The summer of 2020 was tumultuous, George Floyd’s murder having kicked off reckonings with racist abuses of power in many corners of American life. The size and extent of the demonstrations that year, which began just hours after the police killing on Monday, May 25, made them the largest mass-protest movement in American history, with anywhere from 15 million to 26 million Americans participating.
How much impact that movement had on the unnaming of a 60-year-old, sand-colored building on the UC Berkeley campus, Kroeber Hall, is anyone’s guess. But a proposal to strip off the name reached the university’s Building Name Review Committee on July 1, in the very heat of the George Floyd moment, and just five days later, the proposal had been released for university-wide comment, an unusually swift turnaround as these things go.
Alfred Kroeber (1876–1960), an American anthropologist, had long been ripe for some kind of dethroning. Once a hero of modern social science—the “founder of anthropology in the West,” as he was often called—Kroeber had become a symbol of his discipline’s many failures in regard to Indigenous people. Kroeber’s academic output—more than 500 publications, including hundreds of works of detailed ethnography and first-in-the-field language transcription—spanned most of the 20th century. He helped raise four promising children as well, among them the future novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, whose fiction offers us several characters suggestive of her beloved father, whom she once described as “a Victorian…and a bit of a Puritan” but also as someone whose “curiosity about people different from one’s own kind” led to her own delight in difference and to dreams of other worlds.
Kroeber was all over anthropology during his long career. At various times, he was the head of the American Folklore Society, the American Anthropological Association, and the Linguistic Society of America, and his ideas about which research topics were deserving of encouragement deeply shaped his discipline. His well-known textbook Anthropology, first published in 1923, argues for scientific objectivity but portrays anthropologists as involved, moral actors; as he puts it in the 1948 second edition, ethnocentrism is “one of the great perverters of truth.… To see and appraise humanity and its works…free from the distortions of ethnocentrism…is perhaps the largest contribution of anthropology.”
Hired at 25, Kroeber soon got into trouble with the worst possible enemy at Berkeley’s Anthropology Department, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, a regent since 1897 and the widow of George Hearst, the wealthy mining magnate and publisher. (She is also the great-grandmother of Alta Journal editor and publisher Will Hearst.) Mrs. Hearst was the reason there was anthropology at Berkeley: she funded the department herself for years, weighing in on personnel decisions and seeing to the creation of a museum in San Francisco, where some of her own collections went on display. In a richly researched new book, The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California, UC Berkeley linguistics professor Andrew Garrett shows Hearst to have involved herself in the Anthropology Department at all levels, from the planning of international expeditions—Egypt, Peru—to the provision of research stipends to new faculty hires (Kroeber received $1,500 in 1901, about $55,000 in today’s dollars).
Kroeber struck Hearst as not quite the right sort. Some Arapaho stories he transcribed as a student were judged obscene by one of her friends, the Harvard-connected anthropologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher, and in 1902, Hearst tried to get Kroeber fired. But what really annoyed her was his indifference to museum collecting. He was excited not so much by artifacts as by direct contact with living humans—Native people he could interview—to learn about their languages and lives. California had more distinct Native languages, nearly 100, than any other area of comparable size in the Western Hemisphere. For someone like Kroeber, fieldwork was paradise.
Soon catching the drift of things at the university, he made nice with Mrs. Hearst, letting her know he would be more helpful with artifact gathering in the future. In a letter he wrote to a colleague in 1920, he explained his start at Berkeley this way: “Anthropology is always going to get the short end of every deal for at least another generation except where it is specially endowed or where it helps to make a showing in a Museum. You might as well make up your mind to that and saw wood.”
RUSH TO JUDGMENT?
In 2020, the Kroeber Hall proposal quickly gathered 595 responses from the UC Berkeley community, 85 percent of them in favor of ditching the name. Why was Kroeber so unloved, so deserving of erasure, a century after he pretty much invented cultural anthropology in the West? Here’s what Garrett and other informed observers see as the three main reasons.
