Jeffrey Anderson | Hobart & William Smith Colleges (original) (raw)

Books by Jeffrey Anderson

This article offers a critical analysis of settler colonial profiles of Arapaho people evident in... more This article offers a critical analysis of settler colonial profiles of Arapaho people evident in a body of texts by explorers, government officials, historians, travel writers, and journalists written from the second half of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Based on no or brief direct encounters, such profiles framed Arapahos in diverse but starkly ethnocentric, racist, and cultural evolutionist terms. The profiles participated in a shift in the American master narrative toward the trope of the ignoble savage overdetermined by multiple ideologies of white supremacy, such as polygenesis, scientific racism, Manifest Destiny, and Anglo-Saxonism. Authors often clearly borrowed profiles from each other without citation, in the process socially constructing enduring threads of accepted pseudofacts that have remained embedded in the historical record. The most striking particular pattern in early profiles is the tendency to portray Arapahos as more ignobly savage-like than other Plains peoples and thus less likely to survive the westward advance of settler colonialism. While much more work has been done to reexamine generic racial profiles of Indigenous peoples of North America, this work aims to contribute to a postcolonial revisionist understanding of how settler colonial profiles of a particular people were constructed and reproduced in the written record. (NOTE: I have submitted this article to two journals. At this stage in my career, I am no longer compelled to transform my work into something that satisfies peer reviewers. With all due respect, their concerns are misplaced.

of the population show that a high percentage of the cases in the local courts -as high as fifty,... more of the population show that a high percentage of the cases in the local courts -as high as fifty, in one instance-are suits for divorce brought by the red men." 1 The Shoshone Indian Agency under orders from the Office of Indian Affairs had imposed a new policy for marriage and divorce on the residents of the Shoshone Reservation in Wyoming, later renamed the Wind River Indian Reservation. 2 Marriage licenses and divorce cases were no longer to be processed by the superintendent in Fort Washakie but by the county district court in Lander. There was, and still is, much confusion surrounding this policy. The first peculiar thing is that for almost all other matters federal or tribal jurisdiction applied on the reservation. The second is that there was no congressional action mandating this policy, as required of all federal Indian law, and, as was quite common, the policy at Wind River did not apply to all other reservations. The Office of Indian Affairs had for some years prior to 1912 "mandated" application of state jurisdiction over marriage and divorce, though many state governments resisted and congressional action had not been forthcoming. The shift in policy introduced Northern Arapahos and Eastern Shoshones to a legal system ostensibly shared with non-Indian Wyoming citizens, though few if any reservation 1 residents had by that time achieved, as allotment policy intended to allow, a level of "competence" to earn citizenship. As was generally the case for all aspects of assimilationist policy in early reservation era, local implementation raised complex issues of enforcement, contradictions over jurisdiction, and much confusion for both officials and reservation residents.

Papers by Jeffrey Anderson

Ethnohistory, 2015

The subject of this book is the correlation between Arapaho women's ritual quillwork and what And... more The subject of this book is the correlation between Arapaho women's ritual quillwork and what Anderson terms "life movement"-that is, the living of a long, straight, honorable existence over the course of four life stages (18). Arapaho ritual quillwork (cradles, tipi ornaments, robes, and leanback covers) was produced in historical times by members of the elite women's quilling society under the direction of the senior Seven Old Women. Influenced by structuralism and semiotics, Anderson constructs the concept that "quillwork activated multiple paths and shapes of motion" (22). He finds evidence of such motion in, among other places, the repetition of movement when making quillwork (23); the power of symbolic designs to bring together "the motion of sacred beings, humans, and nature" from mythical events and beings (26); "the movement of objects in everyday life" through gift giving and "symbolic exchange"; and even the movement of women's artistic reputations within and beyond their social group (16). In the first two chapters, Anderson lists and describes different quillwork designs (referred to here as "styles") by employing the accounts and interpretation published by Alfred L. Kroeber and George A. Dorsey in their ethnographies of the Arapaho and, even more so, the unpublished field notes taken by Cleaver Warden (himself Arapaho) under their direction, all produced in the first years of the 1900s. Anderson examined objects in several museum collections, although he does not provide the kind of data on materials, techniques, or dimensions that such research would generate. The diagrams Anderson provides seem to be based on Warden's drawings, and it would be helpful if these had been correlated with some other published illustrations. Surviving objects are often referenced (and some illustrated) but not always, and information in Warden's notes about who made these objects or for what purpose is at times omitted. The names of designs appear to be Warden's, and the only discernible additions by the author to this record are four designs which are not in Warden's notes. In the next chapter, Anderson offers a review of the symbolism expressed by elements of ritual quillwork (color, shape, orientation, sequence) as identified by the early ethnographers but framed within his concept of motion. He seeks associations of quillwork elements with what he views as cosmological, cultural, natural, and metaphorical manifestations of movement. This is followed by a discussion concerning the origins of quillwork using Ethnohistory

