Oct. 24 Talk Explores Lives of Native American Anthropologists Who ‘Turned the Power’

Florence Shotridge, a Tlingit woman from Alaska, did something unheard of for Native American peoples in the early 20^th century: She conducted anthropological fieldwork among Northwest Coast communities and played an “Indian princess” as she educated schoolchildren who visited Philadelphia’s University Museum where she worked. And she did it by using her Indian boarding school education to, as Nathan Sowry calls it, “turn the power” against the system that forced that education on her in the first place.

Shotridge and others are the subject of a talk planned for 1 p.m. Friday, Oct. 24, in the Holland Library old lobby given by Sowry, the reference archivist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and a WSU alum. Sowry published Turning the Power: Indian Boarding Schools, Native American Anthropologists, and the Race to Preserve Indigenous Cultures this year through University of Nebraska Press.

Turning the Power follows the forced indoctrination of 10 Native American students in the Indian boarding schools of their youth, and how they rebelled against federally sanctioned racist assimilation programs as adults.

Though largely forgotten today, each of them applied their English knowledge and work experience in the anthropological field to embrace, document, and preserve their Native cultures rather than abandoning their heritage.

In his book, Sowry restores identity and returns humanity to these individuals who spent their lives teaching others about their Indigenous cultures. At the Smithsonian, he regularly collaborates with Native and non-Native researchers, scholars, and community groups interested in utilizing archival collections and visiting their cultural heritage.

The road to publishing Turning the Power started as Sowry was writing his dissertation on Native American representations in anthropology museums for the history doctorate he earned from American University in 2020. He looked at the lives of non-Native anthropologists, the history of different museums across the country, and the Native individuals that these anthropologists worked with.

“As I was doing this research, I kept coming across the same names of different Native collaborators who worked with non-Native museum anthropologists and who were essentially anthropologists in their own right, but not afforded that title,” he said. “So I wanted to dig more into these people who had been written out of the larger history, or were referred to only in footnotes.”

Sowry found 20 or 25 Native anthropologists, but eventually settled on 10 for the book. As he scoured the archives for more information on their lives, he learned that all of them were also Indian boarding school survivors.

Among them are Tichkematse, William Jones, and James R. Murie, who were alumni of the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Richard Davis and Cleaver Warden were in the first and second classes to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Amos Oneroad graduated from the Haskell Indian Industrial Training School in Lawrence, Kansas, after attending mission and boarding schools in South Dakota. D.C. Duvall, John V. Satterlee, and Florence and Louis Shotridge attended smaller boarding and mission schools in Montana, Wisconsin, and Alaska Territory, respectively.

These survivors became key cultural informants for anthropologists conducting fieldwork during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Salvage anthropologists of this era relied on Native informants to accomplish their mission of “saving” Native American cultures and ultimately turned many informants into anthropologists after years of fieldwork experience.

“All of their lives were fascinating, and for many of them, quite heartbreaking as well,” Sowry said.

The Turning the Power author cut his eye teeth on archival work when he came to WSU in 2009 for his master’s degree in history. Experiences working in the WSU Libraries and Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections encouraged Sowry to follow his passion and led him to his position at the National Museum of the American Indian.

“I loved my time at WSU! I made some great friends in my master’s program, many of whom I am still in touch with 14 years later,” he said. “It was my first time doing real archival work and learning those skills that I still use today. I loved learning about early WSU history, and the history of Pullman and the surrounding area.”