Documenting the Everyday: Civilian Conservation Corps Newspapers and «Indians at Work»

Ass. Prof. Dr Mindy Morgan (Michigan State University)

During the 1930s and 1940s, the US Office of Indian Affairs used the periodical Indians at Work to forward reforms and policies of the New Deal era. Seen primarily as a vehicle to advance the administration’s views of tribal nations in the United States, scholars have questioned the periodical’s usefulness in understanding the perspectives and concerns of local Indigenous communities. By focusing on Indigenous authors and local stories that appear in the magazine, this presentation explores Indians at Work in a new light. It contextualizes the magazine within other camp newsletters produced at the same time and analyzes the ways in which these papers not only documented a critical period in US history, but also produced a salient multi-vocality that countered dominant historical narratives. By comparing the magazine with newsletters from other minoritized communities, the talk illustrates how participants used writing and publication as a form of resistance by focusing on documenting daily life. Seen in this way,Indians at Work is less a top-down publication, and more of an illustration of the ways in which Indigenous communities were positioning themselves within this moment of political, social, and economic change. Local authors proved a keen awareness of documentary power and used this form to challenge existing ideas and tropes about what it meant to be Indigenous in the early 20th century.

Short Bio

Mindy Morgan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and an affiliated faculty member of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Michigan State University. Her work lies at the intersection of linguistic and sociocultural anthropology and concerns issues such as Indigenous language use and transmission, literacy practices, and knowledge construction among both historic and contemporary American Indian communities. She is the author of ’The Bearer of this Letter’: Language Ideologies and Literacy Practices among the Fort Belknap Communities (University of Nebraska, 2009). Her ethnohistorical work includes scholarly articles and book chapters related to tribal participation in various Works Project Administration (WPA) programs. She has also written about contemporary efforts to integrate Indigenous languages in university systems, focusing primarily on Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) at Michigan State University. Recently, she turned her attention to the history of the discipline and the ways in which Indigenous communities have responded to anthropological projects in the early 20thcentury.

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