March 6th Notes

March 6th Notes:

We began our review of To Remain an Indian today. Jay reviewed the
introduction. The text focuses on the ways in which we sue policy to make
things safe-in this case, Native American culture. The introduction
reviews the methodological underpinnings of the text. The authors use
archival records, life histories, indigenous cultural ethnographies,and
their information as partial insiders and outsiders of Native American
culture to weave together a narrative. The ultimate goal of the text is
to understand the ways in which policies have intersected with Native
American agency to determine the ability to which a Native American can
"remain an Indian." We split up the chapters and will be reviewing them
over the course of the next several weeks.

We also discussed the implications of post-structuralism and the idea of
the person as political. This week we talked about testimonios and
journals as qualitative inquiry. We questioned how far qualitative
inquiry can go before it is not longer considered valid. If a journal is
a cultural text, than everything is a cultural text. While we did not
disagree with this fact, we wondered where the line is in terms of actual
lived experiences. Examples in the text include fabricated
testimonios-the story was not actually experienced. Since it was not a
true event, is it really a valid text? Or is it valid based on its
ability to transform and empower individuals? We hope to explore this
further in class.