Mutuality: Anthropology's Changing Terms of Engagement

Mutuality

MUTUALITY

Anthropology’s Changing Terms of Engagement

Edited by

Roger Sanjek

Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press

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Contents

Introduction. Deep Grooves: Anthropology and Mutuality

Roger Sanjek

PART I. ORIENTATIONS

Chapter 1. Anthropology and the American Indian

Garrick Bailey

Chapter 2. The American Anthropological Association RACE: Are We So Different? Project

Yolanda T. Moses

Chapter 3. Mutuality and the Field at Home

Sylvia Rodríguez

Chapter 4. If You Want to Go Fast, Go Alone. If You Want to Go Far, Go Together: Yup’ik Elders Working Together with One Mind

Ann Fienup-Riordan

PART II. ROOTS

Chapter 5. The Invisibility of Diasporic Capital and Multiply Migrant Creativity

Parminder Bhachu

Chapter 6. A Savage at the Wedding and the Skeletons in My Closet: My Great-Grandfather, Igorotte Villages, and the Ethnological Expositions of the 1900s

Deana L. Weibel

Chapter 7. Thinking About and Experiencing Mutuality: Notes on a Son’s Formation

Lane Ryo Hirabayashi

Chapter 8. Cartographies of Mutuality: Lessons from Darfur

Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf

PART III. JOURNEYS

Chapter 9. On the Fault Lines of the Discipline: Personal Practice and the Canon

Robert R. Alvarez

Chapter 10. Listening with Passion: A Journey Through Engagement and Exchange

Alaka Wali

Chapter 11. Why? And How? An Essay on Doing Anthropology and Life

Susan Lobo

Chapter 12. Embedded in Time, Work, Family, and Age: A Reverie About Mutuality

Renée R. Shield

PART IV. PUBLICS

Chapter 13. Dancing in the Chair: A Collaborative Effort of Developing and Implementing Wheelchair Taijiquan

Zibin Guo

Chapter 14. Fragments of a Limited Mutuality

Brett Williams

Chapter 15. On Making Good in a Study of African American Children with Acquired and Traumatic Brain Injuries

Lanita Jacobs

Chapter 16. On Ethnographic Love

Catherine Besteman

Conclusion. Mutuality and Anthropology: Terms and Modes of Engagement

Roger Sanjek

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Contributors

Introduction

Deep Grooves

Anthropology and Mutuality

Roger Sanjek

We can begin this volume’s collective examination of mutuality by asking: Why do we do anthropology at all? What values underpin anthropologists’ commitments to lengthy academic training, to fieldwork, to writing and publication, and to communication with various audiences? Why do we do what we do?

Anthropology, I propose in response, has two contending value systems that motivate our work. One I will term the academic-career complex, and the other I call mutuality, which is the collective focus of this book.

The academic-career values that motivate us as professionals include the satisfactions of discovering and deepening an expansive anthropological worldview; our advancement along career paths to initial employment, work and research opportunities, and promotion; and approval and esteem from colleagues. These last may be evidenced in requests to speak and in invitations to participate in meeting panels, conferences, and essay volumes; in publication acceptances, peer citations, and favorable book reviews; and in professional honors and prizes. As we are thus disciplined by the discipline, these values and rewards define us as individuals within a professional world, aspects of which we become aware of only after we enter it.

For many anthropologists, however, there are, in addition, other values, brought from the wider social worlds in which we have grown up and in which we live as persons, actors, and citizens, which include the value we place upon mutually positive relations with the people we study, work with, write about and for, and communicate with more broadly as anthropologists. These values too may bring welcomed, even career-long satisfactions and may complement or even outweigh professional goals and achievements. The essays in this book explore how these values of mutuality and the efforts they inspire operate in the relationships between anthropologists and the communities and wider social orders within which they work and live.

Sometimes the two value sets pull an anthropologist in opposite directions—either inwardly, toward the world of other professional anthropologists, or outwardly, toward the larger social worlds that produce and reproduce us. At still other times, the two value sets may be compatible, even in synch, motivating anthropologists both to pursue professional academic goals and, at the same time, to adhere to and advance values of the people and communities they study, work with, live in, and may originate from (see Ames 1986; Jacobs-Huey 2002; Lippert 2007; Sanjek 1987).

