Turning the Power

This week's review explores how 10 Native American students from the boarding school system "used their acquired knowledge as a resource within the discipline of anthropology" to shape the subject area and prevent erasure.

Posted on November 17, 2025 in Reviews of the Month

Turning the Power: Indian Boarding Schools, Native American Anthropologists, and the Race to Preserve Indigenous Cultures

Sowry, Nathan. Nebraska, 2025
358p bibl index, 9781496241924 $65.00, 9781496242853

Turning the Power explores the contributions of 10 Indigenous anthropologists and collaborators to understand select Native American societies. Following a historical chronology (c. 1875–1925), the book details early Native ethnologists’ life stories and contributions to anthropology, museums, and their natal Indigenous communities. As youth, they all experienced the coercive educational system of mission and boarding schools, designed to eradicate Indigenous lifeways and replace them with Euro-American civilizational attributes. Despite being subjected to an enforced, sometimes abusive assimilative education, each used their acquired knowledge as a resource within the discipline of anthropology. During an era in which Native Americans were considered a vanishing race, they labored cooperatively with non-Indigenous colleagues to document, preserve, and perpetuate their cultures, saving them from eventual erasure. Throughout the work, Sowry (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution) skillfully interweaves their personal experiences, interrelationships with their Indigenous communities, and work relations to craft an intricate, complex, often contradictory description of their scholarly and cultural contributions to a discipline that played a role in various institutions that directly impacted Indigenous societies. Through this examination of these Native Americans’ personal and professional lives, readers gain insights into how they navigated a society determined to permanently alter them and their central roles in shaping the anthropological discipline.

Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty; professionals.
Reviewer: G. R. Campbell, University of Montana
Interdisciplinary Subjects: Native American Studies , Racial Justice
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – History, Geography & Area Studies – North America
Choice Issue: Oct 2025

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