From the Editor

We begin volume 33 with some changes to our editorial team, which I will take a moment to outline. First, I would like to thank our outgoing book review editor, Jay Vest, for his years of service to American Indian Quarterly. Jay has devoted many hours to AIQ, and we appreciate his dedication and commitment to the journal and to the field of American Indian studies.

At the same time I would like to welcome Lloyd Lee, our incoming book review editor, to the AIQ staff. Lloyd, a visiting assistant professor of Native American studies at the University of New Mexico, has already proven himself to be an asset to our work.

I would like to thank Alison Fields for her years of excellent work by announcing her promotion to managing editor. Alison deserves much credit for keeping the nuts and bolts of our operation running smoothly.

As always, I thank our editorial board, contributors, peer reviewers, and readers, all of whom play a significant role in the continued success of American Indian Quarterly.

Finally, I have news of my own to share. As many of you know, I took a leave of absence from UNM almost two years ago to accept a position at the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. I serve as the administrator of the Division of History and Culture. In this role I oversee our museums, libraries, archaeological collections, and language program as well as the Chickasaw Cultural Center (which is currently under construction in Sulphur, Oklahoma) and the Chickasaw Press. The Chickasaw Press, which is the first tribal publishing house of its kind, was recently honored by the Harvard Honoring Nations Program as an outstanding example of tribal governance. In addition, I hold an appointment as an associate professor of English at Oklahoma State University. Oklahoma State will serve as the new home for AIQ.

In many ways my work at the Chickasaw Nation could not be more different from my work as a professor at UNM. At the same time, however, it is a direct extension of my work as an American Indian studies professor and wholly inseparable from my work as a scholar. The last two years have been the most time-consuming, most challenging, and most satisfying work of my career to date. At the Chickasaw Nation I am asked to make decisions every day—decisions about which language revitalization program will benefit us the most, what the content of our museum exhibits will be, how we will handle sensitive archaeological issues, what we will publish or not publish, and how we can best allocate our economic resources. As a "decision maker" I am more theoretically engaged in issues in American Indian studies than I have perhaps ever been, and I am more conscious of the on-the-ground complexity of those issues than ever before. Nothing is easy.

Having said that, the possibilities for connections between Native American studies and Native communities are wide open and extremely exciting. Although I have much more to say about these possibilities, and I will say it at a later date, I will close this section of my introduction with a call to scholars in Native studies to do research that is more than merely relevant to Native communities. At our most reflective, our most creative, our most responsible, what are we, as scholars, capable of? All ideas are welcome.

This issue begins with an excellent "state-of-the-field" piece by senior scholar Clara Sue Kidwell (Choctaw/Chippewa), "American Indian Studies: Intellectual Navel Gazing or Academic Discipline?" In it Kidwell reflects on the history of the discipline as a product of political forces at the national and tribal levels. By outlining political trends in the academy and their relationship to major trends in scholarship over time, Kidwell is able to identify a set of basic premises that, taken together, form the basis of American Indian studies as we currently know and understand it.

In the second essay, "Contemporary American Indian Studies," Sidner Larson argues that we have been overdependent on the legal system as a way to address the major issues impacting Native Nations. Larsen asks us to consider...