Program History
Beginning in the late 1980s, American Indian faculty, staff, students, and their allies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign called for a dynamic cultural space, a first-rate academic program, and a high-level administrative office to oversee recruitment and retention efforts and to advocate for the issues related to Indian students. As a result of these appeals and actions, the Native American House opened in 2002, and in 2004 tenure-track faculty in American Indian Studies were appointed for the first time in the history of Illinois.
In 2006, tenure-track faculty began to develop a curriculum for the discipline of American Indian Studies -- as a result, an Undergraduate Minor was approved in 2008 and Graduate Minor was approved in 2009. These actions help cement the contributions American Indian Studies offers to the intellectual life of the campus and to the professionalization and development of the field nationwide.
In 2009, the Native American House was administratively relocated to the Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Relations in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs as part of ongoing efforts to provide professional student support programs to Native American students. As an academic program, American Indian Studies remains in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The faculty of the American Indian Studies Program at Illinois strive to develop an intellectual paradigm for academic and community based research and teaching. Since its inception as a field in the 1970s, American Indian Studies programs across the nation have focused on issues of sovereignty and self-determination, intellectual and linguistic revitalization, and cultural and artistic expression. The faculty and program builds upon these core disciplinary concerns in order to innovate the field by providing theoretical and methodological models that center themselves within American Indian communities and then engage outward toward international Indigenous Studies. Focused on the intersections between aesthetic, political, cultural, historical and anticolonial traditions, American Indian Studies (undergradutae studies) and American Indian and Indigenous Studies (graduate studies) at Illinois provide students the opportunity to study the interrelationships between and among American Indian nations, transhemispheric and transoceanic indigenous peoples, and settler-colonial nation-states and their ethnic and racial populations.