Indigenous Thinkers

Michael Yellow Bird

Wicazo Sa Review 20.1 (2005) 189-197

I want to thank the sponsors, American Indian studies at Arizona State University, for this conference. I want to thank all those speakers who have preceded us here today and all those great questions—I'm very stimulated by all the things that have been going on. And I want to thank Professor Duane Champagne for charging forward with the constitution and those of you who voted for that constitution, and those of you who abstained, and all those of you who voted against it. That shows democracy working here in this room, and I'm happy about that and glad that step has been taken.

I'm a relative newcomer to American Indian studies—it's not really a term that I use, "Indian" or "American Indian" studies. I began my academic career back in 1972 when I was at the University of North Dakota. It was a time of protest. Although I'm not Lakota or Nakota or Dakota, we were out protesting the name of the "fighting Sioux" at the University of North Dakota. There was a lot of political activism at the time and it seems to me that Native American or First Nations or American Indian studies programs were born of protest, like a protest discipline, or resistance discipline, or as Dr. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn said yesterday, "a discipline of defense." It was interesting for me when I first started to take a course in tribal government—I was unfamiliar with tribal government at the time, although I was born [End Page 189] and raised on a reservation in North Dakota. I came from a little town called White Shield.

I got a chance to see firsthand what was going on on my reservation with respect to how we were behaving as a sovereign nation. My perspective coming into social work was led by the activities on my reservation: I had witnessed a lot of premature death, poor health, disunity among tribal peoples, a lot of tribal infighting and family disintegration, a lot of social workers knocking on our doors and taking kids away, a lot of alcoholism in the community. I was raised in that kind of environment, and I always really wondered why it was our people were the way they were. It seemed to me my mother spoke of a time before the Army Corps of Engineers flooded our families out, our people along the Missouri River, and that our lives were stable then and people depended upon one another. And it was many years later, when I became a faculty member at the University of British Columbia in the School of Social Work that I really began to investigate, as aboriginal peoples were doing in Canada, the terms "colonialism" and "colonization."

It seemed to me, as I graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a Ph.D. in social welfare, that I learned to be a pretty good quantitative researcher. But I learned very little about what I would consider to be colonization. It was as if, when I was in the United States earning my Ph.D., I was in a political coma, and I didn't come out of that political coma until I went outside of this country and saw what First Nations people were doing in Canada. Aboriginal peoples were coming there from different parts of the world, talking about colonization. There was a major movement going on in Canada in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was there, and they were decolonizing using spirituality as a tool as well as dealing with the federal government about land claims and challenging the effects of the residential schools on the many children who had been abused in them, physically, sexually, psychologically, intellectually. And for the first time I really began to understand Paolo Freire's work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and that people there were breaking what they call the "culture of silence" by talking about their suffering under colonialism. In the United States I didn't see people talking about that. You could see it in the communities, but you didn't see it in the textbooks or in the mainstream discourse. And this new discourse enlightened me to that fact that indigenous people in this country didn't just wake up one day and decide to have alcohol problems. They didn't wake up one day and decide to abuse their wives and their children. They didn't wake up one day and decide to have splintered, fractionated infighting among themselves and their tribal governments. I began to understand that these problems were part of a process of colonization and of colonization taking many different forms: emotional, political, psychological, or spiritual. All these different aspects of colonialism then began to make sense to me, and a [End Page 190] conversation about them seemed to be missing in a lot of the writing and works here in the United States. I think one of our major challenges today is to begin to operationalize and conceptualize what those terms mean. We talk about colonization and decolonization a lot, but we have yet to define what those terms really mean.

I read Professor Cook-Lynn's article a few years back: "Who Stole Indian Studies?" I thought about that question for a long time and came up with a few different questions. Why was it stolen? Why would anybody want to steal it, to steal from people who lack political clout in the first place? And who let them steal it? Was it us, was it the university, the students, the lack of faculty? Why was it so easy to steal? Did we really value what was stolen? Then finally, what's going to happen when we steal it back, when we reclaim these programs?

