# Indigenous Anthropology

## Indigenous Agency and Rights

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Explain the significance of Indigenous peoples being declared “domestic dependent nations” in the United States.
2. Discuss Indigenous rights to natural resources and the degree to which Native nations have been successful in asserting these rights.
3. Describe some traditional techniques used by Indigenous peoples to create cultural objects as well as efforts to restore this knowledge.
4. Articulate two features of Indigenous philosophies and worldviews and explain how researchers access Indigenous philosophies and worldviews.
5. Describe political responses to federal government policies pertaining to Indigenous peoples in the United States.
6. Articulate Indigenous critiques of the use of Indigenous names and images as mascots for sports teams.

### Treaties and Removal

In the mid-19th century, the United States federal government shifted its approach toward purchasing tribal lands rather than conquering Indigenous nations. Many Native societies had already suffered greatly due to White settlement and were ready to sign treaties that would guarantee them protection on federal Indian reservations. Population loss caused by epidemic disease also played a role in many tribes’ decisions to sign treaties with the federal government. Those who signed treaties received payment for lands, money for schools, and support in establishing Western farming practices in addition to land allotments on a reservation where federal authorities were to guarantee their safety.
As White settlement expanded into the western United States, Indigenous peoples both on and off federal reservations were subject to waves of removal from their lands. Areas set aside for reservations that had once seemed undesirably remote for White settlement became increasingly desirable as the White population grew. In the 1830s, tribal peoples living on reservations east of the Mississippi River were forced to move to what is now Oklahoma, then called Indian Territory. The tribes were promised that they would be able to keep their new reservation lands in perpetuity. However, when political currents changed, largely due to the pressures of European immigrants moving westward who desired land for settlement, the land formerly designated Indian Territory was opened to White settlement, and reservations diminished.
The most famous Native removal was the Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1838. After President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the US Army forced an estimated 16,000 Cherokee then living in the southeast United States to walk to Indian Territory. An estimated 5,000 of these people died on the trail. The Cherokee Trail of Tears was not the only removal. Each time the United States expanded its borders into Indian Territory, tribes were forced to move to smaller reservations with less desirable, resource-poor lands. The Choctaw were removed from Florida to Oklahoma in 1831, and the Creek were removed in 1836, leading to an estimated 3,500 of their 15,000 people dying. Twenty years later, the United States assumed sole title to the lands of the Oregon Territory and removed 4,000 Native people from some 60 different tribes onto two reservations, the Coast and Grand Ronde Reservations. During the western Oregon “Trails of Tears,” members of tribes then living on the temporary Table Rock and Umpqua Reservations were forced to walk more than 300 miles in the dead of winter to the Coast and Grand Ronde Reservations, with many dying from exposure. Once at the Coast and Grand Ronde Reservations, the tribes were made to live with many other tribes from five different language families and to join as one tribe on the reservations.
In all parts of the United States, life on the reservations was very challenging. Native peoples had to build their own houses and establish means of producing food and other necessities with limited resources. Federal aid, although guaranteed in the treaties, was slow to arrive and sometimes lost in transit or simply missing. For the first 20 years of the Grand Ronde Reservation, residents lived in poverty with inconsistent food and health care and poorly planned schools. On Oregon reservations, the tribal peoples did not receive their treaty rights of individual plots of farmland until at least 1873. While the government had guaranteed food, by 1860, it was clear that federal officials could not be counted on for regular food shipments. Thousands of Native people died at early ages in the first two decades due to malnutrition and newly introduced diseases. Similar stories can be told for all tribes in the United States. Problems were also caused by untrained, unqualified, and corrupt government officials who stole food, money, and supplies.

### Domestic Dependent Nations

The legal status of Native nations was greatly influenced by several paternalistic rulings by the US Supreme Court in the 1830s. Three rulings known as the Marshall court trilogy (Johnson v. M’Intosh, 1823; Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 1831; Worcester v. Georgia, 1832) determined that tribal peoples were domestic sovereign nations within the United States and dependent on the federal government to guarantee their sovereignty. These rulings meant that all reservations were “federal lands,” not part of the states, with the federal government as the administrator. Native rights, therefore, must be given through federal authorities or named in treaties with the federal government.
This state of dependency has caused much consternation among Native peoples ever since. As “domestic dependent nations,” many aspects of tribal societies—including management of money, land, education, health care, and other programs—have been administered by the federal government. Beyond the question of the appropriateness of this arrangement, there have been innumerable documented cases of Native peoples not receiving the services or funds they were promised. Between 1910 and the 1980s, Native peoples filed hundreds of civil cases against the federal government for mismanagement of service, land, and money. By the 1940s, there were so many cases that the federal government established a special jurisdictional court, the Indian Claims Commission, to deal with the volume of lawsuits. Under the Indian Claims Commission, many cases were consolidated to make the process more efficient. Originally planned to exist for 10 years, the court was extended into the 1970s, as hundreds of cases had been filed and it was taking decades to decide many of them. The Klamath tribe, for example, filed seven Indian Claims lawsuits for mismanagement of the money they earned through logging operations. The Klamath cases were combined and decided in the 1950s, with some payouts from their lawsuits extending into the 1960s. The Indian Claims Commission ended in 1978, having cleared 546 dockets and named 342 awards totaling $818,172,606.64.
One example of a successful Indian Claims case (number K-344) involved California tribal members of groups called the Mission Indians and other tribes from Northern California. These tribes had signed 18 treaties with the federal government in 1851. The treaties were never ratified, and as such, the tribes were never paid for their lands. After the treaties were found hidden in the vast record collections of the National Archives in 1905, the California tribes began working on a case for payment for the lands, for which they filed suit in 1928. The first case was not decided until 1942, with the court declaring that “the Indians of California consist of wandering bands, tribes, and small groups, who had been roving over the same territory during the period under the Spanish and Mexican ownership, before the [1848] treaty between Mexico and the United States whereby California was acquired by the United States” (Indians of California ex rel. U. S. Webb v. United States, 98 Ct. Cl. 583, 1942) This decision meant that the tribes were determined not to have a case for the return of lands and could only ask for cash payments. A second case was decided in 1964. Payments from both cases did not come until 1969, when the court gave the tribes 47 cents per acre for the 64 million acres of California lands they had once occupied, a total of $29.1 million. Court awards were subject to political maneuvering and arbitration within the House of Representatives over how much the tribes would actually receive. In the case of K-344, the award amount was based on the value of the lands in 1851, which had skyrocketed in value over the more than a century that had passed. Many tribal members were very upset by the paltry sum awarded for the wealthy lands of California.

### Water, Fishing, and Agency

From the 1960s to the 1980s, an issue of particular concern to the tribes of the northwestern part of the United States was fishing rights. The “fishing wars” were a series of political and legal battles over whether Indigenous peoples had the right to fish in their usual and accustomed places, as promised in numerous treaties. Following the Belloni (Sohappy v. Smith/United States v. Oregon, 1969) and Boldt (United States v. Washington, 1974) court decisions, the tribes of Washington State, including those that had been terminated and not yet restored, maintained their rights to fish in their usual and accustomed ways—and their right to half the catch in the state of Washington.
These decisions affirmed tribal sovereignty rights promised in ratified treaties but had the negative consequence of causing delays in the restoration of other tribes from termination. Many sport fishermen’s organizations feared that an increase in restored tribes would impact fishing for non-Natives. Both the Siletz and Grand Ronde tribes experienced delays related to fears about fishing in their federal restorations in the 1970s and 1980s. Ultimately, both tribes were forced to give up fishing and hunting rights to become federally restored. Ironically, neither the Grand Ronde nor the Siletz have fishing or hunting rights in their ratified treaties. Both tribes concluded that restoration of the tribal governments was more important than holding out for fishing and hunting rights.
The Klamath tribe of Oregon was terminated in the 1950s, along with tribes in California, including the Karuk and Yurok, all of whom traditionally relied on fish from the Klamath River. In the 1970s and 1980s, these tribes were restored by the US federal government with their rights intact. The Klamath tribe of Oregon is the only tribe on the river with a ratified treaty that guaranteed fishing rights. During the termination period, the federal government had built numerous dams and water reclamation projects on the river and given away water resources to farmers and ranchers in the area. Dams such as the Shasta Dam had destroyed many salmon runs, and the water giveaways had taken much-needed in-stream flows out of the river, making the river warmer and less environmentally friendly to fish. When local tribes were restored, they began demanding rights to fish the river again. These rights were decided in a series of court decisions determining that the Klamath tribe’s water rights preceded those of farmers and municipalities, meaning that their rights to in-stream flows needed to be upheld. Numerous projects are underway to eliminate the dams on the Klamath River and return it to its original state.
Tribes with fishing rights in their treaties are now encroaching on the territories of tribes without such rights, leading to legal and political maneuvering between tribes. In Oregon, the Grand Ronde tribe was forced to purchase land at a key fishing location, Willamette Falls, and had to sidestep federal permissions, working with the state to gain “ceremonial” rights. Ultimately, the intertribal conflicts are caused by tribal adherence to federal bureaucratic processes that rely on legal or political channels to resolve problem rather than traditional tribal methods that bring people to the table to form agreements under traditional protocols.

