Indigenous Quotient/Stalking Words

Two scholarly essays by the award-winning educator, author and Professor of History at UCLA, Juan Gómez-Quiñones.

“Indigenous Quotient” depicts the history of academic discourse on American Indigenous Peoples. Gómez-Quiñones chronologically examines the context and purpose of Western discourse, specifically U.S. and Spanish/Mexican on Indigenous peoples, which demonstrates a continued attempt by Western intellectuals to rationalize colonization from Columbus to current proponents of financial globalization. “Stalking Words” begins where “Indigenous Quotient” left off by developing a paradigm rooted in Indigenous ethos that consists of:

1) critiquing colonialism and all oppressive power structures
2) self-reflection of historiography, theory, and philosophy
3) responsibility of transmitting heritage
4) Indigenous epistemology as the foundation of personhood and auto-validation
5) ideological autonomy

By establishing these tracts as a foundation for intellectual theorizing, Gómez-Quiñones points students and researchers towards the theory that also serves as a pedagogy that teaches the values and ethics of compassion and understanding, or as he states it, “of strong heart and wise character.”

Reviews:

“…if I were rich, I would buy a million copies of this book and have them dropped from airplanes on every university campus in North America.”

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Professor Emeriti, Ethnic Studies, at California State University East Bay, and author of Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico