They say that a bad day fishing is better than a good day at the office. Those who say that are not professors at research universities. Think about it. You get paid to have conversations with smart people and there is a bureaucracy dedicated to making sure the people who want to talk with you are smart enough. The subject matter of these conversations is something you care enough about to have dedicated much of your life to becoming an expert.
”Research university” is not something I understood growing up in Oklahoma. All higher education was ”college” and it was the stomping grounds for a lot of rich white people and a few jocks. It had nothing to do with me. I did not know anybody who had been to college, much less returned. School was something to be tolerated until I could get a job.
I hated school. The job of a teacher, besides keeping broken furniture to a minimum, was to tell students how it is so they could tell those things back on an exam. At a research university, you don’t spend a lot of time talking about how things are. That’s in the textbook, and it’s insulting to tell students to read something and then repeat it to them. You spend more time talking about how things were, how they are going to be, and how they should be, and why. Your job is as much to listen and respond as it is to profess.
I remember my low point in the Oklahoma schools like it was yesterday. The Coach was teaching Oklahoma history, which normally meant The Coach was reading the textbook to us. Oklahoma is football country and The Coach is an important person. On this day, The Coach was in high good humor, talking about the discovery of oil on the Osage Reservation.
More precisely, The Coach was telling us about the white vultures who preyed on the newly rich Indians. ”They were selling washing machines to dumb Indians who had no electricity,” The Coach informed us, adding a ”haw haw haw” in case we did not get the humor. The Indian kids, maybe a fifth of the class, were looking at our shoelaces and praying for the bell to ring.
Because I was Indian, I was destined to work with my hands, perhaps as an artist but more likely as a carpenter or plumber or some such. This was problematic because I had no aptitude for such things, and further complicated by the fact that relatives who had preceded me in the schools in fact did have artistic talent.
The teachers wanted nothing but the best for me. They knew what Indians do, and they wanted to help me become a very good craftsman or, if I had the talent, an artist. Everyone knows there are no Indian intellectuals, right?
Today, I am a gatekeeper for the intellectual union card, the Ph.D., and I work with two Indian Ph.D. candidates. Need I add that I consider those students to be solid gold, that their existence justifies my own?
My own existence as a tenured professor at a research university is highly unlikely because I’m an American Indian high school dropout from a background of rural poverty. Some day, maybe I will write about how I got here, but I don’t expect that my struggles are greatly different from those of other Indian professors.
It’s against this background, my background, that I hear the moccasin telegraph of cyberspace crackling with the news that Andrea Smith has been denied tenure at the University of Michigan. Smith is the author of ”Conquest: Sexual Violence and Native American Genocide.”
I’m thinking the university could disregard that book because South End Press, an outfit more political than academic and noted for publishing Ward Churchill, published it. But she has another book with Duke University Press.
I’m thinking the university could get exercised about ”Native American Genocide.” I am reminded that two of my three thesis advisers objected to my use of the term ”ethnic cleansing” to refer to white settlers removing Indians from Texas. The third adviser was a Paiute. There is a world of cultural distance between a Paiute and a Cherokee, but we could agree that my use of ”ethnic cleansing” when it was a neologism was a straightforward description and not a rhetorical excess.
I’m thinking that Smith’s case has the same scent as Robert Warrior’s tenure denial by Stanford, partially in disrespect of his book, ”Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee.”
I’m reminded of two other recent tenure denials. Waziyatawin Angela Wilson’s denial at Arizona State was explicitly based on her ”political agenda,” and it was reversed after an outcry by many if not most Indian scholars (there are not that many of us). Pamela Owens’ denial at the University of Nebraska – Omaha is at this time without public explanation, but it’s worth mentioning that a letter favoring her tenure came from Vine Deloria Jr., who was the foremost Indian academic of our generation. Owens’ case is heading to litigation.
I’ve been tenured twice, but both times my writings on Indian issues were belittled. In my third-year review at the University of Texas – San Antonio, I was flatly told to ”lay off the Indian stuff.” At Indiana, the man who was department chair at the time I was hired professed not to know what it is I do and abstained on my tenure vote.
Refereed articles – articles vetted anonymously by several experts, called referees – are the coin of the academic realm, and there are three leading refereed journals that will publish Indian policy from the Indian point of view: ”Wicazo Sa Review,” ”American Indian Quarterly” and ”American Indian Culture and Research Journal.” These journals get little respect in the mainstream; but if you publish in mainstream journals, you define Indians as the problem. In the Indian journals, it is permissible to define the settlers as the problem. This perspective affects research questions.
I guest-edited an issue of an Indian journal of lesser status than the three named above, and I remember begging a Navajo colleague to submit an article I knew he was writing. He apologized and told me he already had a publication in one of the top three that was being disregarded and he could not afford another article in a venue that would not ”count” towards tenure.
See a pattern here? The deck is stacked. Smith has some 15 refereed articles in addition to book chapters, books written, and books edited. She is currently the director of Native American studies at the University of Michigan.
To avoid roadblocks to tenure, an Indian scholar should tread carefully around Indian issues or ignore them. Then when we go home, the folks there want to know what our education has done for them and why they should send us, their smartest young people. Indian academics must attack academia’s insular customs in order to survive but defend academia to Indian country. A day spent torn between higher education and all the reasons I aspired to higher education is, indeed, a day that makes a bad day fishing very attractive.
Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and an associate professor of criminal justice at Indiana University – Bloomington. He is a columnist for Indian Country Today.