In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith speaks eloquently of this generation’s reach for indigenous research projects that reflect “a shift... between being reviewed as research objects and... becoming our own researchers.” 1 Our intervention into American studies as a field should come as no surprise. The “Americas” did not exist prior to those Indigenous peoples who are its millennial civilizations, and Canada, the United States, Mexico, and other nations in the hemisphere do not exist today without our presence and our interventions. We remain vital living societies perpetually locked into discursive and material struggle. To paraphrase Anthony Appiah on the inextricably intertwined state of the colonized with the colonial, the Americas and Indigenous knowledges become mutually unintelligible without the full record of what has happened here. Native societies are often characterized as colonized, but that colonization challenges our generation of Indigenous writers to specify its content as it changes and morphs. I prefer to speak of hegemony. Hegemony is not prior to, but is a result of the process that seeks to reconcile the agon, all the divergent elements present when different claims are constituted as “truth.” American studies then, is a field where divergent elements contest and constitute differently positioned “truths.” American studies is a mutually wrought field of action that should recognize how each account, particularly those that have been silenced make the other. The inclusion of our gendered Native interventions may reconstitute what questions might be considered legitimate in such a field of study. This is the potential of what we are doing. Beverly TallBear makes the point that the problem with “discourses of conquest” is that they cannot be simply exposed as “false” and its associated policies and conversations “corrected,” since they also form the basis for resistance and the claiming of rights. TallBear understands that colonial discourses are the complex outcomes of negotiations where any one strand (position in the