### Culture and Language

Native languages are the most threatened part of the cultures of Native peoples. Many tribes now have only a handful of people who fluently speak the tribe’s language. Of the estimated 10,000 languages once spoken worldwide, at least half have now gone extinct with no speakers, and there are 3,018 Indigenous languages spoken worldwide that are today endangered. One assessment of the 115 Indigenous languages currently spoken in the United State rates two as healthy, 34 as in danger, and 79 likely to go extinct within a generation (Nagle 2019). The rate and severity of language loss is connected to the remaining population of the tribe, whether the tribe has a functioning cultural center, and whether the language continues to be spoken in the households of tribal members. In large part, tribal people of the United States are becoming English-only speakers (Crawford 1995).
Language recovery and revitalization have become a focus of many Indigenous peoples. Many tribal members consider knowledge of their language to be the true determinant of tribal identity. Complex understandings of philosophies and lifeways are embedded in language. In addition, tribes believe that their ancestors’ spirits visit members of the tribe to speak with and advise them, and if a person does not know the language, they will not be able to understand them. Tribes are now working to restore, preserve, stabilize, and teach their languages to the next generations to preserve their knowledge and cultural identities. The University of California, Berkeley, developed a master-apprentice program that is helping many Indigenous groups develop more language speakers by partnering fluent speakers with young tribal members. Even with this type of training, it can take years to learn to fluently speak the language. Another approach is the language immersion program, inspired by Hawaiian and Maori educational models. The immersion model places students in immersive classrooms for a period of several years, in which only the Native language is spoken. Evening classes are also offered for adult learners.
In addition to efforts to restore Native languages, many tribes and urban tribal organizations offer cultural education classes to teach traditional skills. Art and craft classes are quite popular. Classes offered by Native instructors teach traditional techniques for making bows and arrows, weaving baskets, drawing in traditional styles, beading, and making moccasins, among others. History is another area that is receiving some attention. As just one example, the Cherokee Nation has instituted a history program for tribal members and tribal government staff so that all people working with and for the tribe have a shared understanding of history. Finally, Native events and celebrations typically draw substantial crowds. Many tribes and organizations host events such as powwows and tribal dances annually. These events are free to attend and present many different styles of dance and drum music, along with the opportunity to shop for Native arts and crafts. Powwows are usually multi-tribal events, in part reflecting the origin of these events in intertribal boarding schools.
Tribal cultures and languages are a deep part of Native identity. There was a time in the United States when Native people were heavily exposed to assimilation pressures. During this time, many Native people stopped identifying as Native and did not teach their language or culture to their children or grandchildren. Acceptance of Native peoples has now shifted in most regions of the United States, and Indigenous peoples do not experience as much overt racism as they have in the past, although there are still some areas in the United States—many on the borders of tribal reservations—where overt racism against Indigenous peoples persists (Ashley 2015). Many of the descendants of once reservation-bound tribes are now actively seeking to reassociate themselves with their tribal cultures, recognizing this part of their heritage as a central part of their identity.

### Traditional Material Culture

The traditional material cultures of Indigenous peoples showcase an impressive array of styles and skills. Native art was heavily collected by individuals and museums in the 19th century, when there were fears that Indigenous cultures were disappearing. Native art remains popular today. While many Indigenous artists continue to work in traditional styles, some are also incorporating contemporary styles and techniques. Native material cultures embed much cultural philosophy. As anthropologist and museum director Nancy Parezo says, “To anthropologists, Native American/First Nation arts are windows to understanding other cultures and societies. They can be specimens used to support evolutionary theories or explain the maker’s cultural concepts of beauty—to show universal concepts and cultural differences, shared meanings, and modes of communication” (1990, 12).
Artistic styles such as petroglyphs, in which images are carved into stone, and pictographs, or drawings, can be appreciated as both historic and spiritual statements. The petroglyph site in Cascadia Cave, near Sweet Home, Oregon, has hundreds of carvings. The most easily recognizable are the bear paws on the wall of the cave. There are also numerous lines, zigzags, and holes carved out of the cave wall. Willamette Forest Service archaeologist Tony Farque noted that people had long thought that the place was used to gain “bear power” for Native shamans. However, when one steps back, it is apparent that the decorated area of the wall is bordered by a large relief of a salmon, with one hole as its eye and the carved lines creating gills. The cave is now understood as a site where Indigenous peoples—Kalapuya, Molala, and other tribes in the region—sought to gain power when fishing in the nearby South Fork Santiam River, where salmon were known to spawn.
Cultural sites such as Cascadia Cave are in danger of being destroyed by too much attention from archaeologists and the public. For more than a century, Cascadia Cave has been visited by thousands of tourists who have touched the walls, dug in the ground in search of artifacts, taken rubbings of the carvings, and sometimes even carved their initials or painted over petroglyphs to make them stand out more. All these activities degrade the site. Early archaeologists did much the same, digging into the ground and moving many yards of dirt, which has caused rainfall to pool at the walls of the cave. The pooling moisture accelerates the growth of mosses and other plants, which also degrade the walls of the cave. Digging also destroys the archaeological context of the site. It is important to note that in many countries, including the United States, it is illegal to dig up and remove archaeological materials. Those who continue to dig up materials for private collection or for sale are conducting illegal activities. Many of the sites illegally dug are cemetery sites, containing the remains of people and cultural artifacts that are related to descendant tribal populations today.
Weaving arts are another significant aspect of material culture for many Indigenous peoples. Basketry techniques were and still are used to construct vessels used for regular household and resource-gathering activities. Indigenous groups developed various techniques for weaving, such as right twist, left twist, overlay, and false embroidery. These techniques result in decorative styles unique to individual tribes. Weaving techniques make use of many natural materials. Large objects such as mats were typically made with cattail and tule, while baskets could be made from a wide variety of materials, including juncus, hazel branches, cedar bark, bear grass, spruce roots, willow, and maidenhair fern. Some materials were chosen for their stability and durability, others for their flexibility, and still others for their color and luster. Dyeing weaving materials created complex color variations. Baskets were even used for cooking. The technique for boiling water in a basket is similar across many cultures: the basket would be tightly woven, normally with a double weave, and then filled with water. The fibers of the basket and the tight weave created a watertight exterior; additionally, some traditions coated the fibers with grease or pitch. Hot rocks, heated in a fire, would be placed in the basket to make the contained liquid boil. In this manner, food could be cooked without destroying the basket.
Many tribes now offer classes to teach people the basic techniques and styles particular to their tribal heritage. The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde offer classes in carving, weaving arts, beading, regalia making, drum making, and other arts associated with the 27 tribes that make up the confederation. Arts and crafts are intermixed with education about Native philosophy, spirituality, and language. Some people attend classes for years to master the art style they enjoy, and tribal members may apprentice with master artisans to learn more advanced techniques. Many artisans are creating works of art that are inspired by deep feelings of Native identity, using their art to define themselves and their people within the contexts of both the present and the past. Several artists have become professionals and are producing work for galleries, exhibits, exterior monuments, and contracted sales. The artists employ traditional arts as well as contemporary sculptures and artistic traditions such as painting, drawing, and illustration. Many traditional three-dimensional artworks, such as cedar statues, are now rendered in metal, stone, or even glass so that they are more durable and can survive the rigors of contemporary tourism.

