Academic knowledge about indigenous peoples in the Americas: a comparative approach about the conditions of its international circulation

ABSTRACT Studies concerning indigenous peoples in the Americas have grown notably in recent decades, though with diverse rhythms and featuring-specific conditions in different countries and regions. Within the framework of studies of the history of science that address the conditions of production and circulation of knowledge, in this paper, some characteristics of international links between researchers in this field are analyzed. I suggest that features such as overseas training, the use of foreign languages, publications in a second language, frequency and quality of contacts with foreign countries and international collaboration, are indicators that can provide insights into the extent of internationalization of this field. It is my hypothesis that there is not an internationalized field of indigenous studies as such, but rather regionally segmented circuits mostly defined by linguistic areas. The study covers, in a comparative manner, academics from countries such as Canada, the United States of America, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Peru.


Introduction
Social studies of science have long acknowledged that several factors such as material conditions, social configurations and the histories of disciplines and fields in different countries and regions, are crucial factors for the development of particular configurations of scientific studies. The features of international circulation of knowledge in different disciplines and fields have been addressed by studies in Science, Technology and Society (STS), but there are still few case studies in social sciences. In this paper, some characteristics of international links between researchers in the vast field of indigenous studies are explored. We consider variables such as international mobility in undergraduate and graduate education, the use of foreign languages and frequency and quality of contacts with colleagues abroad. It is my hypothesis that according to these indicators, there is not an internationalized field of indigenous studies as such across the Americas, but rather regionally segmented circuits, mostly defined by linguistic areas.
It is necessary to point out that this paper is part of a wider project that seeks to analyze up to what extent the selection, formulation and circulation of main lines of research concerning indigenous peoples are influenced by factors such as configurations of national anthropologies and historiographies, the links that relate different research centers, the agendas of native peoples organizations, indigenous participation in academic research (or lack thereof), and priorities in funding allocated by government agencies, private institutions and NGOs. In this sense, the study of international links between researchers can provide information regarding the international circulation of knowledge in this field. Our research stands at the intersection of social history and sociology of science, some of whose experts have stressed the importance of considering the conditions of production of scientific knowledge and its circulation and the complex relationship of external and internal factors in the configurations of each scientific field.

