American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Scholars have focused significant attention on the need for relational conceptions of “accountability” as alternatives to Western modes of knowledge production. This article suggests that conceptualizing accountability through the normative frame of the “community” can narrow the breadth of possible ways of realizing ethical and accountable research relationships and that critical analytical strategies to help ensure researcher accountability to diverse perspectives and experiences within Indigenous communities also demand our attention. The need for research to be driven by and for Indigenous communities has been emphasized, yet within colonial heteropatriarchy, deference to collective units has historically functioned to homogenize and/or erase the knowledge and experience of Indigenous women, girls, and GLBTQ2 peoples. Researchers and academics have the potential to either challenge or reproduce these tendencies in our own works; thus, a decolonial research and activist agenda must be informed by a commitment to address patriarchal and heteronormative structures both internal and external to Indigenous communities. To this end, I propose a turn to Indigenous feminist methodologies as a means of informing broader notions of responsibility and accountability.

In an effort to improve health outcomes, the proportion of hospital-attended births has been on the rise in Mexico since the 1990s, resulting in an increased medicalization of reproductive health. Ethnographic research in southern Mexico highlights women and Indigenous midwives' ambivalence about “being cut.” While “being cut” can refer to procedures such as episiotomies or cesarean sections, it also stands for Indigenous and poor women's multiple experiences of frustration, mistreatment, and violence during childbirth. I argue that such violence can only be fully understood when examining the conditions shaping women's consent through an intersectional lens, to include a failure to value poor women's desires, whose silenced voices exist at the intersection of multiple oppressions.

Rhymes for Young Ghouls is a hyper-stylized film, extremely conscious of the way narrative conventions are organized into genres. In telling a story about a Mi'kmaw girl's leadership of a revenge plot, the film juxtaposes the genres—and the very different models of time-space—of the Gothic novel and the Red Power-era exploitation film. I read this jolting combination as a critical intervention into what I call Residential School Gothic, a dominant discourse on the historical wrong of Indian residential schooling which has emerged in Canada over the past two decades. The film's immanent critique of this public narrative template for telling stories about residential school exposes some of the crucial ways in which Residential School Gothic serves to reconfirm a settler common sense about liberal progress.

The noted nineteenth-century Choctaw leader and intellectual Peter Perkins Pitchlynn counts among his accomplishments having served as the secretary of the joint Council meetings of 1826–1828. The Choctaw attendees, many of them quite eminent, were charged with amending traditional governing practices and codifying them. Pitchlynn's handwritten Choctaw notes were translated into English and published in 2013. One of Pitchlynn's salient problems was putting legal terms that were rooted in Euro-American governing systems into the Choctaw language. The author discusses the choices that Pitchlynn made in rendering such concepts into Choctaw, and also the choices the translators made in recapturing those concepts. The selected legal terms encompass legislation, political entities, law enforcement, and civil law, including terms for money.

This paper examines peer-reviewed publications studying the use of social media by Indigenous peoples in relation to the digital divide. Within the rubric of digital divide challenges that Indigenous peoples face in using social media, five themes were identified: (1) remote and rural location; (2) low socioeconomic status; (3) hardware and software; (4) digital content; and (5) age and culture. Moreover, Indigenous peoples primarily use social media with four objectives: (1) cyberactivism; (2) creating digital archives to preserve and promote their culture; (3) connecting and maintaining relationships with other peoples; and (4) accessing health education and virtual health-support groups.

In 1979, when a remote Diné (Navajo) community in New Mexico learned that under new federal self-determination guidelines it could establish its own school, it jumped at the opportunity. But just two years after the school's founding, conditions were so bad that teachers and community, in fear of a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) takeover, mounted a full-scale rebellion against the school's leadership. Now, some thirty-five years later, the author, who witnessed the events described, recalls in intimate and painful detail this story—a moment in Native American educational history, he suggests, not without meaning for other Indigenous communities' ongoing quest for greater educational sovereignty.