American Indian Studies Programs

Setting Up an American Indian Studies Program From Scratch

I spent about six years trying to build a credible American Indian Studies concentration inside a department that had never hired a tribal studies faculty member before. The first problem nobody warns you about is that the work doesn't look like a typical academic program on paper. It looks like a committee, a small budget, a long list of unincorporated community partners, and a curriculum that requires faculty from anthropology, history, English, and political science to share actual teaching load while everyone pretends this isn't unusual. I learned most of this the hard way. An American Indian Studies program is a disciplinary concentration that sits somewhere between ethnic studies, area studies, and tribal sovereignty studies. It is not a single field the way physics or biology is. It pulls from ethnography, Indigenous historiography, legal studies on tribal jurisdiction, language revitalization methods, and visual culture. The exact shape of the program depends heavily on where your institution is located and which tribal nations maintain a presence within commuting distance. A program in Oklahoma will look completely different from one in Rhode Island or Wisconsin, even if the course catalog uses the same names. Below I describe the practical steps I used to go from zero to an approved program at a regional public university, plus the decisions that almost derailed it.

Step 1 — Secure the Institutional Home Before You Write a Single Syllabus

The biggest mistake I see people make is drafting five sample courses before getting a departmental home. No matter how impressive the syllabi are, they float until someone agrees to carry them. You need an administrative sponsor who understands that American Indian Studies usually requires cross-departmental cooperation, and preferably someone who has already survived a curricular review at your school. At my university, the proposal landed initially in the anthropology department because tribal material culture was considered part of their domain. That framing was wrong for half the curriculum. We eventually moved the proposal to a joint home under Ethnic and Community Studies, which turned out to be the right call. The administration needed a place to put the program, and the right home is the one that can credibly host both the humanities side and the policy side. If your school lacks an ethnic studies umbrella, look for a department that already teaches Native American history and will tolerate a shared appointment.

Step 2 — Map the Local Tribal Landscape Before You Design Courses

You cannot build a legitimate program without knowing which tribes have treaties, federal recognition, state recognition, or unacknowledged status in your region. I made the error of assuming that listing the closest federally recognized tribe was enough. It was not. My program sat in a state with three federally recognized nations and two state-recognized groups, plus several unacknowledged communities whose elders were actively fighting for federal recognition. A curriculum built only around the federally recognized tribes ended up reproducing the exact erasure the field is supposed to critique. Before writing course descriptions, I spent a summer visiting three tribal education offices and asking them what they wanted students at our university to know. Two of them told me the same thing: teach treaty law early. They also flagged that many general-education surveys present Native peoples as historical subjects rather than contemporary political actors. That feedback became the organizing principle for our lower-division sequence. We started every intro course with the 2020 census and contemporary governance, then moved backward into pre-contact and colonial history. It changed how the classes felt immediately.

Step 3 — Build the Core Sequence With Deliberate Tension

A strong program needs a core that forces students to sit with discomfort rather than offering easy closure. I structured ours around four pillars: sovereignty and law, historical trauma and resilience, language and epistemology, and contemporary Indigenous politics. Each pillar required at least one upper-division course. The tension comes from making students read both colonial legal doctrine and tribal court decisions in the same semester, which usually produces more debate than comfort in the classroom. The specific course sequence I recommend, based on what actually worked at my institution, is roughly this: Foundations of American Indian Studies, which is a survey course but not a soft one. It covers treaty history, the Major Crimes Act, ICWA, and the basic frameworks of tribal sovereignty. Students who come in thinking this will be easy usually change their minds by week four.

Indigenous Research Methods, which teaches oral history protocols, community-based participatory research, and IRB considerations specific to tribal data sovereignty. This is where students learn that standard research ethics do not automatically apply to tribal communities. I have a concrete example of this failing. Early on, a graduate student tried to conduct interview-based research with an enrolled tribal member using our university IRB template. The tribe rejected the protocol entirely because the form assumed individual consent without addressing collective harm or data ownership. That was a useful reminder that tribal institutions operate on a different legal and ethical framework than the university does.

