Indigenous studies has been marked by a resistance to theory born out of its liminality; the same year that the summer school and conference Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture was held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Marxism and Native Americans, edited by Ward Chuchill and including essays by the Oceti Sakowin luminaries Russell Means and Vine Deloria, Jr., was published by the radical South End Press. While the similarly star-studded 1983 conference at the University of Illinois explored the “limits, frontiers, [and] boundaries” of Marxist critique in the humanities and social sciences and would effectively inaugurate cultural studies and postcolonial studies as recognizable fields in North America, those spatial and retrospectively colonial demarcations did not include a consideration of the theft of Indigenous land and genocide of Indigenous peoples as constitutive of capitalist modernity. For their part, contributors to Marxism and Native Americans viewed Karl Marx and his disciples skeptically—as, in Deloria’s words, “yet another group of cowboys riding around the same old rock. It is Western religion dressed in economistic clothing, and shabby clothing it is. It accepts uncritically and ahistorically the worldview generated by some ancient Western trauma that our species is alienated from nature and then offers but another version of Messianism as a solution to this artificial problem” (135).Footnote ¹

This position was not uncontested among Indigenous thinkers, of course; the Métis intellectual Howard Adams, whose own unfairly neglected book Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View (1975) offered a Marxist analysis of anti-Indigenous racism in Canada, described the volume as “a disappointing book” that “fails seriously in its suggested aim” (62). He faults Deloria and Means specifically for not engaging with the critical and liberatory possibilities of Marxism for Native people in their contributions, which he calls “misleading” and “superficial,” respectively (60). In her important book I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism (1988), the Stó:lō writer Lee Maracle argues that “[o]ur most brilliant movement leaders have been Native Marxists” and, though she includes various critiques of the left’s “betrayal” of Native people, proclaims, “I firmly believe that the philosophy of my ancestors lines up quite tidily with the philosophy of communism” (109, 113, 112).Footnote ² Nonetheless, the distrust of Marxism among North American Indigenous nations as, in Means’s words, “a ‘new’ European revolutionary doctrine” meant to “reverse the negative effects of European history on us” was reflected in the methodological approaches of an emerging field (24).Footnote ³

As Maracle suggests, despite her own belief in the continuity between traditional Indigenous cultural values and Marxism, this distrust was well-earned. Indeed, in the over seven hundred pages of the volume Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture published five years after the conference by the University of Illinois Press, Indigenous people and colonization in the Americas are scarcely mentioned; such an omission would be surprising, if not unthinkable, were a similarly expansive collection of cultural critique produced today.Footnote ⁴ Yet the invisibility of Indigenous nations and perspectives in such kinds of academic analysis has only recently begun to be addressed in the humanities. I consider here how Indigenous thinkers and the broader field of Native American and Indigenous studies responded to the disciplinary shifts that occurred following the 1983 conference and argue for the necessity of a capacious Indigenous theory informed by radical praxis that can counter its simultaneous appropriation and marginalization as a supplemental discipline within the neoliberal university.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Illinois conference in 2008, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, hosted a series of events under the title Subaltern Studies and Indigenous Critical Theory. A subsequent special issue of Interventions in 2011 brings the categories of subalternity and indigeneity into dialogue. The coeditors of the special issue, the Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd and Michael Rothberg, who, along with D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark, were coconvenors of the 2008 event, note in their introduction that “[p]ostcolonial studies can and does provide important conceptual tools for indigenous scholars, even if postcolonial scholars rarely consider that the inverse is also true” (4). The Osage scholar Robert Warrior writes in his contribution, “The Subaltern Can Dance, and So Sometimes Can the Intellectual,” that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay from the 1988 volume following the 1983 conference “has become the most influential of the pieces gathered” for Indigenous intellectuals because the concept of subalternity has been so productive in thinking about the Native world (87). In tracing the influence of Spivak’s essay on Indigenous studies and proposing forms of subalternity resonant with Indigenous material reality as well as intellectual pursuit, Warrior notes “the chronic peril of Native American studies and also Indigenous studies as they continue to lack a stronger and more integrated critical theory”; he argues that “Indigenous studies needs to be contributing more often and more energetically to contemporary theory,” including by offering a critique of the field’s own frequent use of a Foucauldian model of power (86, 88). There is, however, a “persistent resistance to theory in the most prominent domains of Indigenous studies,” owing in large part to the erasure of Native North America in postcolonial theory (89–90).Footnote ⁵ The failure of postcolonialism to describe the coloniality of Native life in North America and other settler colonies—along with the notoriously fraught periodization in its deployment of the prefix post—has made its use in Indigenous studies seem counter to the demands of Indigenous struggle, and indeed the field of postcolonial studies in the North American academy has often seemed uninterested in “local” issues of colonization (90).