First, there’s Ishi. The so-called “Last Wild Indian in North America,” the only surviving member of his hunted-down tribe (he was a Yahi-speaking Yana, known by white people at the time as a Mill Creek Indian), Ishi by the 20th century had become a world figure, one who subsumed and also escaped all definitions, having been a real person, a man in a specific history, as well as a subject of myth, a symbol of California in the ancient times—before the Europeans arrived. Kroeber’s second wife, Theodora Kroeber, undertook to write a biography of Ishi because her husband wasn’t up to it emotionally. The book she published in 1961, Ishi in Two Worlds, has had an immense reach. Other serious works followed hers, among them Ishi in Three Centuries in 2003, edited by two Kroeber sons, and Ishi’s Brain the following year, by Orin Starn, which is about the discovery of that lonely organ in a vat at the Smithsonian.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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There have been plays, documentaries, a feature film—Jon Voight plays Kroeber; Graham Greene, Ishi—and countless artworks and installations inspired by Ishi’s story. More and more, that story has become the province of Indigenous commentators. The tale as told by Theodora Kroeber—terrorized, starving last wild Indian stumbles out of the woods near Oroville and comes under the protection of kindly Berkeley anthropologists, who bring him to San Francisco to live in Mrs. Hearst’s welcoming museum, where he heals from his trauma and is befriended by everyone—has been stood on its head, to say the least.
Newer interpretations highlight the scientific self-interest of the University of California anthropologists who subjected him to countless arduous sessions of cultural downloading; the liberal paternalism that inevitably colored the friendships between Ishi and his hosts; and assorted other “contradictions that now scream at us,” as James Clifford, professor emeritus at UC Santa Cruz, has put it. Clifford’s influential 2013 book, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century, summarizes a large and ever-evolving body of writing related to Ishi. He describes how researchers have shown, for instance, that “Ishi’s people, the ‘Mill Creeks,’…were certainly not a tribe” and that “the Yahi language recorded by Kroeber…included Spanish loan words, as well as bits from Wintu, Atsugewi, and Maidu.” Furthermore, the final hideaway of the cruelly besieged Yahi group “was filled with pilfered commodities from the white man’s world,” and “Ishi had already been making arrowheads from glass bottles while in hiding.” In other words, the so-called Stone Age purity attributed to him by the scientists was largely imaginary, a romanticization.
The second likely explanation for Kroeber’s loss of status involves the taking of land and culture. Kroeber earned his PhD in 1901 at Columbia University, where he studied with Franz Boas, among whose other celebrated students would be Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edward Sapir. Boas is the true fountainhead of modern American anthropology. Beginning in the late 19th century, he fought to loosen the grip on his discipline held by scientific racism, which posited that societies are different because the races that compose them are different—more or less capable of complex thought, for example.
Kroeber, as Boas’s first PhD student, loyally developed his mentor’s ideas throughout his career. During his UC Berkeley professorship, he became a prominent public intellectual and a sharp critic of eugenics and of the idea of fixed racial characteristics. In Anthropology, he declares that “most of the alleged evidence” for such characteristics “is likely to be worthless.” The fourth chapter of that textbook—arguably the most influential educational publication in anthropology in the 20th century—is a “sustained argument, using evidence from anatomy, physiology, and psychology, against the belief that some ‘races’ are innately superior,” according to Garrett. Kroeber’s research, meanwhile, gave evidence that all races create complex cultures, unique worlds worthy of study.
Other attitudes that Kroeber borrowed from Boas are less attractive, however. Boas believed that Indigenous people were in irreversible decline, that their cultures had been fatally damaged by the Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans; he advised his fellow social scientists to conduct what is now known as “salvage” anthropology, an urgent gathering of nearly everything: all that was about to be lost.
This led to acts of crucial cultural rescue: in the area of languages, Kroeber made the first studies and recordings of 40 of them, his associates adding dozens more. But it also gave fuel to continued dispossession of Indigenous tribes: Why not continue to steal the land, plow up the burial grounds, and sell the irreplaceable artifacts of a people soon to vanish? Most bitterly, why not send their children to workhouse-type schools where their languages and lifeways were often beaten out of them, or worse?
Kroeber surely knew of such practices, understood their vicious effects; in a paper published after his death, he wrote that no one who worked with Native Californians “could escape the shattering that their society underwent…their deprivations and spoilation.” Still, his great talents were given not to a career as an activist-reformer but to the mostly noninterventionist, observational work of academic social science.
Finally, a third reason for Kroeber’s demise involves Ishi’s remains. Despite his promises to Hearst, Kroeber never became much of a museum stuffer. Nor was he personally a collector of Indigenous skulls and other physical parts. After he became department head in 1909, though, he was identified with everything that the Anthropology Department did and was known for, and UC Berkeley from almost the moment of its founding in 1868 had been a prodigious collector of human remains, most of them Indigenous.
