More Light Than Heat: The Current State of Native American Studies

On a cold November Sunday in 1786, Francis Asbury preached in Maryland. Describing his sermon and the church in which he had delivered it, the great Methodist bishop and circuit rider wrote laconically in his journal, "I preached at Cambridge, on 'We preach Christ crucified,' &c; little light, and less heat."¹

When Amanda Cobb asked me, as a new member on the American Indian Quarterly (AIQ) editorial board, to contribute a "state-of-the-field" piece to this first issue under her editorship, Asbury's words, which I first read two decades ago (two hundred years to the day after he penned them), leapt to mind. Such assessments, it seems to me, are most often bland laundry lists, insider baseball that says little to anyone not intimately involved (and little enough even to them). When they attempt more, when they attempt to say something more substantive, they usually come off as cranky—rants that provide more heat than light. Nevertheless, I agreed, albeit with a good deal of internal reluctance. In what follows, I shall try to steer clear of the pitfalls on either side. I want to mention some recent work that I value and use, without becoming a kind of academic costermonger cataloguing all the produce for sale in the shop. At the same time, I will try to suggest some substantive things, while not falling prey to mere rant.

Obviously, I write from my position as a professor of Native American studies (NAS) and a director of a relatively new program in the field. I also write as a Native person. And I write with affection, as someone who loves NAS. Because I write out of that love, I may also express a few uncomfortable truths, to which some will no doubt object—not because they are untrue but simply because the objectors perceive that in Indian circles they are politically incorrect.

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a founding doyenne of NAS, has been in the forefront of those scholars who maintain that NAS is a separate academic discipline, a position she staked out famously in her 1997 Wicazo Sa Review essay "Who Stole Native American Studies?" and in her keynote address at the conference "Translating Native American Cultures," which I organized at Yale in 1998 (published in Wicazo Sa Review and reprinted in Cook-Lynn's volume Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya's Earth). In the first of these, she writes,

The potential for the development of the discipline of Native American Studies in American universities has not been nurtured in appropriate ways nor has it been actualized since its inception in the way that other epistemologies have been, feminism, for example, or Black Studies, which has produced major African-American intellectuals speaking out on all manner of national issues.²

Unpacking this statement, Robert Warrior and I wrote, "The reason for this failure, she argues, is not the lack of 'disciplinary mechanisms,' but a concern for where Native American studies 'fits in' within the institutional structures of the academy."³

To be sure, not everyone agrees that NAS is a separate discipline. Robert Warrior is "more intrigued by the model provided by various 'area studies,' such as East Asian Studies or Latin American Studies, and their programmatic flexibility." Warrior and I have written, "Each position has things that recommend it and those that do not, and perhaps the most important point to be made is that a wide variety of points of view now exist in Native Studies, and one of our present challenges is to find more effective ways of articulating and promulgating those perspectives."⁴ AIQ and our other journals can and should take a lead role in this process.⁵

I agree with Cook-Lynn. One of the first things I did at the University of Georgia was to initiate a series of ongoing seminars for my faculty and our graduate students to talk about the work of Cook-Lynn, Vine Deloria Jr., and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, for instance, but also to discuss our own ongoing work, whether it be my own...