“JUST A YOUNG TOURIST IN OUR COUNTRY”: ARCHIE PHINNEY, A NEZ PERCE LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGIST

Born in Culdesac, ID, Archie Phinney, a Nez Percé, was the first Native American to receive an undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas. He collaborated with prominent Smithsonian anthropologists J. N. B. Hewitt and T. Michelson as well as the great Franz Boas; visited Leningrad after being invited by Vladimir Bogoras in the context of an academic exchange program; defended his candidate thesis at the Institute of Anthropology, Archeology and Ethnography (MAE); and returned to serve as an Indian agent in different reservations in the USA. The USSR scholarship of Phinney fell on a difficult yet crucial period in the history of Soviet ethnography, when it was not yet completely closed and remained receptive to the influences of Boas’ School. Through Phinney and other American researchers like him, who visited the Soviet Union at that time, the Soviet practice of “indigenization” had a reverse effect on J. Collier’s liberal Indian New Deal. Phinney collaborated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, when the latter was on the Indian Commissioner’s post. Today, Phinney’s figure again attracts interest after some oblivion. The department of anthropology at the University of Idaho, Moscow, occupies a building named in his honor. The scope of the paper is based on the Boas Paper collection — his correspondence with Phinney, Bogoras, Averkieva, Barton and others, stored at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. The analyzed materials, representing the general atmosphere in the 1930s Soviet academic community, are still little-known to the Russian-speaking reader.

A Dream of Emancipation

This chapter shows how the contradictions and frustrations surrounding veterans came to a head with the onset of the “Indian New Deal” initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt's Indian commissioner, John Collier. As Collier pushed his agenda of reform and return to communal landholding on Indian reservations, patriotism became the privileged weapon of an active minority of veterans spearheading resistance to the New Deal. Moreover, World War II proved a very favorable moment to realize a rhetorical and organizational connection that linked patriotism, the conservative defense of Indians' civic rights, and the rising tide of termination. At the end of the 1940s, the World War I generation reached the peak of its influence in Indian country and demonstrated the complexity of Indian patriotism. A new generation of Indian soldiers was soon to take their place. They would turn ceremonies popularized with World War I into a new, modern Indian tradition.

Native American Religions in the Twentieth Century

This chapter discusses Native American religions in the twentieth century and major figures and themes including: the Pueblo Dance Controversy, the Indian New Deal, John Collier and the restructuring of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Native American Church, Native American Pentecostalism, the American Indian Movement, the work of Vine Deloria Jr., the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, issues surrounding sacred land, and the court case of Employment Division v. Smith. In recent years, the study of native religions shifted from being understood in white “Western” terms to something now studied from the native point of view. Scholarship has shifted toward privileging native understandings of sovereignty, political engagement, sexuality, space, land, time, and religious belief. Despite the fact that their religious freedoms were rarely protected, native peoples found new ways to defend against white encroachment on their sacred traditions and made their voices heard within traditionally white institutions of power.

Charity or Industry?

Despite proven entrepreneurial successes in the southwest, only 11 out of 156 U.S. federal work relief projects designated for Indian reservations during the Depression specifically targeted women. Those schemes, administrated by home extension programmers, were, in essence, occupationally reductive and domestic in nature. This chapter examines relief programs among Blackfeet women in Cut Bank, Montana, during the 1930s. Such programs potentially shunt women, once again, to “the margins of the capitalist labor market in the 1930s.” Even in the so-called enlightened modern era promised by the administrative renaissance of the U.S. Indian New Deal, economic policies were restrictively gendered in design and scope.