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Literature Review

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The American Indian Studies Program mainly works to promote an environment where

the university community can find out, examine and appreciate various cultures, values, and

traditions which reflect the scores of contributions that the American Indians have accomplished

and what they continue to do in improving the quality of life in the modern society (Fixico 111).

This program offers information, consultation, and referral to all the students and the overall

citizens in the entire state, focusing on facilitating the leadership development among the Indian

fraternity (Fixico 150). The program promotes the academic success of the American Indian

students as well as assisting them in getting involved in activities that contribute positively to the

society.This literature review gives an overview of the development of the American Indian

Studies Program, establishing various strengths and weaknesses of each work from various

studies. It also describes the relationship of the various works under consideration, in addition to

identifying the controversial areas from different works.

According to Samuel Cook, the American Indian studies program was originally created

at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) in 1999 following the request of some

indigenous individuals and since then, the subject has been conducted by a collaborative

mandate. In June the same year, the Monacan Indian Nation which is a tribal council located in

Amherst County sent a letter to Paul Torgersen, the then Virginia Tech president proposing that
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the organization consider instituting an American Indian studies program. The letter provided the

blueprint for the proposed program which was meant to educate the citizens concerning the

American Indian cultures, history, and other issues, as well as being of service to the indigenous

individuals.One of the major strengths Cook’s work is that from his article, he shows how the

Monacans envisioned a program which would treat the American Indians as colleagues and

partners and not subjects, engage the country’s indigenous groups in ventures which would

promote their political, economic, and cultural autonomy. The program was also meant to

promote a broader space and awareness in the academic standard or canon for the value and

legitimacy of the indigenous knowledge (134).

Even though the social, economic, and political conditions for the Indians have gotten

better in a considerable manner since the 1960s, the "racial integrity" policies and their

distinctive manifestations generated a formidable impediment to the education of the Indians

which continues to pose some problems (Cook 136). However, one important relationship

between these sources is that they both acknowledge the fact that the native American studies

efforts in the US has demonstrated a mixed-bag as far as success is concern.According to Cook,

some tribes such as Pamunkey, Chickahominy, and Mattaponimanaged to take their children to

federally sponsored Indian schools in Cherokee, Haskell, and Bacone College mainly through the

advocacy of Frank Speck, an anthropologist (136).

Some of the challenges faced in developing Virginia Tech American Indian Studies

program include limited resources. The only stable source of funding for the program was the

coordinator’s salary. According to Cook, this situation was worsened by an extended financial

crisis in the Virginia State, which had a considerable effect on Virginia Tech. A similar

challenge related to lack of enough resources is the fact that most faculties involved directly in
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the development ofAmerican Indian Studiesprogram found themselves working as de facto

outreach and recruitment agents in the indigenous groups and as service providers for the

indigenous students (Cook 139).

Another challenge encountered was political intolerance. Despite the first enthusiasm

which appeared to come from Virginia Polytechnic’s administration when the query was first

sent by the Monacans, the coordinators faced some political obstructions in developing the

program, some reflecting the local and state controversies which had racial overtones (Cook

134). For instance, some administration officials expressed concerns that the program was

developing in conjunction with the current campaign for federal recognition (Cook 140).

The American Indian Studies program has also shown some strength in terms of its

achievements such as the development of a collaborative model. Since the programs aren’t

taking place in space, they essentially entail cross-cultural interactions as well as intra- and inter-

cultural affairs. However, whether the students or other faculty members are from the Indian

origin or not, the institution has a responsibility to its prospective indigenous group which if not

fulfilled, invalidates the legitimate assertion to holism which an institution could make. The

institution has tried to accomplish such requirements by keeping the state’s indigenous

individuals involved in the program in all the steps of development.Virginia Tech’s approach

develops on the already existing collaborative models, accentuating on research methods as it

seeks to transform both the scholarly approaches within its field and the academy, which it is

part of (Cook 140).

