Berkeley removes name from Kroeber Hall
Channel: UC Berkeley
Date: 2021-01-26

For full story, visit: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/01/26/kroeber-hall-unnamed/
Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Clare Major

January 26, 2020 - UC Berkeley’s Kroeber Hall became the fourth building on campus to be stripped of its name in a year’s time. The decision by Berkeley officials capped a formal review process and was made, in large part, because the building’s namesake — Alfred Louis Kroeber, born in 1876 and the founder of the study of anthropology in the American West — is a powerful symbol that continues to evoke exclusion and erasure for Native Americans.

A proposal to unname the hall was received in July 2020 by Chancellor Carol Christ’s Building Name Review Committee. The committee reached a unanimous vote last fall in support of removing the name, following an analysis of the proposal and a solicitation and review of comments from the campus community. Of the 595 responses received, 85% favored unnaming Kroeber Hall, home of the Department of Anthropology, Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Department of Art Practice and Worth Ryder Art Gallery.

Christ supported the decision, then sought and received necessary approval from UC President Michael Drake.

In her letter to Drake, Christ added that some of Kroeber’s views and writings “clearly stand in opposition to our university’s values of inclusion and our belief in promoting diversity and excellence.” She added that removing Kroeber’s name would “help Berkeley recognize a challenging part of our history, while better supporting the diversity of today’s academic community.”

Among the key reasons highlighted in the proposal and in the review committee’s recommendation to Christ was that Kroeber collected or authorized the collection of the remains of Native American ancestors and curated a repository of them for study. While the research practice was not illegal then, the review committee wrote, “it was immoral and unethical, even for the time.”

In 1911, Kroeber also took custody of a Native American man, a genocide survivor he named Ishi, and allowed him to live at the UC’s anthropology museum, where the proposal states that he ‘”performed’ as a living exhibit for museum visitors,” making Native crafts, such a stone tools. After dying of tuberculosis in 1916, his body was autopsied, against the wishes he’d expressed to Kroeber for cremation and burial without autopsy.

Additionally, Kroeber’s pronouncement that the Ohlone people were culturally extinct contributed to the federal government not recognizing the Ohlone and “leading to the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe having no land and no political power,” according to the committee.

Phenocia Bauerle, a member of the Apsáalooke tribe of Native Americans who is director of Native American student development at Berkeley and is on the campus’s Native American Advisory Council, said today’s announcement “may seem like just political correctness, just a gesture, but it is a big gesture, because, for so long, names like Kroeber were untouchable. He signified a particular version of history, and if Berkeley is willing to make room for other histories, different experiences, to be brought into the fold, this will allow societal change to happen.”

Removing Kroeber’s name, added Ataya Cesspooch, a Berkeley Ph.D. student who is Northern Ute, Assiniboine and Lakota, is a “first step” that Berkeley must take to acknowledge that “influential scholars, such as Kroeber, participated in the dehumanization of Native Americans.”

Boalt Hall, at Berkeley Law, had its name removed in January 2020, and last November, Barrows and LeConte halls also were unnamed on the same day. Like Kroeber Hall, each had a controversial namesake whose legacy clashes with Berkeley’s mission and values. Kroeber Hall will temporarily be called the Anthropology and Art Practice Building.

Founder of anthropology in the West
Alfred Louis Kroeber, raised in New York City, attended Columbia University, earning a B.A. in 1896 and an M.A. in 1897, both in English literature. At Columbia, he also met anthropologist Franz Boas, in Boas’ seminar on American Indian languages, and “was so affected by the encounter that he went on to obtain his anthropology doctorate in 1901, the first supervised by Boas at Columbia,” wrote Ira Jacknis, a Berkeley research anthropologist at the Hearst museum and a leading historian on Kroeber’s work, in Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia.

After getting his Ph.D., Kroeber moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where the University of California was initiating a department and museum of anthropology. He was hired and began teaching anthropology in 1901, when he was 25, became a full professor in 1919 and retired in 1946.  (CONT'D: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/01/26/kroeber-hall-unnamed/)

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