Chapter 15 - Grounding Nineteenth-Century Studies in Indigenous Studies

Summary

How do Indigenous studies methodologies and concepts bear on nineteenth-century literary studies? How does Indigenous studies reconfigure accepted signposts of the field of nineteenth-century studies, from its temporal ending and beginning points, to scholarly objects of study? As much as these questions might seem to make the familiar scholarly move of asking what happens when we bring two fields together, we argue that Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) poses unique questions and directions to nineteenth-century studies. At the same time, we argue that engagement with Indigenous studies must go beyond simply reading works that feature or are written by Indigenous peoples to more substantively engaging with NAIS as a methodological orientation and field. We posit that NAIS contains methodologies for understanding not just Native American literatures but topics that have long been mainstays of nineteenth-century American literary studies, including dispossession, race, citizenship, language ideologies, and gender.