In Native American literary studies today there is a gap between the variety of criticism being produced and the metacritical debate about what Native literary criticism should look like. A review of recent issues of "Studies in American Indian Literatures", for example, will discover a wide variety of approaches, some relating literary works to tribally specific contexts, others demonstrating the utility of pan-Indian or pan-Indigenous approaches, and others suggesting a variety of ways in which Native literatures might be simultaneously related to both Native and non-Native contexts--or, indeed, suggesting that these contexts are themselves deeply connected. All of these approaches are, of course, joined by still other modes of criticism that make no overt claim about the relationship between a text and the cultures that produced it. At the same time, however, the metacritical debate about what Native literary study "should" look like has become polarized between theorists favoring an inward-facing nationalism and those insisting on an outward-facing cosmopolitanism. The author's aim in this article is to survey this polarization of the theoretical debate and, in so doing, to suggest a route toward a middle ground. Finding a theoretical justification for such a middle ground will help to provide a firmer grounding for criticism that sees modern Native and non-Native cultures as both distinguishable and historically entangled and that therefore rejects the unnecessary polarity of much of the metacritical debate in recent years.