Winter 2003
David Wilkins: In Hot Pursuit of Truth
Photo by Leo Kim
DAVID WILKINS
Associate professor, American Indian studies
Education
Ph.D., U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; M.A., University of Arizona; B.A., Pembroke State U
On teaching
"When I talk to students, very few have been exposed to native issues. It's troubling that original sovereign people are excluded from texts. And when they're included, the emphasis is on the way we once were, not on the way we are now. Other groups have been allowed to walk into the 21st century. But there's a tendency to keep Indians in a timeless state, in their tepees. I want people to know we are steeped in tradition, but oriented to the future."
On academic objectivity
"It's a false dichotomy to say that passion is on one side and objectivity is on the other. My Indian-ness helps me to see the whole picture. I can slide back and forth. I have learned to always pursue the truth, whether I see a wrong path by a tribe or a wrong path by the U.S. Supreme Court."
Take a class from David Wilkins, there is no danger that you will simply sit through the semester taking notes. Lectures are just not his style.
"I'm not a television that you flip on when I walk in the room," laughs the associate professor in the Department of American Indian Studies. "Students become too passive that way. My classes have to be interactive; there's got to be a dialogue."
If not every student is actively engaged, all are moved by the passion and energy of this quietly unassuming scholar, who joined the U's faculty in 1999 after taking a circuitous route to a niche in scholarship.
Wilkins is a Lumbee Indian, the son of an Army officer, who lived on three different military bases by the age of 13. It wasn't until he attended Pembroke University--now the University of North Carolina at Pembroke--that he had his first epiphany about his heritage. The watershed was Vine Deloria's classic Custer Died for Your Sins, the book that laid the groundwork for subsequent American Indian social, legal, and political movements.
"The book opened my mind and hooked me on the study of American Indian issues," Wilkins says. His consciousness kept expanding via a series of experiences that included working on a Native American newspaper in New York state--"I learned there were tribes other than the Lumbee," he says--and living for a summer on a reservation.
During a stint as an archaeological archivist at the University of North Carolina, he also learned that he had a knack for scholarship. "The whole research angle fascinated me," says Wilkins, "and I realized I wasn't half-bad at it."
That realization--and a full-ride scholarship to the West Virginia University--seemed to set him on a solid course toward academia, where he could steep himself in the American Indian studies that drew him. But intuition intervened.
"I drove to West Virginia to start school," he remembers, "and when I got to campus I just had an overwhelming feeling that I didn't belong there. Something just didn't feel right. I never unpacked my car." That night, he drove back to North Carolina.
As it turns out, Wilkins's academic U-turn was more a beginning than a conclusion. A series of events brought him into contact with his hero Vine Deloria, who invited Wilkins to come to the University of Arizona, where Deloria was launching a new academic program for young Indian people. It didn't take Wilkins long to realize he had found his "something."
So in the fall of 1988, he packed his car again, this time for a successful pursuit of a master's degree, studying with Deloria, whom he calls "the leading Indian intellectual of our generation." A Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina and a faculty post at the University of Arizona followed. Nine years later came the call from Minnesota.
"This was the place with the oldest Indian studies program in the nation. The U had a new president, a new CLA dean, and Minnesota offered an opportunity to learn about Midwestern Indian tribes like the Ojibwe and Lakota. I thought, ‘Hey, this is nice.'"
Today, Wilkins is recognized as one of the nation's most prominent scholars of American Indian law and politics. His several books--including Tribes Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations with his mentor Deloria--have examined the relationship between Indians and the U.S. government.
That baffling and often contradictory relationship is structurally flawed, says Wilkins, by the fact that the U.S. Constitution provides no legal rights for Native Americans.
"Ultimately, the frustration for indigenous nations comes from being excluded from the Constitutional framework," Wilkins says. "It is a matter of structural disadvantage. If you have a case, say, of a tribal nation vs. the U.S. government, that case is heard by the Supreme Court, which is part of the tripartite U.S. federal government. As a nation, we are not part of the matrix so we're at a disadvantage. What was once a relatively bilateral relationship is now systemically unbalanced. That's why we have to find ways to revive the relative balance of the treaty relationships."
Wilkins sees no conflict between his passion for treaty rights and his passion for academic objectivity. In fact, he finds these traits complementary. "Ultimately, I am about pursuing the truth," he says. "I'll challenge a tribal leader as soon as a Congressional leader."