Bio
n my work as a cultural anthropologist, I use ethnographic, historical, and semiotic methods to study Indigenous (American Indian) activism in contemporary struggles for survival and self-determination. I have published peer-reviewed articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, The American Ethnologist, Ethnohistory, and Reviews in Anthropology, among others, and have received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society. My current research project focuses on the “Indian News,” a corpus of over 1,400 articles written by four men from the Ho-Chunk Nation for local newspapers in central Wisconsin between 1931 and 1949. The book will focus on their account of American Indian life in the pivotal decades of the Great Depression and World War II and on how their writings made “Indian News” a new literary genre and popular print commodity. My first book, Ho-Chunk Powwows and the Politics of Tradition (Nebraska 2016), focuses on the powwow, a widespread celebration of Indigenous music and dance. It traces the way the people of the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin developed their powwow tradition from the 19th to the 21st centuries as they confronted the tensions between earning money by performing for tourists and honoring Ho-Chunk military veterans as exemplars of traditional values. I also have an active interest in the History of Anthropology, particularly in the “action anthropology” of Nancy Oestreich Lurie (1924-2017) and the “heterodox” Boasian anthropology of Paul Radin (1883-1959). Past and future projects include Indigenous autobiography and the history of Chicago’s American Indian Center. Check out the rest of Dr. Arndt’s works here.