I agree with other speakers about the importance of sovereignty. But sovereignty is a tricky term. I'm not sure what it means in many respects: are tribal governments, for instance, ready to take over complete sovereignty and act in our best interests? At the University of Kansas, what we did in our curriculum—and we did steal it back, I think—was to have a major battle with the folks who had stolen First Nations studies, namely, the historians and anthropologists and archaeologists. We began to change terminologies: we stopped using the terms "Indian" and "American Indian," and "Native American," because to us those were colonizers' terms. It's hard to find a term that isn't a colonizer's term, but we began to look at "aboriginal" and "First Nations"; we began to think about "indigenous peoples." And so one of the battles we had first was the ideology battle about who was going to set the rules and the regulations for this program and about what we would be named. Robert Porter, who is Seneca, a law professor at the time at Kansas, now at Syracuse—he and I had this charge of trying to name the program.

With the help of the students—we had to convince the students first that it was important to change the name of the program—we became the Indigenous Nations studies program. We felt "American Indian studies" described more of a voyeur program, where you didn't really have to do anything but learn about Indians. We felt that In-digenous Nations studies was more applied and spoke to us about our mission, which was more engaged, and about the empowerment of tribal peoples, and capacity—building, and strengths and talents and characteristics of tribes and all of those different things we could work with the tribes to further develop. Which then led us to our analytical framework: we try to analyze, whether it's history or literature or social science or business, from within the framework of colonialism. What does that mean? It means our scholarship proceeds by analyzing the colonization of our peoples, our lands, our languages. That's become very important to our curriculum development.

One of the things that's important, I think, is the need for some [End Page 191] courses that are prescriptive and some courses that aren't. If we have too many prescriptive courses and not enough that are engaged in what we call "intellectual criticality"—which are about critical thinking such as in Paolo Freire's work, where it's important to understand the contradictions that exist in a democratic society; critical perspective, which is about understanding how our lives are mediated by culture and even by the chemistry of our bodies; also, critical reflection, because it's so important for us to have our ideas and writing batted around by our colleagues and by our students in order to retool those ideas over and over again; and finally, critical doing, which is part of our mission here. So criticality—intellectual criticality and social criticality—of our curriculum is essential.

One of the reasons I say that is this: if we were just to say, "Someone stole our sovereignty from us"—I'm reminded that my son and I were having a conversation the other day about sovereignty being under threat, and during that conversation he said, "You know, Dad, it takes two to lose your sovereignty, or to deny sovereignty." I thought that was a very important way to look at it. If we engage, as indigenous peoples, to understand some of these questions: What do we want to save? What do we want to keep for ourselves? What's important for us to keep? We have to have those discussions, though I'm not really sure what those will look like at this point, because of the diversity of tribal peoples. So it's hard for me to develop prescriptions for courses. All I know is that Kansas is developing models of decolonization that seem to make sense. But what even precedes that is the question of the mission of tribal governments. We see tribal government engaged in all levels of interaction with "the colonizer"—whether it's casinos or whether it's compacts or cross-deputization of law enforcement or working with folks in natural resources. There's just a number of things that need to be sorted out, and I think that's one challenge of these programs out there: to define how we're going to change the world for indigenous peoples.

As I look back, it's important for us to begin to challenge our communities to think. I believe in this idea of understanding deeply the effects of colonialism. I think, for instance, every tribal community should have a think tank. We're talking about reading lists here in the university, but our tribal communities should have those same reading lists and be reading from that same list in tribal community colleges. We should have an ability to interface with tribal communities using new technologies like video conferencing, where you can teach right from a university classroom and include people in the tribal community in a discussion of a book, an article, a theory. The world is so inclusive now, it's difficult to stay isolated at the university with all these kinds of opportunities.

I'm not sure where we are in American Indian studies now in terms of the direction we want to go, but as I talk to students in my classrooms [End Page 192] about who they'll vote for in the upcoming election, a lot of students don't think it makes a difference. I think it does. George W. Bush doesn't have a statement on Native peoples. I know John Kerry does, as does Wes Clark. Whether or not they'll fulfill those obligations as president, I don't know, but we have to engage ourselves, not just on a tribal level but on national and global political levels as well. American Indian studies, or Indigenous Nations studies as I call it, is a very political discipline and is still growing, expanding. There are people yet to come who will make a big difference. Students cannot be passive in the classroom and just sit there and not read their assignments and not ask critical questions. I'm supervising a class now, and I notice that when people come in they often use the banking approach and give a lecture—no one says anything after it; there's no critical challenge to what people have said, whether they agree or disagree with them. And I think that challenge is a very important thing because, even if we do agree with what's being said, we have to challenge our own agreement to find out if it's something that fits with the understanding and the capacities and the culture of the indigenous people, the communities in which we live.

