Unacknowledged Tribes, Dangerous Knowledge: The Muwekma Ohlone and How Indian Identities Are "Known"

In this article, I will outline the analysis I have been developing to investigate a very specific case study: the history of the Ohlone peoples of the San Francisco Bay Area and their petition for federal recognition as the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. Because I am a cultural anthropologist and I work as tribal ethnologist for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, the approach I have taken in much of my work has been to show the role played by anthropologists and anthropological knowledge in Ohlone history. Early in the twentieth century, the work of anthropologists helped to legitimate the disenfranchisement of Ohlone peoples; in the early twenty-first century, I use anthropology instead to support the Muwekma Ohlones' current acknowledgment petition. Consequently, my treatment of these histories is directed toward both Ohlones and anthropologists, their past and present intersections, and their future trajectory.

In the post-World War II era, it is a commonplace that anthropology has been and remains the child of imperialism. Most anthropologists have acknowledged that anthropological knowledge production about indigenous peoples (in particular) has been historically linked tothe bureaucratic systems nation-states developed and deployed in order to at least control and sometimes destroy indigenous cultures and societies. Many times, however, such linkages have been asserted more than substantiated, and in my work I am increasingly concerned to rigorously demonstrate the relationships between anthropology and nation-states in the knowledge/power systems that control indigenous peoples. In general, I think the United States is an ideal location to undertake such research because (1) the state system has been and continues to be overtly and continuously engaged in defining and policing Indian identities for the public record, and (2) anthropologists have been actively employed by both the state and the tribes to use knowledge to defend a variety of different identity positionings. The particular histories of unacknowledged tribes such as the Ohlone and their contemporary struggles for federal recognition demand more precise descriptions of the power that anthropology has (and has not) had with respect to indigenous peoples in this country.

I propose that anthropology's power with respect to native peoples of the United States should be understood as a series of relationships between, on the one hand, the "official anthropology" elaborated and promoted by the government bureaucracies charged with developing U.S. policies toward native peoples, and, on the other hand, the work of academic anthropologists in universities. Official anthropology is an outcome of the ways that the U.S. nation-state has used classificatory and categorizing schemes derived from academic anthropology as well as other sources to demarcate native identities. ¹ In making this statement, I am updating previous positions I have taken with respect to an overall complicity between anthropology and bureaucratic systems of power (see Field 1999), in favor of an approach that focuses on explicitly official anthropologies as the loci where anthropological knowledge is harnessed to systems of power. This relationship has been made especially evident to me in comparing the work I do with the Ohlone and other unacknowledged peoples in California with the work I have done with native communities in Latin America. Making this comparison, I conclude that anthropologists working with North American indigenous communities operate under relatively restrictive constraints because of the relationship between their work and official anthropology. I would make the argument that anthropological analyses of native people in the United States far more directly support or endanger indigenous peoples' identities and communities than anthropological analyses of such communities in Latin America. For example, while forms of mestizaje that are in many ways like Latin American mestizaje exist here in the United States, it is a risky subject for anthropologists to engage because of the ways such research could directly threaten the rights of particular native groups in the United States. Indeed, I would argue that these risks circumscribe the...