
Americans love the land as they love western "things." And they love Indian "things." But, they've never understood the "west" and the land. And, they've never thought much of Indians.
—Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (1990)
Many scholars who write the "New Indian History" . . . are doing nothing new and different. Where are the Indian voices? Where are Indian views of history?
—Devon Abbott Mihesuah (1998)
We must challenge the way people think about history, themselves, and the way they think about us. This intellectual battle . . . is the most important battle we will ever face.
—Taiaiake Alfred (2000)
Introduction: Looking Back from the Headwaters of an Indigenized Academy
As Elizabeth Cook-Lynn intimates for the stories Americans tell themselves generally, so American Indian written history tends to romanticize "Indians" and claim our distinctive histories as something singular, following a common trajectory, and as something the settler-colonizer owns and controls.1 Looking back at historiography through the recent works of Waziyatawin Angela Wilson as a point of departure to think [End Page 101] about its futures, three turning points are evident: the racialization of original peoples as savage, foolish "Indians" urgently requiring "white man" (or American) influences; the advent of ethnohistory, the "new Indian history";2 and the decolonization of academic history through efforts to bring the new Indian history into conversation with the sophisticated interdisciplines of original peoples.3 As I am insinuating, and as others such as Devon Abbot Mihesuah and Taiaiake Alfred have compellingly suggested before, the problem that dominant historiography poses for original peoples is neither history (finally behind us) nor apolitical.4 Rather, contemporary historiography is still in 2007 deeply rooted in the residue of colonization and racism, despite the encouraging influences of ethnohistory over the last half century and notwithstanding the centuries-long efforts of indigenous interdisciplinarians. Because it is incorrect when whole peoples' perspectives are dismissed simply because they are grounded in their own languages, there is hope for the futures of academic history in its practice among a new generation of indigenous interdisciplinarians.
Emerging from Euro-American historiographical tradition with James Adair's speculations in 1775 about the racial origins of "Indians," racializing original peoples and then calling them "Indians" long has been the prevailing practice in academic history.5 As is suggested by the use of the racist designation "merciless Indian savages" in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, academic history at its origins in the United States functioned as an ideological adjunct (a sympathetic companion) to the cultural, economic, and political colonization of original peoples. Rather than engage in an exercise of exchanging languages and ideas with the peoples whose histories it claimed to objectively record, academic history fortified colonial rule.6 It naturalized the ideological fabrication of linked subgroups (tribes) into an inferior race named "Indians." Thus represented as cantankerous and intellectually unsophisticated "Indians" forever trapped in adjustments and struggles, original peoples themselves had no autonomous role as intellectual partners in the academic cocreation of historical consciousness.7
At one time dominant, the long American tradition of racializing "Indians" as savage and primitive, thankfully, has been displaced (but not altogether replaced) by a newer dominant paradigm, ethnohistory or the "new Indian history."8 At the headwaters of the ethnohistorical movement fifty years ago, there was no great distance between the once-dominant racial and nascent cultural paradigms.9 Laboring exclusively from dominant historiographical traditions that named original peoples interchangeably "historic Indians" and "primitive peoples," academic historians continued the tradition of crafting an "Indian" history that unfolded at points where relationships with whites stimulated conflict or influenced cultural change.10 [End Page 102]
The emergence forty years ago of American Indian Studies (not, as William Hagan has reported, the rise of ethnohistory) stripped academic history of its exclusive rights to its one-sided "Indian" history.11 Intellectual work emerging out of American Indian Studies has challenged the dominant historiography that excluded indigenous interdisciplinarians as cocreators of historical knowledge. Thanks to Winona Wheeler, we know that decades before ethnohistorians debated the relevance and reliability of indigenous oral traditions, indigenous interdisciplinarians "were the first to articulate Indigenous understandings of the past, apply Indigenous historical methodologies, and transform their peoples' oral traditions into written texts."12 Yet, seven years into this century, academic history does not adequately account for the residue of first racializing and later culturalizing (or multiculturalizing) original peoples and altogether rejecting the intellectual power of indigenous interdisciplines. Thus, it still today has not ended the objectification of original peoples and instead wastefully plows familiar ground, as Vine Deloria Jr. characterized the broader problem in his enormously influential work.13
