Replanting Cultures bears the fruits of the 2014 annual American Society for Ethnohistory conference, which called for greater collaboration between Native nations, academics, and citizen-scholars. While the ethical necessity of community-engaged scholarship has been widely accepted, few resources detail what successful community engagement looks like. The authors of this collection of essays argue that for community-engaged scholarship to succeed, the traditional power structures surrounding knowledge production must be inverted. While this is not a guidebook on how to do community-engaged scholarship, the authors show that successful community engagement should strengthen tribal sovereignty and lead to the recovery of Native histories and cultural practices.
Community-engaged scholarship seems daunting to scholars, but the authors demonstrate that reorienting what it looks like to do research can make projects feasible. For community-engaged scholarship to be successful, academics must treat Native nations and citizen-scholars as intellectual equals. The authors emphasize that scholars should not start...
