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…

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…

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…

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…

Being an ecologically literate citizen involves making decisions that are based on ecological knowledge and accepting responsibility for personal actions. Using writing-to-learn activities in college science courses, we asked students to consider personal dilemmas that they or others might have in response to how human choices can impact coastal…

This qualitative textual analysis investigates the ideological lenses through which U.S. History content standards for grades 5-12 for Arizona and Washington frame interactions between American Indians and European Americans during U.S. national development. The study's multiperspective critical conceptual framework interrogates the standards not…

In the 1990s, as Virginia Indians faced the 2007 quadracentennial of Jamestown's founding, they initiated plans to publicly correct inaccuracies and omissions embedded in the historical narrative. The Beyond Jamestown: Virginia Indians Past and Present Teachers' Institute was one such initiative through the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities'…

In this study, the author focuses on how Cowessess First Nation band members have constructed their identities over time, and the link between their identities and notions of kinship. Specifically, the author examines how Cowessess band members' continued adherence to principles of traditional law regulating kinship has undermined the imposition…

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…

This paper demonstrates how Indigenous studies is controlled in some Australian universities in ways that continue the marginalisation, denigration and exploitation of Indigenous peoples. Moreover, it shows how the engagement of white notions of "inclusion" can result in the maintenance of racism, systemic marginalisation, white race…

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) has fundamentally changed the relationship between museums and tribal peoples. Since 1990, thousands of human remains and funerary objects and hundreds of sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony have been repatriated to tribes. Human remains and funerary objects have been…

In this article the author situates the analysis of two popular children's books in theoretical frameworks emerging from American Indian Studies. Using a new historicist lens, she discusses Anne Rockwell's (1999) "Thanksgiving Day" and Laura Ingalls Wilder's (1935/1971) "Little House on the Prairie" and suggests that these…

In this article, the author presses the virtues of insider research, suggesting that Native American studies might profit from a deeper engagement with the broader debates that have taken place in other disciplines and fields. Insider research, he suggests, can generate questions not available to those with outsider perspectives. Participating in…