2014 NAISA Presidential Address: Centering the “I” in NAISA

2014 NAISA Presidential Address:Centering the “I” in NAISA Chadwick Allen (bio) THIS IS THE SIXTH ANNUAL MEETING of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). Those of you who have been involved with NAISA from the beginning, however, will be aware that a total of eight meetings have actually occurred, if we include the two preparatory meetings organized before NAISA became a reality as an association for scholars, students, and community members engaged in all aspects of Indigenous studies. The first meeting, held in 2007 and organized by Robert Warrior and his colleagues at the University of Oklahoma, was titled “What’s Next for Native American and Indigenous Studies?” The second meeting, held in 2008 and organized by Jace Weaver and his colleagues at the University of Georgia, was titled “Who Are We? Where Are We Going?” The questions posed in those initial conference titles remain relevant and, indeed, vital for us as a scholarly organization, ones we still need to attempt to answer in 2014—and, undoubtedly, in the many years ahead. I have titled my address this evening “Centering the ‘I’ in NAISA.” The title is meant to provoke an obvious pun, but it is also meant to provoke interrogation of these initial, relevant, and vital questions from a particular location and in a particular direction. My address has a specific itinerary, and my humble hope is that its movements will serve as something of a personal and professional map for moving NAISA toward fully achieving the incredible promise of this organization’s original conception as a collective of scholars, students, and community-based intellectuals that is globally focused and globally relevant. Since that first exhilarating meeting in Oklahoma in 2007, the early organizers and leaders of our association have offered suggestions for naming potential precursors and antecedents for NAISA, including, most prominently, the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars held at Princeton University here in the United States in 1970 and, decades before that, the many gatherings of the Society of American Indians (SAI), which held its early [End Page 1] meetings on the campus of the U.S. academic institution at which I happen to be employed, The Ohio State University, in 1911 and 1912.1 Non-U.S.-based and non-U.S.-focused members of NAISA have noted, however, that although these potential precursors and antecedents are relevant to our contemporary organization and endeavor, they limit the story of Indigenous research, scholarship, reporting, and outreach, as well as the story of broader Indigenous political organizing, to a genealogy centered almost exclusively in the United States, and thus they limit the full potential of our conceptions and understandings of Indigenous research, scholarship, reporting, outreach, and organizing. Similar genealogies for Indigenous scholarship and activism can be constructed based in other parts of the world: in Australia, in Aotearoa New Zealand, in Canada, in northern Europe, in Oceania, in Mexico, in various parts of Central and South America, in various parts of Asia, and so forth. These multiple genealogies of Indigenous scholarship and activism, with their multiple points of intersection and, importantly, multiple divergences, provide a more accurate, more challenging, more politically relevant, and more intellectually adventurous account of where we have come from—and where we might travel in the future. Another approach to understanding our organization’s relationships to history, however, would be for NAISA to locate its primary genealogy in explicitly international, transnational, global, or what I would call trans-Indigenous gatherings and organizations. Such a genealogy would spotlight, perhaps most preeminently, associations like the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP), an international Indigenous rights organization incorporated in the mid-1970s that was formed and led by Indigenous peoples themselves, though they did welcome various kinds of outside assistance.2 Similar to NAISA, the WCIP was founded on the principle that the activities of Indigenous “research,” broadly defined, and the “reporting” of that Indigenous research to various publics and governing bodies, was the basis for all of its other activities (Massey 1986, 61). The point of my address this evening, then—the destination marked in my itinerary—is admittedly quite simple. I want to argue that to center the “I” in NAISA...

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