### Indigenous Philosophy and Worldviews

A shared element of Indigenous philosophy across various cultures is the conception of humans existing in relationship to the world around them. Native peoples believe they are deeply connected to the natural world; animals are viewed as relatives, and plants, rocks, and mountains are all understood to have animistic spirits. Rivers, lakes, and even the seasons themselves are also understood as having spirits. Many Native American peoples believe that animals were once their brothers and sisters. It is believed that from the actions of some of the godlike animals, such as Coyote, Beaver, and Raven, much of the world was made. Many Native peoples gain shamanic powers by forming close relationships with certain animals. These powers might include the ability to heal, to poison, to call salmon, to call weather, to fish, or to communicate with animals. Typically, these abilities are gained through ceremonies designed to familiarize people with their spirit helpers at a young age. Ceremonies differ, but a common format involves a youth going off by themselves into a special natural area—such as a forest, hilltop, or mountain cave—and fasting and meditating until they hear their helper spirit. In this manner, many Native peoples are connected to spiritual powers; the most powerful may become a shaman or spiritual leader of their tribe. Details of these types of ceremonies are kept secret within each tribe. One reason for this secrecy is a concern that non-Native people might attempt the same ceremonies without guidance and perhaps hurt themselves or the world around them in the process.
Native philosophy is understood to be embodied in the elders of the tribes. By living a full life within their particular cultural context, tribal elders gain wisdom about their people and culture. Many maintain tribal languages, too. Elders are honored and supported by younger members of their societies, who in turn learn about tribal traditions and philosophies from the elders. Elders come to their position partly through age, but normally they are recognized by their tribes when they exhibit great wisdom. Certain elders may have greater status than others depending on how well versed they are in their traditions and how respected they are by the community.
Native philosophy can also be gleaned through the study of oral histories. Many oral histories relate to subjects such as how the world was formed, how humans relate to animals, and how to acquire food, offering moral and ethical lessons. Oral histories may also be records of historic events, such as when the tribe was removed to a reservation, when many people died from disease, when a tsunami forced the people to escape to a mountain, when the land was changed by geological activity, or when there was a war. Oral histories are often full of metaphors and symbols of powerful spiritual forces that caused the event. One example is the story told by the Wasco people of when Coyote and Wishpoosh (Beaver) fought on the Columbia River and created the Columbia Gorge. This oral history reflects Native explanations of a series of flood events that occurred when rushing floodwaters carved out the Columbia Gorge in Oregon. The Missoula floods occurred from 18,000 to 15,000 years ago during the large Ice Age. The floods, perhaps as many as 90 of them, are noted by geologists to have been caused by the breaking of glacial ice dams behind which was Lake Missoula. During fluctuations in the warming period, the ice dams burst, and millions of hectares of water from the glacial lake flooded down the Columbia to carve out the Columbia River Gorge. The dams would refreeze and burst again, perhaps hundreds of times, to scour the lands east of the Columbia of topsoil and carve out the gorge. The topsoil would be deposited in the Willamette Valley (Allen, Burns, and Burns 2009). It is remarkable that Native peoples maintained oral histories documenting this event for at least 15,000 years. The Wasco oral history of Wishpoosh and Coyote is only one such story of this event. All tribes in the region have a story that mentions a flood of this magnitude.
Indigenous worldviews are embedded in ceremonies as well. The Tolowa Nation of Northern California practices Nee-dash, their world renewal ceremony, also called the Feather Dance, on the winter and summer solstices. This ceremony lasts as long as 10 days and is meant to showcase the wealth of the tribe. Dancers, both men and women, wear regalia and dance continuously for the 10 days of the ceremony. Each day, they increase the number of necklaces they wear and the wealth displayed in their regalia. When the dancers become “wealthier,” it is a metaphor for the growth of food, understood as the wealth of the land, that begins in the spring of each year. Dancers move in a semicircle, men on one side and women on the other, as a leader sings Native ceremonial songs and stamps out a beat on the hard-packed earthen floor with a tall stamper stick. Dancers take turns “coming out” and dancing, individually or in twos, threes, or larger groups, understood to be displaying their ceremonial power in hunting, fishing, or gathering. An audience of tribal people is normally situated around the benches of the dance house, men on one side and women on the other. The dances are meant to renew the earth to ensure strong returns of seasonal fish runs, good hunting opportunities, and rich yields of acorns or berries. The ceremony honors the land, the animals, and the plants that sustain the people. This ceremony establishes a spiritual relationship in which people are not separate from nature but a part of it, with the responsibility to act as stewards of its great wealth.
Most Indigenous cultures have ceremonies similar to this, centered on events such as the first salmon catch, the first hunt, or the first gathering of any important food. First salmon ceremonies for the Takelma peoples of the Rogue River Valley in Oregon involve a young man taking the bones of the first salmon caught that year down to the bottom of the Rogue River. These ceremonies are an important way for Native peoples to acknowledge and recommit themselves to a responsibility to steward the natural world in order to sustain its health and vibrancy so that the people who rely on it may thrive into the future.

### Indigenous Critique: Rights, Activism, Appropriation, and Stereotypes

In the contemporary era, the publications of academics have had a great deal of influence on how tribes have been treated by the federal government and other groups. A 1997 essay, titled “Anthropology and the Making of Chumash Tradition,” included the authors’ opinion that the Coast Chumash tribe were descendants of Mexican people, and not Native people of North America at all (Haley and Wilcoxon 1997). The essay relied in part on rumors that were later refuted as unproven by archaeologist Jon Erlandson (1998). These claims, even disproven, aided other Native peoples in accusing the Coast Chumash of not being Native, resulting in many social and political problems for the community. Scholarly publications such as these can affect the ability of tribal nations in the United States to gain federal recognition status because all applicants for federal recognition must establish continuous culture and governance. Public and scholarly opinions can have a huge effect on whether tribes get recognized and are able to restore their culture and sovereignty after centuries of colonization.
Responses to the disempowering effects of colonialism have sometimes been overtly political. In the 1960s, the American Indian Movement (AIM) took actions to bolster tribal sovereignty throughout the United States. AIM was involved with several highly public activities, including an occupation at Mount Rushmore in 1971 in protest over the illegal taking of Sioux lands and the carving of presidents’ faces in a mountain sacred to the Sioux. AIM also participated in the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, the site of a historic battleground, in protest over the failure to impeach Oglala Sioux president Richard Wilson; the resulting standoff with federal law enforcement lasted 71 days. Public awareness of the federal government’s oppression of Native peoples grew when a large military force was deployed during a second occupation of Wounded Knee, an event called Wounded Knee 2. AIM’s work was part of a larger civil rights movement that involved Black, Latina/Latino, and women activists as well as the growing anti–Vietnam War movement. This larger movement created political shifts in the United States that benefited Native communities (Johansen 2013).
Beginning in the 1970s, several laws were passed by Congress to empower tribes. These included policies pertaining to education (Indian Education Act, 1972), child foster care (Indian Child Welfare Act, 1978), college education (Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities Assistance Act, 1978), freedom of religion (American Indian Religious Freedom Act, 1978), and rights to archaeological sites and remains (Archaeological Resources Protection Act, 1979, and Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, 1990). This period also saw the end of the national policy of termination and a turn toward allowing tribes that had been terminated to be restored, with self-determination becoming standard federal policy.

