Defining “Radical Indigenism” and Creating an American Indian Scholarship

In their influential book Writing Culture, James Clifford and George E. Marcus (1986) probed the challenges and limits of anthropological work. Rejecting the assumption that conventional research methods supplied tools for the neutral description, classification, and analysis of data drawn from the objective observation of other cultures, they argued instead that such methods often functioned as mechanisms of control and domination. The critique easily generalized to related disciplines, and the resulting loss of social scientific innocence helped create a space for members of subordinated and colonized groups, including indigenous peoples around the world, to call for new models of research that better reflected their interests, perspectives, goals, and voices (Rigney 2001). In the intervening decades, indigenous scholars have begun the important work of articulating the values that might motivate such research and the general goals it must reflect (e.g., Rigney 1997; Warrior 1995; Weaver 1997; Alfred 1999; Smith 1999). They commonly express interest in the community-based or “participatory” research models that are increasingly finding currency in the academy, but they also set their sights on a more distant horizon. They call, as well, for a “new intellectual