Apart from opening a significant dialogue channel between the state’s Indian nations and

the institution, the foremost Virginia Indian Nations Summit on Higher Education (VINSHE)

produced two vital and highly positive outcomes. First, the institution instituted a tribal advisory
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board which consisted of representatives from every tribe in the state in addition to some “at-

large” members from the other tribes. Second, the institution initiated the Virginia Indian Pre-

College Initiative (VIPCI) which became a mentoring program. Virginia Tech’s latest initiative

referred to as “Virginia Indian Nations 101” which is a complex project meant to provide media

through which the members can educate the general public on Virginia Indian histories, realities

and cultures.The American Indian Studiesprogram, therefore, has helped in maintaining open

and constant communication among the indigenous constituency hence fostering a significant

political lobby (Cook 141-143).

Further researches, therefore, need to address ways through which the challenges faced

by the Native Americans can mitigated such as how the community can become financially

stable (Fixico 130). Another aspect is finding better ways of handling cultural differences which

has also been found to contribute to higher education failure among the Indian Americans. The

term cultural difference is not only about the difference in physical outlook, but also includes the

perceptions of racism, hostility, or biasness within the school setting.

Interdisciplinarity covers one of the most significant transformations in the methodology

and attitude in the university history (Clifford 50). Interdisciplinary research or interdisciplinarity

involves bringing together two or more academic disciplines into a single activity. It gets

information from multiple other fields such as economics, psychology, anthropology, and

sociology. It is about the creation of something by imagining across borderlines. It is connected

with an interdisciplinary field or an interdiscipline that is a unit of organization which crosses

historical boundaries between schools of thought or academic disciplines as modern professions

and needs come out (Moran 10). The word interdisciplinary is used within training and education

pedagogies to define researches which utilize the insights and methods of various traditional
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study fields or established disciplines. The interdisciplinarity involves teachers, researchers, and

students in the objectives of linking and incorporating several technologies, professions, or

academic schools of thoughts together with their particular perceptions in pursuing a common

goal (Cook 138). The global warming or HIV/AIDS epidemiology needs comprehension of

diverse disciplines to find solutions for the complex challenges.

For a long time, the term interdisciplinary has been a familiar phrase in the debates of

pedagogy and education (Kidwell et al. 99). Nevertheless, of late the word interdisciplinary has

acquired a new urgency and force. This partially because as an agenda, interdisciplinarity

appears to flow logically from the left culturalist theory imperatives, that is, from the new

historicism, the original neopragmatism version, feminism, Marxism, and deconstruction. Of

course, each of the movements needs to be differentiated from others in many aspects. But it is

just to note that they are alike all hostiles to present arrangements of objects as corresponded to

by the structures of the institution by the methods of which the different academic disciplines

create and expand their claims of territory as well as the social structures by ways of which the

political authority lines are sustained (Cook 140). This paper examines the challenges facing

educators and learners in the interdisciplinary classroom.

Drawing on cultural-historical activity model and the basis of the observation of team-

taught interdisciplinary classes, I argue that the psychological double binds that originate from

various disciplinary activity systems clash consist of the most abundant potential and the most

significant challenges of multidisciplinary classrooms (Clifford 120). Being interdisciplinary or

doing what comes naturally is not all that hard to perform. Without a doubt, the discussions

around interdisciplinary usually presume that students and teachers are always firmly positioned

within disciplines before the discovery of interdisciplinary studies. For many students, an
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excellent open-minded arts education could well have at the same time proceed along the lines of

interdisciplinary and disciplinary. Interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity are jointly formed and

need not be thought of oppositional (Kidwell et al. 120). Learners need to view disciplines as

social fields which are internally heterogeneous assemblages, relational and dynamic instead of a

unified totality. The discipline sense related to citizenship, liberal learning, and critical thinking

is part of cosmopolitanism and self-cultivation ethics which lies at the generous social thought

heart. But the discipline sense related to studies has little to do with cosmopolitan citizens,

cultivated creation, and much to do with protocols and training for generating disciplinary

knowledge and training specialists. It needs to be clear from the beginning that the program

parameters imply that some scholarly dispositions and tendencies are more effective than others

(Fixico 90). Interdisciplinary could be used where the topic is felt to have been misrepresented or

even neglected in the historical research institutions structure.

The institutions generated by human cultures, mood-altering behaviors, and practices are

collectively referred to as psychotropic mechanisms (Cook 144). Even though the psychotropic

is a strong term, it is not completely unsuitable because the mechanisms have neuro-chemical

impacts which are not that unrelated or divergent from the ones generated by the drug usually

known as psychoactive or psychotropic. With a reason, it is usually pointed out that the

contemporary economy is adjusted around the status goods delivery. It is yet debatable which of

the two is the most significant to the contemporary economy: psychotropy or status.

