As the U.S. Supreme Court prepared to rehear for the second time the case of "Brown v. Board of Education" in 1953, the 83rd Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108 and Public Law 280--policies that would terminate federal treaty and trust responsibilities to Native Americans. Even as post-"Brown" desegregation went…

Recently, the question has arisen as to whether or not federal Indian law should be taught at tribal colleges and universities (TCUs). To answer this three questions must be asked: (1) Why should such a subject be taught and who would teach it; (2) Which department should be responsible for Indian law courses; and (3) Should they be offered…

American Indian studies claimed a space to interrogate Western disciplinary epistemologies utilizing Indigenous ways of "knowing". This epistemological struggle has, not surprisingly, been that: a struggle. As the author writes in 2010, people understand that their continuing desire to bring Indigenous community-based ways of knowing into dialogue…

In his keynote address to the Fifth Annual American Indian Studies Consortium in 2005 David Wilkins began by commenting on earlier attempts to formally organize such a gathering in ways that might help establish and accredit Indian studies programs. He said he had the sense that the thrust of earlier meetings "was really an opportunity for Native…

The relationship between American Indians and the U.S. federal government and state governments is complicated. It is a relationship that controls almost all aspects of tribal life and has resulted in American Indians being the most legislated people in the United States. For many years tribal people relied on non-Native attorneys to help navigate…

As a student at Whittier College, Robert Jacobo relished learning more about Native American culture through courses in history and anthropology. But it was a business management course that helped him make up his mind about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. "The professor was also doing some consulting for an Indian tribe," says…

The espoused foundation of U.S. society, "E pluribus unum" (out of many, one), is based on the belief that this nation should simultaneously support pluralism and promote unity. The road to making this ideal a reality, however, has not always been smooth. The ever-widening achievement gap highlights how this discordance plays out in our…

American Indian higher education in the United States has evolved within paternalistic, hierarchical decision-making policies and practices based on complex sociopolitical and cultural factors since the 1600s. Indigenous peoples had historically been excluded from most decisions affecting their lives until the 20th century when a deliberate Indian…

Linda Lomahaftewa, a noted painter, has taught at much bigger places than the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). But Lomahaftewa, who is Hopi-Choctaw, and others on the faculty of IAIA are intensely devoted to the mission of this small but unique school. IAIA--the nation's only four-year fine arts institution devoted to American Indian and…

In 2005 the author published an article discussing the teaching method teachers used for an introduction to American Indian studies course at Iowa State University. In his previous piece, the author did not delineate the elements that go into an American Indian pedagogy. In this article, the author discusses some elements of American Indian…

In 1999, the author was awarded a Scholars for the Dream Travel Award to help defray the costs of her attendance and presentation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Although she had been to the conference before, she had never presented a paper, and she was thrilled to be part of a group of scholars whose work was…

Across the United States, tribal people are noticing adverse changes in the natural world due to climate change--and these changes affect their cultures. Today, tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) are developing and delivering the education and research opportunities needed to produce the next generation of American Indian science,…

With local lumber mills shutting down, Robert Kenning, an instructor at Salish Kootenai College in western Montana, and the tribe's forestry director, came up with an idea. Kenning landed a $200,000 Department of Agriculture grant in 2010 to explore the possibility of turning logging scraps and smaller trees into chips or pellets that could be…

In this paper, the author begins by saying how privileged he feels to be included in the celebration of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal (AICRJ) and to toast forty years of American Indian studies at UCLA. He looks back over the field of Native American literature and criticism, then peeks at the present, and last, makes some…

In this article we introduce a "head and heart" approach to community-engaged scholarship. Through the literatures of Aboriginal scholarship and engaged scholarship we reflect on a community-university research and program development project undertaken in response to health and education concerns of Aboriginal people in Canada. We…