Conceptual approach
In 1989, Bourdieu pointed out that It is often believed that intellectual life is spontaneously international. Nothing is more wrong. The intellectual life is the place, like all the other social spaces, of nationalisms and imperialisms, and the intellectuals convey, almost as much as the others, prejudices, stereotypes, received ideas, very summary and elementary representations, that feed on the accidents of everyday life, misunderstandings, injuries (those for example that can be inflicted on narcissism when being unknown in a foreign country). (Bourdieu [1989(Bourdieu [ ] 2002 Social conditions, and particular spaces, then, are crucial factors. Since social studies in science and technology started stressing that "geography matters in the pursuit of science" (Jöns 2007, 97), many authors in this field have explored several dimensions to account for the ways in which these processes take place (Jöns 2007;Arellano Hernández, Avarnitis, and Vinck 2012). Internationalization has been addressed in terms of transnational mobility either of scholars (Jöns 2007) or institutional policies to foster such mobility (Lamfri and Salto 2016), and of scientific collaboration (González Alcaide and Ferri 2014) and book translations (Heilbron 1999) among other aspects. Recently, Heilbron et al. have systematized a series of indicators to analyze internationalization processes in social sciences and humanities, considering the following dimensions: (1) The development and role of international scholarly organizations; (2) The development and role of international journals; (3) The flows and meanings of book translations; (4) The development of transnational co-authorship; (5) The politics of internationalization. (Heilbron et al. 2017, 133) A problem that has received important attention is that of the relationship between centers and peripheries in the production and circulation of knowledge. From classic studies explaining these processes in terms of dissemination from centers to less developed countries to more recent approaches, a whole array of issues has been taken into account to explore the dynamics, tensions and the ways in which asymmetric relations are produced and reproduced 1 and the heterogeneity and concentration in "peripheral" regions themselves (García Guadilla 2010).
In all these studies, post-mertonian trends 2 in STS studies have stressed the importance of social relations, networks, spatiality and the need to pay better attention to the social conditions and processes in which knowledge is produced and circulates (Rodriguez Medina 2014a, 2014bGarcía Peter 2016). Concepts such as social worlds, boundary objects, institutionalized fields and networked fields have been used to provide clearer pictures of such dynamics in specific cases (Rodriguez Medina 2014a, 2014b. The concept of social world "highlights the interconnectedness of science with other human endeavours, such as economy, the military / … / law, / … / politics / … / and religion" (Rodriguez Medina 2014a, 13). In our case, indigenous movements seem to have exerted an important influence in spaces where academic knowledge is produced in countries such as Canada and the US, where many scholars have an indigenous origin and commitment to their peoples. Such a commitment involves an epistemological and methodological turn which is not always understood by non-indigenous scholars, resulting in difficulties and discrimination, for instance, in peer-review processes (Whyte 2017). On the other hand, in Latin America, where political instability implied in many occasions the repression of indigenous peoples, processes of that kind did not take place in such an important proportion and had diverse rhythms. This wouldat least partiallyexplain the lack of indigenous scholars in this region. The importance of such variables, that is, on the one hand, the number of indigenous scholars in different countries, and, on the other, extra-academic circulation of scientific production among indigenous peoples, cannot be addressed here but will be examined elsewhere.
Also, the importance of the use of a native language in academic research about indigenous peoples is a factor that deserves consideration elsewhere. In this instance, we put the emphasis on languages such as English, Spanish and Portuguese, since they are considered crucial for international exchanges among scholars.
Bearing in mind these limitations, and considering that a relational approach is necessary to explain the dynamics of scientific knowledge production and circulation, this paper will be exploratory and descriptive. It will dwell on features that can account for relationships among scholars and the conditions in which they take place in this particular field of indigenous studies in the Americas, the area covered in our project.
According to Kreimer (2016), the relationship between disciplines and fields of studies is a complex one, and the issue has been addressed from different perspectives. In our case, if it could be assumed that studies regarding indigenous peoples are conducted only by anthropologists, it would be relatively easy to turn to the stories of national anthropologies 3 to account for the differences in styles and historical configurations of research about them. But not only are there different disciplines interested in social processes involving indigenous peoples (such as history, education studies, law, literary studies, linguistics, archaeology, medicine and ecology, among others), but also hybrid fields such as ethnohistory and indigenous studies have risen, comprising interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, and being increasingly institutionalized as such. Reflections on 2 A detail about these in Kreimer (1999b, 8-59). 3 There are numerous studies in this area, such as Fígoli (2004); Grimson, Ribeiro, and Semán (Comps.) (2004); Caviedes (2007); Degregori and Sandoval (2007); Martínez Novo (2007); Pineda Camacho (2007); Salazar-Soler (2007); Lins Ribeiro and Escobar (2008) methodology, theory, scope and institutional aspects of ethnohistory and indigenous studies have been addressed elsewhere, mostly by colleagues working within such fields. 4 Also, there have been studies concerning the circulation of anthropologists in the region (Isola 2018) and knowledge in the field of multicultural studies (García Peter 2016) or comparative studies between specific countries (Baines 2012). But a comparative reflection involving different countries is still necessary to account for the extent of internationalization in the field of indigenous studies.
Therefore, a clarification about the extent of the term indigenous studies is particularly relevant in this case. In Central and South America (countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Chile and Argentina), most research about indigenous peoples is conducted within traditional disciplines such as history, anthropology and ethnohistory (a term which some authors use to refer to a discipline and others to a methodology or a conceptual approach). However, other countries such as Canada, the US and others outside the Americas (namely Australia and New Zealand) have developed specific terms such as American Indian Studies (AIS) and later Native American Studies (NAS), Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), Aboriginal Studies and First Nations Studies. Since the use of such terms implies not only an academic differentiation but also a political and epistemological one, a brief history is introduced here about this field of research.
The first labels for Indigenous studies were those of AIS and NAS, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They emerged especially in those universities located west of the Mississippi and as part of social mobilization against the Vietnam war and for civil rights. Later, the term "Indigenous Studies" started to have a wider use. A similar context of political mobilization in Canada during the 1960s led to the introduction of First Nations Studies. While in the US ethnic studies included Black Studies and Chicano Studies, in addition to Native Studies, in Canadian universities -where the first two had less relevancethe main subjects involved in this trend were indigenous peoples, or first nations, as they are called. In Southeast Asia and the Pacific, the most important centers are Australia and New Zealand. In Australia, aboriginal studies emerged as a multidisciplinary field with the creation of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS) in 1961, with a 22-member academic Council, none of them indigenous. Later, from the 1970s, it started including the Torres Strait Islanders, and it currently includes 580 researchers, and it is now called the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies (AIATSIS). The term Indigenous Studies has been used lately to include Aboriginal Studies and/or Torres Strait Islanders Studies plus comparisons from the international Indigenous context (Nakata 2006). In the Pacific universities (mainly New Zealand, plus Guam and Hawaii), indigenous studies had been part of a wider field called Pacific Studies, which encompass multiple forms of native studies.
For some authors, such as Weaver (2007), NAS/AIS was from the beginning a space of comparative and interdisciplinary nature (comprising studies of history, anthropology, law, literature and archeology), and paying particular attention to the indigenous perspective (as opposed to a frontier history that addressed the study of social relations in border areas from the point of view of white settlers). Precisely for that reason, the topics chosen were those of interest to indigenous peoples, such as land rights issues, sovereignty, the role of the peace treaties in negotiations for land, and indigenous worldviews. Also, a strong interest in a comparative approach and the building of a borderless discourse encompassing all indigenous peoples in the hemisphere, as Weaver put it, allowed this field to include studies from around the world, particularly from Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and, lately, Latin America. It should also be noted that an important proportion of scholars in this field has a native origin and a strong commitment to native communities.
For the sake of brevity, the term indigenous studies will be used in this paper to refer to all the research done in the Americas concerning indigenous peoples, whether it may be produced from disciplines such as history, anthropology, law, linguistics, and so forth, or from interdisciplinary fields as NAS, AIS, NAIS, First Nations studies, among others.