Step 4 — Hire Faculty Who Can Handle Interdisciplinarity

Tenure committees at most universities still evaluate Native studies faculty through traditional disciplinary lenses. I watched a colleague get criticized for publishing in both a political science journal and a tribal law review during tenure review. The department argued the publications were too scattered. That argument ignores the reality that Indigenous studies requires exactly that kind of scattered engagement because the field does not fit inside a single disciplinary box. When you hire for the program, prioritize candidates who can teach at least two of the four core pillars. A historian who can also teach contemporary policy is more valuable than a historian who only teaches colonial contact periods. Language faculty are useful, but you need educators who understand that language revitalization is not only a cultural practice, it is a legal and political project tied to tribal sovereignty.

Step 5 — Create a Community Advisory Board That Has Actual Power

Many programs create advisory boards and then treat them as ceremonial. Ours was different because we wrote into the program constitution that the advisory board had veto power over curriculum changes affecting tribal content. That decision cost us six months of internal friction with the faculty senate, which argued that faculty should control curriculum. The compromise was that the board could veto changes to the core sequence but not elective courses. That limitation turned out to be mostly symbolic because the core sequence is where most students encounter the program, and diluting it would have undermined the whole thing. The board includes two enrolled tribal members, one elder who specializes in oral tradition, and one attorney who works in Indian law. Their involvement has prevented at least two courses from being added to the catalog that I now recognize would have been harmful. One proposed course framed Native spirituality as a standalone topic without any grounding in tribal governance or treaty rights. The advisory board blocked it on the grounds that the framing reinforced a common stereotype. That was a productive conflict.

Common Pitfalls That Break These Programs

Underestimating the administrative workload is the most common failure point. Teaching a course on tribal law requires guest speakers, site visits, and careful coordination with tribal institutions. That is not something a single adjunct can sustain. Programs that rely on temporary faculty burn out quickly because the institutional memory walks out the door with each semester. Another pitfall is treating American Indian Studies as solely a historical discipline. Students entering the program often expect to read about the nineteenth century and leave. But the field has expanded into environmental justice, digital humanities, Indigenous health disparities, and legal practice. A program that does not reflect that expansion will feel stagnant within five years. A third pitfall is failing to secure funding for student travel. Fieldwork in this area frequently requires visiting tribal archives, participating in community events, or assisting with language documentation projects. If the program cannot support travel costs, the students who need it most will not participate. I worked around this by creating a small grant pool funded through a local tribal foundation, which has provided between two and four thousand dollars annually since its inception. It is not large, but it prevents the program from becoming exclusively accessible to students who can self-fund field experiences.

How to Evaluate Whether a Program Is Legitimate

If you are a prospective student or a colleague trying to assess the quality of an American Indian Studies program, look for three things. First, check whether the program has a community advisory board with documented influence on curriculum. Second, look at the faculty profile and verify that hiring reflects interdisciplinary competence rather than single-discipline appointments. Third, examine the alumni outcomes. Strong programs produce graduates who enter tribal government, legal practice, community health, education, and cultural preservation. Programs that only feed into generic master's tracks without specific tribal affiliations are usually signaling weakness. I have also learned to look for whether the program publishes student work outside the classroom. Our senior capstone project required a public presentation to the advisory board and a published report. Some of those reports later informed local policy discussions. That level of engagement is rare and worth noting when evaluating a program's seriousness.

The Uncomfortable Truths About Running This Type of Program

American Indian Studies programs operate under perpetual resource scarcity. Enrollment fluctuates. Funding is competitive. Tribal institutions occasionally withdraw participation because they feel exploited by academic extraction. None of this is unique to this field, but it is more visible here because the communities involved are small and politically complex. I have watched programs collapse when a single tribal nation withdrew its support after feeling that the university was using their participation for accreditation purposes rather than genuine partnership. That happened at a neighboring institution, and it serves as a cautionary note about the difference between performative collaboration and real collaboration. The program at my university survives because the advisory board has teeth, the faculty are genuinely interdisciplinary, and the curriculum refuses to treat Native peoples as relics. It is not perfect. Some courses still feel too broad. Funding remains inadequate. The advisory board veto was partially overridden in 2023 after a faculty revolt over a proposed change to the research methods sequence. The override did not stick because the board documented its objections thoroughly, but the conflict revealed how fragile the arrangement can become when political pressure mounts. If you are building or joining an American Indian Studies program, expect it to be harder than most humanities concentrations. Expect conflict. Expect partnerships that require patience rather than quick results. And expect the work to matter in ways that are difficult to quantify but impossible to ignore once you are inside it.