Close Up
Grinde’s star is on the rise
Don Grinde has a number of projects going on, among them work on a film about the impact of Native American philosophy on American philosophy. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE
Don Grinde, professor and chair of the Department of American Studies, is a hot property.
He’s at work on a film with Jamie Redford that insists upon the influence of Native-American values in American life, has a few books in the works, and Japanese journalists recently came here to interview him about his 1991 book, “Exemplars of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of American Democracy,” which has long been one of the best-selling, nonfiction, academic books in the United States.
He also is working with UB faculty members from several departments on a $3.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education Research and Traineeship) program. The grant is being used to fund graduate fellowships and develop courses on ecological restoration and sustainability as part of UB’s Ecosystem Restoration through Interdisciplinary Exchange (ERIE) program.
Grinde spent some time in Montana recently participating in Redford’s film project. Redford, the son of film actor Robert Redford, is a well-regarded filmmaker whose movies include “Trudell” (2005), a documentary about American Indian Movement poet/prophet/activist John Trudell (Grinde is also a member of the American Indian Movement), and the PBS murder mystery “Skinwalkers (2002), which depicted policing on the Navajo Reservation.
Redford’s current project, however, is described by Grinde as being grounded in the influence of Native-American philosophy on America—an idea that Grinde explores in his book “Exemplars.”
Pragmatism—in the simplest terms possible—holds that an ideology is “true” if it works well; that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of its adoption. Classical pragmatists included Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey, and as the philosophy’s tenets reverberated throughout American life and thought, they profoundly influenced such diverse fields as aesthetics, social sciences, public administration, feminism and the philosophy of religion, as well as logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy.
If you’re an American, there’s no escaping the influence of pragmatism.
Therefore, to allege, as do Grinde and other historians and philosophers, that this most American of philosophies originates in a context framed by interaction with Native Americans and their philosophical ideas and attitudes is to challenge the accepted history of American thought.
Redford’s film, which will be out in a year or so, makes precisely that claim: that Native-American philosophy was not something “defeated” or “displaced” by colonial European influences or buried under post-colonial thought, but was incorporated into the work of American pragmatic philosophy and went on to leave a profound mark on American culture and society.
“The film it is an important statement,” Grinde says, “and involves filmed discussions with many scholars, both native and non-native.”
The natives interviewed in the film are from different traditions, he says, including Apache, Shoshone, Salish Kootenai and others, and teach at universities throughout the West and Southwest, as well as at UB. Among them are several of Grinde’s former graduate students, including James Riding In of Arizona State University and Steven Crumb of the University of California-Davis. Also involved is Ed Valandra, a UB American studies PhD who now heads the American Indian Studies Department at the University of South Dakota.
Although Grinde is a nationally recognized expert on the Haudenosauee, or Iroquois Confederation, he is not an Iroquois himself. He is from Georgia, whose Savannah River Valley is the homeland of the coastal Native American tribal group he claims as his own: the Yamasee (People of the Bluffs).
He taught in this region in the 1970s, then spent 18 years in the West at UCLA, the University of Utah and UC-Riverside before returning east to the University of Vermont, where he taught from 1995 to 2003.
He came to UB in 2003 as chair of the Department of American Studies with a promise to iconic Onondaga Faith keeper and Chief Oren Lyons, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of American Studies at UB, and the late UB faculty member and Seneca historian John Mohawk that he would strengthen and expand a department whose history and quality had, in part because of their leadership, already earned it an international reputation.
“My interest in the Haudenosaunee began when I started teaching American Indian history at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., in the early 1970s,” he says, noting that at the time, the Kinzua Dam controversy was still fresh in the public mind.
The New York-Pennsylvania Kinzua Dam project on the Alleghany River was built from 1960 to 1965 as a flood control/hydroelectric/recreational waterways project that required the legal condemnation of 10,000 acres of the Seneca Nation’s Allegheny Reservation and forced the relocation of 600 Seneca from ancient tribal lands. It provoked protest and native outrage as an exemplar of U.S. government treatment of Indians—in this case the Seneca, a member nation of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Grinde went on to teach Buffalo State College from 1973 to 1977, where he met several local members of Haudenosaunee associated with UB, among them Lyons, Mohawk, Barry White (Seneca), still an instructor in American Studies at UB, and Rick Hill (Tuscarora), a leading authority on contemporary Native American art and Indian images.