### Stereotypes

Native peoples have also become vocal in confronting stereotypes about them. The first Western stereotypes of Native peoples in North American depicted them in primitivist terms as noble savages, living in harmony with nature, with no notions of laws, time, or money. Implicit in this view was the idea that Indigenous peoples were not fully civilized and did not deserve the same rights as White, Christian people. Their land could thus be taken away. This stereotype has been described by writer Albert Memmi “as a series of negations: they were not fully human, they were not civilized enough to have systems, they were not literate, their languages and modes of thought were inadequate” (Smith 2021, 31). Throughout the history of the United States, these stereotypes have been used to progressively take more and more away from Native peoples. When reservations were first established, they were said to be permanent homes, but as White settlers began to see these lands as attractive places, the notion was again raised that Native peoples were not using the land appropriately.
Additional stereotypes originated with early anthropological research. Notions that Native peoples could not digest alcohol, were lazy and would not work, were not intelligent enough to become civilized, or were dying off as a population because they did not have a civilized culture have all been perpetuated by scholars who embraced social evolutionary theories about human societies. The idea that societies and civilizations existed in competition with one another, and that Native peoples were not competitive because they were savages or barbarians, was inspired by Lewis Henry Morgan’s proposal of a hierarchy of civilizations. These ideas have been heavily refuted, but the stereotypes persist and continue to affect Native peoples in prejudicial ways.
Recently, the issue of Indian mascots has received a lot of attention. In the early 20th century, private and professional sports teams and franchises begin to name their athletic teams after Native groups or some characteristic words referring to Native peoples. Common names include the Warriors, Chiefs, Indians, Reds, Redskins, and Braves. Some of these names may have been chosen to honor the strength and resilience of people who had survived centuries of war with colonizing peoples. Regardless of the original intention, as time went on, fans of many of these teams developed practices that disparaged Indigenous peoples. Many mascots were cartoonish or savage caricatures. These mascots may have been the only exposure many American people had to Native peoples, at a time when there was no valid education about Native peoples offered in public schools.
The first significant challenge to the use of such mascots was led by Charlene Teters, a student at the University of Illinois, against the university’s mascot, Chief Illiniwek, in the 1980s. Teters criticized various aspects of the chief’s presentation, including the headdress, regalia, and dance style, the latter of which was the invention of students who took the role of mascot each year. The campaign against this mascot continued for some 20 years, with many fans and alumni of the university countering that the mascot was meant to honor the Illiniwek people. The mascot was finally dropped by the university in 2007.
Much opposition to mascots is connected not to the use of the figure itself but to the behavior of fans. Practices such as dressing in red paint, wearing outfits of fake feathers and fake headdresses, and using arm motions such as the “tomahawk chop” to show team spirit have offended Native groups. Names might also carry meanings not fully understood by fans. Controversy around the Washington Redskins’ name and mascot lasted for some 30 years. Many fans weren’t aware that the term redskins was used in states such as California and Oregon to refer to Native scalps collected by White American militia members. These scalps, or redskins, could be returned to the state government for a bounty. At certain periods in U.S. history, hundreds of Native people were killed, and whole villages sometimes destroyed, by militia seeking redskins to collect these bounties. In 2020, the Washington Redskins dropped the name, becoming known as the Washington Football Team until a replacement name was chosen. Similarly, in 2019, the Cleveland Indians dropped its “Chief Wahoo” mascot, and in 2021, the team changed its name to the Cleveland Guardians.
In some cases, tribal nations have collaborated with universities to develop more respectful mascot images. The University of Utah has collaborated with the Ute tribe in designing its mascot image featuring a feather, and Florida State University has worked with the Seminole tribe to develop its Appaloosa horse rider and spear imagery. There remains a political divide in the debate about mascots, with some Native activists believing there should be no Indian mascots, while others think that sovereign tribal nations, as sovereign governments, should be able to decide how their people are characterized by organized athletic organizations.


# Indigenous Anthropology

## Applied and Public Anthropology and Indigenous Peoples

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Explain how tribal cultures are using anthropology to secure rights to sites of cultural significance.
2. Describe how anthropologists and Native scholars aid Indigenous peoples using anthropology.
3. Discuss how Indigenous peoples create networks to help one another.
Applied anthropology, which applies anthropological research and methods to contemporary problems, addresses much of the critique of anthropology offered by Vine Deloria Jr. and others. Many Indigenous peoples have become active participants in applied anthropological research, both seeking out and collaborating with anthropologists to work on projects that they themselves have defined. Many tribes now take a directive approach with researchers, offering contracts and funding for anthropologists who will work on issues that the tribes think are important. As tribes develop their reservation infrastructure, many have established archaeology programs to protect their rights to sites of importance. Many have asked scientists to create GIS (geographic information system) products, which feature layers depicting various resources and characteristics on a map, to manage their lands and help them effectively consult with states, the federal government, and private agencies. The layering of information in the GIS can create deeply immersive maps and models that include information about types of vegetation, the environmental history of lands, changes to lands, and any other information than can be captured and mapped. Layered information can be activated or removed from a map to meet specific aims. Tribes can now reference both the information available through scholarly studies and information about their lands and peoples from their own internal studies, which they do not typically share outside of the tribe. In many ways, tribes are now more knowledgeable about the archaeology of their territory than most institutions and are making plans to protect and preserve cultural sites and resources.
Public anthropologists aim to engage with communities and involve the general public in their work as much as possible. In doing so, they empower communities to address their own problems. Many public anthropologists publish their research in readily accessible formats, such as newspapers and popular magazines. The Internet offers many ways for public anthropologists to reach a broader audience. Blogs and digital journals make it possible for anthropologists to make information broadly available in order to benefit the greatest number of people.
The author of this chapter, David Lewis, describes his own efforts to make anthropological research more readily available:
I produce a blog, the

### Summary

This chapter addresses many issues involving Native peoples that are a result of the colonization of Indigenous peoples, the effects of a long history of governmental administration, and the manipulation of Native history and cultures in public spheres. Indigenous peoples in the United States today have lived through a long period of cultural collapse and are subject to extreme competition for land, rights, and resources. This chapter focuses primarily on the Indigenous peoples of Oregon within the United States. The issues faced by these people are similar to those faced by Indigenous peoples around the world, including a history of colonization, removal from traditional lands to reservations, signing away land and rights in treaties, and forced education in boarding schools. Disempowerment of tribal sovereignty, disenfranchisement from lands and resources, and forced assimilation have significantly affected Native peoples.
In addition, Indigenous peoples of the United States face significant problems adjusting to contemporary society. The general lack of education about Indigenous peoples has caused a lack of knowledge about Native history and culture in society. Within this culture, mascots and stereotypes are challenging to Native peoples, who face racism in society. Contemporary tribal nations struggle to restore cultures and governance systems. Native peoples must adjust to the cross-culturalism of modern society while they seek to maintain tribal identities and memberships in tribal nations. Scholarly studies of Native peoples are also addressed, as the studies and perceptions of anthropologists have significantly affected how tribes are perceived today.

### Critical Thinking Questions

### Suggested Readings

Biolsi, Thomas, and Larry J. Zimmerman, eds. 1997. Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Deloria, Vine, Jr. (1969) 1988. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Deloria, Vine, Jr. (1970) 2007. We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Deloria, Vine, Jr. (1995) 1997. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. Golden, CO: Fulcrum.
Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1999. Spirit & Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr., Reader. Edited by Barbara Deloria, Kristen Foehner, and Sam Scinta. Golden, CO: Fulcrum.
Deloria, Vine, Jr. 2003. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. 3rd ed. Golden, CO: Fulcrum.
Harrison, Faye V., ed. 2011. Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation. 3rd ed. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2021. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 3rd ed. London: Zed Books.

