“Don’t Give Up on Anthropology” — Alumni Profile, Chuck Smythe ’70

When I first emailed Chuck Smythe Jr. ’70 to request an interview for this profile, he could not believe I wanted to write about him.

“This comes as a surprise as I am sure that there are many alumni who have done a lot more cool and exciting things than I!” he wrote back to me.

But there was a reason why I wanted to profile him. As an applied anthropologist, he has worked from everywhere from Alaska to Australia. He has researched how offshore oil development in Alaska affects coastal communities and the sociocultural impacts that wolves have on Native tribes. He has worked to repatriate objects in the Smithsonian’s collection to tribes. He has made decisions on what to do with human remains found on National Park Service land. He has worked with tribes to ensure that energy projects the White House wanted to implement would not negatively impact them or their cultural sites. Despite his humility, Smythe has done some very cool and exciting things.

Four Moves, Five Schools

Smythe’s father changed jobs several times, so by the time Smythe was in eighth grade, he had moved four times and gone to five different schools. Constantly adapting to new environments and social cultures meant that Smythe became more reserved, and he developed a “kind of antisocial approach to life.”

“It was strange … just making changes. You know, making new friends … took a while,“ Smythe said.

His last school, an all-boys private school called Haverford School, was a hard adjustment for him. It was much less diverse than the public schools he had gone to, and he felt that it was much more “immature.” But soon, he felt that he belonged socially.

“There was a time when I was kind of confronted in the locker room by a bunch of boys, and I didn’t know what it was all about,” Smythe said. “And finally, I turned to him and said, ‘What do you want to do? You want to fight?’ And they said, ‘No, no, we want to see if you want to play touch football during lunch.’”

Smythe was a good student and loved to learn. When he started at Haverford School, he was placed on the advanced academic track, but he began to lose interest in his classes.

“By the time I graduated, I barely made Honor Roll because I just sort of deteriorated,” Smythe said. “It wasn’t as engaging to me. I don’t know, I don’t know why that happened.”

Change at Amherst

Smythe came to Amherst as an economics major, thinking that it would be a practical degree and that he could potentially go into business when he graduated. But after a couple of classes in his freshman year, he decided it was not for him. After that, he explored a bunch of different departments.

“I took some anthropology in my sophomore year … I became a religion and philosophy major for a while and [then] switched back to English,” he explained.

For most of his time at Amherst, he still was not very academically motivated.

“I didn’t really apply myself and was sort of coasting and all,” Smythe said.

Though Smythe was not very engaged in academics, when he was an upperclassman, he found purpose through activism on campus.

The Vietnam War had been a source of discussion and protest in previous years, but Smythe said before his senior year, “you could also avoid it” if you did not want to be involved in politics.

In 1969, during his senior year, there was a draft lottery to conscript more men into the military.

“We all were [nervous]. I mean, the college physician was giving all of us physicals to try to find things that would take us out of the draft,” Smythe said.

That, along with the bombing of Cambodia in 1970, activated the Amherst community.

“They had campus-wide speeches and events, and there were demonstrations up and down downtown Amherst … rock throwing at bank windows and stuff like that,” Smythe said. “We used to go a couple times [to] demonstrations in Washington, D.C. [We] went to Nixon’s anti-inaugural ball. We were outside the Air and Space Museum, and we got charged by park rangers on horseback.”

“Even some real conservative professors did an about-face and admitted that they might have been wrong [about the war],” Smythe said.

There were so many protests that the school closed for the last month of classes. Smythe, however, had finally found a class he was excited about — an English class on the 19th-century novel, of all things.

“It became voluntary to go to classes,” Smythe said. “[But] I continued to go to his class because it was just so important to me at the time.”

Finding Anthropology

When Smythe graduated from Amherst, he had no idea what he wanted to do. He lived in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and worked at a library, but he knew he did not want to do that for his whole life.

There was an Amherst class on three French thinkers — Sigmund Freud, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and John-Paul Sartre — that Smythe had wanted to take, but could not due to major requirements he needed to fulfill. But he had the syllabus, and he started reading the materials at night.

“I started to read a lot of Freud and then got into other things,” Smythe said. “Started out [with a] biography, and then read a lot [by] him, and then got into R. D. Laing and ‘The Politics of the Family.’ And then that led me to a book, co-written by Gregory Bateson [and Jurgen Ruesch] called ‘Communication: The Social Matrix of Society,’ about communication conventions, language conventions, and things. And it was very interesting. And then that led me to anthropology.”

He often visited a friend who was in graduate school for anthropology at Bryn Mawr, and their conversations made Smythe realize he was interested in the discipline besides just reading about it in his free time.

