About

Valerie Lambert is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was reared in Oklahoma and is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation, with documented Chickasaw ancestry. Her research focuses on American Indian and Indigenous Studies, particularly tribal nation-building, sovereignty, and resistance. Lambert's first single-authored book, "Choctaw Nation: A Story of American Indian Resurgence," explores the struggles and triumphs of the Choctaw Tribe in rebuilding their government and economic development in the late-twentieth century, highlighting their efforts to restore political and economic presence in the United States. Her second book, "Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs," based on extensive fieldwork, examines the transformation of the BIA from a colonial institution to one run by Indigenous peoples, emphasizing Native resistance, sovereignty, and the ongoing fight against settler colonialism and white supremacy. Lambert's work underscores the ways in which Native peoples leverage federal institutions to serve their interests, reformulate sovereignty concepts, and pursue justice and healing.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Public administration
• History
• Archaeology
• Anthropology
• Ecology

Selected publications

• Toward an Indigenous anthropology

  PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Anthropology
  • Political Science

  Abstract This article introduces a special section that features four Indigenous anthropologists from two different world regions—Africa and Latin America. This section is unique in that the contributions of these anthropologists are being published in the scholars' Native languages—IsiZulu, Kichwa, Nahua, and Wolof—and in English. There are a number of reasons we felt it important to bring together the work of these scholars in one journal. First, we felt that it was important to highlight the work that non‐Western scholars are contributing to a field that is overwhelmingly dominated by Euro‐American and European scholars. Second, as Indigenous scholars ourselves, we are committed to the project of decentering anthropology by facilitating direct conversations between Indigenous scholars in different parts of the world—in this case, Africa and Latin America—that are not mediated by non‐Indigenous voices. By doing this, we are hoping to promote the emergence of a truly Indigenous Anthropology. Our decision to foreground the authors' Native languages draws attention to the problem of linguistic imperialism within anthropology—a problem that has marginalized Indigenous languages. This special section is a modest step towards addressing this problem.

  PublisherDOI

• Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021 by David H. DeJong (review)

  Native American and Indigenous Studies · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Public administration

  Reviewed by: Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021 by David H. DeJong Valerie Lambert (bio) Paternalism to Partnership: The Administration of Indian Affairs, 1786–2021 by David H. DeJong University of Nebraska Press, 2022 RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN Native people and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) are fraught for many reasons, one of which is the agency's long history of trying to exterminate Indigenous Peoples and dispossess us of our land. Another is the often very personal nature of the federal-Indian relationship: as one of many expressions of the solemn, treaty-based trust responsibilities of the United States toward our sovereign Native Nations, most of us are tethered to the BIA from womb to tomb or from cradle to grave. Although the BIA has had and continues to have a significant impact on Indian Country, the scholarship about the BIA is alarmingly sparse. Authored by the federal director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, who is a prolific writer and holds a doctorate in American Indian studies, this valuable reference book helps address this lacuna in the literature. For this reason alone, this work makes a valuable contribution to Indigenous studies. Yet readers will, in addition, find much that is of value and interest in this book, including its central focus on the views of Indian Affairs leaders—in their own words—on numerous topics, including Indian land and land tenure, Indian education, Native youth, and tribal economic development. An introduction and conclusion bookend sixty-five chapters—one on each individual who has headed Indian Affairs. Tackling a period that spans 235 years, the chapters address eight superintendents of Indian Affairs, one chief clerk, thirty-nine commissioners of Indian Affairs, and fourteen assistant secretaries of Indian Affairs. The chapters are composed primarily of extended, uninterrupted excerpts from these leaders' public writings. DeJong mines these officials' words, relying heavily on the annual reports that these leaders produced until 1965. DeJong's undertaking was massive: during the allotment era, for example, certain commissioners' annual reports totaled fifteen hundred pages. DeJong uses these officials' writings to illuminate the conditions in Indian Country as these top bureaucrats saw them, their own and others' Indian policies, major events that were impacting Indian Country, and these leaders' political philosophies. Every chapter begins with a formulaic but comprehensive and usually insightful biography [End Page 122] of each leader, helping contextualize subsequent pages of their public writings or oratory. The initiatives that particular Indian Affairs leaders championed but failed to bring to fruition are especially interesting. The primary sources that ground each chapter reveal that generations before the passage of the General Allotment Act of 1887, numerous heads of Indian Affairs fiercely advocated that our reservation lands be privatized. Other examples of policies thwarted during the years a leader held office include Charles Rhoads's fight to transfer all Indian irrigation projects to the Bureau of Reclamation in the early 1930s and Eddie Brown's battle to remove Indian education from the BIA in the early 1990s—more than a decade before the Bureau of Indian Education was created as a separate unit within Indian Affairs in 2006. Extensive passages testify to the strident, unapologetically anti-Indian words and actions of the dozens of non-Natives who led the BIA through the late 1970s. As their own words make clear, non-Native officials consistently disrespected the federal trust responsibility, stereotyped Indians as lazy and inferior, insisted that the Indian land base was too large, and problematically racialized Indian identity as part of their larger efforts to undermine tribal sovereignty and nationhood. Their statements contrast markedly with those of the Natives who headed the BIA. The latter insisted that treaties and the trust responsibility were of paramount importance, prioritized the expansion of an Indian land base they understood as too small, doggedly worked to combat the racialization of Indian identity, and fought for tribal sovereignty. This otherwise outstanding reference book suffers from only a few minor weaknesses. First, the characterization of "partnership" in the title is misleading. Although assistant secretaries of Indian Affairs often speak about partnering with tribes, "partnership" is something that, for BIA leaders, remains mostly aspirational. Assistant secretaries of Indian Affairs...

