Kim TallBear: Anti-Indian atmosphere thrives in university town

I am currently Associate Professor of Anthropology and Native American & Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. This fall I will assume a new position, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. I am formerly a tribal environmental planner who has long worked on tribal regulatory issues. I am also an enrolled member of Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation. I grew up on another South Dakota reservation, that of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe, where I have many relatives. I am also descended from the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.

While we have healthy debates in Indian Country and in the field of Indigenous Studies on the topics on which Professor Diaz writes in this article, let me add to this conversation that many of us in the field support the American Indian Studies faculty at the University of Illinois and are very sad at the hostility they have long encountered in that institution. Before the Salaita incident, as Diaz writes, they were subject to racist abuse over the vile Chief mascot at Illinois. Indeed, when I am in Urbana-Champaign—I am a founding advisory board member of the Summer Internship for Native Americans in Genomics (SING), which is headquartered at that institution—I feel the anti-Indianism in town, and on campus. I find that mascot in particular highly offensive.

I and others in our field are grateful for the theoretical and activist work in defense of indigenous rights and indigenous studies that AIS at Illinois does. Others and I are sorry for the abuse they have taken and many of us find their actions both brave and intellectually important for our field.