The contributors to this book have constructed anthropological careers incorporating mutuality in many ways. Here they provide examples from past, longer-term, and recent work in which mutuality has been paramount. Some from the start have defined their research and professional objectives by issues, concerns, and values originating in their own communities; others have done so later in their careers. Still others have discovered avenues to mutuality through fieldwork and community-based projects, consultations, and advocacy. Many have emphasized mutuality in publications involving and reaching nonanthropological collaborators and audiences. Several also have done so via various old and new media, in museums and public programs, and in health-care settings.

Mutuality is not something new or recent in anthropology, but neither is it intrinsic to it. Many anthropologists past and present, like the coauthors of this volume, have valued and practiced mutuality in their choices of where and what to study, how they conduct fieldwork, and with what audiences and publics, and in what forms, they share and disseminate anthropological findings and knowledge. The voices in this book are not unique, and experiences and perspectives similar to theirs could be and have been related by many colleagues (see, for example, Aiyappan 1944, 1965; Bennett and Whiteford 2013; Blakey 1998; Bond 1988, 1990; Chavez 1992; Checker 2009, 2011; Cohen 1976; Deloria 1944; Drake 1980; Fiske 2011, 2012; Harris 1958; Hopper 2003; Howell 2010; Kiste 1976; Koff 2004; Lamphere 2004a, 2004b; Leacock 1969; Mafeje 1971, 1975, 1978; Medicine 2001; Mullings 1997; Nader 1976; Obbo 1980; Rylko-Bauer, Singer, and van Willigen 2006; Sacks 1988; Spradley 1976; Stull and Broadway 2004; Zavella 2011; Zentella 1997).

When mutuality is aimed for and achieved, more than individual career goals or interpersonal relationships may be enhanced. Just as greater mutuality between archaeologists and descendant communities has been a salutary result of the 1990 Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (Killion 2007; Thomas 2000; Townsend 2004), so also will growing awareness and practice of mutuality in social-cultural anthropology boost our brand among the greater public and among our current and future students. Moreover, the much discussed crisis of representation, to which postmodernists have alerted us, may in significant part recede as values mutually shared by anthropologists and those we study, learn from, work with, and write for displace the inwardly focused concerns of academia and its arbiters.

Plan of the Book

Mutuality: Anthropology’s Changing Terms of Engagement results from an invitation to contribute chapters that I sent to sixteen colleagues whose work within the deep grooves of fieldwork and collaboration I admired.¹ Ten were able to attend a session at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Montreal in 2011 to present and discuss early versions of their chapters. The volume is organized into four sections, Orientations, Roots, Journeys, and Publics, which are followed by a concluding chapter.

Orientations

The first section, Orientations, establishes the broad terrain and themes of Mutuality. Garrick Bailey, in Anthropology and the American Indian (Chapter 1), traces the relationship between Native Americans and anthropologists from the late nineteenth century to the present, a tale of declining mutuality. He includes reflections on his own role, working on behalf of the Osage and other Indian peoples, in recent struggles over museum exhibit representations. In "The American Anthropological Association RACE: Are We So Different? Project (Chapter 2), Yolanda T. Moses tells the story of the leading professional association’s largest public program ever, which has brought up-to-date anthropological thinking about what race" is and is not to nationwide audiences in museums and science centers and to users of its RACE website. These two chapters address major impediments to mutuality in anthropology’s past and present—its objectification of indigenous (and other studied) peoples and rejection of their native point of view and the historical development of scientific racism to classify and rank culturally generated segments of the human population, with tragic consequences and costs. These two chapters also describe what anthropologists are doing to rectify these impediments and increase mutuality, work in which the authors have been directly involved.

The next two chapters address mutuality in ethnographic fieldwork and collaboration. In Mutuality and the Field at Home (Chapter 3) Sylvia Rodríguez recounts her career transition from early extractive research abroad to collaborative fieldwork and public anthropology in her New Mexico home community of Taos. Then in ‘If You Want to Go Fast, Go Alone. If You Want to Go Far, Go Together’: Yup’ik Elders Working Together with One Mind (Chapter 4), Ann Fienup-Riordan explains how her collaboration with Yup’ik elders in Alaska has evolved, using recent work on weather and the environment to illustrate what she has learned over four decades.

