In light of this November being Native American History month, it is fitting to reflect upon the unique challenges that writing the history of Indigenous Peoples evokes. It is important to consider Donald Fixico’s observation that “obtaining a tribal viewpoint” is mandatory for writing a more balanced history of Indigenous Peoples. However, in a field of study dominated by white, male scholars the question of authenticity in Native American scholarship looms large. The question of Indigenous voices becoming increasingly distanced from the study of their own histories is worrying.
This overwhelming demographic hegemony speaks for the fact that colonialism constitutes a continual process of historical dispossession, as colonised people become deprived of access to their own historical narrative. This situation has profound academic implications because even the utilisation of the term “Native American History”, which is frequently deployed to establish the intellectual confines of the field, is shrouded in deep controversy due to its synonymy with the rigid, colonised identities imposed upon Indigenous Peoples by European settlers in North America. The fact that Indigenous Peoples cannot settle on a single racial label through which to identify themselves, illuminates the significant challenge a historian is confronted with when attempting to summon Indigenous histories respectfully and objectively. Fixico’s insight comes under intense scrutiny with appreciation that deciding upon a singular viewpoint that encompasses the disparate historical experiences of a multiplicity of Indigenous Cultures is an almost unattainable goal.
Native American historical perspectives have varied dramatically over time and the imposition of Western cultural values upon Indigenous history has huge implications in sculpting social perceptions of the past and directing subsequent academic enquiries. Within the scholarship of Indigenous People there is a consistent trend of portraying them as subsidiary to the Europeans, with their presence acting merely as a tool to illuminate the significance of European American historical events. Irrespective of the accuracy of this approach, focus needs to centre upon where this leaves the field as an academic discipline.
To make legitimate strides towards preserving the academic integrity of these studies, Fixico’s idea needs to be taken a step further. The “tribal viewpoint” needs to be the central nucleus of Indigenous scholarly endeavours. The already profound disjuncture between European and Indigenous cultures is exacerbated in Indigenous scholarship by the fact non-Indigenous academics perceptions of history can never be independent of culturally constructed concepts the researcher has previously been exposed to. This illuminates the central dichotomy within Indigenous scholarship, that even in an increasingly de-colonised scholarly world, academics’ divergent cultural experience will always shape their perspectives of history, which will likely never be mutually comprehensible with the historical understandings of Indigenous Peoples.