I want to give just one more example. Before I went back to Kansas, I heard from students and faculty that there was one class, one faculty member, that native students boycotted. This faculty member had written a book about the Bering Strait theory. And he'd used some very complicated statistical analysis and radio-carbon dating to advance his thesis. Students, after he had made his first presentation, boycotted the class. On the one hand, I think it's a very courageous and important thing to do. On the other hand, I think they lose the benefit of challenging that methodology and that individual. Whenever we shut down that kind of discourse, I think we shut down an opportunity to learn.

I taught a class at Haskell where we did a critical thinking exercise. I asked two questions: Where did you come from? Did a creator, an omnipotent being, make you or are you part of the Big Bang? Second question: What's your proof? Many of the Christian students in the class said, "This [the Bible] is our proof." Well, toward the end of the discussion, my son, who was not in the class, and quite young at the time, who had cut his teeth on what I call "French-toast-and-philosophy" time every Saturday morning with his friends and who had heard a lot of critical discussion from me, raised the question of oral tradition. A lot of Native students in the class said to my second question, "We know who we are because our ancestors told us who we are." My son, being naïve of politics and social relationships at the time, said, "Did you ever play the game called telephone? At the beginning of the telephone chain, someone says, 'I have a big red dog,' and by the twentieth person that dog is a 'green red car.'" He asked if there couldn't be the possibility that what the ancestors told us has changed in the same way as the message does in that telephone game. Of course this caused all [End Page 193] kinds of discomfort for me, but I thought, "This is an example of critical thinking, and of challenging precepts." Until we open ourselves to this same kind of critical inquiry for our classes and for our discipline, it's going to be easy for people to steal American Indian studies from us.

Carol Lujan

Good morning. I always told my students that if you're born Native you're born into politics. It's a political reality that the general American population has minimal knowledge about indigenous nations, and the knowledge they do possess is very distorted and inaccurate. They don't know that we as Native Americans have rich cultures and histories, a distinctive land base, and our governments. We also have treaties and a special trust relationship with the federal government that is supported by the Supreme Court and various legislative acts that separate us from other Americans. The depiction of American Indians through distorted images is a daily occurrence. We're bombarded with it daily. An example of that is last weekend's Grammy Awards and how one of the groups, Outkast, depicted American Indians in their performance. The best way I can describe their outfits is "the Thanksgiving Indian look." Locally, in the Sunday newspaper, in the Arizona Republic, there was a front-page story entitled "Ex-leader Brings Old Baggage to New Role," which refers to the recent appointment of Albert Hale, former president of the Navajo Nation, to the state senate seat. The paper immediately cast Hale in a negative light before he had even uttered one word. But this is something where all of us can come up with examples.

Our role in American Indian studies is to dispel these negative and destructive images. AIS is faced with a number of challenges in terms of our teaching, our research, and our service. We're committed here at Arizona State University to assisting Native nations in their endeavors to protect their sovereignty, their land base, their religious rights, their lifestyle. We also seek ways to support them in building self-sufficient nations, to decolonize, and to establish culturally appropriate institutions.

I want to give you a little bit of a picture of AIS here in Arizona. It's relatively young: we had our bachelor's degree approved in 2001. Currently we have sixty-four majors and average about two hundred students that register for our courses each semester. Some of the students that have graduated from our program go on to graduate school in law, social work, and other American Indian studies graduate programs. Other students have sought employment in state, federal, and tribal government. Within the past two years we have grown at an amazing rate and are in the process of pursuing a graduate certificate in American Indian studies. Our long-range plan is to offer a master's and Ph.D.-level program. [End Page 194]

The idea of developing an Indian studies program has been an ongoing discussion for the past forty years. It seems to take a long time to get these types of programs off the ground. We were able to get the program really moving beginning in the early 1990s. Maybe the most important factor in doing that was having a dedicated faculty. Second in importance was tribal support. We also had support within the administration, which is crucial. We now have a new president and an entrepreneurial model in which a premium is placed on bringing money in through grants and enrollments as much as through research and scholarship.

