Keynote Address

Good morning. I greet you on behalf of my people, the Lumbee, my clan, and my wife and children. I was flattered when I was invited to join you folks to discuss these important matters last fall, and I readily agreed. Since this is my first time participating in this, your fifth annual conference, I am not really up on what has previously transpired, although I understand that one of the principal reasons for this year's gathering is to draft a set of by-laws and to formally organize an American Indian studies consortium that might lead to the development of an organization that will help establish and accredit Indian studies programs. A laudable and difficult set of goals, to be sure.

I initially thought this conference was part of or somehow connected to the Native professoriate that also began here back in the early 1990s. I attended that gathering the first few times it met, although I eventually became terribly disillusioned and frustrated when I failed to see that body express any real interest, much less action—save for the ethnic fraud issue—in engaging the many other powerful and surging, controversial and debilitating topics confronting Native nations and their citizens, both within and without the academy. Several colleagues and I tried on several occasions to initiate such focused activism but were informed by the organization's leadership that that really wasn't the professoriate's thrust. We were told it was really an opportunity for Native academics, graduate students, and their allies to meet, chat, socialize, and network. I've not returned to it since the mid-1990s.

So, I was quite relieved when Carol Lujan assured me that this body was a separate entity altogether. When I received a copy of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's provocative essay "Who Stole Native American Studies?"¹ which established the ideological framework for this meeting, this just made me want to attend with even more urgency. In 1970, when the first American Indian Scholars meeting took place in Princeton, New Jersey, I was still in high school. But during my freshman year of college in 1972, when I read Vine Deloria's Custer Died for Your Sins for the first time, I was reminded of the beauty, the humor, the inherent strengths, and the vitality of our nations. At the same time I saw Deloria tweaking the noses of major segments and particular institutions in American society. It prompted in me a deeper search for my own people's seemingly convoluted history and a desire to learn more about other First Nations cultures, governments, and rights vis-à-vis the United States and its separate states. It also inspired me to engage in what Elizabeth Cook-Lynn refers to as the "defense of indigenous nationhood in America." Although at the time I did not know what the words "indigenous" or "nationhood" meant!

In the years since that transformative period, I have thought, acted upon, researched, and written on tribal sovereignty and self-determination, intergovernmental relations, critical legal theory, and comparative indigenous peoples. I have long been interested in how the Ameri-can states and the federal government, international states and NGO's, and the various political actors and social, economic, geographical, and cultural forces active in those polities and corporations have set about defining themselves and how their understanding of their own identity has impacted Native peoples. Much of my early research, therefore, focused on how the states and the federal government sought to define who we are; how and why the United States set about creating what became the formal government of the Navajo nation; how and why the Supreme Court arrived at many of its most egregious and occasionally supportive rulings and doctrines that have both diminished and affirmed First Nations' rights; how those rulings have affected our essential lands, powers of governance, cultural identities, and so on. And I have had the good fortune of coauthoring a book with Vine Deloria Jr. on how and why the U.S. Constitution and its amendments still are largely inapplicable to tribal peoples who reside in Indian country, despite two centuries of coercive...