Museum Anthropology Review, 2014

This work is a book review considering the title Arapaho Journeys by Sara Wiles.

American Ethnologist, 2003

The metaphor of "frontier" or "bonding" or "co-participation" could as well have served as "inter... more The metaphor of "frontier" or "bonding" or "co-participation" could as well have served as "interface." The ethnographic and archaeological papers in At the Interface are sturdy, mostly descriptive reports that can be read and utilized apart from the theoretical "spin." Regrettably, the volume lacks an index. To a considerable extent, the cases document the globalizing spread of world trade into exotic, backwater localities, and with it, the growth or accentuation of class differences, a raised standard of living, consumerism, and tendencies toward individualism. But the accounts also detail some of the limitless ways in which people adapt and accommodate; negotiate the obstacles and opportunities presented by the market and the state; and preserve or reconfigure their communities and their identities.

(This is a longer, unpublished, and rougher version of the published article: "The History of Ti... more (This is a longer, unpublished, and rougher version of the published article: "The History of Time in Northern Arapaho Tribe")

Beginning in the s, the Northern Arapaho appropriated Christianity while maintaining core rel... more Beginning in the s, the Northern Arapaho appropriated Christianity while maintaining core religious forms and tribal solidarity. Through retranslation of the Arapaho Our Father, it is possible to understand how Arapaho Catholics ''converted'' this text and other forms to their own theory of ritual practice. Rather than converting to doctrine or the Word, missions were subsumed within a larger strategy of compartmentalizing new religious forms within distinct boundaries and activating them within a hidden subtext of Arapaho ritual movement. Through a unique religious pluralism, which maintained both difference and congruity among traditions, Arapaho Catholics were empowered to control the boundaries between cultures and the flow of knowledge across them. Retranslation of the Our Father, or Lord's Prayer, through attention to multiple functions, meanings, and uses, offers paths for understanding indigenized texts in their local and specific cultural and historical contexts. This article thus follows an everdeveloping effort in ethnohistory to understand the ways that indigenous peoples actively translated Euro-American texts and interpreted Euro-American culture. Through this pursuit, ethnohistory can move toward greater balance and symmetry as text translation is opened to multiple and continually evolving levels, perspectives, and meanings.

New Perspectives in Native North America, 2006

Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country, 2009

Ethnohistory 58:2: 229-261, 2011

The imposition of Euro-American orders of time has had a major impact on indigenous North America... more The imposition of Euro-American orders of time has had a major impact on indigenous North American peoples throughout the history of contact. To demonstrate that impact, this article examines some of the complex ways in which multiple types and levels of time have reshaped Northern Arapaho society from the late eighteenth century to the present as well as how Arapaho people have actively adapted to contact-induced changes in time throughout that period. Investigated are directly and indirectly imposed changes in interactional, daily, seasonal, lifehistorical, historical, and long-durational levels of time as well as, at a higher level of analysis, the divergent and often contradictory ways in which Arapahos and Euro-Americans have constructed and interrelated those dimensions. Such a history of time is revealed to be essential for a fuller understanding of past and present changes in cultural identity, social space, communication, social relations, decision making, policy, and many other aspects of Arapaho life. While this study does not purport to be comprehensive for the context at hand, it does aim to open suggestive paths for ethnohistorical investigations of time as a historical reality. The analysis thus offers possibilities for transcending past or prevailing approaches that have tended to reduce analysis to (1) one type of time, such as experiential durational time in the work of Alfred Gell (1992), considered to be empirical, universal, and singular, when in fact it is none of those things; (2) in ethnohistory especially, chronological time disconnected from other types and dimensions of time; (3) one type of time in cultural contact, such as clock time or work-discipline, to the exclusion of others; or (4) simple binaries of cultural difference (e.g., linear versus cyclical) without concern for the complex and various shapes of time on either side of and in the intercultural encounter between Euro-Americans and indigenous peoples.