Now there is great sensitivity—and anger and profound disgust—around the pillaging of ancestral remains, which in Kroeber’s era was established practice. Skeletons were sought from all over the world, and in California, miners and ranchers and road builders dug up graves as they hurried to colonize the state, often donating what they found to UC Berkeley. As Garrett writes, the “anthropology museum holds thousands of skeletonized bodies…taken from burial sites in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Native American sites excavated while Kroeber was in charge.”
Many of the votes for unnaming thus implied that Kroeber was a grave robber. “Kroeber’s actions were racist, dehumanizing, reprehensible…[a] horrific legacy,” one commenter wrote on the Building Name Review feedback page. Other typical comments appended to votes for unnaming included “Alfred Kroeber is a disgrace. His…genocidal legacy is a history that…UC Berkeley anthropology has to reconcile with”; “I do not believe that we should recognize the legacy of a man who removed Native American remains from their graves”; and “Kroeber was an instrumental contributor to a brand of racist, inhumane pseudoscience.… This campus…houses the remains of many indigenous people.”
Garrett proves the grave-robbing charge to be false. Kroeber was not a physical anthropologist, one who studies bones and tissues, but an ethnologist-linguist in search of living people and their living speech. He had donated Ishi’s brain to the Smithsonian, though. This electrifying discovery, announced to the world in February 1999, marked Kroeber’s legacy with a stain not easily removed. The implication was that he was more of a Dr. Frankenstein than a benevolent caretaker—certainly not Ishi’s friend but more his captor, his cruel betrayer.
FINAL WISHES
When Ishi died in 1916, Kroeber was away from the Bay Area, on sabbatical. He had fallen into depression as Ishi declined in health. In a letter from New York, he instructed a colleague, “As to disposal of the body, I must ask you as my personal representative to yield nothing at all.… If there is any talk of the interests of science, then say for me that science can go to hell. We propose to stand by our friends.”
Yet prior to his return, Kroeber learned that an autopsy had been performed. Some time later, once back in California, he sent Ishi’s brain to a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian, for study. UC Berkeley anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, writing in 2001, called this “an act of disordered mourning,” a gesture of “ravaged grief.” Kroeber left California again, entered psychoanalysis, and suffered physical torments at least partly psychological in origin. After seven years, his crisis, including his crippling physical symptoms, began to lessen to the extent that he was able to return to UC Berkeley and resume his duties as department chair. Le Guin recalled that her father never mentioned Ishi—never spoke his name. Scheper-Hughes speculated that he was perhaps “observing the Yahi taboo on naming and speaking of the dead.”
THE VERDICT
On October 30, 2020, the Building Name Review Committee announced its decision. The committee—a mix of university leaders, professors, and affiliated scholars—acknowledged that Kroeber was considered “one of the most influential American anthropologists of the first half in the 20th century” and that he had authored those “500 articles and books,” but he had also “authorized the collection of the remains of Native American ancestors” and “curated a repository of [them],” and for this and other reasons, his name should be removed.
The committee’s decision was unanimous. Others who signaled their firm agreement included university officials, most anthropology faculty, all of the UC Berkeley Native student organizations, and the Muwekma Ohlone tribe, on whose unceded land the school campus stands. Phenocia Bauerle, a member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) people and the director of Native American Student Development at the university, commented in a news article that though it “may seem like just political correctness, just a gesture…it is a big gesture, because, for so long, names like Kroeber were untouchable. He signified a particular version of history, and if Berkeley is willing to make room for other histories…this will allow societal change to happen.”
Garrett—one of a handful of professors who wrote against the proposal—did not rise up in high dudgeon, excoriating the unnamers, denouncing them for their selective reading of history; no, his tone was temperate, and he made it clear that he understood why students, especially Indigenous students, might shrink back from Kroeber and his complex legacy. And as for giving a new name to the old building, well, why not? For now, it’s being called the Anthropology and Art Practice Building. Times change, and the appropriateness of names changes. Garrett is a linguist, not an anthropologist. When he first came to Berkeley, he was a scholar of ancient Hittite and other dead languages; 20 years later, we find him authoring works like Basic Yurok, a useful guide to a living California language taught to him by, as the copyright page says, “Lame Billy, Orick Bob, Lowana Brantner, Domingo of Weitchpec, Frank Douglas, Aileen Figueroa, Bessie Fleischman, Fanny Flounder…and many other fluent speakers.”