The tenacity of the problem is evident even in recent scholarship. Having decentered the embodied settler-colonizer and embraced "Indian" voices (always, of course, in English), dominant scholarship derives nonetheless from timeworn models.14 Peruse virtually any page of Houghton-Mifflin's 2006 textbook The People: A History of Native America, for instance, and you will find a history of "most Indian communities" that "does not tie a community to a single event or location," an "ethnohistorical approach" grounded in the ethnohistorical movement that ostensibly articulates "a Native American perspective on events," and a storytelling genre that joins the well-trodden paths pioneered by William Hagen in 1961 and Edward Spicer in 1969.15
Pioneers in New Lines of Defense, Warriors on the Offensive
Privileging "Indian" voices and perspectives is standard practice in historical scholarship, as the Houghton Mifflin textbook suggests. Perhaps because leading historians are content to repeatedly plow the same plot, or maybe because many academically based historians see their projects as creating believable narratives of the past, academic interlopers and tribally connected, academically trained indigenous scholars have challenged their practice (and, sometimes, their motives). Pushing the disciplinary constraints of academic history further to include the myriad ways of knowing and cumulative insights and skills of original peoples is led by indigenous interdisciplinarians. Armed with various degrees of fluency in their first languages, knowledge of their ceremonial cycles, and relationships with their sacred histories and extended families, a growing number of academically trained citizens of [End Page 103] indigenous nations have opened up and cultivated rich and provocative intellectual terrain that ought to be receiving far broader critical attention. Following in the footsteps of leading practitioners as different in their respective approaches and politics as Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Donald L. Fixico, it is this rising generation's efforts to challenge the hegemony of "American Indian" history that this review essay proposes to address.
There is no mistaking evidence that we are in the opening moments of a paradigm shift. Academically trained, culturally connected citizens of indigenous nations such as Waziyatawin Angela Wilson represent a generation of indigenous interdisciplinarians who use history in their interdisciplinary work.16 In the United States, university presses are shaping this shift by introducing new series such as Contemporary Indigenous Issues, Indigenous Futures (both from University of Nebraska Press), and Indigenous Americas (University of Minnesota Press). Thick anthologies of influential and representative essays soon will appear with empirical articles that are informed by and build on calls for change advanced in earlier works such as Natives and Academics and Indigenizing the Academy.17 While in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, the push to indigenize research methodologies is flourishing, ground-breaking manuscripts with titles like Wilson's Remember This! Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives are just now coming off presses in the United States, signifying that we are catching up with our global colleagues.18 Clearly, this is a force to be reckoned with. For academic history, new waves of sweeping innovations are on the horizon.
Looking Forward to an Indigenized Academy: Waziyatawin Angela Wilson
Mother, daughter, niece, granddaughter, and friend Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, whose intellectual work is the subject of this review essay, is a tenured associate professor in the Department of History at Arizona State University. An activist-scholar, she is an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe, a culturally connected citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (or the Seven Council Fires of the Dakota Oyate). Along with Remember This! Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives, her latest book projects include, with Michael Yellow Bird, For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook and In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors: The Dakota Commemorative Marches of the Twenty-First Century.19 Remember This! and In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors, the specific works with which I am concerned here, anchor Wilson as a leading decolonial thinker among a growing group of practitioners engaged in the practice of indigenizing historiography and the new Indian history. [End Page 104]
To indigenize academic history and the historiography of American Indian written history is not a simple matter of adding more Indians to the ranks of academically trained historians. Instead, in part, it is a critical matter of engaging the practitioners of the new Indian history for the purpose of decolonizing historical methodologies. It signifies a dramatic shift not just in who is represented among historians but also a major redistribution of what ideas inform historical methodologies. In This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy, Temagami First Nation citizen and Dartmouth University professor Dale Turner provides a useful frame for thinking about the sort of intervention in academic history with which Wilson is, and others before her have been, concerned.
