Most of the time when I begin a discussion of Native American Studies, I begin by addressing the past, the educational practices which have failed, the hypocritical goals of assimilationists, the selfserving agendae of those whites who have been in charge of educating America's first people. This time, however, I would lilke to begin by talking about the present, by examining the modern influences which have been so astonishingly and profoundly forcing those of us who would like to consider ourselves scholars in the discipline in inappropriate and puzzling directions, both in our intellectual lives as well as our social lives. I began giving some serious consideration to this influence after I saw the film Dances with Wolves, that movie which genuinely touched me, that movie which so effectively used with subtitles the language of my real life, that film which, without any hesitation whatsoever, I would take my grandsons, who are four and nine years old, to see. It is a movie about Indians which, in the year before the Columbus quincentennial, has made all of America remember that this country once belonged to the Indians and, perhaps, still does. After the glow of that film showing, however, as is the case in every seduction, I clearly saw the movie as part of the problem, not as a part of the solution. For that reason, I've begun to believe that it is important for us to try to disengage ourselves from the distortions so evident in our conntemporary and professional lives, and to do that we might proceed on the bases that, first, pop culture, as an instrument of social change and intellectual pursuit, is no less dangerous today than it was in 1860 when the soap opera novel Ramona became enormously popular and overshadowed the essential work that Helen Hunt Jackson was doing in publishingA Century of Dishonor, and second, that Indian Studies as an academic discipline can survive its subordination to the popular imagination of America only by carefully examining its true mission in the context of the radicalization of academic thought of the 1960s and early 70s. First of all, we must start by admitting that popular culture as a vehicle for social change has workedfor us as well as against us. Those of us who in the sixties insisted that whatever the intellectual tradition, it had to be validated by our own interests, i.e., our tribal values and histories, are the same people who started out as students and graduate fellows to eventually become the directors of programs, the professors, scholars, writers, researchers. We were the challengers then and we continue to share that legacy today. Some say we have won the first phase, in that Native American Studies centers exist at institutions of higher learning all over the country and abroad. Our demands for relevance in humanistic study which merged with the so-called popular cultures of the sixties brought about the progressive stance of universities across the country which included us, a precious few of us, to be sure, as well as our courses on Indian America, the very courses which have become the core curriculum of the discipline. The radicalization of the academic consciousness that we all shed blood for back in the sixties brought about Indian Studies as we know it. It achieved visibility by mounting a significant assault upon the narrow-minded notion that there are fixed authorial and western values that distinguish good from bad. We moved away from the idea that we could validate homogeneity of thought by sifting little "homilies" from every historical event, every piece of literature, from all the texts, most of which have been written by the male European thinkers of the past. Twenty years later, and at its most imperious, the popular imagination which brings us the movies and