In Celluloid Indians, Kilpatrick says that "the intention [of boarding schools] was simply to cleanse the Indians of their Indianness so that assimilation could be seamless" (17). To achieve this, children were not allowed to speak their own languages and had to conform to certain Euro-American cultural expectations. In addition, the Dawes Act had destroyed much of the land base of American Indian people and the U.S. government was actively involved in forcing American Indians into "mainstream America". In concert with these aspects of history, how do you think the portrayal of American Indians in the cinema assisted in these assimilation efforts? Do you think it hindered these efforts in any way?
Much of what we have read about anthropology in this class so far has portrayed the field as a harmful force on American Indian cultures because of its tendency to focus on "the distinction of native versus foreign", thereby "othering" American Indian people. It is apparent that this distinction played a role in fueling the era of boarding schools and other attempts at assimilation by the U.S. government. However, do you think that anthropology's attempts at the preservation of "dying" cultures ever have merit? Or does this tendency to make distinctions always lead to the degradation of the culture in question?
Sarah Simpson
Much of what we have read about anthropology in this class so far has portrayed the field as a harmful force on American Indian cultures because of its tendency to focus on "the distinction of native versus foreign", thereby "othering" American Indian people. It is apparent that this distinction played a role in fueling the era of boarding schools and other attempts at assimilation by the U.S. government. However, do you think that anthropology's attempts at the preservation of "dying" cultures ever have merit? Or does this tendency to make distinctions always lead to the degradation of the culture in question?
Sarah Simpson
Response to Sarah’s Question #2
As a student majoring in anthropology I very much believe that what anthropologists do has merit. Having said that, I also believe that many anthropologists have been wrong in their portrayals of certain cultural groups.
Cultural anthropology in particular has received harsh criticism within the social sciences since it’s beginning. In the 1960’s anthropology’s image was severely marred with the accusations of misrepresenting the cultures that were not European. Since then it has been a long road in recovering the reputation of anthropology and ethnography as being a legitimate means of research. This is not to say that bias and subjective thinking is not still prevalent in anthropology today. It certainly is and most likely will always be.
What I am trying to say is that although several anthropologists have made mistakes in how they represented cultures they are only a small number of anthropologist that are in the field. Many have made important discoveries resulting in the preservation of people’s lands such as the prevention of certain water damns in South America. I hope that people will be able to take the good with the bad and realize that anthropologist do what they do for a reason. It is difficult to look at the world in an objective way. We as students must understand how hard it is to not judge and put aside personal bias while thinking of anything new and different to us.
Ethnography like film is easily misconstrued. Therefore just as with film we should view anthropology with a critical eye and not take everything as the innate truth. It is good to question anthropology and it’s intent that is what makes for reform and therefore helps to keep these mistakes from reoccurring.
The problems inherent to anthropology run deeper than the simple injection of bias into the study of cultures as stated by the previous commenter, but instead the problem lies in the very act of transforming culture into an object for study. By performing this transformation we fundamentally stagnate the culture within the academic domain. The very act of recording cultural components effectively “pickles” them and prevents the culture from transforming itself. The moment anthropology “discovers” that -- for instance -- “Dakota people live in tipis” that bit of anthropology stagnates the Dakota culture by transcribing and objectifying it, thereby creating an instance of cultural legitimacy. What this means is that while Dakota people did live in tipis (this at one time was a completely true and non-biased statement about the people) many of them now do not, and the permanency of the anthropological data de-legitimizes any transformation of the culture (e.g. it leads to statements such as: “today’s Dakota people live in houses, not tipis so they must not be real Dakota, because Dakota people live in tipis”). Thus the most fundamental nature of cultural anthropology implies cultural death; to transform culture into an object for study is to presuppose its stagnation and therefore its death.
That said, anthropologists have performed several functions that are very positive. The most prominent of these is the recording and preservation of indigenous languages, which may have otherwise died out (several in fact did), but which have been revived through the use of dictionaries and grammars originally written by anthropologists and missionaries. This recording of (especially non-written) languages allows people to revive the languages even after they have been forcibly stamped out, as is now the case with the Delaware language, allowing a people to revive their identity and reform their own cultural awareness.
Response to Sarah’s Question #1
Although American Indian portrayal in cinema is more harmful to assimilation than helpful, the overall representation of Natives in film may give one cause to support assimilation.
While watching “The Battle and Elderbush Gulch”, one sees the Natives as hell raising, dog-meat loving savages. They are depicted as war loving and untamed. For one watching the film, seeing a group of people trying to eat some poor orphans’ puppies would perhaps be too much to handle. In this aspect, I understand why movies like this would create an outpouring of support for assimilation. People cannot be living in a place where half naked men are running around causing havoc and they obviously thought assimilation is the best method to cleanse this culture of their barbarity.
On the other hand, continually seeing American Indians represented as “others” really does not aid in assimilation. Very few films actually show Native people as mainstream, “normal”, Americans. The Euro-Americans fell in love with the romanticism of the noble warrior and that is what they wanted to see. At the time, one could not imagine living in a world with these wild savages, however, they definitely did not want to watch a movie about them leading a conventional life. This contradiction really hindered the efforts of assimilation. If one keeps holding on to the stereotypes, it will be impossible for assimilation to ever successfully take hold. They will never be “us” but always “them” and this is not the mentality of assimilation.