  PublisherDOI

• Land acknowledgments meant to honor Indigenous people too often do the opposite – erasing American Indians and sanitizing history instead

  2021-10-07 · 6 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Choctaw Tribal Sovereignty at the Turn of the 21st Century

  Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Ada Deer and Kevin Gover treated tribal sovereignty as did most tribal leaders of their time—as, among other things, a bundle of inherent rights. For Bureau of Indian Affairs staff, the message was clear: the United States had been built on a legal and political foundation of the political accommodation of Indian tribes and tribal sovereignty. The thawing-lake analogy also captures the harshness and sometimes even the brutality of the Choctaw experience of defending their sovereignty. In the context of the post-1983 tribal-member-only Choctaw policy and law, the Choctaws in some Choctaw Nation communities have developed a second category of Choctaws, the category, “Choctaw-but-not-enrolled.” Chief Roberts nevertheless pressed forward. He spoke individually with council members, grassroots leaders and other Choctaw citizens to generate support for a tribal gaming enterprise. In the mid-1980s, Choctaw preachers and church members mobilized against Roberts’s proposed gaming venture.

  PublisherDOI

• Rethinking American Indian and Non‐Indian Relations in the United States and Exploring Tribal Sovereignty: Perspectives from Indian Country and from Inside the Bureau of Indian Affairs

  PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review · 2017-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article uses materials from field research conducted at the level of tribal homelands and at the federal level of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to rethink and reconceptualize Indian–non‐Indian relations and federal–Indian relations in the United States. I document the ways Chickasaw and Choctaw tribal officials are moving beyond the “deadliest enemies” model of Indian–non‐Indian relations in tribal homelands in their pursuit of strategies that expand the role of tribal governments, mobilize support from local non‐Indians for American Indian tribal empowerment and resurgence, and institutionalize a reordered regional political hierarchy. Cultural constructions of tribal sovereignty undergird these strategies and the transformations that are unfolding in the territories of the American Indian tribe in which I am enrolled and its neighbor tribe. Turning to a second site of participant‐observation field research, I document the ways a different but related construction of tribal sovereignty drives the work of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an agency whose workforce is more than 95 percent American Indian. Federal–Indian relations are shown to take shape through systematic responses to bureaucratic imperatives, the circulation of legal and popular constructions of Indian identity, and the resistance to segregation of the categories of “federal” and “Indian” in federal–Indian affairs.

  PublisherDOI

• Negotiating American Indian Inclusion: Sovereignty, Same-Sex Marriage, and Sexual Minorities in Indian Country

  American Indian Culture and Research Journal · 2017-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  American Indians are often overlooked in the story of the struggle for marriage equality in the United States. Using anthropological approaches, this article synthesizes and extends scholarly knowledge about Native participation in this struggle. With sovereign rights to control their own domestic relations, tribes have been actively revising their marriage laws, laws that reflect the range of reservation climates for sexual and gender-identity minorities. Debates in Indian Country over the rights of these minorities and over queering marriage bring to the fore issues that help define the distinctiveness of Native participation in the movement. These include issues of “tradition,” “culture,” and Christianity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Big Black Box of Indian Country

  The American Indian Quarterly · 2016-01-01 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Negotiating for survival