Roots

The second section, Roots, concerns the values and experiences that anthropologists bring to their work from their family and community backgrounds, which may include histories of migration, travel, mass incarceration, political movements, and conflict. The Invisibility of Diasporic Capital and Multiply Migrant Creativity (Chapter 5), by Parminder Bhachu, explores the past and present Punjabi craft caste global diaspora, of which her family is a part, and conveys the impact that familial experiences and stories play in the topics she has chosen to study and write about. She illustrates the importance of mutuality in both her anthropological tracing of historical trajectories and in connecting contemporary generations with the histories and sensibilities that produce them. Deana L. Weibel, in A Savage at the Wedding and the Skeletons in My Closet: My Great-Grandfather, ‘Igorotte Villages,’ and the Ethnological Expositions of the 1900s (Chapter 6), interrogates her ancestor’s display of Bontoc Igorot men, women, and children at U.S. world’s fairs a century ago—a form of countermutuality that also involved several professional anthropologists of the day. She then describes her ongoing collaborations with Filipina Igorot anthropologist Patricia Afable and with the now globalized Igorot descendant community.

Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, in Thinking About and Experiencing Mutuality: Notes on a Son’s Formation (Chapter 7), reflects upon his community-based research in the 1970s with his father, anthropologist and ethnic studies activist James Hirabayashi. He specifies the values and methods he learned then and continued to use in later work, including book projects about Japanese Americans and Japanese migrants that involved both Hirabayashis and other Nikkei scholars. Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, in Cartographies of Mutuality: Lessons from Darfur (Chapter 8), describes how she was inspired by her socially conscious father and family members while she was growing up in Khartoum. She focuses on how incidents and memories from that time, and also mutualities from her student days, have affected her research among Sudanese migrants abroad and at home and, more recently, in her multisited fieldwork on the Darfur crisis.

Journeys

In Journeys, the third section, the contributors address mutuality in their various career pathways, which include working in an applied research organization, a museum, independent practice, a nursing home, a statewide health-care reform project, and a medical school, as well as in academic departments. On the Fault Lines of the Discipline: Personal Practice and the Canon (Chapter 9), by Robert R. Alvarez, considers several facets of mutuality: among colleagues, in conducting fieldwork and contract research, with the people we study, and between each anthropologist and his or her professional heritage and identity. In Listening With Passion: A Journey Through Engagement and Exchange (Chapter 10), Alaka Wali links her emerging appreciations of mutuality and aesthetics in, first, research in Harlem and, later, field projects and collections work in Chicago and Peru for the Field Museum of Natural History.

Susan Lobo, in Why? And How? An Essay on Doing Anthropology and Life (Chapter 11), describes strategies and accomplishments during Lobo’s career as a practicing anthropologist, including her long-term collaboration at Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland, California. She closes with wise observations about writing across a range of formats and for various audiences. Embedded in Time, Work, Family, and Age: A Reverie About Mutuality (Chapter 12), by Renée R. Shield, situates her research and work career within the fabric of the mutualities and negotiations one weaves as family member, ethnographer, colleague, citizen, and life-course navigator. Her personal and anthropological experiences reinforce for her Martin Luther King, Jr.’s observation: We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

Publics

Publics, the final section, focuses on mutuality in relation to anthropology’s many nonacademic publics—the people we learn from and about, collaborate with, live among, communicate with, and seek to affect as audiences for our writings and collaborative efforts. These publics range in scale from the macro, even national, level (as in the AAA RACE project discussed by Moses) to the micro, often deeply interpersonal, level of fieldwork partners and subjects. These publics include museum goers, fellow community members, general readers, and policy makers, among others, and they also embrace, as the chapters in this section attest, persons who may be disabled, racialized, economically vulnerable, and locally and internationally displaced.

In Dancing in the Chair: A Collaborative Effort of Developing and Implementing Wheelchair Taijiquan (Chapter 13), Zibin Guo tells the heartening story of the adaptation of a traditional Chinese healing art for wheelchair users and its subsequent introduction nationwide in China, as well as promising applications in the United States. Brett Williams, in Fragments of a Limited Mutuality (Chapter 14), reminds us of the contingent, uneven, and frustrating course mutuality can take as the community ethnographers and friends she portrays struggle at the short end of an unequal income distribution while resources, invisibly and deviously, flow daily from poor to rich.