This article offers a critical analysis of settler colonial profiles of Arapaho people evident in... more This article offers a critical analysis of settler colonial profiles of Arapaho people evident in a body of texts by explorers, government officials, historians, travel writers, and journalists written from the second half of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Based on no or brief direct encounters, such profiles framed Arapahos in diverse but starkly ethnocentric, racist, and cultural evolutionist terms. The profiles participated in a shift in the American master narrative toward the trope of the ignoble savage overdetermined by multiple ideologies of white supremacy, such as polygenesis, scientific racism, Manifest Destiny, and Anglo-Saxonism. Authors often clearly borrowed profiles from each other without citation, in the process socially constructing enduring threads of accepted pseudofacts that have remained embedded in the historical record. The most striking particular pattern in early profiles is the tendency to portray Arapahos as more ignobly savage-like than other Plains peoples and thus less likely to survive the westward advance of settler colonialism. While much more work has been done to reexamine generic racial profiles of Indigenous peoples of North America, this work aims to contribute to a postcolonial revisionist understanding of how settler colonial profiles of a particular people were constructed and reproduced in the written record. (NOTE: I have submitted this article to two journals. At this stage in my career, I am no longer compelled to transform my work into something that satisfies peer reviewers. With all due respect, their concerns are misplaced.

of the population show that a high percentage of the cases in the local courts -as high as fifty,... more of the population show that a high percentage of the cases in the local courts -as high as fifty, in one instance-are suits for divorce brought by the red men." 1 The Shoshone Indian Agency under orders from the Office of Indian Affairs had imposed a new policy for marriage and divorce on the residents of the Shoshone Reservation in Wyoming, later renamed the Wind River Indian Reservation. 2 Marriage licenses and divorce cases were no longer to be processed by the superintendent in Fort Washakie but by the county district court in Lander. There was, and still is, much confusion surrounding this policy. The first peculiar thing is that for almost all other matters federal or tribal jurisdiction applied on the reservation. The second is that there was no congressional action mandating this policy, as required of all federal Indian law, and, as was quite common, the policy at Wind River did not apply to all other reservations. The Office of Indian Affairs had for some years prior to 1912 "mandated" application of state jurisdiction over marriage and divorce, though many state governments resisted and congressional action had not been forthcoming. The shift in policy introduced Northern Arapahos and Eastern Shoshones to a legal system ostensibly shared with non-Indian Wyoming citizens, though few if any reservation 1 residents had by that time achieved, as allotment policy intended to allow, a level of "competence" to earn citizenship. As was generally the case for all aspects of assimilationist policy in early reservation era, local implementation raised complex issues of enforcement, contradictions over jurisdiction, and much confusion for both officials and reservation residents.

Ethnohistory, 2015

The subject of this book is the correlation between Arapaho women's ritual quillwork and what And... more The subject of this book is the correlation between Arapaho women's ritual quillwork and what Anderson terms "life movement"-that is, the living of a long, straight, honorable existence over the course of four life stages (18). Arapaho ritual quillwork (cradles, tipi ornaments, robes, and leanback covers) was produced in historical times by members of the elite women's quilling society under the direction of the senior Seven Old Women. Influenced by structuralism and semiotics, Anderson constructs the concept that "quillwork activated multiple paths and shapes of motion" (22). He finds evidence of such motion in, among other places, the repetition of movement when making quillwork (23); the power of symbolic designs to bring together "the motion of sacred beings, humans, and nature" from mythical events and beings (26); "the movement of objects in everyday life" through gift giving and "symbolic exchange"; and even the movement of women's artistic reputations within and beyond their social group (16). In the first two chapters, Anderson lists and describes different quillwork designs (referred to here as "styles") by employing the accounts and interpretation published by Alfred L. Kroeber and George A. Dorsey in their ethnographies of the Arapaho and, even more so, the unpublished field notes taken by Cleaver Warden (himself Arapaho) under their direction, all produced in the first years of the 1900s. Anderson examined objects in several museum collections, although he does not provide the kind of data on materials, techniques, or dimensions that such research would generate. The diagrams Anderson provides seem to be based on Warden's drawings, and it would be helpful if these had been correlated with some other published illustrations. Surviving objects are often referenced (and some illustrated) but not always, and information in Warden's notes about who made these objects or for what purpose is at times omitted. The names of designs appear to be Warden's, and the only discernible additions by the author to this record are four designs which are not in Warden's notes. In the next chapter, Anderson offers a review of the symbolism expressed by elements of ritual quillwork (color, shape, orientation, sequence) as identified by the early ethnographers but framed within his concept of motion. He seeks associations of quillwork elements with what he views as cosmological, cultural, natural, and metaphorical manifestations of movement. This is followed by a discussion concerning the origins of quillwork using Ethnohistory

