Salvage Anthropology Educational Materials

Cultural and Archaeological ANTH 2301 Salvage Anthropology Salvage anthropology is a field of study related to the gathering of Indigenous artefacts. Salvage anthropology was an attempt in the latter 19th century to gather the material culture of Indigenous peoples thought to be going extinct in the United States and other areas of the world. Many anthropologists devoted their time to gathering artefacts, narratives, linguistic databases, and ethnographies from indigenous peoples around the world at this time. While most collections were made legally, by buying objects or sitting down with collaborators (referred to as informants in the older anthropological vernacular) to record traditional stories, some collections involved stealing cultural artefacts belonging to tribes or buying goods from middlemen traders. Numerous anthropologists were employed by the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), and many of them lived among Native Americans for extended periods of time on the reservations that at the time were the homes of the majority of Native Americans. Given the fast extinction of many Native languages, linguists and anthropologists turned their attention to the study of language. An anthropologist can learn about the philosophy and worldviews of a culture by analysing language in order to comprehend words and their context. The BAE did not pay anthropologists handsomely for this study. Some started augmenting their earnings by purchasing cultural artefacts at a reduced price from the individuals they researched and reselling those items to museums for a significantly greater price. It is now accepted that this technique is exploitative and immoral. This era's anthropological study has also come under fire for neglecting the struggles the culture faces in favour of a narrow concentration on cultural understanding. Few anthropologists, for instance, made the decision to assist their subjects in addressing the conditions of living in poverty on reservations. During the salvage anthropological era, Leonard J. Frachtenberg was an anthropologist who really took steps to assist the populations he was researching. Frachtenberg was collecting languages from the people who lived on the Siletz Reservation in Lincoln County, on the coast of Oregon, during the turn of the 20th century. He produced a number of oral histories based on his study and collaborated extensively with members of the Lower Umpqua, Coos, Coquille, and Alsea tribes, some of whom were residing at the Siletz Reservation and some of whom had returned to their ancestral territories. Along with that, he assisted the tribes in tracking down long-lost unratified treaties from the 1850s, which they used to successfully challenge the federal government. The government agreed to compensate the coastal Indigenous peoples of Oregon for their ancestral lands in the treaties, provided they moved peacefully to the Siletz Reservation. Although the participants kept up their end of the agreement, they were never paid. George Wasson, a Coquille man, needed assistance finding copies of the treaties at the National Archives, so Frachtenberg arranged for his transportation there. The tribes started their successful legal action against the federal government in 1908 to demand recompense for their lands. For many tribes, this procedure took up to 40 years to finish, and not all tribes have ever received proper compensation.