A reconciliation must occur between "indigenous philosophers"—indigenous intellectuals who possess the privileged forms of indigenous knowledge—and what I call "word warriors," whose primary function is to engage the legal and political discourses of the state. . . . In terms of indigenous participation, it matters who participates in ongoing dialogues. . . . I contend that a community of indigenous intellectuals—word warriors—ought to assert and defend the integrity of indigenous rights and nationhood and protect indigenous ways of knowing within the existing legal and political practices of the dominant culture.20
Thus, as we move forward into the twenty-first century, indigenous interdisciplinarians continue demanding both self-representation in the academy, on our terms, and a radical redistribution of what counts as knowledge.
As measured by Remember This! and In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors, and as Turner intimates, indigenous interdisciplinarians also are concerned with more than adding to the storehouse of academic knowledge. In addition to joining indigenous interdisciplines in conversation with nonindigenous ways of knowing (in law and politics, for instance), indigenous interdisciplinarians may use academic theories and resources to facilitate conversation among original peoples, the sort of dialogue necessary for a critical mass to take political action—to decolonize—in ways grounded in their unique form of (for lack of better words) indigeneity or peoplehood.21 Regenerating academic history is not the sole reason to occupy academic spaces and demand redistributions of academic resources. For academically trained intellectuals, following the lead of practitioners such as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Devon Mihesuah, Wilson characterizes another purpose for the shared project this way: "As Indigenous scholars it is our responsibility to bring to our communities useful ways of thinking about [End Page 105] our experiences and co-creating a culture of resistance based both on the recovery of Indigenous knowledge and traditional means of resistance as well as the useful theoretical frameworks and language from outside of our cultures that can assist us in our struggle." Thus for Wilson, who unquestionably and unapologetically is concerned with the wellbeing of all original peoples but with her Dakota relatives in particular, research located in the restorative authority of indigenous interdisciplines has "a transformative power, not just for Dakota people or Indigenous Peoples in general, but also for the world."22 Of course, "the world," includes the historiography of American Indian written history.
The thirteen chapters in Remember This! are organized into two parts. Understood as both a challenge "to the profession and field that has successfully colonized our past" and "a return to Dakota teachings," chapters 1 through 3 examine the importance of the Dakota language to Dakota identity and history (understood as a product, a thing) and historical consciousness.23 In Wilson's hands, historical consciousness and methodology are indigenized (or, we might say, somewhat inelegantly, Dakota-ized); practicing "history" on Dakota terms, grounding it in Dakota interdisciplines, according to Wilson, is crucial to the contemporary and future wellbeing of Dakota peoples. Thus, the first three chapters of Remember This! meticulously assess the devastating traditions of academic "Indian" history, which from a Dakota perspective grounded in a Dakota historical consciousness and the Dakota language is destroyer rather than creator. Chapters 1 through 3 call for basing historical method in the interdisciplines of original (in this case, Dakota) peoples. Chapters 4 though 11, understood as an application of the method identified in the earlier chapters, detail one way—a Dakota way—of doing so.
Representing her Dakota cocreators of Remember This! as well as the wishes of her Dakota interlocutor and teacher Eli Taylor, Wilson explains in the introduction why the Taylor narratives "are so profoundly important" as a contribution to a growing body of Dakota-language texts, a global literature on indigenous decolonization, and "an academic but Indigenous-centered framework" (my emphasis).
In a local or microcontext, the stories of Eli Taylor are positioned to contribute to the Dakota recovery of our traditional knowledge, which we hope will spur new generations to carry on the struggle of resistance from a foundation of cultural strength. On a broader scale, decolonization concerns a simultaneous critical interrogation of the colonizing forces that have damaged our lives in profound ways, coupled with a return to those ways that nourished and sustained us as Indigenous Peoples for thousands [End Page 106] of years. As we engage in this difficult process, we disrupt the world of the colonizer as well.24
Said plainly, the Taylor narratives provide both the linguistic basis and intellectual authority for Dakota decolonization, while they simultaneously contribute to and engage with the widening of a critical consciousness among Dakota peoples necessary for engaging with institutions of settler-colonialism from positions of strength.