Lanita Jacobs, in On ‘Making Good’ in a Study of African American Children with Acquired and Traumatic Brain Injuries (Chapter 15), relates how empathy, love, and grief arose in her relationship with a young boy whose hospitalization she followed as ethnographer for two years preceding his death from a brain tumor. She identifies the obligation she bears to make good in writing for audiences of which she and her subject’s family are a part. On Ethnographic Love (Chapter 16), by Catherine Besteman, offers a close reading of recent anthropological thinking related to mutuality, including that of critics and resistors. She then considers models for mutuality that she embraced in fieldwork in postapartheid Cape Town, South Africa, and that she later employed and extended in bridge building between Somali Bantu refugees and white Americans in Maine.

Conclusion

My Mutuality coauthors have vitalized and expanded the concept of mutuality along many dimensions. In the Conclusion, Mutuality and Anthropology: Terms and Modes of Engagement, I reflect on how my own appreciation of mutuality developed within the deep grooves of an anthropological career—as outsider and insider, fieldworker and citizen—over five decades. I ask how the kinds of writing we do, from theory-driven journal articles and books for academic peers to modes accessible to diverse readerships, including policy and public opinion audiences, impede or enhance mutuality. I consider, as well, past and present anthropological engagement with mutuality in old and new media, museums and public programs, and health-care settings.

The volume closes with brief exploration of how anthropology’s two value systems might be brought more fully into mutual balance.

PART I

ORIENTATIONS

Chapter 1

Anthropology and the American Indian

Garrick Bailey

American anthropology is rooted in the study of American Indians. It was American Indian specialists, more than any group of researchers, who established the intellectual foundations of American anthropology. The reason for this early focus was simple: there was much basic research to be done, and Indian communities were nearby. In an anthology of papers published between 1888 and 1920 in the American Anthropologist (AA), the American Anthropological Association’s flagship journal, some 63 percent, nearly two-thirds, were clearly concerned with American Indians (De Laguna 1960). In a second volume, for 1921–1945, papers on the American Indian dropped to 46 percent (Stocking 1976). After World War II and the increased global involvement of the United States, greater funding for the study of more distant populations was made available, and attention to Native Americans diminished further. In the third AA anthology, covering 1946–1970, only 18 percent of the papers concerned American Indians (Liberty 1978c, 4; Murphy 1976).

Native Americans Versus Anthropologists

To promote his new book, Custer Died for Your Sins, in 1969, Vine Deloria, Jr., published portions of chapters 1 and 4 as Anthropologists and Other Friends in Playboy magazine. The strategy worked, as both the article and book received a great deal of national attention. However, his criticism caught anthropologists by surprise, because they had long considered themselves to be the strongest and most active supporters of Indian rights. Anthropologists, particularly cultural anthropologists, had done far more than merely research and write about traditional Indian culture. Many anthropologists had been involved in various Indian rights organizations, including the Lake Mohank Conference, which began in the late nineteenth century, and later, the Association on American Indian Affairs. Concern over Indian issues had led to the emergence in the 1940s of what was to become applied anthropology. In the 1950s, Sol Tax, arguing that applied anthropologists were accomplishing little other than academically defining the problems, decided on a more activist approach, which he called action anthropology. Securing funding from a private foundation, in 1961, Tax sponsored the American Indian Chicago Conference, a meeting of five hundred Indians from all parts of the country, at his home institution, the University of Chicago. After a week of discussions, the conference produced a forty-nine-page document, The Declaration of Indian Purpose.

Prior to 1961, however, one of Tax’s students, a part-Cherokee anthropologist, Robert K. Thomas, had already started the Summer Workshop on American Indian Affairs in Colorado. This workshop brought together Indian college students to discuss Indian issues. In the same summer as Tax’s 1961 meeting, students from the workshop organized the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), the first of the national Indian activist organizations. By 1969, Indian activist organizations such as the American Indian Movement, Indians of All Tribes, and others had developed throughout the United States. More militant and aggressive, these organizations eclipsed the NIYC as the public face of the Indian movement, occupying first Alcatraz Island and later the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) offices in Washington, and Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Influenced by Deloria’s writings, American Indian activists publically voiced a strong antianthropologist bias. To many American Indians, all anthropologists are alike, and although their strongest objection to anthropological research was the treatment of human remains by physical anthropologists and archaeologists, it was cultural anthropologists, because of their closer personal contact with Indian peoples, who experienced most of the personal abuse.

