Tradition, Media, and Meaning

Robert Warrior, Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas, joined HDS as Visiting Professor of Native American Culture and Traditions during the fall 2024 and fall 2025 semesters. 

A Native American scholar and member of the Osage Nation, Professor Warrior brought his scholarship in Indigenous intellectual history and contemporary Indigenous media into the four courses he taught at the Divinity School, as well as to the broader HDS and Harvard community. 

In the conversation that follows, Warrior reflects on his academic focus, what it meant to bring his perspective to a divinity school setting, and the hope he finds in the students who will carry these conversations forward.  

Where did you grow up and what role did religion play in your upbringing, if any?

I grew up in Kansas, mainly around Wichita, though we moved around because my dad was a salesperson. My dad was Osage; my grandmother was Methodist and much of our extended Osage family is Roman Catholic. My mom was white and her family was largely Baptist.

When I was a teenager, I became involved in a church in Wichita. That was what prompted my own interests and my theological education that ended up taking me to Pepperdine University for my undergraduate education, to Yale Divinity School for my master’s degree, and then to Union Theological Seminary for my PhD.

How did you decide on your academic area of focus?

I graduated from college in 1985 and began exploring the connections between my own religious history and a broader understanding of that history as an Osage person. At the same time, a resurgence of interest in older spiritual and ceremonial traditions was unfolding among Native communities, and I found myself drawn more deeply into Osage ceremonial life than I had been before.

So, while I was at Yale Divinity School from 1986 to 1988, and then Union Seminary from 1988 through 1992, I was working towards integrating myself into the Osage world of which those traditions were, and are, a part.

What did it mean to you to bring your expertise and your unique point of view to a divinity school setting?

It was a terrific opportunity to think about incorporating religious traditions, spiritual traditions, and ceremonial traditions into my teaching in a way that I had not done for a long time.

When I first started teaching, and I was fresh out of my PhD at Union Seminary, I had made a clear decision that I was more interested in thinking about how it was that Indigenous thinkers used technologies like writing to grapple with questions of being Indigenous people and peoples in the modern world.  

There's an assumption oftentimes that what scholars do in exploring Indigenous religious traditions is, in fact, uncovering secret knowledge and then making it available through their academic work. That’s not what I do, and I don’t think it’s appropriate. It was one of the ironic intentions of the title of my first book, Tribal Secrets, that I was trying to say, “I'm actually not sharing anything that's secret knowledge.”

What I really enjoyed about coming back to teach in a theological, educational setting  was being able to find materials that allowed for a discussion that was scholarly in nature but which reflected the integrity of those traditions as lived traditions. There's a recognition within a divinity school that these are institutions where people learn how to think about the myriad ways in which religious traditions intersect with contemporary modern life, and where the study of tradition, ceremony, and other forms of religious experience can be taken seriously, and still remain something that someone holds onto as a living faith.

Tell me about the four different courses that you taught over the two semesters you were at HDS.

Both semesters that I was at HDS, I taught one course about intellectual history and one about media. There is a long history of Native American writing, much of which was done by people who were training to be ministers, like Samson Occom, a Mohegan scholar, or William Apes, the Pequot minister and writer, from the 1830s. You see the role of Christianity and conversion to Christianity in this history. One of the things I've been focused on across my own scholarly career has been to think about that intellectual history, not just as a literary history, but as something that opens up questions about Native American life and about culture, how people change and how traditions change. And, how do people adapt to those actual changes and empower themselves through their intellectual work in that process.

In terms of the media courses, I was interested in contemporary Indigenous media and in seeing the ways that filmmakers in the 1980s and 1990s were representing Indigenous life through film: the ways they were taking this long history of stereotypical portrayals of Native American life that came out of Hollywood and doing new things within various forms of media. Through these courses, I was exploring, how do these forms of new and old media contribute to the same processes that I was thinking about through the written intellectual history that I'd been interested in for so long.  

Over time, these two strands of my work—intellectual history and Indigenous media—have increasingly converged. The four courses I taught at HDS were in many ways reflections of that.

In what ways was being situated at Harvard and HDS enriching for your own scholarship?

Harvard’s own history made the setting especially meaningful. The Indian College, established in the seventeenth century, was a significant site in the intellectual tradition I have studied. Native students, such as Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, studied there in the decades before King Philip’s War, and their work contributed to John Eliot’s translation and printing of the Bible in the Algonquian language.  

During both semesters, I lived in an apartment at the Center for the Study of World Religions, so I was involved in the life of the CSWR, which is a wonderful part of HDS. Overall, being at HDS and Harvard was incredibly generative for new ideas.

How do you think your work and presence contributed to the Divinity School community?

Students who are interested in Indigenous issues, centrally to their work at the Divinity School, had a strong sense of appreciating me being there. They seemed really hungry for the kinds of things I was teaching. I hope for them and for the next set of students that we can better incorporate indigeneity into teaching and learning at HDS and Harvard as a whole, both for their own sake as students, but also the sake of the indigenous world in general.  

What gives you hope?

Our students are the ones who are going to inherit the future. When we think about the impact of theological education on our world, on the institutions that we are part of, whether it's as donors or teachers or staff people, the best place to find the sources of hope are with the students.