Methodological considerations
This paper draws on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, from three sources. One of them is a survey requested from researchers specialized in indigenous studies. The second set of data includes information gathered from 23 journals that usually publish content related to indigenous studies, and a third group consists of interviews and secondary sources that provide data related to different attempts towards internationalization in the field (either in journals, professional associations or transnational mobility).

Survey among researchers
The first of our sources is a survey that was applied to researchers specialized in indigenous studies. But also, qualitative features were elicited, since the survey included questions concerning their perception about the importance of the use of a second language and the motivations to be in contact with colleagues from other countries. To decide to whom the survey would be requested, we used a database built between 2014 and 2016. During those years, the programs of international and regional academic meetings concerning native peoples were loaded into a database. 5 This information gathering resulted in a list of about 5500 researchers from different countries. Further data about each individual was sought online in the first months of 2017 to retrieve email addresses and research interests, resulting in a sample of 3785 subjects from whom the survey was requested between April 2017 and April 2018 (with reminders within those dates), in Spanish, English or Portuguese (depending on the country of residence detected). Of that universe, 508 (13.42%) sent their responses.
About the sociodemographic features of this sample, it can be said that most scholars (68%) are between 30 and 60 years old, with a close to even distribution by gender (56% female respondents and 44% males). In regards to their geographical origin, the survey was requested mostly from researchers in the US, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Canada, obtaining responses in a similar proportion (Table 1).
Special attention was paid to retrieve data about the indigenous identification of researchers. While in Latin America, this is a relatively minor concern for researchers, in countries such as Canada and the US, there are many epistemological, disciplinary and political discussions about the native origin of scholars conducting research about indigenous peoples. This is partly due to the importance that native scholars have achieved during the last decades (starting in the 1960s, as was described previously). So, when the proportions of indigenous/non-indigenous academics are examined, except for Peru (where the three responses are too small a number to establish a clear tendency), Canada and the US show a clear difference in terms of the importance of indigenous scholars when compared with Latin American countries ( Figure 1).  (1)  Among those who identified themselves as indigenous (109), the variety of nations to which they belong is enormous. Only about 7 nations (such as Cherokee, Anishinabee, Choctaw, Chipewa, Zapotec, Mapuche and Cree) feature 4 or more researchers in our sample, while the rest (about 76 individuals) belong to 66 different nations.

Information from journals
The second source for our study is information gathered from 27 journals that usually publish content related to indigenous studies. Our database consists of a list of 3615 entries about authors from different countries. To assess the importance of publishing at an international level, information about the country of origin of its authors was retrieved. To build a representative sample, we tried to cover several criteria: we chose journals from the countries considered in our project (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and the USA), different trajectories (some journals started more than 40 years ago and some are more recent), and thematic orientations (some are anthropology journals, others are more interdisciplinary ones). 6 We retrieved information about its authors for at least the last 10 years (from 2008 issues onwards), or in the case of two more recent ones, from the first issue. 7

