Walter C. Fleming
Native American Studies
Montana State University-Bozeman
Some time ago, I sat in a lawn chair under a tree visiting with my Northern Cheyenne father, an elderly man named Jim, who years earlier had taken me as a son. His house was across the street from the post office in Lame Deer, Montana, and we gossiped about the people who went in to check their mail. This man was the tribal historian. He knew his people and their stories.
A woman drove up and ran into the post office. Jim asked me if I knew who she was. I replied, "Of course, we went to grade school together."
"Did you know she was George Custer's great-great granddaughter?"
Jim told her story. There was a woman, Me-o-tzi, "the Young Grass that Shoots in the Spring." She had a son, fathered by General George A. Custer, some eight years or so before the Battle of the Little Bighorn. This woman, coming out of the post office, flipping through bills, advertisements and letters, was the progeny of the most notorious white man in Cheyenne history.
I mentally began to make a short list of academic publications to which I might submit this account.
Jim finished his story. "But don't tell her. She doesn't know."
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Scholars of American Indian ancestry, writing about American Indian issues, history, and culture, are challenged by expectations that their non-Indian colleagues cannot imagine. We might feel we are serving many masters--our Native societies and the academic community. We are, in fact, major stake-holders in our own work, examining issues that impact American Indian culture and contemporary Indian life.
Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians, edited by Devon A. Mihesuah, raises a variety of these issues such as intellectual property rights, gender, and the importance of Native American Studies.
At the heart of much of the discussion in Natives and Academics is the question of who gets to tell the story. In her essay, "Grandmother to Granddaughter: Generations of Oral History in a Dakota Family," Angela Cavender Wilson speaks for the acknowledgment of "oral tradition" as an acceptable academic source of knowledge but stresses the importance of stories for the "transmission of culture upon which our survival as a people depends. When our stories die, so will we" (35).
The question of the validity of Indian oral traditions recently became an issue when the book Soldiers Falling Into Camp (1992), by Robert Kammen, Fredrick Lefthand, and Joe Marshall, was published. In this collection of oral histories about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Lakota tribal member Joe Marshall and Crow tribal member Fredrick Lefthand present "the Indian point of view" of one of the best known military encounters in American history. Despite being the only book about the battle written by Indians, the bookstore at the Little Bighorn Battlefield would not allow the book to be sold there, partly because the bookstore management believed the book offered a "fictionalized" treatment. There is no reason to even read it, says Robert Utley, noted western historian, dismissing the Native accounts because the Indians were not professional historians (The Wall Street Journal, September 15, 1992).
Paula Gunn Allen advises against the use of some traditional stories in her essay "Special Problems Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony." Gunn Allen first cautions that reading a culturally-based text requires a greater knowledge of tribal ethnography and history than most non-Native teachers possess. Furthermore, using oral tradition in itself may violate Native ethics which hold that one must not violate culturally entrusted material by publishing sacred or social texts. She takes novelist Leslie Marmon Silko to task for sharing a Laguna Pueblo clan story in Ceremony, suggesting that "telling the old stories, revealing the old ways, can only lead to disaster" (62).
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn ("American Indian Intellectualism and the New Indian Story") goes farther yet. She argues that "in spite of the burgeoning body of work by Native writers, the greatest body of acceptable telling of the Indian story is still in the hands of non-Natives" (112). She points to movies such as Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, and Indian in the Cupboard as examples of "the Indian story outside of the tribal genres and the Indian character" (113).
Professor Cook-Lynn asserts "that the American Indian has no intellectual voice with which to enter into America's important dialogues" (110). She describes the vital functions of intellectualism as "to change the world, to know it, and to make it better by knowing how to seek appropriate solutions to human problems" (130-31). She argues that "Indian intellectuals must ask what it means to be an Indian in tribal America" (124).
One can understand Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's concerns about who gets to tell the story. What is not clear is her assault on American Indian writers of mixed ancestry and their place in Indian intellectualism. She asserts that "the story" must be a "tribal story." She criticizes Native writers who give "much lip service...to the condemnation of America's treatment of First Nations" (124). This view seems like intellectual snobbery at best and racism at worst.
