What Does it Mean to Do Indigenous Studies in Europe in the 2020s?

Different Perspectives, Conversations and Reflections

Abstract

Doing Native Studies in Europe has a long tradition that goes back at least to the 1980s, one major stepstone being the founding of the American Indian Workshop in 1980 – a still active network of Native scholars in Europe with an annual conference at different places in Europe with European and American participants. However, the field as such and in Europe has grown and changed considerably over the last ten to twenty years, and this essay seeks to draw out how these differences have impacted and are reflected in research, teaching, networking, and other ways of doing Native Studies in Europe right now.

In which ways have Native forms of resurgence in social, cultural, and political ways as well as the Native-led surge of the field, demonstrated by such rapidly growing institutions as NAISA, changed the ways of doing Native Studies in Europe? What might still be considered distinct European perspectives in Native Studies, and how are they connected to an increasing transnationalization of the field itself? What role does the renewed confrontation with European colonial legacies, histories and practices of dispossession and appropriation play for scholars doing Native Studies in Europe? And are there ways in which what Deborah Madsen called a “multiethnic” approach especially in literary (and cultural) studies has shifted with the advent of an Indigenous and settler-colonial studies framework to considering the intersections of Indigeneity, Blackness, and migration in settler state societies?  

In conversations with different practitioners of Native Studies, who are also involved in institutions such as research centers and journals, this essay seeks to address these questions and offer different perspectives and reflections on doing Native Studies in the 2020s.