The Origins of American Anthropology

Why, by the late 1960s, had the relationship between anthropologists and American Indians become contentious? At first, the answer seemed simple. In 1879, the Bureau of American Ethnology was established at the Smithsonian, and the systematic anthropological study of American Indians began. In that same year, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened, and an official policy of forced assimilation—the destruction of traditional cultures and social identities—was initiated. American Indian cultures and identities were going to be extinguished, and anthropologists were going to become the custodians of the intellectual and tangible properties of the Indian past. Thus the Office of Indian Affairs (renamed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1947) took control of the Indian present and future, and anthropology assumed dominion over the Indian past. The Indian activist movement of the 1960s and 1970s was concerned not just with regaining control over the Indian present and future but with the past as well.

As I examined the question, however, I realized that the answer was not quite that simple. In 1851, Lewis Henry Morgan published League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois, which is considered the first major ethnography of an American Indian society. He dedicated this book to Ely Parker, a Seneca, stating that the study was the fruit of our joint researches. What is little recognized today is that during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, educated Indian intellectuals were deeply involved in the formative stages of the emerging discipline of anthropology. These early Indian collaborators included George Hunt (Kwakiutl), Francis La Flesche (Omaha), James Murie (Pawnee), J. N. B. Hewitt (Tuscarora), William Jones (Sac and Fox), and Arthur C. Parker (Seneca), to name only some (see Liberty 1978a). Many authored or coauthored anthropological books and articles or were in some other way publically acknowledged for their work. They were not anonymous informants. The majority were employed part-time by museums or other institutions to conduct independent field studies. Some were employed as full-time anthropologists: La Flesche and Hewitt by the Smithsonian and Parker by the New York State Library and Museum. In 1904, William Jones became the first American Indian, and only the twelfth individual in the United States, to receive a PhD in anthropology. However, this close collaborative relationship soon changed.

This process of change in the status of Indian intellectuals in anthropology is well illustrated in the career of Francis La Flesche. I first became acquainted with La Flesche’s work as a graduate student in the 1960s (see Bailey 1973). His works proved to be an invaluable source of information, but on the whole, I found La Flesche’s Osage publications confusing and ignored most of their information on cosmology and ritual. In the 1970s, I continued my research on contemporary Osage social and cultural institutions (Bailey 1978, 2001), but toward the end of that decade, I turned to studying the Navajo, which occupied the better part of ten years (Bailey and Bailey 1986). In the late 1980s, I returned to the Osage and undertook a rereading and analysis of La Flesche’s more than two thousand pages of Osage publications; in the early 1990s, I studied his notes and other writings at the National Anthropological Archives (Bailey 1995, 2010). As a result, I came to see the nature of the continuity that linked the contemporary Osages with their ancestors. Continuity was not to be found in formal institutions but rather in ideas, concepts, and beliefs that were alive and well in the collective minds of members of the contemporary Osage community. This knowledge was transmitted not just in words but also through the formal structuring of the physical behavior of individuals and through the use of a variety of material symbols. I came to realize that the key to understanding the culture history of the Osages was a more complete understanding of Osage traditional religion—in other words, in La Flesche’s studies (Bailey 1995, 4–9).

Born in 1857 and educated at a mission school on the Omaha Reservation, La Flesche participated in Omaha religious activities as a boy and even joined their last bison hunt. The younger brother of the well-known Indian activist Susette La Flesche, he accompanied her on her lecture tour of eastern cities in 1879–1880. In Washington, he met James Dorsey, Alice Fletcher, and other members of the emerging anthropological community. After a failed marriage, he secured a job in 1881 as a copyist for the Indian Service in Washington and continued his education, studying linguistics with Dorsey and law at National University (now George Washington University), from which he received his LLB and LLM degrees; he also worked with Alice Fletcher on her research. In 1885, he published the first of his academic papers. Later, he coauthored The Omaha Tribe with Fletcher (Fletcher and La Flesche 1911), and in 1910, he left the Indian Service to take a position as an ethnologist with the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology to study the closely related Osage (Alexander 1933; Liberty 1978b).

La Flesche was an activist whose objective was to change white America’s misconceptions of the Indian. In The Middle Five, an autobiographical account of his boyhood, he stated that the object of this book is to reveal the true nature and character of the Indian boy. . . . it may help [them] be judged, as are other boys, by what they say and what they do (La Flesche 1900, xv). Later, in a published lecture given in Philadelphia in 1903, he stated, The real character of peoples is never fully known until there has been obtained some knowledge of their religious ideas and their conception of the Unseen Power that animates all life. He further stated that the reason white Americans did not understand American Indians was whites’ belief that they alone possess the knowledge of a God and that Indian religious practices were not a true religion. This misinterpretation was due to the fact that The Indian looks upon nature, upon all natural forms, animate and inanimate, from a different standpoint and he draws from them different lessons than does one of the white race. Even the academic community had yet to fully understand these beliefs (La Flesche 1905, 4–5).

