19.2 Colonization and Anthropology

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Articulate the contributions of Vine Deloria Jr. to the critique of anthropology and the growth of Native studies and Native scholarship.
• Define the practice of “othering” and explain how it has affected and continues to affect Indigenous people in the United States.
• Evaluate the historic issues related to anthropologists serving as cultural experts.
• Relate how anthropology has aided colonialism and propose some ways these practices may be reversed.

Anthropology has been criticized by numerous anthropologists and other scholars as participating in the colonization of Indigenous societies. While settlers took land and resources from tribes and forced them to relocate to reservations, anthropologists gathered knowledge from Indigenous peoples for their own purposes. Another critique has focused on the right claimed by some anthropologists to speak for Indigenous peoples. Books written by early anthropologists have been viewed as disempowering Native peoples, claiming a place of greater legitimacy than the perspectives of Native people themselves. Some anthropologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries collected images of Indigenous people posed and dressed to fit a stereotypical conception of “Indians.” Edward S. Curtis was one such anthropologist and photographer. Although his photos are rendered beautifully, they reflect his own conceptions rather than the realities of life for Native peoples at the time the photographs were taken. Curtis and many of his contemporaries are now critiqued for privileging their personal perspectives over the stark realities of Native peoples impoverished on reservations.