Editors' Commentary

This issue is about colonization-decolonization. Within the past decade, American Indian studies, Native American studies, or indigenous nations studies scholars, along with scholars in related fields, have engaged in new and stimulating research that critically examines matters of colonization and decolonization. This issue brings together a rich collection of research in such areas, deepening our understanding of Indian experiences.

It cannot be denied that the thrust of European expansionism, aimed at acquiring lands, resources, and labor belonging to others, dramatically altered the lifeways, sovereignty, populations, governments, landholdings, and spirituality of tens of millions of peoples who lived in hundreds of distinctive cultural and political groupings. This imperialism consciously sacrificed the human and property rights of indigenous peoples while elevating the colonizers to a status of privilege. The disciplines of history, anthropology, archaeology, and education, to name a few, usually served the interests of imperialism by presenting Indians as culturally deficient and as intellectually inferior barriers to progress. Policies rooted in injustice, racism, oppression, coercive assimilation, and confinement on reservations became acceptable ways for the colonizers to handle the "Indian problem." Non-Native scholars in the academy often drew on and reinforced these political practices. Yet, many Indian nations, although certainly not all, survived the land losses, forced removals, epidemics, warfare, coercive assimilation programs, and neglect.

The strength of the spirit and the ingenuity of indigenous peoples to preserve themselves was simply too strong for the colonizers to squash. We have been involved since contact in a series of movements to defend our sovereignty, lands, burial rights, and religious freedom. That resistance, perhaps, has rarely been stronger or more urgent than it is today.

Native scholars, survivors of genocide, have become increasingly important voices in the reconstruction of the indigenous past, in analyzing the present, and in imagining the future. We are participating in a renaissance of ideas about how we may use scholarship for the purposes of decolonization. "Decolonization," of course, means different things to different people. For me, it means that surviving genocide and ethnocide has strengthened the will of Indians to preserve and thrive in a rapidly changing and often hostile world by taking refuge within an indigenous cultural framework rooted in customary values, beliefs, technologies, and lifestyles. It denotes that we must use existing technologies, ideas, and modes of doing things to liberate our minds, bodies, and spirits from the residual effects of colonization.

Since1985, Wicazo Sa Review has been a leading force in this movement. It has been a significant journal where scholars, both Native and non-Native, publish informative, critical, and cutting-edge research important to American Indian, Native American, or indigenous nations studies departments and to Native peoples. The founding editors, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Bea Medicine, Roger Buffalohead, and William Willard, created the journal in part because the gatekeepers of academia held such powerful sway over the publication of manuscripts with Indian subject matter that few indigenous scholars could find a friendly outlet for their scholarship. Now, with the editorial responsibilities of Wicazo Sa Review entrusted to me, it is my commitment to the founding editors, the readership, and American Indian studies to maintain the richness of this journal and its mission to serve as an important venue for American Indians to take possession of our own intellectual and creative endeavors, thereby defining the parameters of research that are important to our discipline.

Carol Chiago Lujan and Gordon Adams follow this tradition by addressing how the colonization of Indian nations through law and policy subjected indigenous peoples to an alien form of dispute resolution that did not match customary styles. Indigenous modes of justice, they point out, emphasized the restoration of balance and harmony, not punishment as in the Western mode of justice. Despite those disruptions, the authors stress that Indian nations, including the Diné, are returning to customary means of dispute resolution to resolve issues of deviant behavior and conflict within their communities.

Donald Grinde takes us to the world of boarding schools during the late 1800s. During colonial times, non-Indians viewed Indian systems of education, which emphasized that Indians are part of nature, as inferior and lacking in...