Wilson is at her finest in chapter 2, "Owotanna Wohdakapo (Tell It Straight)," where she addresses the problem of transferring indigenous oral traditions (in the languages of original peoples) to the academic written tradition (in English), a fundamental methodological dilemma.25 Citing works on oral history by David Henige, James LaGrande, William Moss, and Jan Vansina as misguided, she identifies specific shortcomings in academic techniques of collecting oral materials and interrogations of oral texts. She also suggests that methodological limitations imposed by academic disciplinarity (concerned with disciplining its practitioners), from a Dakota perspective, provoke alarming misunderstanding. Thus, she asks us to imagine what might happen if the unyielding boundaries of academic history were infused with a revitalizing elasticity that might achieve its social-justice potential. She asks academically trained historians to agree with her that there are legitimate indigenous sources of authority that police and validate the integrity of stories that constitute an oral tradition. She makes a case for examining indigenous histories by standards grounded in indigenous interdisciplines, rather than in an academic tradition that has yet to candidly consider its role in the colonization and oppression of original peoples. "As Indigenous Peoples," she writes, "we have our own theories about history, as well as our own interpretations and sense of history, in which our stories play a central role. . . . It is time the field acknowledges, values, and accepts as valid Indigenous conceptions of our past. Only then will there be an understanding of Indigenous history."26
After developing in chapters 1 through 3 her fundamental point that original peoples conceptualize, interpret, relate, and understand history differently than individuals trained only in the traditions of academic history and that they do so from authority grounded in language-based interdisciplines, in chapters 4 through 11 Wilson introduces a specific set of stories within the overarching oral tradition of Dakota peoples. Through these stories, she illustrates how oral tradition, language, historical consciousness, and contemporary Dakota identity are fundamentally linked and suggests that damage to any part amounts to mutilation of the whole: annihilating the language, for instance, amounts to destroying both historical consciousness and contemporary identity grounded in the oral tradition. Chapters 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 13 constitute a bilingual anthology in which she writes particular [End Page 107] stories in both Dakota and English (because, in their efforts to create "Indians," the settler-colonizer's government schools have widely replaced thinking in Dakota with thinking in English and because she hopes her English-only readers will engage her ideas on decolonizing academic history). Chapters 5, 7, 9, and 11 offer (in English) her commentary, as she terms it, on these stories.27
Chapters 10 and 11 may be the most compelling, particularly for thinking about ways of reading In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors as a continuation of Remember This! These two works ought to be read together because doing so illustrates how the academic exercise of indigenous history—an indigenized "new Indian history"—can empower living people. Although the three stories included in chapter 10 differ in content (one is concerned with the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862 and another with Dakota-language code talkers) as well as format and style, they are linked by their common concern with providing opportunities for Dakota people to develop an awareness of historical Dakota figures that has been denied by the settler-colonizer's schools and the historiography of American Indian written history. "Historical consciousness," Wilson argues from experience grounded in her community, "is very closely related to feelings of self-worth and pride and is greatly affected by historical interpretation."
