The Political Thought of Sol Tax: The Principles of Non-Assimilation and Self-Government in Action Anthropology

From the Indian point of view, we are never going to do anything to resolve the problem until we accept, as they do, this obligation, which seems to them both moral and legal, and which seems to us only partially moral and perhaps not at all legal. . . . We must give them control of the money that they require in order to develop in ways that they want to develop. The problem is to convince Indians that we have a policy which will not change every few years. We must also educate the American people to the facts of their history, perhaps by making a speech like the one I am making to a Joint Congressional Committee, if you can imagine that. But, even if we failed with Congress, we would at least have shown the Indians which side we are on. Accept the Indian program, whatever it is, as a starting point; let the Indians organize themselves, if they wish, into a federation on a national scale. I do not know whether this would work or whether Indians would want it, but it might be a way to begin economic development. We might offer to provide the means of development. We might offer to provide the means but to remove experts and administrators from positions of power.

Sol Tax (1962:132–33)

Sol Tax Is Not a Liberal

Few scholars in the history of American anthropology have attained such an enormous persona in the discipline as Sol Tax and yet remained essentially unknown and obscure. Tax's "action anthropology" is a theoretical and methodological innovation in the discipline—an original form of a politically engaged science that is explicitly distinct from the practices of applied anthropology and sought to engage the colonial dimensions of American society decades before the discipline began to scrutinize its practices outside of North America (Asad 1973; Lewis 1973; Pels 1997; Stocking 1991; Trencher 2002). "As observers, they see colonialism as distant from North America . . . [and] as analysts working from a self-reflexive project to stave off the 'crises' in the discipline . . . [they] have focused their gaze away from North America" leaving the colonization of North America entirely unaccounted for in the literature (Pinkoski 2008:176; Asch 2002).

Although not radical in a militant sense, action anthropology was activist in pursuing what Daniel Cobb distinguishes as "reformative goals" through "conventional tactics . . . including writing grants, holding community meetings, convening summer workshops for college students, organizing youth councils, giving testimony at congressional hearings, authoring books and editorials, and manipulating the system from within" (Cobb 2008:2). These are the same strategies Tax incorporated into his bifurcated goals of challenging U.S. government policies and affecting anthropology's role in the colonial enterprise.

Action anthropology was a response to the termination era of American government policy; an era marked by the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) and House Concurrent Resolution 108 (HCR 108). Initiated by President Truman in 1946 in order to settle tribal land claims against the U.S. government, the ICC did "not resolve these complex issues because of its limited jurisdiction . . . [and] worked to the advantage of high-level government officials who valued resource development by private enterprise more than Indian legal rights" (Philip 1999:33). HRC 108 was the result of "an aggressive campaign to assimilate Indians" inspired by Commissioner Dilon Myer's "assimilationist program . . . based on the ethnocentric assumption that all Americans should be alike" (Philip 168-169, 172-173, 175). The action anthropology projects Tax implemented directly challenged assimilationist ideals found in both science and politics. Reflective of Tax's theoretical paradigm of cultural persistence, these anthropological projects consequently had a lasting impact upon the historic and political landscape of U.S. Indian policy.

A map entitled The North American Indians: 1950 Distribution of Descendants of the Aboriginal Population of Alaska, Canada and the United States was completed under the direction of Sol Tax. The data for the United States were completed by two students, Samuel Stanley and Robert K. Thomas. The note on the fourth edition of the map indicates...