The Meskwaki and Anthropologists: Action Anthropology Reconsidered

3. "Science Has to Stop Somewhere"

3. “Science Has to Stop Somewhere” When the members of the first University of Chicago field party arrived in Tama in 1948, the Meskwaki settlement appeared an exotic enclave set off from, yet penetrated by, the mundane heartland of America. The settlement’s thirty-three hundred acres straddled the Iowa River and sloped upward from the river’s muddy backwaters and flood plain to steep ridges covered with woods. About five hundred Meskwaki lived on home sites scattered along dirt roads that traced dusty lines through the otherwise verdant settlement. Guided by a map of the settlement Sol Tax had drawn when he worked on the settlement in the 1930s, the graduate students set out in twos and threes to explore the field where they hoped to cultivate friendships over the summer. They recorded when and where they saw their “first Fox.” They gawked at wickiups, or huts, on this island of Meskwaki culture bounded by the familiar midwestern landscape of green fields and white farmhouses. They smelled fry bread cooking in hot lard outdoors over a wood fire. They wondered if the gooseberries and blackberries that women picked actually grew on wild bushes rather than in cultivated gardens. They heard drums in the distance as fireflies flitted around them in the dark. Their spines tingled with the thrill of being in a strange land. And they noted girls chewing gum, men carrying copies of the Des Moines Register, and “a patch of fair corn” growing here and there. When one reads the fieldnotes from the students’ first days, it is hard to tell which caused the students more wonderment—the exotic Indianness of the settlement or the bits of blandness it shared with the surrounding landscape.1 110 “science has to stop somewhere” The graduate students sampled this stew of heartland homeyness and exotic culture with a mixture of excitement and disappointment. They anxiously awaited the “big thrill” of an invitation to a Drum Society meeting but wondered if Indian girls with permed hair would carry on Meskwaki religious traditions. As they analyzed the juxtaposition of roses on a trellis and bark-covered wickiups, the students tried to classify the Meskwaki as “professional Indians,” acculturated Indians, or, like one youth, a combination of “90 percent Midwestern high-school senior traits, the remaining 10 percent being a combination of Fox and ‘idiosyncratic.’”2 Perhaps disappointed at Meskwaki modernity, members of the field party sought the exotic in the mundane midwesternism of Main Street Tama. “Tama seems like a quiet little town. I suppose it isn’t really poor compared to others its size—this is obviously rich farming country—but to the city-used eye, the Sears Roebuck dresses and little stores make it seem so,” mused one student. Even the muchderided Iowa countryside deserved a closer look. Davida Wolffson wrote, “Though I’ve never been much of a lover of Midwestern scenery , I was really impressed” with the glossy green hills that rippled off to the horizon to meet the deep blue of an Iowa sky in July. The students had met the “other” and found them to be both exotic and Iowan.3 The field party’s early preoccupation with the extent of acculturation among Meskwaki grew out of the charge given to them by their mentor, Sol Tax. Tax had urged his students to try to understand what would happen to the Meskwaki and their settlement in the coming years. Would the community continue to exist as it had? Would young people move away and disappear into white society, taking factory jobs, joining churches, and living in bungalows with picket fences? Ultimately, the project’s leaders would conclude that that was a question for Meskwaki to decide and not one that researchers could or should try to answer. But in the meantime, members of the field party pondered it with the seriousness that only graduate students on their first field experience could muster. An equally important question for the field party was a funda- “science has to stop somewhere” 111 mental one for anthropologists: How would they get along with the Indians? Nineteenth-century American ethnologist Frank Cushing had lived among the Zuni Pueblos and claimed to have bullied the people into cooperating with him, but he was an anomaly among ethnographers of that era. Rather than living for an extended period of time with a group of people, many anthropologists until the early...