Including Native American perspectives in the political science curriculum.

Both native and nonnative Americans recognized 1992 as a quincentennial year. But while many Americans of European ancestry celebrated their "discovery" of this hemisphere in which they are now the dominant culture, Native Americans celebrated their survival despite five centuries of genocide and ethnocide. The rhetoric and discussion of these perspectives will continue long past the quincentenniary. However, the significance of these differing perspectives is not which one is considered historically correct. Rather, each perspective must be studied for what it teaches about each people's conception of the public things, politics. There is, indeed, much to learn.

The worst kind of elitism is that which ignores other cultures, other peoples, other political or economic systems. By ignoring those who are different, stigmatized as "other," we not only deny their existence, but also recognize no dignity or value in these "others." The discipline of political science has certainly been guilty of such neglect with regard to Native Americans (Melody and Murdock 1987; McCulloch 1989). In political science we have largely left the study of native peoples and their political systems to sociologists and anthropologists and have, therefore, denied the role that indigenous peoples have played in the development of the American political system as well as the role they continue to play in the political and economic processes of this country. This neglect has even led us to ignore the existence of tribal governments as autonomous entities in intergovernmental relationships within the American political system (Melody 1980).

The quincentenniary provided political scientists with an opportunity to overcome this ethnocentric neglect. It was a chance to help ourselves and our students understand the greater reality of different ways of living in community which, in turn, promotes tolerance, an essential factor in our multicultural democracy. It was a chance to recognize the existence and validity of indigenous governments and politics and, as a discipline, to broaden our perspectives.

The Value of Including Native American Perspectives

While the quincentennial year provided an opportunity for inclusion, it did not provide the only rationale for a focus on indigenous peoples. We must also examine the governments and politics of native peoples because they are an existential part of the historical and contemporary experience of the American political system. They do not represent merely the "interesting natives" of anthropological study; they exist as important players in this political system (both within and without the constitutional system) and the international political system as well.

Besides seeing Native Americans as actors in our own mass democracy, the study of Native American government and politics offers insight into the theoretical morass that has come to define the discipline. As Almond and Coleman noted more than three decades ago, our conceptual scheme has lost its ability to deal adequately even with Western European politics, because of its unnecessary reliance on a legal and institutional vocabulary. They stated:

Even in the absence of this compelling scientific justification for broadening the scope of comparative politics, practical policy motives have forced the modern political scientist to concern himself with the whole range of political systems which exist in the modern world--from African kingdoms and tribal organizations, to traditional oligarchies such as Saudi Arabia, and transitional, modernizing systems such as Burma and India (Almond and Coleman 1960, 10).

Post-modern theorists extend Almond and Coleman's earlier argument for inclusiveness. They, after all, argued for inclusiveness in terms of attempts to develop general theories--as this attempt was understood at the time. Post-modern theory, on the other hand, recognizes that power establishes the very terms of our discourse, and that every regime provides for a politics consonant with itself. In his recent American Political Science Review article, Lowi put it succinctly: "The APSA follows Leviathan" (1992,4).

The political experience of Native Americans demands attention in our common quest to delimit the reality of politics apart from the hegemonic discourses that currently mark the profession. Ironically, the experiences of "the other"--Native Americans, women, African Americans, Latinos, lesbians and gay men, and others--offer us the possibility to penetrate to our subject matter, to evade the intellectual snares and enticements of Leviathan.

Lowi also calls us back to evaluation and judgment. As he puts it, "We confront an unnatural universe that requires judgment and evaluation. Without this, there can be no love of subject, only vocational commitment to method and process" (Lowi 1992, 5). Certainly, the conquest of the Americas demands critical evaluation.

Nearly 3 million indigenous peoples live in North America, and about 1.9 million live in the United States (Wilmer, forthcoming). Sixty-five percent of the native peoples in the United States live in urban areas, and approximately 800,000 Native Americans reside on about 50 million acres of land recognized by the U.S. government as reservations (Burnham 144-145).

In the United States alone, there are more than 500 different native governments, including those on 310 reservations and trust lands (and four trust lands not associated with any reservation), 217 Alaskan village organizations, and native governments that are not formally recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (Presidential Commission on Indian Reservation Economies 1984, 19 and 29). In addition, native peoples in the United States control substantial quantities of vital natural resources: coal, oil, natural gas, uranium and, most important in arid parts of the United States, water (Barsh 1988). These indigenous peoples no longer willingly accept acculturation just as they have never embraced their conquest. Their self-awareness and sovereignty will now make them a force to be reckoned with not only in the United States, but also in the global community.

While some of our undergraduate students will be political science majors interested in the intricacies of government and politics, many of the students we teach are required by their liberal arts or general education curriculum to study political systems in general or American and state government in particular. It is our major opportunity to make an impact on students we will probably see just once in their academic careers; this is the most important reason for the inclusion of indigenous and multicultural perspectives. We can prepare our students to be more inclusive in their own perspectives by…