Impressive gains have been made in American studies and other academic fields over the past three decades in developing stronger scholarship regarding Native people, their histories, and their contemporary lives. Given that virtually every square foot of the Americas has an aboriginal past and much of the hemisphere has an aboriginal present, a fair question would seem to be why there has not been more. Students and scholars alike would do well to ask themselves whether American cultural studies can consider itself “American” without American Indians being much more central to how the field defines itself.

This is an excerpt from Robert Warrior’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 135).