Information about strategies for internationalization
This set of data includes information from interviews with scholars at professional associations, 8 editorial policies in journals and their composition and data about membership from the Abya Yala 9 working group, a group of scholars at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). Escalante, Tsianina Lomawaima were interviewed in 2014. We use here some extracts of these conversations related to the strategies to expand the geographical scope of NAISA members. 9 The concept of Abya Yala emerged toward the end of the 1970s in Dulenega, or what, for others, is today San Blas, Panama, a Kuna Tule territory. Abya Yala in the Kuna language means "land in its full maturity." / … /. After the Kuna won a lawsuit to stop the construction of a shopping mall in Dulenega, they told a group of reporters that they employed the term Abya Yala to refer to the American continent in its totality. After listening to this story, Takir Mamani, the Bolivian Aymara leader, and Tupaj Katari, one of the founders of the indigenous rights movement in Bolivia, suggested that indigenous peoples and indigenous organizations use the term Abya Yala in their official declarations to refer to the American continent. He argues that recognizing and "placing foreign names on our villages, our cities, and our continents is equivalent to subjecting our identities to the will of our invaders and their heirs" (Arias et al. 2012: 7, my translation). Therefore, renaming the continent would be the first step toward epistemic decolonization and the establishment of indigenous

Results
This section of the paper presents the results of our research in two parts. The first one (items 4.1-4.3) is about the variables and indicators considered, 10 whereas the second reports some attempts at internationalization that have taken place in different spaces.

Learning abroad: international mobility in undergraduate and graduate education
According to Kreimer (2016), the formation of young researchers is crucial to understand the way in which scientific traditions are shaped. He distinguishes three models of formation in the history of Latin America: a first period (between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century) when the State invited mostly European scientists with a certain prestige to spend some time in these countries "to foster the development of sciences in general, in this or that discipline in particular" (Kreimer 2016, 201). A second model, most popular between the first decades of the twentieth century until the 1960s, occurred when young researchersafter an initial training in local laboratoriesmigrated to complete their doctoral formation overseas. In a third period, with the internationalization of higher education in Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s, a higher number started completing their doctoral studies in their home countries.
Our 2017-2018 survey in the field of indigenous studies shows that undergraduate training has taken place in the researchers' home countries (as could be expected). Moreover, in the case of graduate training (master and doctoral degrees), the tendency is the one pointed out by Kreimer since most researchers have received this level of formation in their home countries ( Table 2).
Out of the researchers from the countries selected for our study and who received graduate training overseas (either master or doctoral degrees), most of them are from Chile, Colombia and Mexico 11 (Figure 2).
Although the sample is relatively small, some tendencies can be noticed in regards to the preferences in these three cases where researchers were trained overseas. Mexicans chose mostly the US, probably due to geographical proximity and previous links established by their universities and research teams with American universities. Here it may be worth to note that UCLA and the University of Arizonawhere two out of 8 researchers received their degreeshave been leading centers in indigenous studies in the US. On the other hand, the prevalence of Spain in the choice of Argentinians may be explained by peoples' autonomy and self-determination. Since the 1980s, many indigenous activists, writers, and organizations have embraced Mamani's suggestion, and Abya Yala has become a way not only to refer to the continent, but also a differentiated indigenous locus of cultural and political expression (Muyolema 2001: 329). The number of scholars from Peru who responded (8) does not seem enough to be considered representative.
linguistic proximity and a long tradition also established with the overseas formation of Argentinian researchers, 12 as Luchilo (2010) has shown, whereas Chileans have a more uniform distribution of preferences for their graduate training (Table 3).   Reasons for international collaboration can include geographic proximity, history, common language, specific problems and issues, economic factors, expertise and availability of research equipment, databases, and laboratories (Wagner et al. 2001).

Communicating in other languages
A second variable considered in our study is that of language. Despite "the belief that all modern science is, somehow, the same, of a single class" (Vessuri 1996, 58-59), the importance of language in the asymmetrical relations between regions and that of linguistic competence in transnational mobility and circulation of knowledge is a crucial element to consider. For that reason, our survey included questions regarding these issues. The first one was of course which is the language currently used (the mother tongue or Language 1 = L1), answered as displayed in Table 4. After that, respondents were asked about the following issues: (1) the number of foreign languages used (from reading skills up to high proficiency), (2) how important do they think that proficiency in other language/s is for their discipline and (3) which percentage of their papers are published in a language different than the one they currently use.

