[I first met Donna
Moody at the 2011 New
England American Studies Association Conference at Plimoth Plantation, and
have been fortunate enough to remain connected to her ever since. Her recently
defended PhD dissertation promises to significantly expand and enrich the
fields of Native American Studies and Anthropology, as well as debates over
higher education and our collective understandings of who we’ve been, who we
are, and where we’re headed. I’m honored to share her thoughts and work here.]
When Ben invited
me to write a guest post for August, he was particularly interested in a piece
reflective of 21st century Native American scholarly activism. Questions
which I needed to consider and answer were: what exactly is scholarly activism
and who decides? Who is considered an activist? Does this include
organizations? Much of Indian activism begins, not with academics, but at
grassroots levels within communities. As such, the majority of Indian activism
remains outside of mainstream scholarly purview.
According to Sara
Goldrick-Rab (Higher
Education Policy & Sociology at Temple University), scholar activism
includes:
·
Direct engagement
with practical problems and efforts to improve the world
·
Putting new
issues on the research agenda as well as the public agenda
·
Speaking truth to
power and speaking truth directing to the people
·
Confronting and
making difficult choices
·
Acting with accountability
to the publics you study, and reciprocating
Given the
abysmally low numbers of Native Americans in the U.S. who have achieved a
terminal degree in any of the Social Sciences (another entire essay), locating individual
American Indians as scholarly activists encompasses a very small field.
In considering individuals who are
activists, I think of Dallas Goldtooth of Indigenous Environmental Network
(IEN). Dallas is most certainly an activist and has written much about the
degradation and exploitation of Indigenous resources, but his writing would not
be considered “scholarly.” Neither would much of the writing of Winona LaDuke,
although she holds a Master’s Degree. Narrowing
my subject field to those few activists who also are scholars, I wish to honor
and illuminate the consummate Indigenous activist, Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005)
who addressed a number of White/Red conflicts over a more than 40
year career.
I often think about Vine Deloria’s
views on the interactions between anthropologists and Indians and the sardonic
summaries he wrote, summaries which most often elicited angry responses from
those engaged in the field of anthropology. In Custer Died for Your Sins, Deloria wrote,
behind
each successful man stands a woman and behind each policy and program with
which Indians are plagued, if traced completely back to its origin, stands the
anthropologist. [1969:81]
And, perhaps
Deloria’s most well-noted and highly contested quote:
into
each life, it is said, some rain must fall.
Some people have bad horoscopes, others take tips on the stock
market…Churches possess the real world.
But Indians have been cursed above all other people in history. Indians have anthropologists. [1969:78]
This recurring theme of Deloria’s speaks of the social,
political, and economic ways in which anthropological study has contributed to
the marginalization of Indigenous peoples.
As the colonizers appropriated land and resources, anthropologists and
the discipline have appropriated Indigenous knowledge systems, rewritten those
knowledge systems from a colonial Euro-American perspective, and then archived
the information in places often inaccessible to the very people who provided
the information.
Deloria also is speaking out against the ways in which field
work is financially supported. Financial
resources are allocated through universities, National Science Foundation (NSF)
grants, the Ford Foundation, and countless other funding entities. While these monies support the living
expenses including travel, research, and writing time of the anthropologist,
rarely does it benefit the communities or individuals being studied. Individuals
and communities often recognize that, once again, something is being either
freely given to outsiders, or stolen by outsiders.
One segment of my research for my
PhD dissertation consisted of personal interviews with tribal elders. I asked about this issue of funding received
by anthropologists for field work and if any of those resources were shared
with the tribe or individual informants. I learned of no case or project in New
England where those resources were shared. Maybe it’s a Western Indian
Reservation thing?
Not everyone in the academic world understood what Deloria
was speaking to in Custer. By his own
account, in a reply to a book review written by Deward Walker on We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf,
Deloria wasn’t really writing about Indians; rather in both this book and Custer he was writing “about the forces
outside Indian country that intrude consciously or unconsciously into the
business of Indian people and thereby become disruptive and often destructive” (1971:321).
Certainly, placing Indigenous communities under the anthropological microscope
with no visible benefit to the communities qualifies as disruptive and
potentially destructive. Historically,
the most severe form of “destructive” occurs when anthropological research
results in Indigenous individuals and communities coming under federal or state
government scrutiny.
I spent a good number of hours
researching book reviews for Custer Died
for Your Sins (Deloria 1988 [1969]) and my efforts were rewarded by a mere
eight reviews found in professional journals.
Of those eight reviews, one was a negative review written by Joseph Muskrat
(1969) and a negative response to Mark Randall (1971) by C. Adrian Heidenreich
(1972), positive reviews were submitted by James E. Officer (1970), and Kenneth
M. Roemer (1970). I’m left wondering why there was so little response to Custer in the first few years after
publication: perhaps anthropologists were so shocked at how Deloria portrayed
them in general that they didn’t want to draw attention to the book by
responding to it; perhaps they hoped that Deloria would disappear if they
ignored him; or perhaps they dismissed the young Vine Deloria because he was an
outsider to the tightly knit discipline or because his Indigenous voice simply did not matter to them.
Alfonso Ortiz (1971) wrote a
largely positive, but somewhat guarded, review of Custer in American
Anthropologist. Ortiz ended his review with
this book does not pretend to be a
scholarly work, but this fact only underscores the need for a well-researched
and truly balanced national assessment-by an Indian or several-of current
Indian thinking, needs, and aspirations. It remains to be written. [1971:955]
I believe he may have been saying
that while he enjoyed the book (somewhat), it really needed to be written
through an anthropological lens. And here we run headlong into the beginning
question of this essay, “what
exactly is scholarly activism and who decides what constitutes scholarly
activism?”
We lost Vine Deloria in 2005. His sardonic wit,
intelligence, personal philosophy, and activism will live on in his many
writings and I very much doubt anyone today would question his scholarship.
References
Deloria,
Vine, Jr.
1970 We
Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
1988 [1969] Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Heidenreich,
C. Adrian
1972 The
Sins of Custer Are Not Anthropological Sins: A Reply to Mark E. Randall. American
Anthropologist, New Series, 74(4):1021-1034.
Muskrat, Joseph C.
1969 Review of Custer
Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. American Bar Association Journal 55(12):1172-1173.
Officer, James E.
1970 Review of Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian
Manifesto. Arizona and the West
12(3): 292-294.
Ortiz, Alfonso
1971 Review of Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian
Manifesto. American Anthropologist
73(4): 953-955.
Randall,
Mark E.
1971 Review
of Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian
Manifesto. American Anthropologist,
New Series, 73(4):985.
Roemer, Kenneth M.
1970 Review of Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian
Manifesto. American Quarterly 22(2): 273.
Walker,
Deward E., Jr.
1971
Review of We Talk, You Listen: New
Tribes, New Turf. Human
Organization 30(3):321.
[Thanks, Donna! Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think?]
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