The Pan-Indian Problem: Relationality Within and Beyond Colonialism

Abstract

Though the term is used to refer to various geographic regions, time periods, movements, and ideologies, there is little contemporary research on pan-Indianism itself. Much of contemporary discourse focuses on whether the term refers to the inappropriate homogenization of Indigenous peoples and cultures or whether it refers to the historical intertribal coalitions that developed to fight colonial oppression. Rather than debate the different meanings of the term, this research project explores how and why the concept was created. The term was first introduced and defined in a subfield of Anthropology in the 1950s known as Acculturation Studies. By examining the origins of the concept in this subfield, this project argues that Acculturation scholars manipulated the concept of pan-Indianism to promote assimilationist ideologies and to prove that American Indians were assimilating into dominant American society. Pan-Indianism continues to function contemporarily as a grammar of colonialism which perpetuates these ideologies. Given its ties to this problematic area of scholarship, this project calls into question the use of pan-Indianism as a framework to interpret history and Indigenous people’s experiences, focusing on how the term is used to describe the Society of American Indians and Indigenous people in urban spaces. The project’s goal is to eliminate the use of pan-Indianism to promote assimilative ideologies and, instead, to highlight the history of Indigenous resistance to colonial efforts of assimilation.