Alex R. Steers-McCrum

My Dissertation: “Hattak Vpi Homma” mvt Miha Nanta Fehna? What Does “Native American” Really Mean?

This dissertation title is simply the same question I have been asking since I started my graduate coursework nearly a decade ago. Over time, the question has grown in scope, defying complete or final definitions. Asking what “Native” means, is really asking what it means to be Native—and in what sense I am.  As an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and yet consistently racialized as White, the two most visible definitions of Nativeness are in tension in my person.

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I have chosen to title my work in both Chahta Anumpa (the Choctaw language) and English to emphasize that there are answers to this question that come from within Indigenous communities, answers that are imposed by settler colonial society, and answers that arise from their interplay.

I identify five key aspects of Native identity in the U.S. context: enrollment status, tribal ethnic kinship, Native racialization in settler colonial society, intertribal Indian panethnicity, and Indigenous nationhood. Rather than discrete categories, these ways of being Native are mutually interdependent, porous, contextual, and continuously in flux—understanding each is a part of understanding the others. They often encompass different populations. Most importantly, I ground these senses of Nativeness in (or confront their opposition to) Native American relational social ontologies of kinship with the land.

Inside and outside of my dissertation research, I work broadly in Indigenous philosophy, philosophy of race, and social/ethical/political philosophy. My work tends to blur the boundaries of philosophical branches and academic disciplines. Questions of sovereignty, justice, and the nature of human connections to one another and to our world to impel my research. My immediate future projects revolve around Indigenous-centered critiques of problems in political philosophy, social epistemology, and philosophy of race.