Scholarship and Native American Studies: A Response to Daniel Littlefield, Jr.

Abstract

Everyone who works in some relation to Native literary culture will be grateful to Daniel Littlefield for addressing so forthrightly issues that have been growing in intensity and that have already divided into several camps or factions.* I have adopted here, albeit in inverted commas, Littlefield's use of the first person plural to refer to American scholars, Indian as well as non-Indian, who are products of Western educational philosophies and whose scholarly research and writing and teaching relate to This is what Littlefield says he means By we, here and below. (108n) But this is not how he actually uses the pronoun. Throughout Littlefield's talk, effectively means non-Indian scholars as in such sentences as . . . each of us must decide if we care what opinions have of what we write or say about them, (107) or, .. we can do nothing, try to ignore what the say, and go on about our business as usual . . . , (101) or, No wonder say that what we do has little or no relation to (104) There are dozens of other such sentences. In these, Littlefield constructs the category of Indians as a them set against a non-Indian us; he thus perpetuates exactly the opposition his remarks ostensibly seek to undo. But the situation is much more complex than any simple opposition can convey. Neither Native scholars nor non-Native scholars can legitimately be represented as a singleminded, unified group with a consensual position on the issues in question. don't all see eye to eye any more than non-Indians do. Moreover, Littlefield uses the term Indians ambiguously. For the most part, Indians is a term that does, indeed, refer to Native scholars, academic Indians.

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