The use of a second language
In the case of the first question, most respondents mentioned the use of at least one or two languages (Table 5).
Out of those whose first language is Spanish, the second one they prefer is English, and the reverse happens when English is L1, while those speaking Portuguese use mostly Spanish as L2 (Table 6). It is worth noting that Latin American researchers who   use Spanish as a first language prefer French rather than Portuguese as L2 (79) (101), this could imply that exchanges between Mexicans/Argentinians are less likely to happen with Brazil.
The second indicator of this variable is related to the importance that researchers attribute to the use of a foreign language in their academic development. Here, most respondents (almost 89%) considered it is "very important" (60%) or "important" (28.8%) ( Table 7).
Out of the number of scholars who answered that the knowledge of a second language was "of little importance" or "not important at all" (10%), a majority were those residing in the US (Figure 3).
This can be easily explained by the fact that most mainstream journals are published in English (actually, Web of Science-Thomson Reuters and SCOPUS value that feature in journals as particularly relevant to include them in their catalogs), so, scholars residing in those countries have no needat least for publishingto use a second language. 13 The use of English in scientific communications has been addressed in more extensive studies (see Canagarajah 2002, Ortiz 2006 as well as the problems that the use of this language  Of course, the absence of Latin American scholars in mainstream journals (those indexed in WoS and SCOPUS) does not imply that their publications are of lower quality. According to Beigel, there are segmented circuits of circulation in social scientists' production: a mainstream circuit (the one mentioned before) and a regional circuit comprising journals in platforms such as SciELO, Redalyc, Latindex, in Open Access (see Beigel 2016).
poses for science as a whole. 14 However, linguistic barriers do reflect a second asymmetry, that is usual in any scientific field other than the one we are examining here: the systematic lack of quotations of Spanish-or Portuguese-speaking authors (see for instance Haas 1996). 15 Several authors have noted the tension between insularity and internationalism in American universities: studies by P. Altbach revealed that the American professoriate is least committed to internationalism among scholars from fourteen countries. Only half of American faculty feel that connections with scholars in other countries are very important, and while more than 90 percent of faculty in 13 countries believe that a scholar must read books and journals published abroad to keep up with scholarly developments, only 62% of Americans are of this opinion. (Altbach 1997, 316; see also Haas 1996) A third indicator refers to the use of a second language in the researchers' publications. Our survey shows a clear predominance of the use of L1 in the publications since 333 (66%) have less than 10% or their publications in a second language (Table 8).
An examination considering regional variations does not show important differences, since the general tendency is seen across different countries, with a more prominent proportion of 70% of papers in L2 by Chilean researchers, and a slightly heavier proportion of even less publications in a second language in the case of US-based researchers (Figure 4), a result which is consistent with attitudes towards internationalism noted above.
This tendency can also be noted in scientific production. For this purpose, we examined the geographical origin and language of researchers in 23 journals. In most journals (18 out of 23), the majority of authors are from the same country where the journal is based ( Figure 5). 14 For instance, Ortiz states that feeling is that, due to its comprehensiveness, this language has acquired the ability of "enrolling" the discussion in a global scale. In journalism, "to enroll" means to select, among many, some existing problems, making them relevant and noticeable. This kind of procedure favors the existence of a hegemonic set of mundialized representations, which start to be accepted as valid, naturalizing methodological procedures and several sets of problems. The "cultural studies," or the "multiculturalism," for instance, cease to be analyzed with regard to the context in which they were conceived, and in which they make sense, and impose themselves as 'universal'. (Ortiz 2006) 15 As Kreimer has said it for the field of postcolonial studies in STS they tend to systematically ignore all Latin American production that has been in existence for at least 40 years. I think the reason here is very simple, and the only one that makes it explicit is Law himself: they cannot read Spanish or Portuguese. In all the texts analyzed, there is not a single reference that is not written in English, and only one to a STS researcher in Latin America: what scope, then, can all these works have if they ignore one of the supposedly 'postcolonial' regions with the highest production in STS? Would they not need [those who write from a postcolonial perspective] to admit that their linguistic limitations -that we do not accept in our Latin American students -hinder a serious approach to the issue? (2016, 45, my translation) If we consider the language of the countries of such authors, a regional tendency is clearly marked, since most authors tend to publish in journals whose language is the same as theirs ( Figure 6).
As will be shown in the next section, the use of these languages (mostly English and Spanish) seems to shape regionally segmented circuits of circulation.

