UC Berkeley’s Kroeber Hall was stripped of its name earlier this year because the building’s namesake — Alfred Louis Kroeber, born in 1876 and the founder of the study of anthropology in the American West — is a powerful symbol that continues to evoke exclusion and erasure for Native Americans. I hope I’m not being too cynical when I say that I don’t believe there are more than a handful of Native Americans in the country who could actually say anything of substance about Kroeber. I’d never heard of him myself. Granted I’m not a Native American or an anthropologist, but I’m well-informed. It turns out Kroeber was quite an accomplished scholar, a pioneer of American anthropology, author of more than 500 publications, a co-founder and president of the American Anthropological Association, presided over the American Folklore Society and founded the Linguistic Society of America. Among the key reasons highlighted… Read more →