Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe:Chpater 37, Part one. An Anthropologist Who Sold Out the First Nation. Pat One

  The anthropologist who sold out the First Nations. By Dave Jaffe: Chapter 37, Part One.


       Stanley Whitehead was smart. "My son is doing well in school," his English-born mother would tell her friends in the 1950's. She was right. Her son Stanley, born in the early 1940's, was nearly always at the top of his class in England and later in Canada. For in the mid-1950's, Stanley's family moved to Canada. They ended up in the Okanagan area of southern B.C.
     Stanley kept his clipped middle class English accent nearly all his life. He never really developed a Canadian accent. And he loved to talk and talk and talk. "Wow that guy sure can go on and on," a man who met Stanley in the 1980's said. "He rarely listens to you. He's smart that's for sure.  Yet there's no dialogue with him. It's all a one way conversation."
    By the 1980's, Stanley had already tried to be a lawyer. He passed his bar exams but he didn't like practicing law. This short stocky brilliant man then took up studying anthropology. He found a tribal group to study in the northwest area of British Columbia. He wanted to write a Ph.D or a doctorate on this tribal group. So he went back to university to study anthropology.
     By the time Stanley was reading anthropology textbboks, some troubling issues had popped up. Anthropology was developed in the 19th century by white people. This was the same time that some white people were colonizing parts of Asia and Africa. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead, Franz Boaz and Claude Levi Strauss were progressives who forged new paths in the discipline. Yet many tribal peoples often saw anthropology as a tool of white men  to dominate tribal peoples and destroy their culture. The Oglala Sioux theologian Vine Deloria Junior said in his book 'God Is Red' that anthropology had caused immense harm to First Nations people.
      By the time Stanley Whitehead studied anthropology in the 1980's, First Nations people were in revolt  all across  Canada. They blockaded roads to  stop highway construction and megaprojects. They challenged court rulings  and laws that had turned them into poor people living on depressed reserves. They demanded that Canadian governments give back to them the lands that they once lived on. They also demanded that the governments give them money because of the terrible treatment that they had endured in residential schools.
    "Colonization has certainly done its damag3e to our young men," says the First Nations Oneida activist D.J. Danforth. And white people's colonization, Danforth said, has not only hurt aboriginal men, "but also women and children of our First Nations communities."