She dismisses the voices of some writers who call themselves "mixed-bloods." Her criticism of the works by writers such as Louise Erdich, Adrian Louis, and Sherman Alexie, among others, is that they explore "an Indian identity which focuses on individualism rather than First Nations ideology" (125). The works of these writers, Cook-Lynn contends, "are significant because they reflect little or no defense of treaty-protected reservation land bases and homelands to the indigenes, nor do they suggest a responsibility of art as an ethical endeavor or the artist as responsible social critic..." (126). This "excess of individualism" is the "failure of the contemporary Indian novel and literary studies in Native American studies" and does not contribute substantially to the "intellectual debates in defense of First Nationhood..." (127).
This somewhat pretentious definition of "Indian intellectualism" begs to be challenged. Professor Cook-Lynn dismisses the mixed-blood voice because it lacks the rhetoric of activism and social indignation. Certainly, one cannot argue with Cook-Lynn's examples of "Indian intellectuals." Alfonzo Ortiz, N. Scott Momaday and Vine Deloria, Jr., have each contributed significant perspectives to the question of what it means to be an Indian in tribal America. But, so too have writers like Gerald Vizenor, Michael Dorris, Paula Gunn Allen, and Sherman Alexie, all so-called "mixed-bloods." Because of the overwhelming success of his recent motion picture, Smoke Signals, novelist, poet, and screen writer Sherman Alexie's voice is likely to carry a great deal of weight among non-Indians. One cannot just dismiss his opinion because he writes with an "excess of individualism."
Of even greater concern than what constitutes the Indian opinion, however, is the misappropriation of cultural property and the "commodification" of indigenous culture. Laurie Anne Whitt, in "Cultural Imperialism and the Marketing of Native America," details a National Institutes of Health-sponsored program, the Human Genome Diversity Project, that proposes to collect DNA from indigenous communities around the world, purportedly for scientific study. The "Vampire Project," as it is dubbed by some activists, has been a lightning rod for a variety of concerns about the scientific community. Some native peoples fear that these efforts will lead to the patenting of "the biological inheritance of indigenous peoples" (158). Whitt urges "strategies of resistance" for indigenous peoples to regain control over their "cultural, spiritual, and genetic resources" (160). Whitt calls for action-oriented scholarship; the results of which she hopes will better protect her community.
Some of us, as Native scholars, have foregone teaching in traditional academic disciplines in favor of American Indian Studies, under its various names. We do so because of our belief that Native American Studies enhances the more conventional studies in allied disciplines. Duane Champagne observes that "some scholars are committed to making their work useful to Indian communities and, as a discipline, American Indian Studies bridges the gap between scholarship and the Indian community" ("American Indian Studies Is For Everyone," 188).
The challenge faced by Native American Studies faculty members is to gain acceptance as a discipline grounded in objective scholarship. Not all our colleagues or students are ready to accept that as a given. A non-Indian professor in our department and I once compared how students evaluated teaching effectiveness in our respective courses. This non-Indian scholar consistently rated high for his knowledge of federal Indian policy and history while scoring lower in measures related to his knowledge of Native cultures. I, on the other hand, a Native teacher, rated high in knowledge of indigenous culture but lowest with respect to history and policy. This difference certainly could be accounted for by our diverse experience and education.
The students' written comments were more illuminating. Here, students asserted that an Indian professor is, of course, going to "take the Indian side" when discussing historical issues. My non-Indian colleague, on the other hand, they opined, was objective because he had no axes to grind. Ironically, he and I did not differ radically in either presentation or interpretations. On the other hand, students criticized his knowledge of cultural constructs and praised mine simply because, as an Indian, I was an authority on my own society.
Our students' conclusions seemed to be that I, as an Indian scholar, could not be trusted to "tell the truth" while he, as a non-Indian academician, did not know anything about culture because he "did not live it." My point here is that Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's concern about who gets to tell the story in academe is compounded when one considers that even when Indian scholars are given voice, the veracity or authenticity of their message is questioned.
Vine Deloria, Jr., author of one of the ten essays in this collection, writes: "The first point which we must consider in reviewing any set of essays that pretend to offer an objective view of Indian affairs is that there never has been an objective point of view regarding Indians and there never will be" (66). He made this observation in his review of another collection of essays, but it fits pretty well for Natives and Academics.