Because indigenous scholarship challenges colonizer rhetoric, it is ignored in academic spaces and not taken seriously by top scholars – but resistance is occurring to form methods of praxis against dominant western persepctives

Indigenous scholarship challenges Western authority to interpret knowledge, so in North America decolonizing theorists create neologisms. This diction is invented to describe Indigenous place in modernity. Deloria Jr. and Forbes postulated theories about intellectual resistance in unsubtle ways. Their work describes subjugation as one-sided. Indigenous knowledge is ignored (Forbes 1960, 1998; Deloria Jr. 1970, 1998). Though Forbes and Deloria Jr. challenge each other over the theory and practice of Indigenous knowledge, they argue from the common platform of resistance. Deloria Jr. advocates active defense of Indigenous rights under the rule of law. Forbes, like many writers, searches for the decolonizing verbal modality that connotes an Indigenous aspect (mode just). As an example of work to translate Indigenous theory, Forbes offers the notion that the study of Indigenous knowledge in the Western Hemisphere would be called "americology." Forbes (from the southwest) echoes Sioui-Wendat (from the northeast) who calls the individual actualization of Indigenous self-study an "auto-histoire." Sioui-Wendat further describes Indigenous self-knowledge as "americity" (Sioui Wendayete 1992a). Similarly, Churchill and Jaimes-Guerrero developed a description for intellectual resistance they call "indigenism" (Churchill 1992b, Jaimes Guerrero 1999). Finally, in Tribal Secrets (1995) Robert Warrior declares that there is a century-long literary tradition of resistance in the Americas that gives rise to the advent of the conception of "intellectual sovereignty" for self-determination. Attacking what he calls the "essentialist understandings of Indian culture," Indigenous writers concomitantly expressed the "central concern for critical reflection in the midst of political action" (xvii, 29). Warrior studies Indigenous literature for its understanding of the "presuppositions of the culture that has come to dominate both the land and the people" who are hardly passive and unreasoned (68). Warrior's description of longstanding intellectual sovereignty coincides with many writers who have advocated sovereignty since the 1800s. The practice of Iroquois resistance indicates how widely applicable Warrior's thesis may be (Six Nations 1924; Gawithra 1990; Hall c.1975; Alfred 1994, 1998). By the late 1900s self-determination veered into land claims and resistance to further colonization, such as the ecologically thinking Indigenous activism critiqued by Krech III (Goodleaf 1995; LaDuke 2000; Pennybacker 2000). Specifically, Iroquois people defend intellectual and territorial properties as self-determination for inventing their future (Jaimes Guerrero 1999; Greene c.1960; Colorado 1991; Mohawk 1977; Johnson 1997; Mann 1999; Doxtater 1998; Porter 1998; Brant 1985, 1984; Rickard 1999; Niro 1992). The mission is to set the story straight. Euro-scholarship ignores Indigenous knowledge for the purpose of promoting its own narrative structures based on Western knowledge that decides what is true. Hobsbawm argues against an Indigenous narrative while supporting a Marxist historical narrative that says Indigenous knowledge is actually "peasant consciousness." Wallerstein, Hobsbawm, Krech, and Diamond perpetuate the authority of Western knowledge as the Great Transformation or the "Great Leap Forward."