Decolonization Matters: Featured Review Essay
Americans love the land as they love western "things." And they love Indian "things." But, they've never understood the "west" and the land. And, they've never thought much of Indians.
—Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (1990)
Many scholars who write the "New Indian History" . . . are doing nothing new and different. Where are the Indian voices? Where are Indian views of history?
—Devon Abbott Mihesuah (1998)
We must challenge the way people think about history, themselves, and the way they think about us. This intellectual battle . . . is the most important battle we will ever face.
—Taiaiake Alfred (2000)
Introduction: Looking Back from the Headwaters of an Indigenized Academy
As Elizabeth Cook-Lynn intimates for the stories Americans tell themselves generally, so American Indian written history tends to romanticize "Indians" and claim our distinctive histories as something singular, following a common trajectory, and as something the settler-colonizer owns and controls.1 Looking back at historiography through the recent works of Waziyatawin Angela Wilson as a point of departure to think [End Page 101] about its futures, three turning points are evident: the racialization of original peoples as savage, foolish "Indians" urgently requiring "white man" (or American) influences; the advent of ethnohistory, the "new Indian history";2 and the decolonization of academic history through efforts to bring the new Indian history into conversation with the sophisticated interdisciplines of original peoples.3 As I am insinuating, and as others such as Devon Abbot Mihesuah and Taiaiake Alfred have compellingly suggested before, the problem that dominant historiography poses for original peoples is neither history (finally behind us) nor apolitical.4 Rather, contemporary historiography is still in 2007 deeply rooted in the residue of colonization and racism, despite the encouraging influences of ethnohistory over the last half century and notwithstanding the centuries-long efforts of indigenous interdisciplinarians. Because it is incorrect when whole peoples' perspectives are dismissed simply because they are grounded in their own languages, there is hope for the futures of academic history in its practice among a new generation of indigenous interdisciplinarians.
Emerging from Euro-American historiographical tradition with James Adair's speculations in 1775 about the racial origins of "Indians," racializing original peoples and then calling them "Indians" long has been the prevailing practice in academic history.5 As is suggested by the use of the racist designation "merciless Indian savages" in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, academic history at its origins in the United States functioned as an ideological adjunct (a sympathetic companion) to the cultural, economic, and political colonization of original peoples. Rather than engage in an exercise of exchanging languages and ideas with the peoples whose histories it claimed to objectively record, academic history fortified colonial rule.6 It naturalized the ideological fabrication of linked subgroups (tribes) into an inferior race named "Indians." Thus represented as cantankerous and intellectually unsophisticated "Indians" forever trapped in adjustments and struggles, original peoples themselves had no autonomous role as intellectual partners in the academic cocreation of historical consciousness.7
At one time dominant, the long American tradition of racializing "Indians" as savage and primitive, thankfully, has been displaced (but not altogether replaced) by a newer dominant paradigm, ethnohistory or the "new Indian history."8 At the headwaters of the ethnohistorical movement fifty years ago, there was no great distance between the once-dominant racial and nascent cultural paradigms.9 Laboring exclusively from dominant historiographical traditions that named original peoples interchangeably "historic Indians" and "primitive peoples," academic historians continued the tradition of crafting an "Indian" history that unfolded at points where relationships with whites stimulated conflict or influenced cultural change.10 [End Page 102]
The emergence forty years ago of American Indian Studies (not, as William Hagan has reported, the rise of ethnohistory) stripped academic history of its exclusive rights...
