Message From the Director

Indian Lore and Indian Studies
by Sam Deloria

We used to be about the only people with lore. You never heard people saying, “I’m taking my fellowship in Italy and studying Italian Renaissance Lore.” Or “My major is English Lore.” So it is undoubtedly a major advance in our relentless march to civilization, acceptance and even prestige that we have moved from “lore” to“studies”. It’s like Fine Art, and Indian art, which presumably is Not So Fine Art.

But we’re not there yet. I think “studies” refers to something inter- or cross-disciplinary, the concept focusing perhaps too much on this cross-cutting characteristic, and overlooking that virtually any subject, properly examined, is cross-disciplinary. You don’t hear of majors in French Literature Studies or English History Studies (of course, these days you don’t hear much of those majors anyway). Wait, maybe while we Indians and our lore-studies are moving in the direction of the majors of my youth (or “Ute”, as they say in the movies), the things people major in are becoming more like Indian studies – communications, criminal justice: those are things that, in
my day, people did after getting a degree but didn’t, couldn’t, major in.

Every society has ways of passing two kinds of things down from one generation to the next: how to make a living; and how to be a “Human Being”, in the words of Old Lodge Skins. In the larger category of how to be a human being, our kind of people, we include the origin and history of the people, spirituality (what used to be called“religion”, but for some reason isn’t any more), and things like that, and that inescapably includes a bit of bragging and a bit of favoring ourselves over the people who live over the mountain. All societies do that. It takes away from the purity of the study of history, perhaps, but historians by and large have learned to live with it.

Societies generally assign these intergenerational responsibilities in part to various family members and in part to specialized people, and in various ways the how-to-make-a-living may be combined with the who-we-are. Much of the quarrel we have had for the last hundred years or more with the educational system has to do with our contention that those who have historically offered us education have sold it on the basis that it would help us make a living, but instead have used it to indoctrinate us to accept THEIR who-we-are as our own, particularly when a good share of their positive who-we-are about themselves refers to us negatively.

How to make a living – that is pretty scientific, verifiable. You tell a kid that to hunt a buffalo you just walk up to him and whack him with a rock, if he lives through his first hunt he is going to lead seminars about your worth as a hunting instructor. You tell a kid he doesn’t need to be able to write clear English, sooner or later he or she is going to come back and correct you. On the other hand, you can get away with just about anything at all plausible if you teach in the who-we-are department. That leads me
again to Indian Studies and Indian-controlled institutions. I have been sending young Indian people to law school for nearly 40 years, and for two years here at AIGC I’ve been sending them to all kinds of grad schools. In that time, a time of great progress in Indian and Native Self-Determination, our young people have become much more conscious and informed about who they are, but I don’t know that we are doing a much better job of getting them ready to make a living. We may have overcorrected; we have to do both; we need to talk about how we balance the two kinds of education, instead of assuming that our present approach to the who-we-are is enough.

Am I being too rough on Indian and Native-controlled institutions?
Yes, and for the same reason it makes news when the preacher gets caught up in the raid on the bawdy house. We hold certain people and institutions to higher standards because they claim special privileges based on those standards. Of course, public and other non-community schools do a bad job, too, but they don’t claim the expertise that we do.

We claimed control over education based on our right to control our own schools just like our non-Indian neighbors, and also on the ground that as Indian and Native people we would have a better understanding of how to balance the practical and the inspirational aspects of education. But I don’t think we have been all that good at it and I think we have sold our own kids short in the process. Our young people are capable of performance at a very high level if we know how to get it out of them. We do it every summer at PLSI. But too many of our institutions take the easy way out and fail to challenge the students, instead filling them with excuses for failure.

I think the most important question in Indian education is how to balance the need to equip students with practical skills against the larger role of inspiring students to become good citizens of the various societies in which they belong. But try to get into a conversation about that with an Indian educator. It is either the minutia of Title This and Title That, or it is a mantra about the superiority of Indian cultures over all other cultures in the history of the human race. Maybe I’m talking to the wrong people and reading
the wrong things. I hope so. But if that is the explanation and, if we are doing a great job of preparing our young people to make a living in this society and everyone knows it but me, then please someone clue me in so I can move on to misunderstanding something else.

Sam Deloria, Director (Standing Rock Sioux Tribe)
American Indian Graduate Center