### Bibliography

Al-Asfour, Ahmed, and Marry Abraham. 2016. “Strategies for Retention, Persistence and Completion Rate for Native American Students in Higher Education.” Tribal College and University Research Journal 1 (1): 46–56. https://issuu.com/collegefund/docs/tcurj_v1_1_full_journal_high-resolu.
Albers, Patricia, and Beatrice Medicine. 1983. The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women. Washington, DC: University Press of America.
Allen, John Eliot, Marjorie Burns, and Scott Burns. 2009. Cataclysms on the Columbia: The Great Missoula Floods. Rev. 2nd ed. Portland, OR: Ooligan Press.
Ashley, Jeremy. 2015. “Native American and Multi-ethnic Experiences with Racial Discrimination in Indian Reservation Border Towns.” PhD diss., Northern Arizona University.
Brayboy, Bryan McKinley Jones, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, and Malia Villegas. 2007. “The Lives and Work of Beatrice Medicine and Vine Deloria Jr.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 38 (3): 231–238. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25166623.
Crawford, James. 1995. “Endangered Native American Languages: What Is to Be Done, and Why?” Bilingual Research Journal 19 (1): 17–38.
DeAngelo, Linda, Ray Franke, Sylvia Hurtado, John H. Pryor, and Serge Tran. 2011. Completing College: Assessing Graduation Rates at Four-Year Institutions. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles. https://heri.ucla.edu/DARCU/CompletingCollege2011.pdf.
Deloria, Vine, Jr. (1969) 1988. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Deloria, Vine, Jr. (1995) 1997. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. Golden, CO: Fulcrum.
Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1997. “Anthros, Indians, and Planetary Reality.” In Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology, edited by Thomas Biolsi and Larry J. Zimmerman, 209–221. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Ellinghaus, Katherine. 2017. Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Erlandson, Jon McVey. 1998. “The Making of Chumash Tradition: Replies to Haley and Wilcoxon.” Current Anthropology 39 (4): 477–510. https://doi.org/10.1086/204760.
Haley, Brian D., and Larry R. Wilcoxon. 1997. “Anthropology and the Making of Chumash Tradition.” Current Anthropology 38 (5): 761–794. https://doi.org/10.1086/204667.
Hegeman, Susan. 1989. “Native American ‘Texts’ and the Problem of Authenticity.” American Quarterly 41 (2): 265–283. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2713025.
Hinton, Leanne. (2001) 2013. “The Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program.” In The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice, edited by Leanne Hinton and Ken Hale, 217–226. Leiden: Brill.
Johansen, Bruce E. 2013. Encyclopedia of the American Indian Movement. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood.
Lewis, David Gene. 2002. “Native Experience and Perspectives from Correspondence in the SWORP Archive.” In Changing Landscapes: “Sustaining Traditions”; Proceedings of the 5th and 6th Annual Coquille Cultural Preservation Conferences, edited by Donald B. Ivy and R. Scott Byram, 25–39. North Bend, OR: Coquille Indian Tribe.
Lewis, David Gene. 2009. “Termination of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon: Politics, Community, Identity.” PhD diss., University of Oregon. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10067.
McNickle, D’Arcy. 1968. “The Sociocultural Setting of Indian Life.” American Journal of Psychiatry 125 (2): 219–223.
Medicine, Beatrice. 2007. Drinking and Sobriety among the Lakota Sioux. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Memmi, Albert. (2003) 2010. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Translated by Howard Greenfield, with an introduction by Nadine Gordimer. New York: Earthscan.
Miller, Robert J. 2012. Reservation “Capitalism” Economic Development in Indian Country. Santa Barbara,CA: Praeger.
Nagle, Rebecca. 2019. “The US Has Spent More Money Erasing Native Languages Than Saving Them.” High Country News, November 5, 2019. https://www.hcn.org/issues/51.21-22/indigenous-affairs-the-u-s-has-spent-more-money-erasing-native-languages-than-saving-them.
Nenemay, Kimberly Alice. 2005. “An Exploratory Study of Tribal Enrollment, Blood Quantum and Identity among the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe of Western Montana.” PhD diss., Rutgers University. ProQuest (AAT 3180991).
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Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2021. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 3rd ed. London: Zed Books.
Thornton, Russell. 1997. “Tribal Membership Requirements and the Demography of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Native Americans.” Population Research and Policy Review 16 (1–2): 33–42. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005776628534.


# Anthropology on the Ground

## Introduction

In “Waddling In,” a provocative essay published in 1985, interpretive anthropologist Clifford Geertz proposed that among the various academic disciplines, anthropology was uniquely capable of leading into the future. He pointed out the fundamental changes anthropology faced as it headed into the 21st century—changes in its traditional subject focus, its traditional field sites, and its wide, holistic perspective, which Geertz referred to as “walking barefoot through the Whole of Culture” (1985, 623):
In our confusion is our strength. For Geertz, this confusion reflects anthropology’s flexibility as a science and a humanity and its acknowledgment that we do not yet know everything about who we are as a species. Our ongoing mission is to be open to what comes next, open to the potential of what it means to be human. This is especially important at this moment in history when global challenges remind us of how much remains to be done for every person to have a life of dignity. Instead of predicting the end of anthropology, “Waddling In” challenges anthropologists to discover an ever-widening relevance and importance for the discipline, in a world of ongoing cultural change.
Anthropology is both an academic and an applied discipline. What anthropology reveals about human culture and human biology can be used to improve lives today. Anthropology is deeply relevant to contemporary lives in many ways. Museums are a common way in which anthropological knowledge is presented to the public, interpreting cultural and biological diversity and inspiring new generations of scholars and a broader public. The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, shown in , is an example of one way anthropologists share their knowledge in a public space. But there are many other ways in which anthropologists interact with and influence our global community.


# Anthropology on the Ground

## Our Challenging World Today

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Identify some of the most critical global challenges.
2. Define ethnosphere.
3. Analyze the importance of the ethnosphere today.

### Critical Global Challenges

Today humanity faces a growing number of global problems, most of them linked to one another and to long-standing historical inequities and injustice. Many of the problems people experience in their daily lives derive from major global issues, which intersect with and affect cultural traditions and contemporary social behaviors. In other words, our global problems are deeply connected to the ways we live locally. Local and global problems connect and reinforce each other.
In 2021, the United Nations (UN) identified 22 critical global issues, several worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. These are challenges that “transcend national boundaries and cannot be resolved by any one country acting alone” (United Nations 2021). Many of these challenges, which affect all nations, are particularly harmful to those facing discrimination, environmental and social racism, and economic poverty. As you read through these “global issues,” notice how many of these challenges are linked together (e.g., Africa, decolonization, democracy, poverty, global health, etc.). Go through this list and note which of these impact you and which might have affected your ancestors. Consider such things as cost of goods and services, possible effects on health and welfare, and even the political instability that might result from these issues, creating global ripple effects. Also, consider how populations suffering various injustices might experience greater impacts than those in otherwise stable communities.
1. Africa: promoting democratic institutions, supporting economic and social development, and protecting human rights.
2. Aging: responding to the growth of aging populations (ages 60 and over) worldwide.
3. AIDS: continuing to reduce infection and death rates in the global fight against AIDS.
4. Atomic energy: promoting the safe, secure, and peaceful operation of more than 440 nuclear reactors generating electricity worldwide.
5. Big data for sustainable development: monitoring inclusiveness and fairness in the application of new data sources, technologies, and analyses.
6. Children: protecting the rights of every child to health, education, and protection and expanding children’s opportunities.
7. Climate change: responding to the unprecedented challenges of shifting weather patterns that threaten food production and create climate emergencies.
8. Decolonization: continuing to monitor and encourage self-determination among former colonies, which the UN refers to as a “sacred trust.” When the UN was founded in 1945, approximately 750 million people were living in colonies and dependencies; today, fewer than two million live under colonial rule.
9. Democracy: strengthening democracy, “a universally recognized ideal” and a core value of the UN, as a way of strengthening human rights.
10. Ending poverty: reducing global poverty rates, which could increase by as much as 8 percent of the world’s population during the COVID-19 pandemic.
11. Food: working toward food security and increasing nutrition for the most vulnerable population groups, especially during COVID-19.
12. Gender equality: promoting gender equality as both a fundamental human right and a critical factor in achieving peaceful and sustainable societies.
13. Health: monitoring, promoting, and protecting health concerns worldwide. Much of the leadership in this area is provided by the World Health Organization (WHO).
14. Human rights: continuing the ongoing effort to guarantee human rights around the globe. This is a central focus of the UN’s work, as set out in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
15. International law and justice: continuing to promote international law and justice across the three pillars of international peace and security, socioeconomic development and progress, and respect for fundamental human rights and freedoms.
16. Migration: ensuring the orderly and humane management of migration, finding practical solutions to migration problems, and providing humanitarian assistance to refugees and internally displaced persons.
17. Oceans and the law of the sea: ensuring peaceful, cooperative usage of the oceans and seas to the common benefit for humanity and combating the rising threat of pollution and waste from transport vessels and oil tankers.
18. Peace and security: helping restore peace and preventing disputes from escalating into war.
19. Population: promoting sexual and reproductive health and individuals’ ability to manage the size of their families.
20. Refugees: providing aid and safe haven to the millions of people forcibly displaced worldwide. In 2019, an estimated 79.5 million people were refugees, 26 million of them under the age of 18.
21. Water: managing the competition between individual and commercial needs for access to water, which is critical for all human populations.
22. Youth: providing for a more just, equitable, and progressive future for persons between the ages of 15 and 24, including ensuring access to health, education, and employment and working toward gender equality.
Private philanthropists have been working on some of these same problems as well. In 2020, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, founded in 2000 to work collaboratively with governments to solve critical global health issues, expanded their focus by naming three major action areas for their multibillion-dollar foundation, in addition to ongoing educational priorities:
1. Climate change: increasing clean energy, providing zero-emissions energy to low-income countries, and developing innovative approaches to food production.
2. Gender inequality and gender-based violence: expanding access to education to improve women’s lives and increasing women’s leadership positions in government, finance, and health.
3. Global health: sponsoring initiatives to deliver vaccinations and otherwise combat major global diseases, such as AIDS and malaria. (Bass and Bloomberg 2020)
These lists represent only the beginning of the challenges that face us as human beings living on one shared planet. Underpinning these challenges are many others, none more important than the loss of diversities. We face devastating losses in three major areas of diversity: biological diversity, as species are increasingly endangered or become extinct; cultural diversity, as Indigenous peoples, minorities, and smaller populations in more isolated areas, such as rural areas, face encroachments on their lands and their lives, including their right to exist as diverse cultures; and linguistic diversity, with thousands of languages already extinct and many more facing imminent extinction. As diversity declines, our species has fewer options and less flexibility. When we consider that most innovation builds on preexisting forms—whether of biology, culture, or language—the loss of anything that once existed is also a loss of potential, of what could have been.
But all is not doom and gloom. Hope is offered by disciplines, such as anthropology, that work to value and preserve diversities. Anthropology has taken a lead role in bringing positive change to our global world. Projects in which anthropological knowledge and insight is applied to current challenges include language reclamation and revitalization, primate conservation and habitat enrichment, revitalization of traditional foodways and technologies, and other projects to revive, restore, and encourage cultural, biological, and linguistic diversity.

