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…

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…

The development of David Armitage's "white Atlantic" history parallels the Cold War origins of American studies with its mission to define and promote "American culture" or "American civilization." British scholar Paul Gilroy's "The Black Atlantic" served as a necessary corrective. Armitage's statement leads…

After two elections and several recounts and court decisions, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma has installed a new principal chief for the first time in a dozen years. Unlike his predecessor, Chief Bill John Baker has not opposed descendants of the tribe's former slaves, known as the Cherokee Freedmen, having rights as tribal citizens. That legal…

University of Minnesota Extension is expanding work in Indian country by building community-university partnerships through a methodology of listening by gathering data in Indian country; learning by creating opportunities for professional development; and responding by building trusting relationships, resulting in more educators working in…

Although several academic associations in the United States devote at least some part of their annual conferences to research on American Indians, many scholars of indigenous populations have long felt they lacked an intellectual home, a place where they could gather with large numbers of people who share their interests. A fledgling organization,…

In the year 1999, OPI [Montana Office of Public Instruction] brought together representatives from all the tribes in Montana and created 7 Essential Understandings. These are some of the major issues all tribes have in common. They form the basis for all of our curriculum efforts and initiatives. There is great diversity among the 12 tribal…

In this article, we offer a tribute to the memories of Dr. Beatrice Medicine and Dr. Vine Deloria Jr., two of the most revered and celebrated Indigenous educators. We describe the legacy these scholars leave as one that calls on Indigenous communities to survive by both fighting against ongoing colonization and pursuing individual and communal…

In this article, the author talks about the experiences of many of the people involved in the Carnegie Project, an effort in the 1960s to establish ties with the "tribal community"--people who spoke Cherokee as their first language and lived in small kin-related settlements spread across five counties in northeastern Oklahoma--and…

Academia is the author's second career, and his path to that career was unusual. Oklahoma schools had little to offer, and he had given up on education in the ninth grade because it had long since given up on him. The Vietnam War bought him a position in the Air Force that improved his self-image, and the GI Bill bought him an education. He came…

In the winter of 1883, the photographer H. H. Bennett decided to spice up his descriptive catalogue of stereo views with something new. Several years earlier, a simple listing of his photographs--mostly landscape views of the area surrounding the Wisconsin River Dells--brought the small-town studio photographer considerable renown and enhanced…