Museum Anthropology Review, 2014

This work is a book review considering the title Arapaho Journeys by Sara Wiles.

American Ethnologist, 2003

The metaphor of "frontier" or "bonding" or "co-participation" could as well have served as "inter... more The metaphor of "frontier" or "bonding" or "co-participation" could as well have served as "interface." The ethnographic and archaeological papers in At the Interface are sturdy, mostly descriptive reports that can be read and utilized apart from the theoretical "spin." Regrettably, the volume lacks an index. To a considerable extent, the cases document the globalizing spread of world trade into exotic, backwater localities, and with it, the growth or accentuation of class differences, a raised standard of living, consumerism, and tendencies toward individualism. But the accounts also detail some of the limitless ways in which people adapt and accommodate; negotiate the obstacles and opportunities presented by the market and the state; and preserve or reconfigure their communities and their identities.

(This is a longer, unpublished, and rougher version of the published article: "The History of Ti... more (This is a longer, unpublished, and rougher version of the published article: "The History of Time in Northern Arapaho Tribe")

Beginning in the s, the Northern Arapaho appropriated Christianity while maintaining core rel... more Beginning in the s, the Northern Arapaho appropriated Christianity while maintaining core religious forms and tribal solidarity. Through retranslation of the Arapaho Our Father, it is possible to understand how Arapaho Catholics ''converted'' this text and other forms to their own theory of ritual practice. Rather than converting to doctrine or the Word, missions were subsumed within a larger strategy of compartmentalizing new religious forms within distinct boundaries and activating them within a hidden subtext of Arapaho ritual movement. Through a unique religious pluralism, which maintained both difference and congruity among traditions, Arapaho Catholics were empowered to control the boundaries between cultures and the flow of knowledge across them. Retranslation of the Our Father, or Lord's Prayer, through attention to multiple functions, meanings, and uses, offers paths for understanding indigenized texts in their local and specific cultural and historical contexts. This article thus follows an everdeveloping effort in ethnohistory to understand the ways that indigenous peoples actively translated Euro-American texts and interpreted Euro-American culture. Through this pursuit, ethnohistory can move toward greater balance and symmetry as text translation is opened to multiple and continually evolving levels, perspectives, and meanings.

New Perspectives in Native North America, 2006

Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country, 2009

Ethnohistory 58:2: 229-261, 2011

The imposition of Euro-American orders of time has had a major impact on indigenous North America... more The imposition of Euro-American orders of time has had a major impact on indigenous North American peoples throughout the history of contact. To demonstrate that impact, this article examines some of the complex ways in which multiple types and levels of time have reshaped Northern Arapaho society from the late eighteenth century to the present as well as how Arapaho people have actively adapted to contact-induced changes in time throughout that period. Investigated are directly and indirectly imposed changes in interactional, daily, seasonal, lifehistorical, historical, and long-durational levels of time as well as, at a higher level of analysis, the divergent and often contradictory ways in which Arapahos and Euro-Americans have constructed and interrelated those dimensions. Such a history of time is revealed to be essential for a fuller understanding of past and present changes in cultural identity, social space, communication, social relations, decision making, policy, and many other aspects of Arapaho life. While this study does not purport to be comprehensive for the context at hand, it does aim to open suggestive paths for ethnohistorical investigations of time as a historical reality. The analysis thus offers possibilities for transcending past or prevailing approaches that have tended to reduce analysis to (1) one type of time, such as experiential durational time in the work of Alfred Gell (1992), considered to be empirical, universal, and singular, when in fact it is none of those things; (2) in ethnohistory especially, chronological time disconnected from other types and dimensions of time; (3) one type of time in cultural contact, such as clock time or work-discipline, to the exclusion of others; or (4) simple binaries of cultural difference (e.g., linear versus cyclical) without concern for the complex and various shapes of time on either side of and in the intercultural encounter between Euro-Americans and indigenous peoples.

