From Sovereignty to Minority: As American as Apple Pie

I find myself in an unusual situation, having just recently been denied reappointment as director of the American Indian Studies Center at UCLA. Certainly, that experience motivated the editor, Lee Francis, to call and ask me to write a personal story about my experiences with American Indian studies in general, but, more specifically, to write about the recent trend toward submerging American Indian studies into ethnic studies programs, or sometimes anthropology departments, American studies or other units or departments. To be sure, in many cases, the drive to fold American Indian studies into ethnic studies is generated by organizational or financial concerns. Nevertheless, the easy, or apparently natural, placement of Native studies into ethnic studies, or other interdisciplinary arrangements, submerges the study of indigenous peoples into mainstream academic orientations and understandings. Most universities manage relations with Native peoples as if they are minorities and group them with ethnic studies for administrative purposes.

Universities and colleges are state or private institutions and do not honor treaties and laws upholding Native rights, which is largely a federal government obligation. According to treaties and federal Indian law, many Native peoples have rights to land, resources, self-government, and the practice of their religions and cultures.¹ Ethnic groups in the United States do not have similar rights. Most have stories of traveling from their old countries and settling in the United States to make a new life within a new country. Immigrant ethnic groups do not make claims to territory or have treaty rights or self-government but rather work within American law and adopt a new country. Native tribal members have not given up their rights to land, self-government, or citizenship within their Native nations. Since an Act of Congress in 1924, Natives have dual citizenship, as members of their Native communities and as U.S. citizens. While the federal government recognizes a government-to-government relation with more than 560 Native nations, U.S. policy has focused on assimilating Native people and transforming them into an ethnic group. For most Native communities, this transformation is far from complete. Nevertheless, in contemporary America, very few people in the general public, or in academia, understand the political and legal status of Native Americans, and therefore the ethnic minority classification is easiest and makes sense to most people. University and college administrators often do not have knowledge or understanding of Native issues, and therefore there is a strong tendency to manage Native students and programs just like all other minority or ethnic programs are managed.

For many of us who work in Native studies, this effort to treat Native studies as another ethnic studies program has often been disorienting. Native studies issues do not coincide with many of the issues and perspectives expressed in ethnic studies curriculum, research, or writings. One could make an argument that the massive migration of Native peoples from rural reservations since 1940 to urban areas constitutes a process similar to that encountered by minority and ethnic groups, and that similar issues could be analyzed. There is some validity to this position since in the last census about 70 percent of Native people live in urban areas, and there is a very large group of people with Native and other racial ancestry. Many Native people, those without direct contact with a Native community, may have life experiences that are very akin to ethnic and minority groups. Nevertheless, Native peoples who live and identify within their ancestral communities do not see themselves as racial, ethnic, or minority groups in the general American sense of those terms. Native peoples who live in or have ties to their traditional communities see themselves as part of long-standing communities or nations with rights to self-government, land, and resources that predate the U.S. constitution and are granted by the Creator. Native peoples, even urban Indians, do not form an ethnic group but are members of nations recognized by the United...