  2015-03-09

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855-1970

  Ethnohistory · 2009-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Book Review| January 01 2009 The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855-1970 By Clara Sue Kidwell. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. xix + 320 pp., foreword, acknowledgments, introduction, illustrations, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth.) Valerie Lambert Valerie Lambert Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2009) 56 (1): 217–218. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-2008-052 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Valerie Lambert; The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855-1970. Ethnohistory 1 January 2009; 56 (1): 217–218. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-2008-052 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsEthnohistory Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. American Society for Ethnohistory2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

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• Political Protest, Conflict, and Tribal Nationalism: The Oklahoma Choctaws and the Termination Crisis of 1959–1970

  The American Indian Quarterly · 2007-01-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Political Protest, Conflict, and Tribal NationalismThe Oklahoma Choctaws and the Termination Crisis of 1959-1970 Valerie Lambert (bio) The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, a tribe in which I am enrolled, is headquartered in southeastern Oklahoma and has a tribal citizenry of just over 175,000. Our tribal government currently compacts almost all of our tribe's Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and Indian Health Service (IHS) program funding and runs dozens of tribal businesses that today fund more than 80 percent of our tribal programs and services.1 More than six thousand people work for our tribe, which is headed by a chief, a twelve-member tribal council, and three tribal judges.2 Our people rebuilt our formal tribal political structures and institutions in the 1970s and 1980s, more than a half-century after the Curtis Act of 1898, the Supplemental Agreement of 1902, and the Five Tribes Act of 1906 eviscerated our elaborate nineteenth-century polity and allotted most of our land. Little scholarship exists about the era of our tribal history that spans the years between allotment in the early 1900s and the tribal nation-building of the 1970s, the era that is the focus of this article. Despite the dearth of scholarship about this era of Choctaw history, by the late twentieth century a dominant scholarly narrative of this period had emerged. This narrative alleges that, during the greater part of the twentieth century, many Choctaws pursued a strategy of assimilation into the larger, non-Indian society and acculturation to white culture. "Nothing set the Five Tribes people apart quite so much," David W. Baird writes, "as their outspoken advocacy of assimilation with the white majority."3 James H. Howard and Victoria Lindsay Levine characterize Choctaw "sentiment" during the early twentieth century as "ultra-assimilationist," with many Choctaws undergoing "rapid white acculturation" and making "an all-out effort to remodel their culture to approximate [End Page 283] that of whites."4 Naomi Ruth Hunke notes that in the 1930s leaders of the only Oklahoma Choctaw community still holding Choctaw dances and stickball games decided to stop such performances, citing as their reason "opposition" from Choctaw tribal officials, among others.5 In the late 1940s, anthropologist Alexander Spoehr concluded that, in part because of the Choctaw pursuit of acculturation, Choctaw kinship had "lost its importance as a means of widely establishing and regulating social relations" and "of integrating the local group."6 Pointing to Choctaw behavior at the regional and national levels, several scholars have observed that the Five "Civilized" Tribes, including the Choctaws, provided much of the leadership for the Society of American Indians (SAI), a pan-Indian organization founded in 1911.7 The SAI, which Robert Warrior has identified as part of the "first important movement of twentieth-century American Indian intellectual history," embraced a "mainstreaming ideology" and promoted Indian "integration" into the larger, non-Indian society.8 For many scholars, the ultimate expression of Choctaw assimilationist aspirations during these years is our tribe's response to the termination era of federal Indian policy (1945–1960). In the late 1950s, Choctaw Chief Harry J. W. Belvin supported federal legislation to terminate our tribe, making the Choctaws one of as many as 109 cases of termination initiated between 1945 and 1960.9 The date upon which Choctaw termination was to become effective was extended three times in the 1960s before the law was repealed on August 24, 1970.10 While we did not become part of the 3 percent of the total Indian population that was terminated, according to historian Donald Fixico, "the Oklahoma Choctaws seized the initiative in abrogating their trust relationship with the government."11 Using interviews and archival research that I conducted in 1995–1996 and 2005, this article raises questions about the extent to which our people supported this effort to terminate our tribe and thus the extent to which assimilationist aspirations defined Choctaw experience during these years. By documenting the emergence in the late 1960s of an organized Choctaw youth movement that resisted Choctaw tribal termination, I seek to expand scholarly interpretations that address only a single Choctaw position on tribal termination, or that, like Kidwell, acknowledge but only briefly address...

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael Lambert

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2 shared

• Elisa Henderson

  University of Edinburgh

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• North American Indian Prose Award
• Finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award
• National Book Award of the Labriola Center
• Best Subsequent Book Award Honorable Mention by the Native A…