Digging for Identity: Native American Anthropological Practices and the Development of Race in American Anthropology

Abstract

Anthropology has a very short history as a true discipline, but its history is highly interwoven with the half-millenium of Euro-American colonization and domination of American aboriginal inhabitants, which has caused many of the long-term patterns of violence and injustice that have only recently been recognized today. The permanence of race theory, as it pertains to biological or phenotypical differences, has persisted to today due to the continued introduction of biological methods into the social sciences like anthropology. The methods of scientific inquiry, craniometry and salvage archaeology, which predominated early anthropolotical·methodology did not involve cooperation with the indigenous peoples being studied. Not. until the 1960's did American Indian activism in the civil rights movement call attention to the antagonism present between indigenous peoples and anthropologists and not until the Native American Grave Protections and Repatriation Act was passed in 1990 was any real country-wide action taken on the Native American's account.