We Have Always Been Here: Indigenous Scholars in/and Eighteenth-Century Studies

Outlining my own experience as a modern American Indian in academia, in this essay I reveal the ways that my Choctaw heritage and identity have been outlawed, and discouraged by social expectations and racist stereotypes. Part manifesto, part personal narrative, I highlight needed changes in decolonizing scholarly research, publishing practices, and pedagogy, and I call on the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) to make changes that illustrate true commitment to diversity initiatives which centre Native American and Indigenous Peoples’ (NAIP) voices, experiences, and knowledge. My ancestry, connected to Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears, centres as a catalyst to my call for an overthrowing of academic complicity with settler colonialism.