Networks and contacts
To elicit features about the building of networks and international forms of collaboration, questions were asked to scholars about the existence of projects with colleagues abroad, the number of such projects that each researcher has had or is developing, the countries with which he/she is connected to develop them, the frequency with which he/she establishes email contact with their colleagues abroad and the

Contacts and space: the shaping of regions
Responses to the question of the number of projects with colleagues from abroad focused mostly on research projects, though a small number of respondents chose to mention collaborative editorial projects, such as books. In our sample, 224 (44.26%) said they have had or currently have projects, while 282 (55.73%) did not.
As regards the number of projects engaged by each researcher with colleagues abroad, a vast majority mentioned they have had 1, 2 and 3 projects (77%) ( Table 9).
In terms of the countries chosen by scholars for collaboration in research projects, a few regularities are evident from the survey.
Firstly, US and Canadian researchers prefer to establish links between themselves and with Australia and New Zealand. In the second place, Mexicans prefer to establish links with the US in the first place, and Guatemala, Germany and Argentina. In the case of Argentinians, the importance of Spain (as noted earlier in the case of graduate training) is evident, whereas Brazilians distribute their preferences more evenly (see more details in Table 10).  A similar tendency can be observed in scientific production. If we consider the country of origin of authors in 23 journals, two areas are clearly marked: one constituted by English-speaking countries such as the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and on the other hand, Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries in Latin America, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. The journals based in each country of this region feature authors from the same region and only very rarely from the other region (Figure 7).
Given the exchanges between researchers from Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America with Spain and of English-speaking countries in North America with Australia and New Zealand, we browsed four more journals in these countries (Spain, Australia  and New Zealand) where content about indigenous peoples are published. 16 The same tendency can be observed in these journals. In Spain, most authors come from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, and in Australia and New Zealand, the importance of Canadian and US-based scholars is significant (Figure 8).

Frequency of contacts
Another indicator is that of the frequency of contacts by scholars with colleagues abroad. Our sample shows an even distribution among those who have less contact and those who have a more frequent communication with researchers based in other countries (Table 11).

Motives and instances of interaction
And finally, researchers were asked what were the reasons and instances for them to communicate with colleagues in other countries. Most of them (60%) are in contact for arrangements concerning international conferences and meetings (Table 12). The importance of these spaces has been underestimated in sociology and social history of science. The roles of conferences in academic life as such have not been thoroughly studied, though authors such as Gross and Fleming (2011) have stressed the importance of such spaces in testing, developing and pushing forward scholars' ideas and noted that the practice of conference attendance varies according to career state, disciplinary location and institutional status.
The number of scholars who declared they do not usually have contact with colleagues in other countries is smaller but with a certain importance (11%) and clearly indicates that intellectual life is not "spontaneously international," as Bourdieu clearly stated.

