“God Made Me an Indian”: Who Made Native Studies?

Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country? God made me an Indian.

Tatanka Iyotake

This article examines the first dissertation written about the significant role that Native studies scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has played in the development of Native studies. The dissertation, Reading Cook-Lynn: Anti-Colonialism, Cultural Resistance, and Native Empowerment, by Kodjo Ruben Afagla, identifies the initial challenges that Native studies has faced in its development as a discipline. The leading challenge, of course, is Native Country’s relationship to mainstream Native studies: Native communities, who comprise Native Country, should be the primary constituency and beneficiary of the discipline’s research. Afagla’s work explores Cook-Lynn’s influence on how Native studies is addressing—or, in Cook-Lynn’s view, fallen short of addressing—this challenge.

Afagla explains that in the mid- 1980s Cook-Lynn established herself as a leading Native studies spokesperson. Her consistent call to Native studies has been that, without a sharp focus, the discipline would become fuzzy and uncritical; it would not step up to the original tasks before it: decolonization, nation- building, defense of Native peoples, and cultural revitalization. Arguably, disciplinary fuzziness over the decades has given rise to a claim that Native studies is for everyone—that Native peoples hold no special relation to the discipline and therefore that Native communities can neither hold the discipline accountable nor provide its intellectual center. For Native studies to serve Native peoples, disciplinary coherency remains a primary challenge.

Afagla admires Cook-Lynn’s work, but he nonetheless critiques her unwavering position that any Native scholar or Native studies scholar who fails to confront U.S. colonization within our respective Native nations is at best marginal to the discipline, if not to Native peoples. According to Afagla, this position has alienated both Native and non- Native intellectuals whose research is not centered on confronting colonization or whose work is not derivative from this aim, i.e., does not promote meaningful Native sovereignty. Afagla’s concern is that Cook-Lynn’s approach could stunt Native studies, particularly its disciplinary development.

This article considers this and another of Afagla’s leading critiques: Does Cook-Lynn’s uncompromising stance about how Native studies scholars expend their intellectual energies help or hurt the discipline? Does her singular focus adversely affect the discipline? I argue it does not; it sharpens Native studies’ intellectual edge. The critical focus she advocates is necessary for Native studies to address topics essential to Native Country’s development from the foundation of being sovereign nations.

I also emphasize how groundbreaking Afagla’s work is on Native studies. Approaching its fiftieth anniversary, Native studies now has an opportunity to self- reflect, to assess its contribution to Native Country, and to rethink its disciplinary evolution and revolution since 1969. This article engages an important dialogue about the first fifty years of Native studies as a discipline and considers how and where Native studies might best focus its intellectual capacities over the next fifty years. After all, Native Country, sans USA, will look much different than it does today.

NATIVE STUDIES’ ORIGIN STORY

In 2019 Native studies as a mainstream discipline will, as I said, celebrate its fiftieth year. From its inception, Native studies has experienced programmatic growth.¹ The first Native studies departments were established at both Trent University and the University of Minnesota in 1969; today, several dozen programs offer baccalaureate degrees. Programs that have department status, such as the University of Manitoba and the University of Arizona, offer a doctorate in Native studies. Of course, Native intellectuals and Native studies scholars who understand the discipline’s evolution in academe know that whatever gains Native studies have made have been both challenging and challenged.

Leading up to Native studies’ entry into the academy—from the mid- 1950s to the early 1970s—sociopolitical activism increased throughout the United States. For example, Native Country successfully defended...