The Land Claims Cases: Anthropologists in Conflict

Abstract

In a session devoted to Anthropology and Indian Land Claims Litigation conducted in Bloomington, Indiana, in May, 1955, expert witnesses from both sides and one somewhat out-of-place attorney discussed not only the problems involved in proper adjudication of the cases now being prepared and heard but the potential usefulness to anthropology of the research findings being accumulated.* It appears from the partial transcript of the discussions which has been made available that there was general agreement among those who participated that the data were likely to be of such great value to ethnohistorians that something ought certainly to be done to bring the findings together and make them available examination by interested researchers and scholars. But there are other and related matters of more than parenthetical interest which came out of the symposium and which merit the consideration not only of those who are immediately involved in these cases but of the whole professional anthropological fraternity as well. For although the behavior of participants on both sides seems to have been decorous in the extreme, there is no escaping the faint tone of self-righteousness in the expression of those who are 'defending the Indians and the counter-assertive tone of belligerence of those who are working for the Justice Department. This has interest beyond providing us with proof of the essential 'humanness of anthropologists. For it is inevitable