SUMMARY:

As the first Native American to receive a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kansas (1926), the Nez Percé anthropologist Archie Phinney collaborated with the renowned American anthropologist Franz Boas and visited Leningrad on an academic exchange program. His peer, a Soviet graduate student Julia Averkieva spent a year and a half in New York studying under Boas and in British Columbia researching the Kwakwak’awakw. Phinney’s graduate training in Leningrad happened to take place during a crucial period in the history of Soviet ethnography, when it remained partially open to international influence, especially that associated with Boas’s school of anthropology. After returning from the USSR, Phinney worked at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Through American researchers and activists like him who visited the Soviet Union at that time, the Soviet practice of “indigenization” was deployed in the debates on Indian politics and it influenced the liberal “Indian New Deal” (the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act) proposed by the commissioner of Indian affairs, John Collier. The essay reconstructs Phinney’s experience as an exchange student in Leningrad based on materials from Russian and American archives.