HIST 3510 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: 1969 White Paper, Playing Indian, Indian Act
24 Dec 2016
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I wanted to try to make visible a division that separates native people as history and native people as historians. The dominant position of the nation-state in professional history and narrow definitions of identity and historical labor work to alienate indigenous historians. Aboriginal scholars and professionals are frequently asked to problematize and justify their presence in academia and to theorize about their difference. Material by native academics is often structured around questions of legitimacy. They have deconstructed colonial mythologies that represent indigenous people as static relics of an earlier stage of evolution. Aboriginal critiques have shifted from a discussion of access to knowledge to a discussion of its production, translation, use, protection, and ownership. Reductive claims that one must simply be native to do accurate historical scholarship about. Native people suggest that professional history is made in transparent, unproblematic, and apolitical ways.