A problem faced by many First Nations people is the discrepancy between how Indigenous history is interpreted in written texts, most often written by the colonizers and oppressors of Indigenous people, and how Indigenous history is interpreted within our oral traditions. This becomes even more obvious in accounts written about events in which direct conflict occurred between Indigenous people and whites. For the Eastern Dakota, this is nowhere more evident than in accounts surrounding the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862.28
Understanding the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862 as a historical event that Dakota peoples are reclaiming a right to interpret on their terms is crucial for linking Remember This! to In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors. In "Decolonizing the 1862 Death Marches," a key contribution to In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors, Wilson meticulously and disapprovingly surveys scholarship concerned with the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862 that is anchored in academic history. Demonstrating the critical importance of an academic interdisciplinarity flexible enough to accept indigenous interdisciplines as restorative ways of knowing, she uses the decolonial works of Taiaiake Alfred, Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Albert Memmi, as well as the work of psychologists Eduardo and Bonnie Duran, Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, and Susan Yellow-Horse Davis, to reframe the U.S.–Dakota [End Page 108] War of 1862 and expose as fraudulent and misguided dominant tellings of the war that validate and therefore endorse conquest, ethnic cleansing, and the destruction of whole ways of being. Grounding an indigenized telling of the specific events and their immediate aftermath in the authority of a Dakota-language oral tradition, she situates the war instead in a context of subjugation and oppression that began decades before 1862 and carries forward into the present. She does not stop with noting what ought to be obvious to everyone (transparent displays of institutional, anti-indigenous racism and barefaced individual racist acts) but goes further to indict as coconspirators even those individuals who have been misrepresented as affable "whites" and Dakota–white relationships that have been mischaracterized as friendly.
Looking ahead to an indigenized future for Dakota peoples, one in which a Dakota historical consciousness has been widely revitalized, Wilson anticipates that violence will mark efforts to decolonize tellings of the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862 (particularly those retellings that are a consequence of the commemorative marches). Revitalizing a Dakota historical consciousness, she forecasts, citing the theoretical authority of Paulo Freire, will challenge not only the dominant narrative grounded in the hegemony of academic history but will undermine the settler-colonizers' self-stated right "to exist on our land and their right to exploit our resources" and will call into question those Dakota collaborators who carried out the settler-colonizers' objectives. She also offers hope for the future:
Once we make a proper account of the U.S.–Dakota War in the broader context of colonialism and thus achieve a wider recognition that our people have been subjugated, we will have taken a major necessary step in our own healing and in restoring our dignity. To accomplish this, we must step forward and tell each other and our children that we do not need to make apologies for our actions and that we need to give one another the strength to tell our stories.29
In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors does not simply chronicle the Dakota commemorative marches of 2002 and 2004, key steps in healing the intergenerational trauma of state-sponsored oppression.30 Instead, Wilson includes poetry, photographic essays, narrative essays, and maps to varyingly document the central theoretical concern in her other book, Remember This! She does so brilliantly. In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors comprehensively illustrates how oral tradition and stories, historical consciousness, language, identity, and praxis work together to empower living Dakota human beings. As a result of acting in ways grounded in their language-based interdisciplines, Dakota peoples are sanctioned to acknowledge the sacrifices of their ancestors during [End Page 109] the decades leading up to and after the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. In 2006, 144 years later, as numerous contributors to In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors detail, inspired human beings stirred by historical examples of courage march together along the route of the 1862–63 forced removal from the Lower Sioux Agency to the historic sites of concentration camps located at Fort Snelling and Mankato. They do so not in protest but to heal the intergenerational trauma, the soul and earth wounds, of colonization. Thus, they are bringing people together—children and adults, old and young—many who previously suffered a form of cultivated amnesia, a death sentence for Dakota identity that is fortified in the ideological authority of academic history.31 Together, reunited and rejuvenated by a historical consciousness nourished in their oral tradition and emboldened by a common purpose, Dakota people in the twenty-first century are reclaiming Minisota Makoce (a place which translates into English as Minnesota), the sacred territory into which their principal maker led them at the end of their original creation.
Perhaps the most compelling contributions to In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors are the two sections entitled "Voices of the Marches." In these two sections, from a rich variety of perspectives and in a blossoming range of voices, Wilson documents why Dakota and other indigenous and nonindigenous people participated in the 2002 and 2004 marches. In their own words, numerous individuals, indigenous and nonindigenous, Dakota and non-Dakota, testify that they participated in the marches to honor indigenous women's history and experiences, deal with the pain of their oral stories, confront the consequences of colonization, reunite relatives and the Oceti Sakowin Oyate, face and defy racism, seek justice rather than reconciliation, reclaim their history through their stories and truth-telling, and affirm their basic humanity. None of these voices is more powerful than Sisseton Wahpeton Community College Dakota Studies professor Clifford Canku, a spiritual leader on most of the 2002 commemorative march. Speaking a few weeks after the march, Canku in his own unique and marvelous way embodies the transformative power of a contemporary Dakota identity linked to a Dakota historical consciousness grounded in sophisticated, language-based interdisciplines.
We don't need to be complacent anymore. We can speak out and be proud of who we are as Dakota people. It is okay to do that. I think many of us grew up with parents and grandparents who felt very intimidated by the White person. They felt a sense of staying in their place and saying the right thing, not yet realizing that the right thing is to be who you are, coming out with appropriate words that would be true to us as Dakota people and not to surrender our freedom. . . . I think it's time that we risk bravery and [End Page 110] say this is what we feel, this is what we need to do, and get it done, do it.32
Some Conclusions: Singing Our War Songs, Telling Our Stories
Unfortunately, in 2007 indigenous practitioners of academic history and our allies still must risk bravery, or at least allow bravery to be risked. With notable exceptions, few of us do so, instead quietly opting to concede to the hegemony of an intellectual authority that for too long shamelessly celebrated white supremacy and conquest. The enduring problem is that academically trained historians still have not accepted indigenous interdisciplines, preferring instead to re-create only racialized or multicultural "Indians" and the related historical consciousness that represents the dominant narrative of American Indian history as natural rather than ideological. This is a shame. A good deal might be gained from embracing the restorative promise of indigenous interdisciplines, of looking out at the world from intellectual locations grounded in thousands of years of living and knowing from particular locations, in what we might term "the sacred," in languages that are not English (or Spanish), and for purposes other than to rob human beings of their unique, language-based historical consciousnesses.
Looking at this matter from the contemporary perspectives of (Indian, indigenous, original) peoples whose ancestors were cleansed from those same states today that fund the colleges and universities in which many of us work (training, for the most part, the rising professional managerial class), the reason for a radical redistribution of intellectual resources becomes obvious. At their creation and until recently, these institutions of higher learning and the disciplinary traditions that unfolded along with changing landscapes did not function as sites for exchanging languages and ideas. Instead, they operated, coercively, as sites of substituting indigenous interdisciplines with the settler-colonizer's ways of knowing. Today, maybe, this is changing. Because the elders of American Indian Studies—individuals such as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and the late Vine Deloria Jr. (to mention just two of many)—in a wide variety of ways forty years ago acquired the intellectual resources required for established disciplines to accept at least the presence of indigenous scholars, the academy now must not simply tolerate "outsiders" in the professorial ranks. The time for "circling the wagons" in defense of some exterior menace or contagion is past—or should be. Instead, because our intellectual forerunners risked bravery, and because the current generation of leading indigenous scholars occupy a vital infrastructure, the academy today must bear challenges to an academic status quo that earlier had hardened to the point of common sense in our absence. [End Page 111]
The question of whose terms will determine the futures of history (and the academy overall) remains open. Will the field's younger foot soldiers risk bravery? Will "we" (understood inclusively) be allowed to do so? Will we learn to authentically exchange languages and ideas? Will we infuse our disciplinary practices with the sort of flexibility necessary to thoroughly reconceptualize and rewrite the historiography of American Indian history? Or will the singular "Indian" history continue in its largely uninterrupted tradition of creating reasonable narratives about "Indians" and their intrarelationships and dealings with white people? Is there room for indigenous interdisciplines in the post-forced-removal academy? Or are our recently desired contributions simply a flavor—a spicier, more exhilarating blend—of the established academic disciplines? Perhaps there is reason to be cautiously optimistic. Looking back now at the beginnings of American Indian Studies and the earliest intellectual work and activism of its practitioners, there is hope. In this moment, as this review essay has suggested, the academically based writings of indigenous scholars anchored in the transformative power of indigenous interdisciplines are inspiring. On the horizon, too, in the rising generation of indigenous interdisciplinarians and our allies, there are grounds for guarded anticipation. Only time will tell.