PENN ANTHROPOLOGY COLLOQUIUM

"Consorting With Savages: Indigenous Informants & American Anthropologists."

Speaker: Margaret M. Bruchac, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Connecticut

During the early twentieth century, a cadre of highly influential white male scholars---Franz
Boas, Frank Speck, and William Fenton, among others---dominated the field of American
anthropology. These scholars asserted intellectual authority over their research, yet their
unpublished correspondence reveals the agency of Indigenous gatekeepers---including George
Hunt (Tlingit), Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Mohegan), and Jesse Cornplanter (Seneca), among
others---who assisted, resisted, and otherwise complicated processes of ethnographic
exchange. The protocols of these encounters shaped emerging anthropological theory and
practice, and provoked disputes over representation and ownership that continue to resonate in
contemporary discourse around constructions of knowledge from Indigenous collections.