(NAME-MCE) Russell: From the bottom of the education barrel

[KispokoT at aol.com]

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.
_http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096416847_ 
(http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096416847) 



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