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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [First Page] [143], (1) Lines: 0 to 45 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [143], (1) 8. should american indian history remain a field of study? Devon Abbott Mihesuah Why do we write American Indian history? What is the point of attempting to reconstruct the past? Historians usually say they study and write Native history because they are curious about long-ago happenings . Something—a specific event, a person, a chain of happenings— has caught their interest. Perhaps they are interested in their ancestors, human nature, or discovering stories of those who are often ignored in U.S. history texts. These are among the reasons I entered graduate school in 1984. Thousands of books and essays have been written about Native peoples and Indigenous-white relations, so obviously, there is a great deal of interest in historic Natives among scholars and readers. However, there is a great deal of difference between historians who are concerned about present-day realities Natives face and historians—both non-Native and Native—who pursue their armchair interests while vehemently supporting academic freedom and claiming to be inclusive in their writings, yet simultaneously appearing to have no concern for the people they write about. Most humanities scholars argue that acquiring knowledge of the world’s cultures and their histories is important to understanding ourselves and is the mark of an educated person. Even many individuals who are not formally educated watch National Geographic Explorer, The Discovery Channel, or read Biography because they are curious about humanity. While curiosity about Others is not a problem in itself, it becomes a moral problem when scholars write colonialist histories about Others for distribution only among themselves in the ivory tower and only for their benefit. Grants, fellowships, and awards have been bestowed upon hundreds of historians who write about Natives,and there is no question that many 144 devon abbott mihesuah 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [144], (2) Lines: 45 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal P PgEnds: T [144], (2) historians of “Indian history” have prospered from creating versions of the past. Contrary to the lifestyles of historians in academia, conditions for many Natives remain stark. Standing Rock Sioux Vine Deloria Jr. stated in 1991 that “We need to eliminate useless or repetitive research and focus on actual community needs; it is both unethical and wasteful to plow familiar ground continually.”1 Indeed, poverty, racism, disease, frustration, and depression are common throughout many tribal nations . How many works of history actually analyze the perpetrators of colonialism in an attempt to ascertain how we have arrived at this point? How many history books and essays have tried to find solutions to these problems? What can we say is the usefulness of all these history books that focus on Natives? If essays are going to continue to be reprinted in anthologies, then why can’t we see more collections of papers devoted to the historical reasons why Natives are in their current situations, in addition to proposed solutions to the problems? Ironically, many of the “powerhouse”scholars have never met an Indian or visited tribal lands,illustrating the actuality that“highly educated”people can simultaneously be insulated from many of the realities of life. As a historian who has read hundreds of history works in my eighteen years of seriously studying “Indian history,” and who also knows quite a few historians, I can think of only a few non-Native or Native historians who study past events truly with tribes’ benefits in mind. Native intellectual activists and our non-Native allies are growing in number, and most of us are concerned about this issue, much to the discomfort of established historians who have maintained their power base in Native history and in Native studies as a whole. Indigenous intellectuals are also becoming increasingly vocal in their objections to the way their ancestors have been portrayed or ignored in works of history and how those images and absences in stories about this country’s past translate in the present. We are impatient with scholars who...

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