### The Ethnosphere

When considering the many challenges facing us as a global community, we must also acknowledge our assets—the tools and conditions we can harness to increase value and effect positive change. We do not enter our future empty-handed. To some extent, our challenges and assets have evolved together, hand in hand. As we face concerns about another possible global health pandemic, for example, we bring with us a depth of scientific knowledge based on earlier experiences, having learned and retooled our responses to be better prepared for those things we have experienced before. As we begin to combat overwhelming climate crises after decades of abusing our environment, we have knowledge and tools to make positive changes while continuing to educate people about our physical world, pollution, and global warming. We understand the causes of most of our challenges, and we have the ability to harness large groups of people globally to work together to address them, with an impressive array of technology at our fingertips. We are not a helpless species. We are not necessarily smarter or wiser than our ancestors were, but we do have one great treasure—we have what our ancestors left to us. We have the accumulation of all their cultural wisdom, ingenuity, and humanity.
In 2001, Canadian cultural anthropologist Wade Davis coined the term ethnosphere to refer to the sum total of all of human knowledge across time:
The diverse ways in which humans have solved or managed the challenges of our lives, many of them challenges that we have inflicted on ourselves because of greed and ignorance, is a rich storehouse for our future. Too often, contemporary people feel there is little to learn from those who are different from us or who came before us, but the solutions to our current problems are founded upon this legacy.
Humans have faced grave environmental challenges more than once in our species’ history. Our ancestors also faced global climate challenges. The last glacial period occurred between 120,000 and 11,500 years ago. During that time, alternating periods of global cooling and warming displaced human populations and forced them to adapt to new plants and animals as they migrated and ultimately peopled the globe. One of the notable consequences of the last years of the glacial period was the extinction of some 177 species of megafauna (large mammals), including woolly mammoths, giant deer, and saber-toothed cats. There have been two primary theories about these extinctions, which occurred worldwide (in Europe, Africa, Asia, and North and South America). Did the animals go extinct due to climate change and habitat loss or to overkilling by human big-game hunters? Recently, researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark studied the extinction of megafauna species through global mapping techniques that compared timelines of human occupation and of animal extinction (Sandom et al. 2014). In about one-third of the animal extinctions, the correlation of the dates of the earliest arrival of human hunters and the extinction of the animals was clear and consistent. While the majority of cases were not consistent, they did not present contrary evidence to the theory of human overkill and environmental exploitation. It appears that humans were involved in mass extinctions and environmental changes even in these early periods.
And yet people have also been involved in animal reintroductions and species conservation. Today, U.S. National Parks have reported a variety of species reintroduction success stories. In several national parks across the United States, native animal species have been reintroduced to better manage habitats, conserve endangered species, and support a healthy ecosystem. Among the most successful reintroduced species are California condors, Pacific fishers, black-footed ferrets, gray wolves, bald eagles, desert pupfish, bighorn sheep, elk, and nēnē, a species of goose native to Hawaii (Errick 2015).
Entomologist Edward O. Wilson has devoted his life to studying and working to protect biodiversity, the astounding variety of plants and animals on our planet that together form a healthy ecosystem. As part of the biological web of life, humans are important actors. Within the ethnosphere lies the wisdom of generations of human interactions with other species for food, medicines, clothing, shelter, protection, companionship, and economic exploitation. Many of the tools related to this valuable knowledge are found within Indigenous cultures, too many of them also endangered or extinct today. By preserving and valuing the ethnosphere and its diversity, we preserve ourselves, our children’s futures, and the hopes we have for our planet.
Anthropology plays a major role in preserving, valuing, and teaching about the ethnosphere. In this critical role, anthropology makes an important difference in how well we encounter the future—whether we will adapt and thrive or face ever-increasing threats to our survival. Whether you are a practicing anthropologist, a student of anthropology, or someone who enjoys learning about our diverse world, including its diverse peoples and cultures, you have a role to play in bringing about a more hopeful future.


# Anthropology on the Ground

## Why Anthropology Matters

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Explain the characteristics of anthropology that make it uniquely relevant today.
2. Describe and give an example of anthropological values.
3. Analyze the importance of anthropological skills.

### A Uniquely Relevant Discipline

As you learned in What is Anthropology?, anthropology is a unique discipline. Not only does it study all aspects of what it means to be human across time, with a focus on evolution and how changes occur in our bodies and cultures, but it also examines the ways in which we adapt to different social and physical environments. This process of adaptation is a primary source of cultural and biological diversity. Anthropology is also holistic, examining the context of and interconnections between many parts of our lives and weaving together our biology, our traditions, and the diverse social and physical environments in which we live. The anthropological approach views humans as part of a wider system of meaning, as actors and change-makers within a dynamic environment populated by others. Across cultures, those others can include other species (plant and animal) and spirits as well as other human beings. It is the human ability to imagine and construct the universe in which we live that most interests anthropologists.
In most four-field introductory classes, students are surprised at the breadth of anthropology, but this wide lens is the cornerstone of the discipline. Today, anthropologists increasingly approach the study of humans as a dynamic construct. We see humans as agents in motion, undergoing change as a normal state of being, rather than as objects in a petri dish, preserved and inert. This means that anthropological studies are by necessity messy and in flux, as our subject matter makes change. Because holism, adaptation, and adjustment are critical to anthropological studies, we bring an especially powerful lens to attempts to understand complex, large-scale global problems.
Few of our challenges today are simple. Solving the climate crisis requires changes not just to our use of fossil fuels but also to the ways in which we produce food, bathe, heat and cool our houses, and travel. Each culture and each community must be aware of its power and potential to enact positive change. Both a scientific and a humanistic approach are needed to solve our current global challenges.

