Anthropology, American Indians, research, and the ensuing 'identity' plague

This research investigates the identity struggles that confront American Indian students within mainstream higher education. It argues that the sociolinguistic framing of American Indian identity constructs a limited frame of operation which requires native scholars to employ strategic ways of engaging in discourse and rhetoric pertaining to the subject matter of "American Indians." The operating assumption to this project is that the complementary subject-matters/topics of "culture" and "American Indians" would make "anthropology" the ideal discipline to be pursued by American Indians who possess a cultural reality and ontology distinct from mainstream American culture. However, the polemics of Vine Deloria Jr., and his discourse against anthropology(ists) in (1969) symbolically initiated a negative association of anthropology and American Indians.;Therefore, this study investigates the reasons why American Indians either choose to pursue, or not to pursue, the discipline of anthropology in today's world of higher education. This exploration thoroughly inspects the various underpinnings involved in the construction of an American Indian scholar/academic's identity through the examination of their ontological positionality. I explore the paradoxical relationship between reason and nature that lies at the core of Western scientific thinking and Modernity, while examining exactly how it manifests itself in the identity and behavior of contemporary American Indian scholars/academics.;Anthropology was originally intended to analyze what is, now problematically, "non-Western" knowledge and understandings of how people in "non-Western" societies perceive(d) themselves. This relationship of "the observer" and "the observed"---"The Crisis of Representation" has not been resolved with respect to conducting field research. Specifically, with regards to the descendents of the people who were the original "non-Western" subject matter for American anthropology---(contemporary American Indian scholars/academics), I demonstrate that they negotiate their "American Indian" cultural identities in conjunction with their Western scientifically oriented and institutionalized professional careers. This is done through the ability to grasp language and recognize that discourse shapes the ways in which we conceptualize reality. In my findings, the responses of negativity are not directly involving anthropology, but are more oriented towards Academe and the incongruities of culture and equity in America at large.