The future challenge I see for all American Indian studies programs is to develop national accreditation. I was very happy to witness the passage of the constitution of the American Indian Studies Consortium yesterday. That was actually a historic moment. And that consortium will be invaluable for setting up standards in curriculum in AIS. For instance, after Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's talk, someone asked about a book written by a non-Indian, and I think that's one of the challenges this consortium should take up. We should be giving our stamp of approval for works that are indigenous-based books by indigenous scholars and that do not infringe on the intellectual property rights of indigenous peoples.

Another challenge that I think is important, and that David Wilkins mentioned yesterday, is this tribal college or university research concept. I think it's important to develop strong connections with the tribal colleges that are out there. That's a great challenge for all of our Indian studies programs as well as for the consortium.

In conclusion, I'm pleased to be here and among people who are interested in the cause and survival of Native nations.

Octaviana Trujillo

I would like to give honor, tribute, and recognition to the traditional owners of the place where we are today. I want to begin by telling a little bit about why I'm at Northern Arizona University working with the Department of Applied Indigenous Studies. My area of work and research has been Native American language, literacy, and policy. When I completed my degree, I joined the faculty at the University of Arizona's Department of Language, Reading, and Culture. I was also affiliated with the American Indian studies faculty there. It was my first year as an untenured professor, and I was really enjoying my work with students. I got a call in February of 1992 from members in my community about why I should consider running for the tribal council seat. I had done a lot of work in the Yaqui communities here in the Phoenix area and in Tucson. I thought it was very nice of them to consider me a person that should serve on the Pascua Yaqui tribal council, but I kept [End Page 195] saying, "I'll think about it, thank you, but I don't think it's possible right now." I finally got a call from my mother and she too asked that I should consider helping the community. I was rather shocked she would call me at work, since she didn't like to use the phone. I thought something was terribly wrong. She too wanted me to consider this very seriously since the elders had also come to her. I finally said that I couldn't do this, to which she said, "Stop thinking about it; just do it." And I did. I went out to the community, filled out all the necessary paperwork, and I thought, "Well, I'll go through the motions, since they're not going to elect a woman, a so-called educated woman, someone with strong positions with regard to our community development." Lo and behold, I was elected, and I decided that this was a great honor after all, and that I was ready to leave my tenure-track faculty position to answer a community that was calling me to serve.

I was very lucky because the university also thought that this was a great honor and certainly in line with their position of being a land-grant institution in the state of Arizona, and so they allowed me to remain a member of their faculty on a reduced contract. I spent most of my time on the Pascua Yaqui Reservation dealing with major issues I never imagined being confronted with. I think my stinkiest job was that we did not have any money to pay the city of Tucson for the landfill fees. And so our garbage truck could no longer take our garbage away. The more I looked into our finances, the more nervous I got. Here I had been trained to study and work in the field of language, literacy, and education, and my new post forced me to become a generalist. I had to learn about the Indian Health Service, policy issues, service, and the practical side of meeting health needs of Yaqui people, and about dealing with the Environmental Protection Agency, because fellow council-men had reported a leaky gasoline tank to the EPA. And so I had to deal with that, even though we had no funds to fix that tank.

At that time I had the privilege of working with tremendous tribal leaders in the state of Arizona, debating and coming to hard decisions about Class III gaming. I along with others—Rodney Lupe, Clinton Pattea, Josiah Moore—we spent many evenings and weekends talking about how and why we were going to do this. And so we're among the first tribal leaders to develop gaming compacts with the state of Arizona and battled with Governor Symington at that time to force him to come to the table to negotiate tribal Indian gaming compacts.

When I was invited to consider joining the faculty at Northern Arizona University, and they shared their vision for the preparation of their students and with all the talk about nation building—I had been there, I had seen how much we need our very own to come back and really truly do nation building. Students must have good skills, not just the theoretical: How can they translate and apply those important theoretical, knowledge-based materials to what we need today in Indian [End Page 196] Country? That is what we are doing at Northern Arizona University in our applied Indigenous studies degree program. Our department's areas of academic focus include environmental sciences, economic development, policy administration, and now we've developed extended majors that address traditional knowledge and cultural-resource management. Our faculty has developed and addressed curriculum identified by tribal leaders as important—to help us accomplish our goals in our urban communities as well as on the reservations.