The Meskwaki and Sol Tax: Reconsidering the actors in action anthropology.

Abstract

In 1969, Native American activist Vine Deloria, Jr. stunned anthropologists with a blistering critique of their profession in his book Custer Died for Your Sins. Deloria labeled anthropologists a plague of locusts that descended upon Indian communities each summer, living off grant money and gathering information for books that were irrelevant to poor Indians. Deloria's critique, however, overlooked an effort twenty years earlier to practice anthropology in a more ethical manner, called action anthropology. In 1948, some residents of the Meskwaki settlement near Tama, Iowa, delivered their own grass-roots critique of anthropology to graduate students from the University of Chicago. Through subtle hints and blunt questions, they demonstrated their resentment at being studied and their expectations of reciprocity from the researchers. In response, University of Chicago anthropologist Sol Tax and his students committed themselves to collaborating with community members on goals they set. In the encounter, Meskwaki individuals manipulated their would-be helpers and set limits on their behavior. Previous analyses of action anthropology on the Meskwaki settlement focused on its scholarship program and arts and crafts project on the settlement, but the project's influence went beyond that. Some settlement residents said contact with the anthropologists deeply influenced them by allowing them to come to know whites for the first time or making it possible for them to attend college. A decade of carrying out action anthropology on the Meskwaki settlement also helped to mold Tax's views on federal Indian policy and to establish his credentials as a consultant in that field. Tax spent much of the rest of his career promoting themes that emerged in his experiences at Tama---self-determination for Native Americans, leadership development in Indian youth, higher education for Indians, and cultural freedom. Until now, knowledge of Tax's contributions to Indian activism of the 1960s has been limited to his organization of the 1961 American Indian Chicago Conference. Tax's career, however, had other links to Indian political activity. A close examination of the effects of Tax's relationship with the Meskwaki shows his influence on Bob Thomas, who developed the concept of internal colonialism, as well as Tax's role in summer workshops for youth that brought together many of the next generation of Indian leaders. Thus, the encounter between the Meskwaki and Chicago anthropologists emerges not only as another way of doing anthropology but also as another source of 1960s Indian activism.