Native North American Studies in the Journal of American Folklore During the 1980s and 1990s

In this post I continue considering the absence and presence of Native North American and First Nations studies within the work of the American Folklore Society. Please look at earlier (and future) posts in the series to gain context for what is being examined here. In the earlier years of the society, the journal contained more content than the annual meeting and thus was the harder of the two venues to scan and assess. Over time, this dynamic reversed and by the later 20th century, AFS meetings were huge relative to the journal. With help from JSTOR, studying the journal is a relatively simple and quick task (setting aside the coding questions that I have mentioned previously). It will take more time to work through the more recent meetings. In this context, I polish off the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) through 2020 in this post and one that will follow it for the 2000s and 2010s.

The JAF data for the 1980s (6%) and 1990s (5%) is not radically different from the JAF data for the 1960s (5%) and 1970s (5%). The plateau continues. Here first is the JAF table for the 1980s. As you consider the 1950s-1990s plateau, recall that the JAF percentage for Native North American studies content in the 1920s was 31%.

In this series I have been trying to track not only the presence and absence of Native North American and First Nations studies scholarship within the field of folklore studies as practiced in the United States and as represented by the work of the American Folklore Society, I have also been considering the presence and absence of Native North American and First Nations scholars within, and intersectional to, this field. As the field of Native American and Indigenous studies is presently constituted in the United States and as laws such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 and the Native Programs Act of 1974, as amended, work, Native Hawaiian people have a standing like but not the same as federally recognized Native North American nations within the present-day US. I mention these contexts because, to the best of my knowledge, ethnomusicologist and hula scholar Amy Ku’uleialoha Stillman is a Native Hawaiian person and a JAF author in this study period (issue 434, 1996). I hope that Professor Ku’uleialoha Stillman will forgive me and correct me if I have misperceived and misrepresented this delicate matter. I am thrilled that she chose to share her work with the JAF readership and I hope that she contributes to the journal again. The larger point is that Native North American, First Nations, and Native Hawaiian colleagues continued to be virtually non-existent in the work of the AFS as reflected in the JAF during the decades that have been reviewed.

The table for the 1990s follows below.