American Indian studies claimed a space to interrogate Western disciplinary epistemologies utilizing Indigenous ways of "knowing". This epistemological struggle has, not surprisingly, been that: a struggle. As the author writes in 2010, people understand that their continuing desire to bring Indigenous community-based ways of knowing into dialogue with Western research paradigms is fraught with difficulty. Western universities often resist the oral knowledge and language production of the communities, and, as Jace Weaver once pointed out, Western academic discourse continues to monopolize the conversations. In this essay the author revisits the once-urgent demand within Indigenism to decolonialize people's minds, the demand by Indigenous scholars to reaffirm, construct, and act from Indigenous subjectivities. It is an increasingly critical issue that haunts the halls of American Indian and Indigenous studies. Thus, the author looks at the political stakes and epistemological issues that are inherent in this position. (Contains 32 notes.)