To La Flesche, religion formed the intellectual core of a culture. If one does not understand the core beliefs of a society, then one cannot fully understand its other cultural practices, because other aspects of its culture are derived from these beliefs. Academic studies were only superficial accounts. La Flesche’s objective was to explain the Indians to white Americans and, in so doing, demonstrate that Indians were not simple, ignorant savages but were as mentally capable and sophisticated in their thinking as were white Americans. In The Omaha Tribe, he did not merely describe Omaha culture; rather, he attempted to get close to the thoughts that underlie the ceremonies and customs of the Omaha tribe (Fletcher and La Flesche 1911, 14). In attempting to explain, not merely describe, the Omaha culture, he used the Omaha conceptual model of the universe to explicate their social and political organization. Later, he would use the Osage to illustrate the true complexity of Indian philosophy and culture.

Academic reviews of The Omaha Tribe were mixed. The most critical review was by anthropologist Robert Lowie, in Science. He objected that the volume contained no literature review, thus ignoring the earlier writing of J. O. Dorsey, so sane, conscientious, and competent an ethnographer (quoted in Mark 1988, 338). Further, he criticized [Fletcher and La Flesche] for classifying the material in accord with ‘aboriginal’ rather than ‘scientific’ logic and for attaching historical value to the origin accounts of a primitive tribe, a ‘tendency, now definitely abandoned by ethnologists.’ . . . they slighted topics like material culture and decorative designs. . . . ‘Every professional ethnologist may reasonably be expected to pay some attention to the points that have come to be of theoretical interest to his fellow students’ (quoted in Mark 1988, 338). The Omaha Tribe thus failed to meet what Lowie considered to be the professional standards of academic anthropology.

La Flesche’s lengthier study, The Osage Tribe—more than sixteen hundred pages—was published in four separate volumes of the Bureau of American Ethnology’s (BAE) annual report, between 1921 and 1930. In addition, he published seven articles on the Osage, and after his death, two more unpublished Osage manuscripts were published as BAE bulletins. Although none of these works was professionally reviewed, in Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America, Alfred Kroeber remarked, Thanks to La Flesche we know several of [the Osages’] rituals in detail; but these give relatively few indications of the type of culture as a whole (1939, 75).

In retrospect, Kroeber’s dismissal of La Flesche’s Osage studies should not be surprising. The two men had very different approaches to the study of the American Indian. Kroeber was concerned with describing and analyzing the tangible; his dissertation had been on Arapaho decorative art. La Flesche was interested in describing the metaphysical world of the Indian as a means to understanding their culture; in doing such, he was describing an Indian world that it is doubtful Kroeber could even imagine.

Throughout his career in Washington, La Flesche was involved in professional activities. In 1922, he was elected president of the Anthropological Society of Washington (Liberty 1978b, 46). In April 1923, his closest friend Alice Fletcher died, leaving him most of her estate (Mark 1988, 346–348). That summer, he visited the Osage for the last time. By then, most of the traditional Osage priests were dead, and he spent his time taking notes on Osage plant usage (Bailey 1995, 289 n55). Returning to the Smithsonian, he worked on preparing his final manuscripts for publication, and in 1929, he moved back to Nebraska to live with his brother. He died in 1932.

La Flesche’s obituary in the American Anthropologist reflected the diminished status of Indian intellectuals in the discipline. Its author, Hartley Alexander, praised The Osage Tribe as collectively . . . what is certainly the most complete single record of the ceremonies of a North American Indian people (1933, 329–330). However, he asserted of The Omaha that the text is from her [Fletcher’s] pen (1933, 329), and he did not list it in La Flesche’s accompanying bibliography. I have never found any basis for this claim that Fletcher was the sole author of The Omaha. La Flesche was an accomplished and prolific writer, not only of academic articles, books, and monographs, but even of short stories and an opera.