### Anthropological Values

The anthropological perspective is grounded by principles and standards of behavior considered important to understanding other people and their ways of life. These include the value of all cultures; the value of diversities, biological and cultural; the importance of change over time; and the importance of cultural relativism and acknowledging of the dignity of all human beings. These anthropological values undergird our discipline.
The study of culture intersects with each of the four subfields and highlights the importance of diversity. From the beginning, humans have used ingenuity to tackle problems and provide solutions to challenging circumstances. Anthropologists study and value this extraordinary process of human creativity, documenting it in living and past cultures, in our languages and symbol systems, and even in our bones, through cultural procedures such as elongating women’s necks (as is practiced by the Kayan people of Myanmar) or flattening/elongating people’s heads (practiced by the Chinookan peoples of North America). Even our diets, which are cultural artifacts of adaptation, are written on our bones. The consumption of corn, for example, is measurable as carbon isotopes in human bone. Anthropology celebrates this human uniqueness and diversity, understanding that different ways of being are humanity’s greatest legacy—a foundation embodied in the concept of the ethnosphere.
Anthropological studies produce documentation of immeasurable worth. Through anthropological research, we collect, preserve, and share the stories of living humans as well as human artifacts, sites, and bodies. Together, these documents form a valuable database. Field notes and artifacts from the earliest anthropologists document diversity that has since disappeared. Franz Boas taught his students how to make life masks of the people they were studying to document the physical diversity of different groups of people (A. Singer 1986). This vast collection of some 2,000 life masks is now preserved at the Smithsonian Institution as an archival resource for understanding environment, culture, and biological adaptations. Many masks document ethnic groups that are now extinct. Anthropology collections are of inestimable value for future research.
The Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records, or CoPAR, works with anthropologists, librarians, and archivists to obtain and preserve anthropological records and make them available both for the study of human diversity and as a record of the history of the discipline. The organization has two primary goals. The first is to educate anthropologists on the value and urgency of saving documents. The second is to help train archivists and information specialists in best practices for handling the sometimes very sensitive information within these documents while also facilitating them in making sure that the information is available to scholars anywhere (Silverman and Parezo 1995).
Diversity is a product of adaptation and change over time. As cultural groups encountered different challenges in their environments, they used ingenuity and innovation to address these challenges, sometimes borrowing other cultures’ solutions when applicable. In the high Andes of South America, the steep mountainous inclines mean that there is little flat ground for growing food. In response to this challenge, Inca farmers used terrace farming, building steplike terraces into the hillside to create areas of flatter surfaces for growing crops (see ). Forms of terrace farming are found all over Asia and in parts of Africa, with cultures in each area adapting the use of terraces to meet specific climatic conditions and crop requirements (e.g., paddy rice cultivation requires small earthwork borders to allow for flooding). In short, there is no one way to do something; every solution is calibrated to particular needs. Today, with increasing urgency to minimize our carbon footprints, architects are designing homes to meet clients’ demands for net-positive houses—that is, houses that produce more energy than they consume through solar power and lower-energy appliances (Stamp 2020). As we work toward reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, the architectural and construction industries are beginning to adapt to these changing needs and demands.
Besides culture and diversity, anthropology is also about the human power to change. Through adaption, evolution, and even acclimatization (short-term adaptation to environmental change), the human body has evolved alongside human cultures to make us a species uniquely capable of adapting to almost any environmental or social conditions. Humans can survive even in such inhospitable environments as outer space (thanks to the human-designed technology that makes up the International Space Station) and the polar regions (where human-built structures and protective gear make habitation possible at McMurdo Station in Antarctica). And humans have survived health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and historical tragedies such as slavery and warfare. The ability to change, redirect, reassess, reimagine, and innovate has sustained our species across time.
Diversity matters more today than ever. Where diversity is valued, there is greater potential for innovation and collaboration. A central value of anthropology, evident in both research and applied work across communities, is anthropologists’ focus not only on understanding other cultures and different ways of living but also on translating them—that is, communicating what is learned across cultures in order to share it more broadly.
The most important anthropological value, however, is cultural relativism, or suspending judgment about other cultures until one gains a clear understanding of the meaning and significance of what those cultures do and believe. Cultural relativism requires us to understand the rationale, purpose, and meaning of cultural traditions and knowledge before we decide on their validity. And it provides significant advantages in better understanding others:
1. It allows us to see the worth, dignity, and respect of all persons, allowing for initial exchange and collaboration between “us” and “them.”
2. It reminds us to approach the study of other cultures without automatically judging them as inferior, thus minimizing ethnocentrism.
3. It helps us keep an open mind about the potentials and possibilities inherent in our species.
First formally introduced by Franz Boas, cultural relativism laid the groundwork for the discipline of anthropology, a science that would study what it means to be human in all its diverse forms. Boas and his students worked to apply cultural relativism across racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic boundaries, documenting the rich cultural traditions of Indigenous peoples, minority communities, and immigrants. The concept, though, has undergone a great deal of debate since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. Is anything okay if a culture decides it is? Are there any boundaries to cultural relativism? Do we have to accept everything that a group does, or can an anthropologist ultimately judge that a practice is damaging, harmful, and not deserving of being respected and upheld?
While these debates remain, anthropologists still value cultural relativism (and the worthiness of other peoples and cultures), although perhaps in a modified form that anthropologist Michael Brown calls cultural relativism 2.0. As Brown states, cultural relativism 2.0 is “a call to pause before judging, to listen before speaking, and to widen one’s views before narrowing them” (2008, 380). In other words, first give people a chance.
Anthropology is important today, perhaps even more than when it formally began some 150 years ago. As French anthropologist Maurice Godelier says:


# Anthropology on the Ground

## What Anthropologists Can Do

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Describe the primary areas where the anthropological approach is relevant.
2. Identify the ways that anthropologists are specifically trained for today’s challenges.
3. Explain how anthropological skills can help address contemporary problems.

### What Anthropologists Do Today

Anthropologists are at work now to make a difference in our lives. There are various ways in which anthropologists and those utilizing an anthropological lens or framework contribute critically needed skills and resources in the 21st century.
1.
      Many of the chapters in this text feature stories about anthropological research and its importance in understanding what it means to be human. Each of the subfields engages in distinct types of field research as ways to test theories and advance our knowledge of human beings. Theoretical research is the backbone of academic anthropology.
2.
      Cultural anthropologist Genevieve

      In a TED Salon talk titled “
      Bell left Intel in 2017 to serve as a distinguished professor at the Australian National University College of Engineering and Computer Science, where she serves as the director of the School of Cybernetics and continues to research the interface between culture and technology.
3.
      The

      One of the challenges that anthropologists face is better educating governments and corporations about the skills they can bring to understanding and addressing contemporary problems. Working collaboratively within and beyond the discipline is important for advancing an awareness of the possibilities that anthropologists offer as public policy advocates.
1.
      In 2014, the WHO reached out to sociocultural anthropologists to help address an outbreak of the Ebola virus in Mali. They sought the help of these anthropologists as liaisons to connect with the local people and lessen their anxieties about the disease, help those recovering cope with the stigma of having had Ebola, and build a bridge between the community and the health system. They also sought anthropological direction on how best to interact with local people while respecting their culture and traditions. The WHO described some of the roles of the anthropologists who aided in this project:

The global emergency of COVID-19 mobilized a number of anthropologists, especially those in the applied field of medical anthropology. Medical anthropologist Mark Nichter (2020), who has studied emerging diseases and global health for much of his career, was returning from fieldwork in India and Indonesia when COVID-19 cases started being diagnosed in the United States. He traveled from Asian countries, where people were wearing masks and showing a high level of concern for the disease, into Europe and then the United States, where there seemed to be little concern. These different attitudes prompted him to think about other pandemics he had experienced as a medical anthropologist and about how complex these global events can be. Deeply aware of issues of social inequality, he worried about the poor infrastructure conditions in so many countries and the dense populations in refugee camps. What would happen in water-insecure areas where accessing any kind of water, especially clean water for handwashing, was difficult? He wondered just how bad this was going to be as a global event.
During lockdown in the United States, Nichter used his training as a medical anthropologist to create positive change within his community. He first developed a COVID-19 primer, explaining health concepts about COVID-19 and methods of slowing and preventing transmission in everyday terms to help professors and teachers educate themselves and their students. The primer quickly began circulating on campuses in the United States and around the world. Nichter also worked with fellow anthropologists in a special working group supported by the American Anthropological Association to identify research areas of critical need. Many of these research areas concerned structural threats and areas where mortality data were revealing disparities, indicating that certain populations were more vulnerable than others. Third, Nichter began advocating and working for COVID-19 testing resources, the development of contact tracing, and symptom monitoring to better contain outbreaks within communities. Lastly, he helped develop a health care worker support network with both online and grassroots resources, knowing that frontline workers would be those most taxed by the pandemic. Nichter advocates for what he calls anticipatory anthropology. In the context of medical anthropology, anticipatory anthropology acts to shore up the fault lines that have emerged in the global health system, working toward creating stronger resistance to the next health care emergency. “COVID-19 provides an opportunity to build alliances and momentum for significant health care reform” (Nichter 2020).
Anthropological skills are increasingly vital to developing and communicating culturally relevant messages. While global health initiatives are very prominent within the field of applied and practicing anthropology, the range of interventions is wide. Applied anthropology projects might involve improved farming techniques and heirloom seed banks, better educational services, and even work on the front lines with persons displaced by war, migration, or climate emergencies.

