The Meskwaki and Anthropologists: Action Anthropology Reconsidered

Introduction

Introduction On July 15, 1948, Ed Davenport was glad to see his old friend Sol Tax get out of the car on the road by his home on the Meskwaki settlement near Tama, Iowa. It had been thirteen years since the University of Chicago professor had visited the community where he did research for his dissertation in anthropology, and some catching up on the health of family members was in order. Then the two men turned to the reason Tax had come, to talk about the state of the Meskwaki people and how they had changed in recent years. After answering Tax’s questions about education, a new law enforcement arrangement for the settlement, and political divisions within the tribe that had just ousted him as chairman, Davenport interrupted the flow of the conversation with his own questions. “Do you find politics everywhere, the same as here?” he asked Tax. When Tax answered that indeed he did, Davenport laid it on the line. “Then why don’t you work out some sort of a plan to fix things up, instead of just studying people?” he wanted to know. Davenport, who had served as an informant for anthropologist Truman Michelson in earlier years, must have wondered what more there was to learn about the Meskwaki after all the work Michelson and other anthropologists had done. With the community divided deeply over a new government and the possibility of reduced federal services looming, Davenport may have thought that more study was irrelevant to the pressing needs of the tribe.1 One of Tax’s students who had accompanied him on the visit, Walter Miller, delivered a defense of the social sciences based on the need 2 introduction to understand how society worked before attempting to fix it, but the answer was only a short summary of one position in a simmering dispute over the role of social sciences in the modern world. Davenport’s question touched on an issue that had stirred sharp debates among anthropologists and other social scientists in recent years. In his own way, Davenport was re-asking the question Robert Lynd had posed in his 1939 essay Knowledge for What? in which Lynd had challenged social scientists to make their research socially useful.2 As the drift of the conversation indicated, the meeting between Tax and Davenport had many layers. On one level, it represented a re-uniting of people who had not seen each other for several years and were glad to renew acquaintances. On another level, it represented two people who were not so much re-united as eying each other across an educational and cultural divide. On that level, the meeting represented the coming together of an intellectual and a common person, a social scientist and a person from the society to be studied, an anthropologist and a Native American. In coming years, the broader group of anthropologists and Native Americans represented in the Tax-Davenport meeting looked at each other across that cultural divide many times and tried to understand the context, agenda, and expectations of the other. In the crucible of cross-cultural communication, people on both sides of the divide worked out a new way of doing anthropology that came to be called “action anthropology.” The cultural divide across which Davenport and Tax viewed each other existed in part because of an imbalance in power between the two parties, an imbalance that Native Americans had experienced since the birth of anthropology in this country, but an imbalance that anthropologists rarely acknowledged. Most American anthropologists would not be ready to rethink their relationship with the people they studied until 1969, when Vine Deloria Jr. delivered his scathing critique of anthropology in his book Custer Died for Your Sins. Deloria compared anthropologists to a plague of insects that descended upon Indian communities each summer, living off grant money and gathering information for books that were irrelevant introduction 3 to the day-to-day needs of the desperately poor people whom they studied.3 For Deloria, the very act of studying Indians turned them into objects for manipulation and experimentation. He blamed anthropologists ’ focus on Native Americans as berry-picking food gatherers for the eagerness of Congress to force Indians into mainstream society. Indians who did not fit the primitive stereotype constructed by anthropologists became invisible, as anthropologists ignored the current needs of Indians in favor of piling up masses of irrelevant information...