The most telling aspect of the obituary was the accompanying photograph. In almost all photographs of him, La Flesche appears impeccably dressed in a coat, vest, and tie (for examples, see Bailey 1995, 8, and Fletcher and La Flesche 1911, plate 1). Yet Alexander selected a photograph for the obituary showing La Flesche bare chested and dressed in a buffalo robe (1933, plate 24). In death, La Flesche was treated as an oddity, a curiosity, a wild savage, a mere informant who was not truly one of us, not a fellow professional.

What happened to La Flesche and the other Indian intellectuals involved in anthropology during the first decades of the twentieth century is best summarized by Robin Ridington in his introduction to the 1992 edition of The Omaha.

Lowie and others of his generation in the first decades of the twentieth century reversed the focus of anthropology from the world of the Native Americans to that of the academy. They valued the university programs they were founding above an interest in the lives of aboriginal people. . . . In the years immediately following, anthropologists became obsessed with a search for an objectivity that they envied in the physical sciences. As they began to train students and grant graduate degrees in anthropology, they rejected the . . . works of authors like La Flesche as subjective and unprofessional. (1992, 5)

Professionalizing Anthropology

With the professionalization of anthropology in universities, the era of collaboration between white scholars and Indian intellectuals came to an end. Indians as Indians would and could no longer play a collaborative role; they could only be interpreters, informants, or subjects of research. In fact, their intellectual insights were not considered necessary to understanding native culture. As Margaret Mead stated, In complicated civilizations like those of Europe, or higher civilizations of the East, years of study are necessary before the student can begin to understand the forces at work within them. . . . A primitive people without a written language present a much less elaborate problem and a trained student can master the fundamental structure of a primitive society within a few months (Mead 1928, 14–15).

Academically trained anthropologists now asserted sole dominion over the Indian cultural past. William Jones (of the Sac and Fox nation) died in 1909 while conducting fieldwork in the Philippines for the Field Museum (Hall 1997, 42–44), and it would not be until 1952 that the second American Indian, Ed Dozier, a Santa Clara, would receive a PhD in anthropology (Norcini 2007). With no intellectual input from Native Americans, white academically trained anthropologists alone decided what was suitable for research, and they defined, evaluated, and analyzed the American Indian world. As Lowie stated in his 1935 preface to The Crow Indians, The audience I have in mind . . . embraces anthropologists . . . sociologists, historians, and other social scientists eager to grasp the varied patterns of human societies. Although Lowie was speaking of studies in cultural anthropology, the same attitude applied to linguistics, archaeology, and physical anthropology. The audience for anthropological studies was other academics, not the members of Indian communities.

Anthropologists felt that they had an inherent right, as well as an academic responsibility, to study and record whatever they wished or thought important. Leslie White made this clear in his preface to The Pueblo of Sia, New Mexico: Whereas the pueblo, as a community, takes a firm stand on the question of secrecy [regarding their religious practices], there are occasional individuals who realize full well that the culture of their people is rapidly disappearing. . . . It is the ethnographer’s task to ‘scent out’ such individuals (1962, 7). Anthropological research on the American Indian was premised on the myth of the vanishing Indian. White saw Indian culture as inferior to that of the United States and Europe (1962, 3). Indians as Indians could not be part of the modern world, and they were doomed to disappear. As Julian Steward noted in 1945, Anthropologists are in general agreement that it is purely a question of time before all Indians lose their identity (quoted in McNickle 1970, 6). Thus, what living Indians thought or felt about what was said concerning them, their communities, or their ancestors was irrelevant. Their vanishing cultural heritage was the exclusive domain of the professional anthropologists.

The White Man’s Indian

In the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., there is a painting by Henri Rousseau that serves as a visual metaphor for the problem of the Indian (see Strickland 1979). The Indian is portrayed struggling with something that never existed, a New World ape. So it is, and has been, with almost every facet of Indians’ interactions with dominant white society—they have had to struggle with the white man’s Indian, an imaginary Indian that never existed. It is not just that every law passed and every legal decision handed down by the courts was and is based, in large part, on the mental image of an Indian who never existed; almost every encounter between Indian peoples and members of the dominant white society was and is, to some degree, conditioned by this myth.

La Flesche made it clear that his involvement in anthropology was to correct these misconceptions. Only anthropology was or is capable of directly challenging the core concept of this myth: that America before the white man was a wilderness occupied by mystical, uncivilizable savages who could not remain Indian and be part of the modern world. However, the potential for correction was extinguished with the professionalization of anthropology within the universities. Instead of challenging the misconception of the Indian that was, and is, pervasive in American popular culture, anthropology has served to give academic validation to this imaginary Indian.

