So Long

During one of the telephone conversations we used to have, Uncle Vine admonished me to tackle federal Indian law from my perspective, so I did. In "Making Sense of Federal Indian Law" (Wicazo Sa Review 20, no. 1 [Spring 2005]: 9–21), I began by citing his caution about the legal system and other things, such as Indian-run gaming. I was reminded of this when I recently read about the billion-dollar divide between Connecticut's Indians, where the residents of the run-down Eastern Pequot reservation can look up and see a glow in the sky from the massive Foxwoods Resort Casino, where the neighboring Mashantucket Pequot Indians—separated from the Easterns by a 1638 treaty, a short stretch of road, and an enormous difference in good fortune—pull in more than $800 million a year on slots alone. Unfortunately, within the last 18 months, the Eastern Pequots and three other would-be casino tribes have seen their bids for federal recognition rejected.

Such division, to Vine Deloria Jr., represented the worst kind of evil, and he was not shy about saying so. At the same time, as others have noted, he was able to offer criticism in a way that caused people not only to listen but often to laugh in good-natured acceptance. As tribal people work to reconstruct their worlds, such a voice was and is crucial, and it will be an even greater challenge to address the issues before us without it. Law, business, science, and education were disciplines over which Vine ranged freely, recognizing that they all meddled in Indian affairs and were destined to play a part in a common American Indian destiny. Although it appears Indian gaming will play a large role in the evolution of the present presidential administration, and may even bring it to a halt, education was the last subject he and I discussed, and it was our most frequent topic.

Although he always said these things much better, in part because of his trademark saltiness, I remember some of our topics of conversation, in part because I was always interested in his take on how to understand and what to do. For example, at present, American Indian studies exists in various incarnations located somewhere between ongoing colonial suppression of tribal colleges (their most logical home) and the fragmentation imposed by mainstream university departments who often "host" them. AIS is also often not well defined in terms of form or content, which is probably common to any emerging discipline, but there are other areas of concern as well.

One is the mainstream university preference for putative American Indian academics who, in too many cases, have only tenuous connections to both American Indian studies and Indian people. Another problem is the common mainstream university policy of the "joint appointment," where, although hired as American Indian studies specialists, faculty members are forced to belong to a "home department," often anthropology, English, or religious studies. These arrangements are an atrocity almost always resulting in an impossible situation for those who attempt to focus on the American Indian side of their appointment.

Suppression of tribal colleges is administered by the infamous bureaucracy of the federal government, an entity that acts like an alcoholic parent: the tease of funding, the broken promises, the reinforcement of negative self-identity, and the constant destabilization are all part of the burden of survival for educational institutions in tribal communities. Practically everybody knows about the "glass ceiling" as applied to the Other (usually women) in the business world; however, the idea can be extended to the academic world, where, although the appearance of liberty and justice for all is important, they are anathema in actual practice.

For example, although it is clear the underlying problem is enforced poverty, conservative policymakers have instead attacked teachers as incompetent and lazy. These policymakers, few of whom are trained in education, have initiated programs such as No Child Left Behind and the less obvious requirements that schools add daycare and food-service work to the work of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. The result of this withholding of resources is an overextension of...