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The American Indian Quarterly 27.1&2 (2003) 177-188



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Indians Teaching about Indigenous

How and Why the Academy Discriminates

The "academy" of scholars in United States institutions of higher education generally do not like hearing about genocide in the Americas, especially if it implies or states that this country willingly participated in and benefited from genocidal policies. Well, that about sums up the primary problems that Native scholars have in writing about Indian nations or Indigenous peoples. Five hundred years of dancing around a central fact that European powers came to the Western Hemisphere, militarily and underhandedly "conquered" the peoples already living there, and then built their powerful "democratic" societies on "taken land" does not bode well for an Indigenous history.1 What I will do in this article is identify some of the major structures put into place to deny, revise, suppress, and subordinate American Indian scholars and their supporters when they tackle these difficult topics. I will use my own experience with discriminatory practices from academic institutions to illustrate the challenges faced by Indigenous faculty and graduate students.

My first experience with hegemonic practices under state control came when I was running a state's Department of Indian Education. A direct supervisor provided a flow chart that had reservation schools (including Bureau of Indian Affairs [bia] and tribal charter schools) under the authority of the Department of Public Instruction. When I pointed out the tribal sovereignty of a particular nation, senior administrators reprimanded me. Within a few weeks, they planned to remove me while I was still in "probationary" status, and so I filed internal complaints and, after I was released, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (eeoc) charges. What ensued were the longest personnel hearings on state record; the state attorney general personally entered the fray, appointing the solicitor [End Page 177] general of the state as prosecutor. During these contentious hearings, many attempts to intimidate me were instigated, including once when four large non-Indian men yelled epithets at me as I left the state offices, and another when the state-appointed hearing officer had state troopers remove me from the capitol meeting rooms, after they gag ordered both myself and my attorney.

I was offered a good position in a government education department at the outset of these conflicts, and the department never wavered when I entered into prolonged legal conflict (on and off for nearly two years). The background question was why my former employers were willing to throw such resources and deep systemic resistance at a relatively small conflict. Upon further reflection, I observed that the original organizational chart, and indeed the whole conflict, was really about demonstrating state power over tribal sovereignty on reservations. Actually, this was the only variable that explained the original actions, the participation of the state's senior legal and political administrators, and the protracted hearings. Two points could be drawn from this first experience with discrimination: first, that institutions would "test" Indian employees early on to see if they would bend to state authority; and second, that governments were deeply invested in combating true tribal sovereignty, extending from control over schools to legal fights. Both of these lessons would prove valuable in the years to come.

My experiences at the Department of Education at Standing Rock College in North Dakota and as a consultant trainer with a regional bilingual education resource center led me to consider a higher degree. I ended up working for a certificate of advanced studies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Here, too, I felt institutional resistance and discrimination, albeit much more covert. I had decided I wanted to get a PhD so that I could both research further into my dual interests, international and Indigenous issues, and teach about them and related areas as a tenured professor. I also had a pretty good idea what I wanted to write for my dissertation—on a concept I called "culturicide," which better explained much of the United States Indian policy in educational and social sectors. From my...

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