Garrett knew some of these speakers personally. Others he encountered only through documents created a century before, many by Kroeber. The Indigenous-language collections at UC Berkeley are vast, far surpassing those at any other public university in the United States. Garrett’s own publications now include new work on Hittite but also projects undertaken with Indigenous partners—work solidly in the Kroeber style. “My academic life since 2001,” he explains, “has crucially involved Indigenous languages.… I do this with documentary corpora created in research by Kroeber, his students and colleagues, and their successors.… A sympathy for Kroeber thus colors how I write.”
Yet Garrett stops well short of calling him a hero or a model. Garrett is too aware of Kroeber’s conceptual errors, of his failure to engage with the enormous fact of California’s Indigenous genocide, which saw Native populations decline by 95 percent between 1769—when the first Spanish mission was founded here—and Kroeber’s own first years in the state. But behind the debate over discrediting a man who was clearly neither racist nor a grave robber, but whose “assumptions and choices expose his intellectual blind spots,” as Garrett writes, lies an uneasy feeling about anthropology as a field of study and, indeed, about the whole project of our mad-dog transactional civilization. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, an admirer of Kroeber’s, famously observed that “anthropology is not a dispassionate science like astronomy.… It is the outcome of a historical process which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human beings have had their resources plundered…whilst they themselves were ruthlessly killed.… Anthropology is the daughter of this era of violence.”
Kroeber somehow stands for all this. Garrett describes an Indigenous activist who felt “physically sick” upon arrival at the Berkeley campus; the awareness of stolen ancestral bodies, stored underground at the anthropology museum, haunted her. About himself Garrett writes, “When I first became involved…I was, like most linguists, naïve about cultural heritage in the aftermath of genocide,” but he came to understand how “anthropologists and linguists have been part of the apparatus of state-sponsored dispossession and genocide.” Garrett is opposed to all of that—thoughtfully, usefully opposed. But more to the point, he wants Indigenous students to feel welcome at Berkeley, to come to the campus in ever greater numbers, to receive all the support they need for as long as they need it. Yet he stubbornly wants the real, complicated, disturbing story to be told. He is an inveterate educator, and Kroeber’s story, whatever else it is, is a teaching opportunity—exactly the sort of thing that should not be erased.
A CALL FOR RESPECT
Long before the controversy over Kroeber Hall, about a year and a half after the discovery of Ishi’s brain in a vat at the Smithsonian, a handful of anthropologists joined a party of Indigenous people at lovely Summit Lake, on Mount Lassen, for a celebration.
Summit Lake is a “sacred Yahi site of human emergence,” according to an essay by Scheper-Hughes that is included in the book Ishi in Three Centuries. She was one of the anthropologists who had been invited to the gathering. Just a few weeks before, Ishi’s brain had been handed to representatives of the Pit River Tribe, of the Redding Rancheria; they were the Native group judged by Smithsonian officials to be the Yahi people’s closest linguistic relations. Then Ishi’s remains were interred in a secret place, his brain joined at last with the ashes from his 1916 cremation.
Scheper-Hughes felt honored to be invited. In her essay, she recalls the feasting and dancing and the talking circles that were arranged, “at which Ishi and his Yahi culture were memorialized.” In one of these talking circles, she heard Kroeber being spoken of admiringly; indeed, being “forgiven.” Scheper-Hughes describes the scene: “Then an older [Pit River] woman, mindful perhaps of the presence of a few anthropologists, got up to chide those who might be tempted to criticize ‘their grandfather,’ whether Ishi or Kroeber. The old ones had their reasons, she said, for what they did. ‘And they needed to be respected.’ ”
Maybe this spirit of respect—even if only partial, if highly conditional—will come to characterize future debates on such matters as the renaming of other old buildings. My guess is it won’t, though, at least not for a long while. We are still too early in a process of recognizing and accounting for the tormenting past; trying to take in its full, dark weight; and trying thereafter not to “move on,” as it is only human to want to do. Scheper-Hughes’s powerful phrase “disordered mourning” comes to mind in this regard. She applied it to Kroeber in his shame at what he himself had not kept from happening to Ishi, who had a special horror for the white people’s vivisection of their own kind. On a societal scale, though, a similar movement of the heart and mind may have begun, disordered but containing elements of true mourning, looking not for a final resolution, putting all that bad stuff behind us, but for something not quite describable yet. Here’s hoping we can recognize it when we arrive.•
Robert Roper writes novels and biographies and is the author recently of The Savage Professor and Nabokov in America. He lives in the East Bay.
