Many people living far away from Indian reservations express sympathy for the poverty and misery experienced by Native Americans, yet, Thomas Biolsi argues, the problems faced by Native Americans are the results of white privilege.

In Deadliest Enemies, Biolsi connects the origins of racial tension between Indians and non-Indians on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota to federal laws, showing how the courts have created opposing political interests along race lines. Biolsi demonstrates that the court’s definitions of legal rights—both constitutional and treaty rights—make solutions to racial tensions intractable.

This powerful work sheds much-needed light on racial conflicts in South Dakota and in the rest of the United States, and holds white people accountable for the benefits of their racial privilege that come at the expense of Native Americans.

Thomas Biolsi is professor of Native American studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1969 Vine Deloria, Jr., in his controversial book Custer Died for Your Sins, criticized the anthropological community for its impersonal dissection of living Native American cultures. Twenty-five years later, anthropologists have become more sensitive to Native American concerns, and Indian people have become more active in fighting for accurate representations of their cultures. In this collection of essays, Indian and non-Indian scholars examine how the relationship between anthropology and Indians has changed over that quarter-century and show how controversial this issue remains. Practitioners of cultural anthropology, archaeology, education, and history provide multiple lenses through which to view how Deloria's message has been interpreted or misinterpreted. Among the contributions are comments on Deloria's criticisms, thoughts on the reburial issue, and views on the ethnographic study of specific peoples. A final contribution by Deloria himself puts the issue of anthropologist/Indian interaction in the context of the century's end.

CONTENTS
Introduction: What's Changed, What Hasn't, Thomas Biolsi & Larry J. Zimmerman
Part One--Deloria Writes Back
Vine Deloria, Jr., in American Historiography, Herbert T. Hoover
Growing Up on Deloria: The Impact of His Work on a New Generation of Anthropologists, Elizabeth S. Grobsmith
Educating an Anthro: The Influence of Vine Deloria, Jr., Murray L. Wax
Part Two--Archaeology and American Indians
Why Have Archaeologists Thought That the Real Indians Were Dead and What Can We Do about It?, Randall H. McGuire
Anthropology and Responses to the Reburial Issue, Larry J. Zimmerman
Part Three-Ethnography and Colonialism
Here Come the Anthros, Cecil King
Beyond Ethics: Science, Friendship and Privacy, Marilyn Bentz
The Anthropological Construction of Indians: Haviland Scudder Mekeel and the Search for the Primitive in Lakota Country, Thomas Biolsi
Informant as Critic: Conducting Research on a Dispute between Iroquoianist Scholars and Traditional Iroquois, Gail Landsman
The End of Anthropology (at Hopi)?, Peter Whiteley
Conclusion: Anthros, Indians and Planetary Reality, Vine Deloria, Jr.

In 1933 the United States Office of Indian Affairs began a major reform of Indian policy, organizing tribal governments under the provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act and turning over the administration of reservations to these new bodies. Organizing the Lakota considers the implementation of this act among the Lakota (Western Sioux or Teton Dakota) from 1933 through 1945.

Biolsi pays particular attention to the administrative means by which the OIA retained the power to design and implement tribal "self-government" as well as the power to control the flow of critical resources—rations, relief employment, credit—to the reservations. He also shows how this imbalance of power between the tribes and the federal bureaucracy influenced politics on the reservations, and argues that the crisis of authority faced by the Lakota tribal governments among their own would-be constituents—most dramatically demonstrated by the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation—is a direct result of their disempowerment by the United States.