Commodities, practices, all the institutions, pornography, sex, drugs, alcohol, coffee, sports,

shopping, music, novels, TV shows, gossips, and movies all have psychotropic effects (Moran

66). The human nervous systems for the reasons which lie deep in our biological histories are

strongly sensitive neurotransmitters wash which comes from daily interactions as well as
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experiences. The sedentism and civilization advent come with it a political system and an

economy organized increasingly around the providing set of goods, practices, and institutions

that subvert or change the chemistry of human body. This is what offers civilization its texture as

well as color (Kidwell et al. 150). A distinctly psychotropic economy evolution, a characteristic

of past centuries, is one story aspect which can be observed through neuro-history lens.

This is not essentially an adaptive narrative. It is a narrative about the way the

biologically adaptive functions are served by human cultural institutions (Clifford 150). Ranging

from psychoactive drugs to pornographies and other entertainment forms many psychotropic

mechanisms simply cannot be discussed by adaptive reasoning means. The stuffs may be bad for

others, but neither is this deliberate progress or change narrative aiming toward a telos. The

psychotropic mechanisms which have evolved and vanished over the past centuries essentially

came to be by trials and errors and consequently develop through small adaptive nudges sets

because no one has ever comprehended the fundamental chemistry. There has been a direction

illusion, progress sense, if one can call it that over the past five thousand years or so toward an

ever-greater mood-altering mechanisms concentration (Cook 145). It is same illusion created by

thumb of panda phylogeny, because there is precisely no genetic material and no directing mind

which guides the psychotropy phylogeny.

The great historical sciences such as paleonthropology, biology, and geology have been

made and remade over the several decades course in the mid-19th C exposing almost endless

vista as the bottom dropped out of time (Kidwell et al. 89). The history recoiled yet in those early

decades from that vista, fashioning rather a history view which starts with the civilization rise.

Throughout the 20th C, these views dominated curricula.

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To comprehend social concept in general, a theoretical comprehension of inequality and

stratification is essential (Moran 70). Unfortunately, in the U.S, the professional sociology has

historically facilitated a limited theoretical stratification comprehension which tends to assume

power relations, institutional mechanisms, social structures, economic realities, and other

significant aspects like racial discriminations in the reproduction of social class. In the society of

the United States, social class is one of the most persistent and oldest inequalities. People were

aware of their social classes in the past as well as their expected obligations and roles (Smail,

Daniel, and Ebrary 56). Even today, we are still aware of some of the cultural differences among

people from different social classes in a manner that poor people and rich individuals wear

different styles of dresses, have different accents, and are educated differently.

The cultural differences which separate the different classes are called the class indicators

(Clifford 155). Many individuals in the past had a belief that individuals of the upper social class were

to be respected because they were better than other people and they had high social positions. The

phenomena are referred to as deference. The subjective classes can be measured by political opinions,

attitudes, as well as beliefs. In general, this comprises the vague notions of working, upper, lower, and

middle classes and most individuals would determine themselves with these classes (Kidwell et al.

133). The United American sociologists all point out that the best predictors of whether children

shall gain high earning middle-class jobs are the qualifications. Nevertheless, the sociologists

also tend to agree that there are unequal rates of success between unequal success and entry rates

in post-compulsory education and social classes at schools. The government data shows vital

differences between the different social classes educational attainments. Social class inequalities

still have effects at the university (Cook 135). There are connects between social class/parental

income and educational achievement strengthened during this period of time. The social class
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accounts for much different in attainments between the lower achievers and the higher achievers.

In short, the gap between the social classes is widening.

Works Cited

Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and

Art. Harvard University Press, 1988.

Cook, Samuel R. "Developing an American Indian Studies Program: A View from Ground

Zero." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 27.4 (2003): 133-145.

Fixico, Donald. The American Indian mind in a linear world: American Indian studies and

traditional knowledge. Routledge, 2013.

Kidwell, et al. Native American Studies. University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Moran, Joe. Interdisciplinarity. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2010.

Smail, Daniel Lord., and Ebrary, Inc. On Deep History and the Brain. University of California

Press, 2008.