American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Academic programs that focus on the histories, cultures, and contemporary issues of the peoples indigenous to North America, whether they are called American Indian studies, Native American studies, First Nations studies, or, for some as program ideologies evolve, indigenous studies, are not new pursuits. As Native studies continues to develop, administrators, faculties, staff, and students will face questions about theory and methodology and their practical applications. Perhaps inevitably, formulaic theorizing and concerns about methodology seem to evoke doctrinaire responses, compelling the discipline’s thinkers to codify the principles in their programs’ mission statements. Native studies has a continually growing body of critical literature recommending or implying how to theorize the discipline and develop methodological strategies. What this article will offer are ways to think about theory, method, and practice in Native studies from the perspective of the Certificate Program in Native American Indian Studies (CPNAIS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst), a large public institution in the Northeast that draws from a regional population of Native undergraduates in contrast to private institutions like the Ivy League and “Little Ivy” schools, whose students largely come from western federally recognized tribes and whose programs emphasize western Native histories. From this vantage, the discussion will contextualize aspects of the philosophical and pedagogical challenges shared in general with Native studies programs anywhere but that are germane to the UMass Amherst effort. To set up this discussion compels some reference to struggles going on in the older interdisciplinary field of American studies. Similarities regarding theorizing American studies as well as questions about its viability to Native studies offer a useful comparison that cannot be fully covered here. But the coincidental timing of the younger Native studies facing similar structural and epistemological challenges long affecting the older discipline is too ironical to ignore.