Stuart Hall similarly notes in his contribution to Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture the “heightened period of theoretical contestation” in the aftermath of structuralism’s influence on ideology critique and “the charge that, in the pursuit of theory for its own sake, we have abandoned the problems of concrete historical analysis” (35). The most extreme instance of a text making this charge, according to Hall, was E. P. Thompson’s polemic against Althusserianism in The Poverty of Theory (1978), an “intemperate” response to a real problem of overabstraction (35). For Hall, theory exists not for intellectual posturing and academic reputation but as a tool to explain and produce knowledge about “the historical world and its processes; and thereby to inform our practice so that we may transform it” (36). The perceived inability of theory to describe the Indigenous world—particularly the ontological relationship with land, the pursuit of sovereignty or self-governance, and the violence of dispossession—at times meant a refusal to engage with or develop theoretical frameworks in conversation with other fields. Increasingly, however, Indigenous activism and cultural resurgence are dialectically informing theory, leading to a belated yet timely embrace of Marx and a willingness to engage in broader theoretical conversations.Footnote ⁶ Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, which Hall invokes, resonates with the urgency of an Indigenous anticapitalist politics seeking to change the world with its philosophy.

The Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014) modifies Marx to address colonial relations and dispossession, which are ongoing for Indigenous people and not strictly situated in the pastness of so-called primitive accumulation. The Marxian focus on the exploitation of labor by capital ignores the exploitation of land and nature, and, in the Canadian context, it is “the history and experience of dispossession, not proletarianization, [that] has been the dominant background structure” of the relationship between Indigenous people and the colonial state (13).Footnote ⁷ Describing the relationship between Marxism and Indigenous studies, Coulthard writes:

Reading Frantz Fanon in conversation with Marx, Coulthard describes capitalism as based on Indigenous dispossession and criticizes the liberal politics of recognition that developed out of this dispossession.

The turn to Marxist analysis in Indigenous studies is in part, as I have already suggested, informed by land-based Indigenous activism; Coulthard draws from the Idle No More movement in Canada as a model of “what a resurgent Indigenous politics might look like on the ground” (19), while the Oceti Sakowin historian and activist Nick Estes’s account of Indigenous resistance in Our History Is the Future (2019) culminates with the Standing Rock water protectors’ resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Red Nation, the Indigenous advocacy group cofounded by Estes, has published a manifesto called The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth, which calls for Native sovereignty, internationalism, and revolutionary socialism. It draws inspiration from liberation movements in Central and South America, which are largely driven by Indigenous peoples.Footnote ⁸ The symbiotic relationship between the grass roots and Indigenous theory goes some way toward addressing the disciplinary liminality of Indigenous studies.

In a well-known state-of-the-field essay in 1997, the Dakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn asks, “Who stole Native American studies?” She argues that the promise of the field, which was inaugurated with the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars in 1970 at Princeton University, has been eroded by a lack of institutional recognition, including slow progress in the creation of Native American studies departments. In short, because of this structural failure, the field is not answerable to the Native nations it is meant to serve and Native scholars find themselves as mere “tokens” within disciplines such as anthropology, ethnic studies, and literary studies (Cook-Lynn 12). Indigenous students and faculty members are encouraged to “examine their own personal identity crises,” and “the individual search for a personal self-identity was the topic for publication of numerous books and materials used in course development,” at the expense of studying sovereignty and Indigenous languages (15).Footnote ⁹ This neoliberal individualist approach prevents structural critique, evoking trauma and grievance instead, and appeals to the managerial university.Footnote ¹⁰ Further, Cook-Lynn argues that postcolonial studies, in foregrounding “the moment of what is called ‘colonial contact,’” in fact serves to marginalize Indigenous studies and “disguises a history of invasion and genocide” (13).

