Conversation Framed—The Center for Native American and Indigenous Research: A Jeffersonian Legacy

Conversation Framed—The Center for Native American and Indigenous Research:A Jeffersonian Legacy1 Regna Darnell Like the founding of the American Philosophical Society itself, as Linda Greenhouse and Gary Nash so eloquently characterized it in the opening session,2 the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR) did not spring to life fully formed at its nominal origin in 2014. It has a prehistory and an ongoing history that intersects with other APS initiatives extending back to the Jeffersonian legacy we celebrate in the APS's 275th anniversary year. Understanding Native Americans was only part of what Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington meant by "useful knowledge," which they doubtless saw more in relation to the "self-improvement" implicit in "philosophical" meetings and to the ever-present necessity of negotiating terms of colonial expansion—somewhere between hypocrisy and noblesse oblige. As the longest-standing member of CNAIR's founding generation, I have been asked to speak about what it means to the APS. I hope to persuade you, especially those whose interests and expertise lie far from contemporary Indigenous issues, that something important has been happening here—of which the APS membership can justly be proud. I suggest that the American Philosophical Society is the only institution that could have done these things and the only one capable of sustaining them as a legacy to American society and public discourse. There are at least four reasons for this uniqueness: 1. Autonomy: Neither Congress nor Board constrain our imaginations. We are free to dream and take risks to realize our dreams. 2. Continuity: CNAIR builds on a hoary legacy of engagement with Native Americans. [End Page 215] 3. Gravitas: The APS is the oldest and most respected of the New World's intellectual institutions, its history inseparable from that of the nation itself. APS Librarian Patrick Spero has reminded us of the weightiness of the Library's Native American collections. 4. Endowment: The APS has sufficient resources to commit to an expensive and long-term commitment. When the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Challenge Grant is fully funded, CNAIR will become a permanent part of the core budget of the APS. Now to the story: it's important to remember that none of us knew at the onset where disparate initiatives would lead—how or if they would all come together. There have been and still are many moving parts not always in synchrony. Although I can speak only from my own standpoint and experience, I have had a ringside seat for a long time. I provide a snapshot of where we are now, even though "now" is a moving and ever-changing target. For me, CNAIR began in 2008 as a gleam in the eye of Matt Bokovoy, then-incoming Native American Studies editor at the University of Nebraska Press. He approached me about his vision for a documentary edition of the Franz Boas Papers (that is, the professional correspondence). I am highly susceptible to gleams in colleagues' eyes. Nonetheless, after a decade immersed in the life and work of Edward Sapir, I was wary of the pitfalls of biography, given the complexity of any major figure and the absolute impossibility of closure. For good reason, there is no adequate biography of Boas's entire career, especially after 1906 when he moved rapidly away from anthropology as then narrowly understood. But, I thought, the gleam in my own eye building in strength, perhaps a team of scholars and Indigenous users of the collections, especially descendants of Boas's original collaborators, might pool their expertise and insights. Former APS Librarian Marty Levitt's eyes lit up with a now increasingly familiar gleam when Matt and I approached him. We began to plot, to amalgamate and expand existing initiatives that had evolved piecemeal but were nonetheless part of APS tradition. The Phillips Fund for Native American and Indigenous Research "in ethnohistory, linguistics and the history of studies of Native American languages in the continental United States and Canada," on which I have served since 1994, and as its chair since 2006, has supported multiple Indigenous scholars, many of them students, in response to the CNAIR mandate of capacity-building in and...

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