Attempts towards internationalization
Many actors in this field have promoted fostering international exchanges, not only at a regional level, but also to extend the geographical scope of different activities such as academic meetings and publications.
One of these kinds of events is international conferences and professional associations. For instance, in NAISA (Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, founded in 2008), three of its founding members (Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver and Jean O'Brien, based in the USA), sought to include the broadest range of people they considered to be in the field. For such purpose, they invited Kehaulani Kauanui (nation Kanaka Maoli, Native Hawaiian, Wesleyan University) because of her knowledge of Pacific Native Studies; Tsianina Lomawaima (Muskogee nation, University of Arizona); Inés Hernández Avila (Nez Perce nation, University of California-Davis), who was recognized for her involvement with hemispheric studies. 17 Actually, she created, together with Emilio del Valle Escalante, Stefano Varese and Luis Carcamo-Huechante, the Abya Yala Working Group (AYWG). 18 This group emerged early within NAISA to foster the participation of scholars living in Central and South America in the association meetings and leadership. 19 However, lack of resources to travel to meetings usually located in the US, Canada (and lately New Zealand) make it very difficult for Latin American scholars to attend such meetings regularly. At a regional level, in Latin American countries, there are similar instances of internationalization: the Congreso Internacional de Etnohistoria (1989 to present) RAM -Reunión de Antropología del Mercosur (2009 to present)and CIPIAL -Congreso Internacional los Pueblos Indígenas de América Latina (2013 to present). All of them are interdisciplinary from their very conception, none of them are organized by professional associations, and they include scholars mostly from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Chile (and in a lesser degree from Colombia, Peru and Bolivia), but almost none from the English-speaking region of the continent (Canada and the US).
A second strategy towards internationalization is that of transnational mobility of graduate students and scholars. At a regional level, the exchanges between Brazilian and Argentinian scholars have been notable (Grimson, Ribeiro, and Semán (Comps.) 2004), especially with the 1980s Brazilian graduate programs' policies towards incorporating Argentinian students (Isola 2018). Also, the circulation of Brazilian and Chilean anthropologists in developed countries such as France, Germany and especially the US was possible in the context of funding of social sciences from central countries, through institutions such as the World Bank, Ford Foundation or the Inter-American Development Bank (Heilbron, Guilhot, and Jeanpierre 2008;Isola 2018).
A third instance of attempts towards internationalization can be found in journals' different strategies. One of them is publishing in at least two languages (Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, since 2011). A second one is having their papers in English in a Portuguese-speaking country (such as Vibrant, a journal edited by the Brazilian Association Figure 9. Composition of editorial teams. 19 Although membership in the AYWG is not formal, a list can be found in the Facebook group. By December 2018 it had 119 members, whose institutional affiliation was retrieved from different sources. Sixty-five of them (54%) are US-based scholars and 8 (6.7%) Canadian ones working with indigenous peoples in Central or South America; 16 (13%) are from Mexico and 5 (4.20%) from Chile. There is only one member from Brazil, 1 from Nicaragua, and other countries. In 17 cases, their country of residence could not be retrieved.
of Anthropology, where most authors are Brazilian but it is published mostly in English). A third one includes translations into Spanish from texts originally published in English (such as Alteridades), or translating certain sections, such as that of indigenous authors (Espaço Amerindio). Probably the most important strategy is that of shaping an editorial team with members from different countries and regions. Most journals have a vast majority of editors from the same country (Figure 9), except for two of the ones considered in our sample (Tabula Rasa and AlterNative).
Such efforts in some cases are linked with discussions as to what are the proper degrees of internationalization. Geopolitical discussions concerning center and peripheries in anthropology (Krotz 2011) have led to endeavors such as the Red de Antropologías del Mundo-RAM, which seeks to "contribute to transform the current conditions and circuits of conversation among anthropologists in the world recognizing the plurality of positions and power relations that underlie the different locations." 20

Discussion
As our data suggest, the field of indigenous studies is not a very internationalized one: only 18% of researchers have conducted graduate studies overseas, 66% declare that they publish less than 10% of their papers in a second language, 56% of them do not have any collaboration project with their colleagues abroad and 88% of authors speak the same language of the country where their papers are published.
However, this does not mean that there is no circulation at all outside local or national boundaries. As Heilbron et al have stressed, historical accounts of the social sciences have far too easily adopted a nation-centered view uncritically accepting national traditions as a more or less self-evident framework of analysis … Instead of treating them as more or less self-contained universes, it is more fruitful to consider them as embedded in transnational relations of various kinds. (2008,147) Hence the question is not so much whether this is an internationalized field or not, but rather, to what extent and in what ways can we consider that international exchanges take place.
For a better understanding of the features involving internationalization in this field, a useful notion is that of networked fields, proposed by Rodriguez Medina (2014a), as opposed to institutionalized fields, considering a series of criteria such as conditions of entry, number of actors, sources of capital and autonomy. He states that networked fields have several features, such as the isolation of academics and research groups, a "high degree of task uncertainty, i.e. the variability in the possible results of scientific practice" (2014a, 25), job instability, more weight of informal communication among groups and the presence of 'house' journals, lack of encouragement for specialization, reliance on non-standarized procedures and a "lack of solid institutional frameworks for science and technology" (Rodriguez Medina 2014a, 27).
Although more information should be retrieved in order to compare whether the field of indigenous studies fits these criteria, some features concerning the links and circuits established by their scholars could be assimilated to those of networked fields. Furthermore, it could be said that these are regionally networked fields. There 20 See more at https://www.ram-wan.net/. seem to be two differentiated circuits comprising English-speaking researchers such as those in Canada and the US on one hand, and Spanish-and Portuguese-speaking ones (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Brazil), on the other hand, with scarce interaction. Due to geographical proximity (and probably prestige in their home country), Mexicans prefer the US for graduate training and collaboration in projects. But US and Canadian researchers prefer to establish links between themselves and with Australia and New Zealand, whereas Latin Americans establish more links among themselves and in some cases, such as Argentinians, with Spain. Within the region, however, Portuguese is not the first choice for a second language for Spanish-speaking scholars, so exchanges between Mexicans and Argentinians are less likely to happen with Brazilians.
This configuration of relationships in the field can also be observed in the organization of academic meetings. Scholars devoted to studies concerning indigenous peoples in the US and Canada usually attended disciplinary congresses, such as those organized by anthropologists, the Modern Language Association meetings and the American Society for Ethnohistory. But since the late 2000s, with the creation of the Native American and Indigenous Association − NAISA − and its annual meetings, scholars from Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand gather regularly on an interdisciplinary basis (Salomon Tarquini 2015; O'Brien and Warrior 2016). Although this professional association opened a space to gather economic support to encourage Latin American scholars, it continues to be scarce. 21 There seem to be separate circuits, not only between a Northern and a Southern circuit, but also among scholars themselves, since more than half of them − 56%declare they do not have projects with colleagues overseas.
Such separated circuits, lack of funding in all countries for translation services, and geopolitical asymmetries in the organization of academic publishing are reflected in the language chosen for publication: a vast number of scholars in this field (76%) publish 10% or even less of their papers in their mother tongue. 22 Other limitations should be considered in the field of indigenous studies: in the US and Canada, many scholars writing about indigenous issues prefer to learn native tongues as second languages and publish in journals that are conducted by indigenous scholars and circulate among them and through indigenous communities. This is a way to cope with the difficulties of institutionalization of indigenous studies as such in specific departments, colleges, schools or faculties within traditional universities in both countries (Salomon Tarquini 2018).