This article is a critical commentary about racialized profiles of Arapaho people written by expl... more This article is a critical commentary about racialized profiles of Arapaho people written by explorers, government officials, historians, travel writers, journalists, a physician, and anthropologists from the mid-nineteenth century to early twentieth century. Based on no or brief direct encounters, such profiles framed Arapahos in starkly ethnocentric, racist, and cultural evolutionist terms. The profiles participated in a shift in the American narrative toward the trope of the ignoble savage overdetermined by multiple ideologies of white supremacy, such as polygenesis, scientific racism, phrenology, Manifest Destiny, and Anglo-Saxonism. Writers clearly borrowed profiles from each other without citation, thus tightly weaving enduring threads of accepted pseudofacts into the historical record. The most striking particular pattern in early profiles is the tendency to portray Arapahos as more ignobly savage-like than other Plains peoples and thus less likely to survive settler colonialism. This work aims to contribute to an emerging revisionist understanding of how racialized profiles of particular Native American groups were constructed and reproduced in the written record.

of the population show that a high percentage of the cases in the local courts -as high as fifty,... more of the population show that a high percentage of the cases in the local courts -as high as fifty, in one instance-are suits for divorce brought by the red men." 1 The Shoshone Indian Agency under orders from the Office of Indian Affairs had imposed a new policy for marriage and divorce on the residents of the Shoshone Reservation in Wyoming, later renamed the Wind River Indian Reservation. 2 Marriage licenses and divorce cases were no longer to be processed by the superintendent in Fort Washakie but by the county district court in Lander. There was, and still is, much confusion surrounding this policy. The first peculiar thing is that for almost all other matters federal or tribal jurisdiction applied on the reservation. The second is that there was no congressional action mandating this policy, as required of all federal Indian law, and, as was quite common, the policy at Wind River did not apply to all other reservations. The Office of Indian Affairs had for some years prior to 1912 "mandated" application of state jurisdiction over marriage and divorce, though many state governments resisted and congressional action had not been forthcoming. The shift in policy introduced Northern Arapahos and Eastern Shoshones to a legal system ostensibly shared with non-Indian Wyoming citizens, though few if any reservation 1 residents had by that time achieved, as allotment policy intended to allow, a level of "competence" to earn citizenship. As was generally the case for all aspects of assimilationist policy in early reservation era, local implementation raised complex issues of enforcement, contradictions over jurisdiction, and much confusion for both officials and reservation residents.

Beginning in the early 1980s, Northern Arapahos entered an unprecedented process of language revi... more Beginning in the early 1980s, Northern Arapahos entered an unprecedented process of language revitalization in response to the shift toward English predominance in the speech community. Out of this process old genres and ideologies merged or collided with new ones in metalinguistic discourse framed by a literacy program and instructional curricula for both the younger generations in the schools and fluent speakers in training as teachers. Early efforts concentrated exclusively on what has become known as the "Salzmann System," after the linguist Zdenek Salzmann who engineered the vernacular alphabet and basic curriculum, based on his field studies . The core of the system was a dictionary he compiled in 1983 with the assistance of the tribally recognized Arapaho Language and Culture Commission (ALCC), which subsequently served as the clearinghouse and facilitator for all research projects in the community. I entered this process as a student of the language in 1989, attending adult classes and participating in various dictionary revision sessions organized by the ALCC and sponsored by the Northern Arapaho Tribe. My participation in and observations of the latter up to 1991 provide evidence for this paper. I neither organized nor directed the interview sessions, and thus departed from the typical model of the discourse-governing 1 field investigator. As time went on I found my place at Wind River through these sessions, developing deep ties with some folks, and, regrettably, losing ties with others.