Critical Indigenous Studies: From Difference to Density

Abstract

Proponents of the discipline of Native Studies (in its various guises) have attempted to produce a methodologically and theoretically distinctive body of scholarship to justify its existence in the field of academia. Critiquing Duane Champagne’s recent article published in a flagship journal for North American Native Studies, I argue that while establishing Native Studies as a discipline has little or nothing to do with securing Native Studies departments on university campuses, a place nonetheless exists for these departments. Marrying Native Studies literature on the importance of producing tribally specific knowledge with Australian-based Whiteness Studies literature focusing on the utility of indigeneity for denaturalising white privilege, I argue that the discipline of Native Studies should justify itself departmentally by teaching about the complex forms of local indigeneity upon which white privilege is reproduced.