21
Those who formed the Abya-Yala working group within NAISA have strong difficulties in fostering the participation of Latin American scholars. Press releases for NAISA annual meetings used to be both in English and Spanish. Yet at two meetings they were released only in English. Recently efforts have been renewed towards including scholars from Spanish-speaking countries. Information about the conference that will take place in New Zealand in June 2019 is also in Spanish, see https://naisa2019.waikato.ac.nz/home/call-for-papers/. 22 It should be noted that while many academic evaluations require researchers to publish internationally in mainstream journals (that is, the ones indexed in Scopus or Web of Science, for instance), this does not mean necessarily that they will choose journals in different languages. As Sabina García Peter (2016) has noted with the case of Chilean scholars la estrategia de estos académicos parece no estar basada en alcanzar un posicionamiento en el campo académico internacional mainstream. La tendencia a publicar en revistas nacionales parece desafiar la idea de que los científicos de las ciencias sociales tienden hacia la colaboración internacional para su consagración. (179)

Conclusions
The analysis of variables such as international mobility in undergraduate and graduate education, use of foreign languages, and frequency and quality of contacts with colleagues abroad, suggests that there is not an internationalized field of indigenous studies as such, but rather regionally networked fields, constituted by circuits mostly defined by linguistic areas and historically shaped by regular academic relations between certain countries.
A relational approach analysis of academic fields can better illustrate the complexities of a field since indigenous studies in the US and Canada are marginalin relation with longestablished disciplines such as history, anthropology and literary studiesand scholars have strong difficulties for opening and keeping institutional spaces. Hence, as Kreimer remarks, quoting Lafuente and Sala Catalá, geopolitical, socio-economic and socio-professional criteria should be considered in relational terms. "For them, according to where the emphasis is placed will depend on concepts such as science dependent, a national science, marginal science or academic science" (Kreimer 2016, 36). The circulation of theories, concepts and agendas between different countries should bear in mind asymmetric relations between different contexts and actors, in the sense already approached by García Peter (2016) precisely about indigenous studies, but asymmetries within central countries' academic environments should also be considered. Some preliminary interviews suggest that struggles of power within American universities to keep NAIS/AIS Departments and faculty are not unusual, and attention should be paid to institutional status, the role of funding, NGOs strategies, and indigenous peoples' agendas. While internationalization is one possible approach, further studies are required to analyze the features and complexities of these growingthough regionally networked -fields.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET, Argentina).

Notes on contributor
Claudia Salomon Tarquini works as Adjunct researcher at CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council) Argentina, and as adjunct professor at the National University of La Pampa. Her main research topics are related to regional history, identities, alterities, and history of indigenous populations (Pampa and Patagonia, nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Her latest research is devoted to the history of indigenous studies in various national and regional contexts. She has been a Visiting Fellow at Yale University and the State University of New York, Buffalo (Fulbright). She is the Managing Editor at Quinto Sol, a history journal, and Associate editor in Culture, Power and Education (Indigeneity and Interculturality) at the Journal of Intercultural Studies (ed. Taylor & Francis-Routledge). She has published books, chapters, and papers in the US, France, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina.