Literature and the Politics of Native American Studies

In a Panel Entitled “American (Indian) Studies: Can the Asa be an Intellectual Home?” at the 2002 Meeting of the American Studies Association, three Native Americanists—Robert Warrior, Philip Deloria, and Jean O'Brien—addressed the relation of their field to the broader terrain of American studies. Each remarked on the tenuous place of Native American studies in the academy, manifested by the underrepresentation of Indian faculty members, the existence of only two institutions granting PhDs in the field, the small number of scholarly journals devoted to Native issues, and neglect by other scholars, even those working in American and ethnic studies. Together, these problems create an institutional situation that Warrior labeled “intellectual homelessness,” in which “Native scholars … don't really belong anywhere” (“Room” 683). Yet these problems also suggest disparities between the questions that define Native studies and those that underlie scholarship in American studies as well as in conventional disciplines. If the marginalization of American Indian studies in academia, as these scholars suggested, reflects the place of Native peoples in United States society, so too does Native politics shape intellectual work in the field.