains and distress
they learn about from elders whose school experiences away from
their communities often involved kidnapping, abuse and violence,
and being told that as "savages" they would never amount to anything.
Furthermore, both non-Native students and administration and counseling
staff need to learn about what that legacy in Indian education
means and how it will demand their reformulating notions about
the American dream. In this context, American Indian Studies:
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Contemporary Issues affirms
the idea that North American education stands only to gain from
Native American Studies because it will help us to demystify romanticism
and begin to comprehend why our relationships to the world around
us differ as strongly as they do.
Native Studies allows us to renew ourselves in the kinds of
knowledge and information we already have or could have learned
from our people; it assists our becoming useful contributors to
the survival of our communities, to "return the gift" so that
all the Creation will be honored, supported, protected, and sustained;
it encourages all its students (faculty included) to pursue holistic
learning and interdisciplinary methods, instilling an appreciation
for how deeply and inextricably Native ways of knowing accept
a connection between all things; and it exposes students to the
multicultural realities of the original inhabitants of this hemisphere.
Respect for the people and their traditions, as well as a willingness
to listen, stand paramount in or outside any Native Studies classroom
or topic. From there, the reader can use this text as a guide
to thresholds of knowledge to bring about broader humanistic tolerance
and change.
Rational for Native American Indian Studies