The Importance of Native Studies
by Mikki Metteba, BR ’22, and Nolan Arkansas, TC ’22
Native Studies contextualizes rigorous, interdisciplinary studies of diaspora, race, gender, class, sexuality, politics, and settler colonialism. Often ignored in the wider scope of academia, and even within Ethnic Studies, Native Studies provides critical insight to these fields with a focus in settler-colonialism. The term ‘settler-colonialism’ describes the ongoing process of non-Native settlers occupying Native land, demanding their world views, morals, and economies be followed, while attempting to erase and assimilate the original inhabitants — for example, European colonization in the Americas. Native Studies explores the difficult realities we live today and envision a globally humane future of tomorrow.
Early anthropological accounts misrepresented Indigenous populations and cultures and later served to further distort western society’s misconceptions of Native people. These anthropologists viewed Native cultures, knowledges, and people not only as primitive and inferior to those of European society, but also as going extinct. The western gaze of anthropology persists in both academia and today’s common ideologies, creating these inaccurate and racist extinction narratives, wherein Natives, characterized by “dying” cultures and “vanishing” languages, are subject to ultimate disappearance.
As colonial power formed the United States, military general Richard Henry Pratt, whose papers are viewable at the Beinecke, spearheaded Indigenous assimilation and cultural genocide through boarding schools. Boarding schools were intended, as Pratt famously said, “[To] kill the Indian… and save the man.” Children were often forcibly taken from their homes and plunged into unfamiliar “educational” environments where they were forbidden from speaking their Native languages. Boarding schools often confined Indigenous students to vocations, such as farming and carpentry, rather than academia so that they “successfully” assimilated into the American workforce as second-class citizens. Native students were actively excluded from the academy and thus unable to articulate their own visions and histories. In the eyes of colonizers, Native people had absolutely no place in U.S. modernity. Native people stood in the way of progress.
Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement of the ’60s and ’70s, Indigenous people throughout the U.S. and Canada began organizing their reservation and urban communities in a larger effort to dismantle colonial and anthropological narratives, reclaim their previous ways of being, and envision futures together. The Red Power Movement, an Indigenous political movement active across the U.S. and Canada, directly challenged academia through anti-colonial history lessons for youth, political escalations, and infiltrations of the academy. Red Power organizers and thinkers laid the foundation for Native Studies as we know it today.
Engaging with Native Studies informs us about the constructions and realities of race, history, sexuality, family, government, and more. In perhaps one of the most-cited essays in Native Studies today, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Patrick Wolfe discusses how early settler societies were formed primarily by disenfranchising Native peoples and enslaving Africans. In order to control Black, brown, and Indigenous bodies, European colonizers constructed a new rigid class and social hierarchy based on race. More Natives meant less access to land, but more Africans meant more access to slaves. White settlers created blood quantum for Natives and the one-drop rule for Blacks in order to manage race. Blood quantum, the quantification of Native “blood,” uses numerical logic to “dilute” Indigeneity. Coupled with eugenic policies, such as the forced sterilization of Native women and kidnapping of Native children from their families, blood quantum made it easier for whites to lay claims to land.
Meanwhile, the one-drop rule worked to create more slaves for the American system, in that anyone with black ancestry was considered “Black,” and therefore a slave. These constructions of race are pervasive. They inform our prejudices, biases, and laws to this day. The unfortunate truth is that so long as Native Studies remains marginalized, we can not properly engage with the real histories and fallacies of race.
Native Studies also works to contextualize modern sexualities. Scott L. Morgensen notes in his book, Spaces Between Us, that as white settlers used sexual violence and gender binaries to police Native communities, many non-binary and gay Natives were forced to conform to a society that rewarded heterosexuality and a gendered binary. This attempt to disrupt Native genders and sexualities even influenced white settlers themselves. As Natives were pushed into default straightness, whites who witnessed this process took it upon themselves to maintain and perpetuate both the gender binary and heterosexual norm. Thus Native Studies again prove their own importance. Without understanding this construction of western gender and sexuality, queer studies, gender studies, and scholarship that engages with patriarchy, such as feminism, are sorely lacking context.
Native Studies today continue to contextualize, critique, and remedy the worlds and studies from which we have been excluded. With knowledge of our own Native lifeways, and with knowledge of how these have been policed and exiled, we carry with us the same values that civil rights academics and organizers once envisioned. Native Studies work to amplify the voices of Indigenous communities throughout the world aim to develop transnational alliances with each other in the face of heightened surveillance, climate destruction, sexual violence, and global capitalism. Ethnic Studies provides Native people with an avenue to challenge settler-colonialism in the larger push to liberate racialized and gendered communities. Today’s Native Studies is vital to Ethnic Studies as it challenges colonial narratives, reclaims subjectivities, and envisions an inclusive, informed, and collective future for us all.