By the 1930s, cultural research had shifted. Little knowledge remained of what anthropologists perceived as traditional culture. It was impossible for field research to produce classic synchronic ethnographies. Most North American Indian specialists now changed to studies of assimilation and acculturation.

So, what did anthropologists do in the late 1960s when the natives announced they were not vanishing and had no plans to do so? It varied by subdiscipline. Physical anthropologists and archaeologists did nothing. Although their research was the most objectionable to Indian activists, they had little personal contact with Indian peoples, and most were not aware of any problem. This started to change in the late 1970s, when Indian organizations began to publicly protest exhibits of the human remains and burial goods in research collections and museums. However, it was not until the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 that they fully realized they too had an Indian problem.

The third subdiscipline, linguistic anthropology, was not particularly controversial. As a result, it was the cultural anthropologists who, in the early 1970s, responded by holding public meetings with Indian activists to confess their sins, verbally flagellate themselves, and promise amends. Academics expect at least some criticism from fellow academics on their research methods or theoretical approach or general conclusions. However, cultural anthropologists now found themselves in the awkward position of being forced to publicly defend their research findings against Indian college students who asserted that what they were saying was simply not true. I was present at a number of these meetings and was involved in many of the informal conversations, both with anthropologists and with their antagonists, which followed.

First, it may be noted, it is impossible to defend yourself publicly against a broad accusation that your research is simply incorrect or when, as one young woman put it, My grandfather told me that he lied to the anthropologists. What surprised me at the time was that many senior anthropologists accepted these accusations uncritically, even at times questioning the veracity of their own research. As to the antagonists, they were a diverse group, not unlike the people with whom I had grown up and gone to school. Most were younger urban Indian college students; some were from traditional families and possessed some traditional knowledge, but most were not. A few were New Age Indians whose actual Indian ancestry was subject to doubt. More than a few were individuals whose Indian identities, even in their own minds, were in question, and they were using the opportunity to assert that they were still Indian. A few actually spoke in broken English, affecting the speech pattern of the older, traditional, non-native English speakers. Many of their criticisms were justified and should have been taken seriously, but others were not. To me, these meetings and conversations demonstrated that in conducting their research, anthropologists collectively had maintained such a high degree of social distance between themselves and the communities they studied that they had little understanding of the actual social and cultural dynamics and diversity of the younger contemporary Native American world.

What was the result? In Vine Deloria’s obituary, Raymond DeMallie wrote, Singlehandedly he had changed the culture of anthropology in relation to American Indians (2007, 932). He had, but not in the positive way implied. Far too many cultural anthropologists now saw all Indians as hostile to their research. As a colleague remarked, Indians are a pain in the ass to work with. Just as important was that, by this time, Indians had lost most of their exotic appeal to anthropologists; they were no longer real Indians. As a result, the relative importance of North American Indian studies in cultural anthropology declined sharply. In the fourth anthology of papers from the American Anthropologist, covering 1971 through 1995 (Darnell 2002), only 10 percent concerned North American Indians. In 1969, 22 percent of the cultural anthropology faculty (by my count) at the ten departments granting the largest number of PhDs were North American Indian specialists (American Anthropological Association 1969). By 2008, however, only 6 percent of cultural anthropologists in these same departments were Native American specialists, and six of the ten departments had no American Indian specialist at all on their faculty (American Anthropological Association 2008). To the detriment of both the anthropological and the Indian communities, it seemed that American Indian studies were no longer an integral part of the study of cultural anthropology.

Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand

In 1998, I was contacted by Richard Townsend of the Art Institute of Chicago, James Brown of Northwestern University, and Kent Reilly of Texas State University–San Marcos. They had an idea for a major exhibit on the Mississippian Civilization of 500 BC to 1500 AD, to be titled Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand, and they wanted it to be a truly collaborative project, with the active involvement and support of the living descendants of the Mississippian peoples. Recognizing that such an exhibit had the potential to challenge the prevailing myth that prior to European contact Indians were uncivilized savages, I agreed to organize a meeting between them and members of local Indian communities in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This meeting was critical, because we agreed that if they failed to gain the support of the invited Indian group, the exhibit idea would be dropped.

The initial problem was who to invite. There are twenty-eight federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma who are descended from the Mississippian peoples, with several hundred thousand descendants overall. The attendees had to