### Anthropological Skills and Resources

Anthropologists are trained to look at the larger context and understand how smaller, local environments fit into overarching forces. They aim to hold a multicultural perspective that represents various constituencies and to interact with people around them with the goal of better understanding where they are coming from and what things mean to them. Anthropologists gather and analyze data that reflects real life on the ground and in the streets. The central anthropological specialty is an unfettered interest in human beings.
In 2020, career research and employment website Zippia interviewed a group of teaching and practicing anthropologists about the anthropological skills they believe are most valuable in today’s job market. The two quotes below illustrate the breadth of career preparation that anthropology provides:
Anthropologists and anthropology students, undergraduate and graduate, fit into a wide array of careers and contribute valuable skills and resources to their communities everywhere. As people specialists, anthropologists understand how to approach diverse peoples, elicit information about and from them, and work with that information to understand broader situations. Some of the broadly applicable skills that different anthropologists have include interviewing; excavating; mapping; analyzing data using various types of methodologies, including mixed methods (combining qualitative and quantitative methods); applying ethics in difficult, emerging situations; and engaging with new technologies in the sciences. All of these are 21st-century skills and resources. However, the most advantageous of an anthropologist’s skills is an attitude of respect and dignity toward diverse peoples everywhere. In our global world, this may be the most important asset of all. As anthropologist Tim Ingold says, anthropologists “study ... with people” and “learn from them, not just about them” (2018, 32).

### How Anthropology Can Lead in the Future

Career and employment trends today align with what anthropologists do, whether or not one is a full-time practicing anthropologist. Students heading into any fields that address the human condition, past or present, will benefit from studies in anthropology. Within colleges and universities across the world, there is a reemergence of transdisciplinary approaches that utilize methods and perspectives from multiple disciplines to study and propose solutions to complex problems. This educational model, sometimes called the  (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineers, and Institute of Medicine 2005), has resulted in the development of new interdisciplinary degree programs such as the biomedical informatics program at Stanford University; the Indigenous food, energy, and water systems program at the University of Arizona; and the science, medicine, and technology in culture program at Union College. Training in anthropological holism is the ideal foundation for working in teams with multiple interests and a shared focus on the larger context. Specifically, the four-field approach in anthropology prepares researchers to apply a keen perception of the ways in which biology and culture interact and influence each other.
With the increasing prominence of social media and grassroots communication across cultures, it is important that emerging leaders have the ability to interview people, elicit relevant information from them, and analyze what they think, do, and desire. Anthropologists are trained to interact with others, seek connections and patterns in what they observe, and analyze the symbolic significance of what they find.
Anthropologists are also trained to work in the field, wherever and whatever the field may be, taking their offices and research labs into the communities in which they work and live. Accustomed to being flexible and adaptable to the needs of the situation and letting the field dictate how best to accomplish their work, anthropologists have the skills, technology, and experience to work well in a global community.
In the 20th century, academia sought to become ever more specialized, constructing departments, specialties, and subspecialties to home in on very particular subjects such as a disease, a genre of literature, or a type of religion. This approach was an advance over the more generalist approach that was common in the 19th century, in which academics were trained in very broad fields such as medicine, ancient history, or culture. Now, in the 21st century, the shift is toward a more complex and multifaceted understanding of how we live and the challenges we face. Many anthropology programs today provide vocational skills and workplace training. There is a growing awareness that we need to develop the ability to think both generally and systematically (such as in an ecosystemic approach) while also seeking to understand the particularities of specific challenges. Anthropology, with its holistic approach, mixed methodology analyses, and deep, abiding appreciation of diversity and the dignity of all people, is situated at the crossroads of what comes next. This is how anthropology can guide us as we move into the future.
As Geertz said, “We have turned out to be rather good at waddling in” (1985, 624). Anthropological skills are based on flexibility and adaptation to a changing world, open-mindedness and openness to new ideas, and a willingness to engage with complex issues in order to find solutions to problems facing our world today. The anthropological skillset is critical in the 21st century.
You can read more about the important work of anthropologists today in the Profile features in each chapter. Through research and work such as the examples featured there, anthropologists are changing the world.

### Summary

As a discipline, anthropology includes academic and applied aspects that focus on, respectively, developing new theories and solving practical problems. Today, we face a growing number of global problems, most of them linked to one another and to long-standing historical inequities and injustice. Many of the problems we experience in our local lives derive from these major issues, and every one of them intersects with and affects cultural traditions and contemporary social behaviors. In 2021, the United Nations identified 22 critical global issues that transcend national boundaries and affect people everywhere, with those who suffer various forms of injustice typically experiencing greater effects from these challenges than those living in more stable communities. Three of the challenges are major actions areas for philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: climate change, gender inequality and gender-based violence, and global health. Intersecting with these global issues are the devastating losses we face in terms of biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity.
The term ethnosphere, first coined by Canadian cultural anthropologist Wade Davis, refers to the sum total of all human knowledge across time—the human cultural legacy. The diverse ways in which we humans have solved or managed the challenges of our lives are a rich storehouse for our future. Too often, contemporary people feel we have little to learn from those who are different from us or who came before us, but the solutions to our current problems are founded upon this legacy. As globalization proceeds, conjoining our lives in myriad ways, it is important to remember that diversity is a storehouse of critical knowledge from the generations before us and the cultures around us, many of which are fighting today to survive. By preserving and valuing the ethnosphere’s diversity, we preserve ourselves, our children’s futures, and the hopes we have for our planet.
The anthropological approach views humans as part of a wider system of meaning, as actors and change-makers within a dynamic environment populated by others. Across cultures, those others can include other species, plant and animal, and spirits as well as other human beings. It is the human ability to imagine and construct the universe in which we live that most interests anthropologists. The anthropological perspective is grounded by principles and standards of behavior considered important to understanding other people and their ways of life. These include the value of all cultures; the value of diversities, biological and cultural; the importance of change over time; the importance of cultural relativism; and an acknowledgment of the dignity of all human beings. These anthropological values undergird our discipline.
Anthropological studies produce documentation of immeasurable worth. Through anthropological research, we collect, preserve, and share the stories of living humans as well as human artifacts, sites, and bodies. Today, anthropologists and those using an anthropological lens contribute to the 21st century in various ways, including through research, research and development, public policy, and applied or practicing anthropology. Career and employment trends today align with what anthropologists do, whether or not one is a full-time practicing anthropologist. Students heading into any field that addresses the human condition, past or present, will benefit from studies in anthropology.

### Critical Thinking Questions

### Bibliography

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# Transitioning to College

## Introduction

### Student Survey

How do you feel about your ability to meet the expectations of college? These questions will help you determine how the chapter concepts relate to you right now. As we are introduced to new concepts and practices, it can be informative to reflect on how your understanding changes over time. Take this quick survey to figure it out, ranking questions on a scale of 1—4, 1 meaning “least like me” and 4 meaning “most like me.”
Don’t be concerned with the results. If your score is low, you will most likely gain even more from this book.
1. I am fully aware of the expectations of college and how to meet them.
2. I know why I am in college and have clear goals that I want to achieve.
3. Most of the time, I take responsibility for my learning new and challenging concepts.
4. I feel comfortable working with faculty, advisors, and classmates to accomplish my goals.
You can also take the Chapter 2 survey anonymously online.

### About This Chapter

In this chapter, you will learn about what you can do to get ready for college. By the time you complete this chapter, you should be able to do the following:
1. Recognize the purpose and value of college.
2. Describe the transitional experience of the first year of college.
3. Discuss how to handle college culture and expectations.
4. List the benefits of adopting a learning mindset.
While Reginald and Madison have had different experiences before and certainly have different motivations for enrolling in college, they have quite a bit in common. They are both committed to this new chapter in their lives, and they are both connected to their families in ways that can influence their commitment to this pursuit. What they don’t know just yet—because they haven’t started their classes—is that they will have even more in common as they move through each term, focus on a major, and plan for life after graduation. And they have a lot in common with you as well because you are in a similar position—starting the next chapter of the rest of your life.
In this chapter, you will first learn more about identifying the reason you are in college. This is an important first step because knowing your why will keep you motivated. Next, the chapter will cover the transitions that you may experience as a new college student. Then, the chapter will focus on how you can acclimate to the culture and meet the expectations—all of which will make the transition to a full-fledged college student easier. Adopting a learning mindset is covered next and will provide you with research-based information that can help you develop the beliefs and habits that will result in success. Finally, the chapter will provide you with strategies for overcoming the challenges that you may face by providing information about how to find and access resources.