A Growing Partnership: Historians, Anthropologists, and American Indian History

Abstract

This article depicts the growth of interdisciplinary collaboration since World War II, and traces its antecendents in the nineteenth century. Attention is given especially to the emergence of the idea of culture in anthropology, and its supplanting of race as the discipline's central organizing concept. The implications for history of this revolution in ideas are noticed, especially in relation to Frontier history. The article argues that all theories and methods must conform to dated events and observed chronological sequences. An explosion in interdisciplinary collaboration occurred shortly after World War II. Like many sudden changes in the life of the mind, it was unpremeditated. As I get the story from surviving participants-you may call this hearsay if you wish, though the custom now is to say that one has consulted the oral tradition-the U.S. Congress of 1946 decided to get Indian land claims out of the way once and for all, and so it enacted the law establishing the United States Indian Claims Commission. The lawyers making up that commission decided to be what lawyers always want to be so, instead of acting as administrators, they set themselves up as judges. Every tribal claim turned into a lawsuit with lots of work for more lawyers on both sides. There was a scramble to buttress each case with the testimony of expert witnesses who were required to speak to both the customs and the history of the plaintiff tribes, and collaboration became a requirement of the circumstances. Apart from the practical judgments of the commission, the results of these proceedings were an archive and two massive sets of publications.' The Department of Justice granted a ten-year contract to anthropologist Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin to set up an interdisciplinary research center at Indiana University which created the Ohio Valley-Great Lakes Ethnohistory Project Archives-a mine of source materials and interpretive essays. It almost became an abandoned mine after the project's completion, but it has been rescued and put in order by the university's archaeology laboratory and an interested graduate student. The Claims Commission's studies have been published in a select letterpress edition by Garland Press and a comprehensive microfilm edition by Clearwater Press.2 I do not mean to suggest that all the interdisciplinary cooperation grew by happenstance from one act of Congress. By good fortune, however, that act came at a time when new conceptual tools made effective cooperation possible. These tools, it must be acknowledged, were forged by anthropologists, and historians have been a little slow in grasping them. They will be discussed further on, together with some of the problems they raise. Here let us notice other instances of collaboration in that prolific post-war era. In 1945, the interdisciplinary Conference on Iroquois Research began to meet, presided over informally by anthropologist William N. Fenton.3 In 1951,