NCIS Proposal, Widening the Road for Independent Scholarship and Personal Narratives
Darnella Davis, Ed.D.
Independent Scholar, NCIS
Proposed paper for the National Coalition of Independent Scholars, June 21-23, 2019, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst
In the field of History, the relative dearth of primary sources has plagued revisionist scholars bent on retracing the shared experiences of divergent groups such as indigenous peoples and the “mixed-bloods” within their communities. Despite the relative paucity of minority voices, new sources and perspectives do emerge. When they do, how are they received? The proposed paper will discuss the challenges of meaningfully situating original voices within the broadening landscape of interdisciplinary studies. These challenges arise from a forthcoming publication, Untangling a Red, White, and Black Heritage, a Personal History of the Allotment Era. The Allotment Era was a period of rapid transformation prompted by the division of Indian Territory into self-sustaining homesteads, accelerated by the various rushes to settle lands, and culminating in the formation of the state of Oklahoma which overlay the former territories of indigenous peoples. For the independent scholar engaging both memoire and history, the challenge is to secure space that resists the boundaries of conventional disciplinary frameworks while negotiating the peerage associated with academic publication.
While de Tocqueville anticipated the challenges of polarization for a nation comprised of three races, in the intervening years scholars have challenged narrow colonialist views and offered alternative perspectives on our collective American experience. Yet, we still struggle with “the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences” (Coates). Attempts to clarify the limitations of our nation’s racial discourse quickly confront the intersection of identity politics, interdisciplinary spaces, and a more heterogenous public square, one where, to quote de Tocqueville, we no longer “remain strangers to each other.” In this space, linguists, historians, legal scholars, and social critics are troubling the canon, poking at comfortable fictions, and unpacking exhausted taxonomies (Forbes, Inniss, Kendi, Krauthammer, Miles, Perdue, Pratt, Simpson, Strum, Wolfe, Yarbourgh) while collaborating through organizations such as the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) that encourage interdisciplinary scholarship. Interdisciplinary studies serve to widen the road for works, such as Untangling a Red, White, and Black Heritage. Such works may receive more scrutiny, based as they are on independent scholarship and personal narratives, especially if they explore uncomfortable, unsettling, and unpopular spaces.
If there is no need for invented traditions where genuine traditions survive, the Allotment Era provides a trove of hastily constructed symbols that eclipsed the images of once prosperous mixed-race communities (its transformation took less than 30 years (Chang)). The paper argues for the refusal of such erasure. It asserts that these silenced voices warrant space in the evolving revision of our national narrative. In this spirit, relinquishing our “idealized” past by decoding supposed symbols of progress may yet reveal a more authentic, a more genuine reality. Hobsbawm and Ranger’s lens may prove useful in gauging the depth of the signs of social cohesion, the legitimization of status, and the socialization of beliefs and values that displaced communities of color during Allotment. It may even offer new models of scholarship to academia.