The analytic—and field—of settler colonial studies has in some measure addressed this latter critique in the time since Cook-Lynn first articulated it and has allowed for productive comparative analysis and solidarity between, for example, Palestinian and North American Indigenous struggles, but it has also introduced anxieties and there has been debate over the extent to which the attempt to understand settler colonialism has itself produced another form of erasure for Native American and Indigenous studies by turning critical attention away from Indigenous resurgence.Footnote ¹¹ The imperiled status of Native studies due to the lack of a unified critical theory further contributes to its resistance to a theory that could marginalize it. This resistance has become generative; Warrior was one of the cofounders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association in 2007, and since that time the field has embraced what Chris Andersen and Jean O’Brien, of the Métis and White Earth Ojibwe nations, respectively, call “methodological promiscuity” (1). The Cree and Saulteaux scholar Robert Alexander Innes lists three concrete aims of the field: “To access, understand, and convey Native cultural perspective(s)”; “[t]o conduct research that benefits Native people and/or communities”; and “[t]o employ research methods and theories that will achieve these goals” (2). This diversity in method alongside a material commitment to Indigenous peoples must be maintained if the field is to survive without being defanged and appropriated as a purely intellectual pursuit.

In a time of academic austerity, particularly in the humanities, it is striking that in the last five years there has been a scramble across many North American institutions to recruit Indigenous faculty members or hire in the field of Indigenous studies. In Canada this has occurred in response to the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which published its report on Indian Residential Schools and their continuing legacies in 2015, after seven years of gathering testimony from thousands of residential school survivors. The report includes ninety-four calls to action, several of which apply directly to universities and cultural institutions. Call to action number 16, for instance, asks “post-secondary institutions to create university and college degree and diploma programs in Aboriginal languages” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2). And call to action 62 urges the government to “provide the necessary funding to post-secondary institutions to educate teachers on how to integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms” (7). Though only thirteen of the ninety-four calls to action have been fulfilled after nearly a decade, the Tri-Council research funding bodies in Canada have set aside historic amounts for Indigenous-related research. This includes funding for multiple Canada Research Chairs in Indigenous topics, which incentivizes institutional and individual attention to the Indigenous. In the United States, in the midst of an otherwise bleak academic job market, the past three years have seen numerous cluster hires, endowed chairs, and new programs launched in Indigenous studies.

There is a risk that this drive toward indigeneity will simply reproduce the dynamic that Cook-Lynn identifies as having “stolen” Native studies away from the Native nations to whom it was imagined at one time to be answerable. These recruitments, including the more ambitious cluster hires, are unlikely to lead to the creation of departments of Indigenous studies or degrees in the field where they do not already exist because of resource scarcity and the present shape of higher education. Yet perhaps the relationship between political movement, cultural resurgence, and theory can help bridge the gap between founding optimism and present alienation. Hall notes that what makes Marxism as modified by Antonio Gramsci useful and distinguishes it as an analytic is that the commitment to socialist transformation means it is a “living theory, an open-ended project of critical thought, without guarantees,” in contrast to “the many other academically closed discourses that presently struggle to hegemonize the intellectual world” (56). This resonates strongly with Andersen and O’Brien’s description of Indigenous studies as an interdisciplinary pursuit and might serve as a productive model for a relational Indigenous critical theory whose transformative goals are not altogether different. Perhaps, then, it is Hall’s essay in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture and not Spivak’s that ultimately offers the most generative contribution to Indigenous studies; in its grounding in Indigenous communities and its refusal of theoretical closure, Indigenous studies sustains and is defined by material commitments that can only be realized with a capacious methodological approach.