The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California

This impressive book reveals the ferocity with which a present generation can bring charges against those of a past generation alleged to have committed errors. Alfred Kroeber, one of the most eminent and productive anthropologists of the twentieth century, had a building on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley named after him in 1961, just one year after his death, at age eighty-four. Sixty years later, the building was divested of his name, and Kroeber's reputation has thereby been damaged. An anonymous campus organization had accused him of a variety of activities hostile to the Indigenous people of California, and the charges themselves were quickly served up as the guilty verdict. The chancellor of the university, Carol Christ, approved the hurried process, which the author of this book describes as “erroneous or unsubstantiated,” but not before amplifying the charges to emphasize the chancellor's contention that “Kroeber's views and writings clearly stand in opposition to our university's values of inclusion and our belief in promoting diversity and excellence.”But at no time during his long tenure at Berkeley did anyone find Kroeber's work unethical or alien to any campus rule or principle. As the first person to have earned a doctoral degree in anthropology at the university, Kroeber went on to help shape that Berkeley department and was widely appreciated by colleagues elsewhere in the United States and the world. Moreover, as a sign of his intellectual probity, he was always opposed to one of the most tempting, and certainly most perverse, movements of the time — eugenics. He wrote against it, spoke against it, and, in correspondence with the Yale economist Irving Fischer, the first president of the American Eugenics Society, repudiated the intrusion of erroneous biological theories into the discussion of social problems. David Starr Jordan, then the president of Stanford University and a noted eugenicist, had solicited Kroeber's support of the spurious notion that the Indigenous people of California had had their “most virile elements” obliterated by war and were left with the weakest. Kroeber responded, “You have come to the wrong man this time,” and elsewhere said that eugenics was a “joke.” What Kroeber believed was straightforward and clearly expressed: “The absolute equality and identity of all human races and strains as carriers of civilization must be assumed.”Although Garrett does not want to have his book understood as a biography, the reader will soon see that Kroeber's work, prolific, precise, and painstaking, was the core of his life. And at that core was a “commitment to teaching Native people to write in their languages.” He knew those languages and transcribed and analyzed them. Only by preserving speakers of them could the languages be preserved, he believed, and, more importantly, possessed by their users, given the prevailing hostility in the surrounding non-Indigenous world to all such languages.Another charge made by the group organized to censure Kroeber, and one echoed by the Berkeley chancellor, was that he had “collected or authorized the collection of the remains of Native American ancestors from grave sites.” This charge includes an acknowledgment that, while these practices were not illegal at the time, they were “immoral and unethical, even for the time.” But no evidence is given to support such a notion about “the time,” given that anthropological practices all over the world then — in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Central America, and elsewhere — invaded grave sites and collected bones and artifacts of every kind. Kroeber did what anthropologists then did and were expected to do. And it is what Phoebe Apperson Hearst, one of the celebrated benefactors of anthropology at Berkeley, likewise did: find, collect, and store in the Hearst Museum, then in San Francisco, whatever her far-flung agents could unearth and remove of the remains and the artifacts of Indigenous peoples.Another charge against Kroeber is that he and his colleagues took custody of a Native American man called “Ishi” and required him to live in the Hearst Museum, where he was used as a “living exhibit.” While Ishi did live there for some time and had a job as a janitor in the building, he conducted much of his life as an independent individual. Kroeber believed he was protecting Ishi as his “guardian,” and Ishi himself said that he “preferred to stay where I am. I will grow old here [in the museum], and die in this house.”A third charge against Kroeber was that he had argued that one tribe of Indigenous people, the Ohlone, was “culturally extinct” since it had lost its language, and his opinion contributed to the federal government's decision to delist the tribe from the register of Native peoples, which meant they would no longer be entitled to own land or exercise political power. True, Kroeber did not, as Garrett concludes, properly value the forces of “linguistic and cultural hybridity, renewal, and self-assertion among Native Californians.” But Kroeber was by training a linguistic anthropologist: words were to him the central feature of cultural identity. What he could not envision in the early twentieth century was that anthropology would change over time and come to advocate “for Indigenous people” — with or without possession of their languages — “and be responsive to their needs.” He was a victim of his time and place, as everyone always is. As Garrett writes of Kroeber's approach, “native people were the Other: civilized, admirable and fascinating in their own right, but objects of study all the same.” Kroeber's position was the same as that taken by Hearst: “an extractivist research stance, features that seem inescapable in the era's anthropological and linguistic writing.”But Kroeber's name, not that of Hearst, would be the one to suffer; the name of the philanthropist is still found on a number of Berkeley buildings. Kroeber was to suffer because the times needed a scapegoat. The strategy of the campus chancellor is revealed in her words: “I agree with those who see this move as being less about condemning Kroeber and much more about creating a truly inclusive campus that provides a true sense of belonging for one and all.” That higher end licensed the erasure of Kroeber.And it turns out, much to the surprise of the reader, that Garrett is in favor of that erasure. He states that the issue at stake in the unnaming was the failure of the decades-long relationship between the campus and the State of California to Native Americans. To help heal that relationship, Garrett contends, Kroeber's “name had to go.” Garrett's careful, detailed, and powerful book concludes as the author, mixing charity with cynicism, reminds his readers of Raymond Chandler's line in The Long Goodbye (1953): “A dead man is the best fall guy in the world.”