It was a time of Native-American intellectual and political foment marked by the 1969 Indian occupation of Alcatraz, Nixon’s 1970 “Special Message on Indian Affairs,” the 1972 siege of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Wounded Knee Occupation in 1973 by the American Indian Movement, the 1975 Pine Ridge Reservation shootout, congressional recognition of Indian rights to self-determination and education assistance, successful Indian demands for better terms in reservation mineral exploitation, Leonard Peltier’s arrest, the establishment of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs (Grinde has testified before this committee several times), the Indian Child Welfare Act and the growth of university-based Native American Studies programs at major institutions.
“In Buffalo, we started the movement to promote the return of American Indian remains from museums to native peoples, and in 1976, the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society became the first museum to do so,” Grinde says.
“Through Oren Lyons, I developed an interest in writing about ways in which the culture, institutions and political thought of the Iroquois Confederacy influenced the way in which the American nation was established,” he says, “and this resulted in my first book on Iroquois history, ‘The Iroquois and the Founding of American Nation.’”
Ten more books followed—Grinde is nothing if not well-published—ranging from “Exiles in the Land of the Free: Democracy, the Iroquois Nation and the U.S. Constitution” (with Lyons, Mohawk, et al) and others that addressed the political legacy of Native Americans, to his current manuscript in progress, “The Mission Indian Federation, 1920-1970,” about the popular and long-lived grass-roots Southern California political organization that wrestled with some of the most difficult political and legal questions of the 20th century.
Grinde is a national figure in Native-American studies because of his role as educator, scholar and activist—as noted, many of his former students head Native American studies departments and programs at other colleges and universities—and much of his writing explores Iroquois history, philosophy, law and culture.
Among his other current projects are a collaborative study of the ecological history of the Upper Susquehanna River Valley and a collaborative book funded through the Kellogg Foundation whose essays and resources, produced by and with other prominent Native American scholars, will help to revise the native K-12 and tribal college curricula so they can be more sensitive in all disciplines to Native-American ideas and values.
The flowering of Grinde’s personal influence comes at a time when the American studies department he heads is about to be consolidated, along with the departments of African and African American Studies and Global Gender Studies, into a new department to be known as “Transnational Studies.” It had been announced last spring that Transnational Studies was being created as a division to house the three departments, as well as the programs in Canadian Studies, Caribbean Cultural Studies, Latina/Latino Studies and Polish Studies. An official announcement of the new alignment and merger of the three departments has yet to be made.
Bruce D. McCombe, dean of the UB College of Arts and Sciences, says the merger is driven by the desire to strengthen the overall activity of the three departments, in the context ofthe recent budgetary restraints.
“In effect, this change means that UB’s historic American studies department, which contains one of the first and most important Native-American studies programs east of the Mississippi, will no longer exist as a distinct department,” Grinde says, adding that he hopes that the budgetary constraints will pass and that American Studies can emerge again as an independent department.
“Although its degree programs will persist for now in Transnational Studies,” Grinde says, “many native scholars and students across the country are puzzled by the term ‘transnational.’
“I want to point out, however, that this department has always been exceptionally productive,” he says, “and although we are a relatively small department, we have around 25 undergraduate majors and more than 70 master’s and doctoral students. About one-third of the students are Native American and 40 percent are foreign students. We place many of our students in Ivy League universities, large state and other private universities, as well as prominent foreign universities.
“American studies is a popular degree program in foreign universities,” Grinde says, “and our program is exceptionally international. We have been graduating foreign grad students for more than 40 years and now our graduates in foreign universities routinely send their best students to UB from overseas to get PhDs. We have, for instance, a healthy number of Indonesian, Indian (from India) and Polish graduate students; thus we recruit from around the world.
“The American Studies department recently rated quite high (in the top quartile) in terms of quality in the 2010 National Research Council ratings of 5,000 university doctoral programs in 59 fields of study,” Grinde says, “and although the ratings are controversial—survey data that underlie the program assessments were gathered way back in late 2006, for instance, and may be out of date, I think our program, which is highly regarded by other American studies departments, remains sound. Sound enough, I hope, to continue to produce the excellent PhDs for which we are well-known nationally and internationally.”
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