Please join the Department of Anthropology for another talk in the Spring Proseminar Series:

Title: Edward Dozier, Termination, & Anthropological Activism

Speaker: Nicholas Barron, Ph.D., Department of Anthropology UNLV

Abstract

This presentation explores the scholarship and activism of the Tewa anthropologist Edward P. Dozier during the infamous policy period of Indian Termination—post-WWII period that sought the withdrawal of all federal aid, services, and protection from tribal members, as well as the end of Native American reservations. Building upon the works of historians, I argue that Dozier’s activism during the 1950s and early 1960s was conducive to the “ethnic patriotism” then being constituted by Indigenous rights organizations as a means to undermine Termination and shore up tribal sovereignty. However, drawing inspiration from historians of science, I contend that Dozier’s embrace of ethnic patriotism cannot be reduced to the exigencies of Termination alone. Bound up in Dozier’s ethnic patriotism was an insightful criticism of a prior period in federal Indian policy—the Indian New Deal. This criticism was born of a combination of Dozier’s lived experiences including his exposure to the discipline of anthropology.