Tom Biolsi, Professor & Chair of Ethnic Studies

Ethnic Studies Department, Native American Studies

Office: 506B Barrows
Email: biolsit@berkeley.edu
Office hours: M 1:00-2:00, Tu 5:00-6:00

I am currently working on a book, Rural Modernities: Space and Time in the American Heartland, focusing on how new organizations of both space and time, conjugated by new race and gender arrangements, emerged and evolved on Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota during the "long" 20th century. The book examines local history from the period of allotment (for Indians) and homesteading (for whites), through the New Deal (the Indian Reorganization Act and New Deal farm programs, including Soil Conservation) and Cold War (especially the Minuteman ICBM silos just west of the Rosebud Country), into the present period of tribal sovereignty and agricultural crisis for family farmers.

Education

NULLPhD, Anthropology, Columbia, 1987
BA, Anthropology, Hofstra University, 1975

Research interests

Native Americans and other indigenous peoples; political economy; race-making and racisms

Courses

Undergraduate Courses
ES 11AC Theories and Concepts in Comparative Ethnic Studies

Graduate Courses
ES 200 Critical Terms and Issues in Comparative Ethnic Studies

Selected publications

2010 "Even if they Have their Own States...: The Immiseration of Indigenous Peoples in the US." Journal of Contemporary Thought Winter:69-89.

2007/2001 Deadliest Enemies: Law and Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

2005 "Imagined Geographies: Sovereignty, Indigenous Space, and American Indian Struggle." American Ethnologist 32(2):239-59.

2004 "Race Technologies." In Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, edited by David Nugent and Joan Vincent. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 400-17.

2004 "Political and Legal Status ('Lower 48' States)." In Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians, edited by Thomas Biolsi. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 231-47.

2002 (with Rose Cordier, Marvine Douville Two Eagle, and Melinda Weil) "Welfare Reform on Rosebud Reservation: Challenges for Tribal Policy." Wicazo Sa Review 17(1):131-58.

1997 (Edited with Larry W. Zimmerman) Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

1995 "The Birth of the Reservation: Making the Modern Individual among the Lakota." American Ethnologist 22(1):28-53.

1995 "Bringing the Law Back In: Legal Rights and the Regulation of Indian-White Relations on Rosebud Reservation." Current Anthropology 36(4):543-71.

1992 Organizing the Lakota: The Political Economy of the New Deal on Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Honors & Awards

Visiting Fellow, Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University, 2003-4