History

Created in 1969, Native American Studies at UC Davis began as a program, originally attached to the College of Agriculture and Encrionmental Sciences through the Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences. The original faculty was Jack D. Forbes (Powhatan-Renape-Lenap), David Risling (Yurok-Karuk-Hoopa), Carl N. Gorman (Navajo), and Sarah Hutchison (Cherokee). In Fall 1973, George Longfish (Senca/Tuscarora) was added to the faculty. Also in 1973, the C. N. Gorman Museum was established in honor of Carl Nelson Gorman, artist, WWII code talker, cultural historian, and advocate for Native peoples. By 1975, the NAS major had been established (the NAS minor went into effect in the 1980s).

In 1989, Native American Studies moved from the Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences (and the College of Agriculture) into the College of Letters and Science, as an interdepartmental program. That same year, Inés Hernández-Ávila (Nez Perce/Chicana) joined the faculty. Additional faculty were hired in 1991: Steve Crum (Western Shoshone) and Stefano Varese. In 1991, Martha Macri (Cherokee) began teaching in Native American Studies.

Native American Studies received departmental status in 1993, becoming the only Department of Native American Studies in the country. The Designated Emphasis (DE) in Native American Studies was also established that same year. The DE in Native American Studies is affiliated with the graduate programs in Anthropology, Comparative Literature, History, Performance Studies, Psychology, Sociology, and Spanish. In Spring 1993, Native American Studies offered its first graduate seminar. The Department welcomed Victor Montejo (Jakaltek Maya) in 1995, as a new addition to its faculty.

The Graduate Program in Native American Studies was approved in 1998, making UC Davis only the second university in the nation to offer a Ph.D. in Native American Studies. In Fall 1999, the Department welcomed its first group of students enrolled in the M.A. and Ph.D. Programs in Native American Studies.

Native American Studies increased its faculty by two in the 2000s: Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Seminole/Muskogee/Diné) in 2003; and Julia Coates (Cherokee) in 2006.

Since its inception, Native American Studies at UC Davis had had a hemispheric approach. The founders of the program foresaw in the early 1970s, the need to address the transnational dimensions of Native American Studies. Their reasoning was multiple. Different forms of Indian ethnicities have survived five centuries of colonial efforts to eradicate them by assimilation. Economic, social, political, and cultural conditions of domination have changed through time and space, as have the adaptive mechanisms of survival and resistance implemented by indigenous people. Native peoples today are a dynamic manifestation of a long historical process in which pre-Colombian and colonial matrices are equally recognizable as foundations of adaptive social and cultural strategies. We continue to witness a process of constant readjustment and cultural creation which allows each indigenous society to reproduce itself and to continue to exist as a social entity differentiated from the surrounding non-Indian community.

These new forms of Indian ethnicities with their complex demographic dynamics, socioeconomic structures, ethnopolitical processes, and with their intellectual expressions, artistic creativity, and unique cultural configurations, constitute the main subject matter of the multidisciplinary study program of Native American Studies at UC Davis.