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In the spirit of self-determination, Indian people should be the ones to write about Indian education.
Karen Gayton Swisher, "My Indian People Should be the Ones to Write About Indian Education"
In my view, there is room for both Indian and non-Indian scholars within American Indian studies.
Duane Champagne, "American Indian Studies Is for Everyone"
Writing in the same volume, Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing aboutAmerican Indians, though from different angles, Swisher and Champagne both engage an important debate in American Indian studies; one that many Native American studies scholars feel very strongly about regardless of where they stand on the issue.1
On the one hand, Swisher's call for Indians to write about Indian education echoes a more general concern voiced by Native American studies scholars about the limitations of non-Indian authored Native American studies literature.2 This concern actually points to a larger critique of the conventional writing tradition that has emerged out of a Euro-American culture and worldview. Having its roots in the Western world, this writing tradition places the single author in a dominant relationship with the text's "subjects." This convention became ensconced within the milieu of a colonial experience whereby colonizers wrote about the colonized as distant, exotic, and silent Others.3 Swisher's sentiments bear out the fact that this tradition continues to have hegemonic reverberations in contemporary writings about indigenous peoples. Consciously or unconsciously embracing this long-standing approach to writing about Others, authors who write about Native Americans who have been and continue to be mostly non-Indians - routinely write about Indian Others without serious regard to their experiences, their perspectives, and (especially) their voices. Even when presuming to listen to and write Indian voices, the dominant writing tradition that the vast majority of authors embrace precludes any shift of authority away from the author's voice. Hence the lack of Indian voices in Native American studies literature is very real: one would be hard-pressed to argue with Swisher when she writes that "much research still is presented from an outsider's perspective."4 Understood in this light, Swisher's call for more Indians to write about Indians - in this case Indian education - is reasonable and defensible. Indeed, Indian authors who challenge conventional ways of writing about Native people provide a voice...