The winter after he graduated from Amherst, he applied to graduate schools. He attended the University of Missouri, which was not a perfect fit for him.

“They had a lot of quantitative emphasis. They wanted us to do that, and I could do that really easily. But it didn’t really mean a lot. Didn’t feel like real anthropology, if you [just] do questionnaires and analyze them,” Smythe said.

Still, Smythe never doubted anthropology was for him.

“I never was hesitant. I knew it was awesome,” he said. “I was only limited by the school I was at, but beyond that, it was really, really exciting. [I] like being focused on something and just devoting my time to it.”

After his master’s, Smythe went to the University of Oregon for his Ph.D.

“I went there because of [Australianist Bob Tonkinson], but then he left and I found that out about a month before I was going to drive cross country to go there,” Smythe said.

Even without Tonkinson, the University of Oregon was amazing for Smythe. There was more cultural anthropology coursework as opposed to quantitative analysis, and he could dive deeper into Australia and Oceania, which he developed an interest in at the University of Missouri.

In 1975, while still completing his Ph.D., Smythe won a Fulbright fellowship to investigate sites of spirituality in Australia and their impact on people’s lives.

“I didn’t go to the field location that [I] had anticipated because when I got to Australia, I found out it was a settlement that was basically run by missionaries … so I just didn’t feel like going there,” Smythe explained. “I changed advisors and ended up going to another place and where it was very traditional … There [were] three different dialect groups that were brought together, living together in the one little outstation, one little community … They wanted me to become kind of a source of funding and they were wondering why I was there. And so I began to look [into] that.”

This experience gave him an opportunity to do long-term fieldwork that he loved. But more importantly, it reshaped what he thought he was going to do after he finished his graduate work.

“I decided I didn’t really want to go into academi[a], which I thought I did before going there,” Smythe said. “I came back and wrote a dissertation, and then decided that I wanted to go into applied anthropology.”

After he earned his Ph.D., Smythe moved to Washington, D.C., and briefly worked for the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists while job-hunting. About a year later, he had two job offers: one in Alaska, and another in Botswana. Both seemed exciting to Smythe, but the Alaska job would cover the costs of moving, and the Botswana job required approval from both the U.S. and Botswana governments before he could start work.

He had never been to Alaska, knew no one, and did not know what to expect. But he was going.

Alaska

Smythe arrived in December, in the middle of the Alaskan winter, and was struck by how different the environment was from everything he had experienced beforehand.

“There was like an inch of frost on all the telephone wires and trees and branches and everything. It was beautiful. [It] was a whole different world,” Smythe said.

Smythe was working as a socioeconomic specialist on a research team investigating how offshore oil development would potentially impact Native communities on the coastline, which had a high dependence on marine life.

“These villages had systems of acquisition and distribution of these resources after they were hunted or fished. They’re brought home and processed, prepared, and shared around the community along kinship lines, through kinship networks. And so any impact to that system would impact people, not only in that community, but [also] in communities to which they have other relationships. So it’s a spiraling effect,” Smythe explained. “Subsistence is a term now that’s very well known in Alaska, [referring] to the traditional practices of hunting and fishing and the Indigenous knowledge … that goes into it … [But] it was way before [that concept] had been developed. And so I realized that we really needed to do research into that.”

Smythe spent most of his time reading and writing reports, environmental impact statements, and other documents, but he also managed projects. He was proud that he started to hire more scholars for projects instead of consultants, because although he had “nothing against consultants,” not many of them were “trained in anthropology and really looking at soc[io]cultural systems in small Alaskan villages.”

His biggest achievement at the job was expanding the budget for a study. A typical study cost between 35,000 and 45,000 dollars, but he designed a project that cost over 300,000 dollars — and he secured the funding.

The project required six months of fieldwork, but before it was completed, Smythe decided to leave.

“It was one of those situations where I was sort of a gung-ho person out of graduate school and some people didn’t work that hard. And I took it maybe too personally, and I tried to take on too much, and got behind in a lot of things. I felt [it] was better just to part ways,” Smythe said.

But there were just not a lot of jobs available for anthropologists. After he left, Smythe started doing what he did not want to do: consulting.

He formed a consulting firm with anthropologist and Alaska Native Rosita Worl (Worl and Smythe have been in an on-again-off-again relationship since the 1980s), working for various organizations, including for the place where he just worked.

“I was missing something. It wasn’t that exciting. It was not that satisfying to not [be] able to get into anything in great depth,” Smythe said.

While he did have a couple of projects that were more interesting to him, he was ready for a change. In 1994, he moved back to D.C. and started working at the Smithsonian Institution.

Smithsonian

The Smithsonian had around 60,000 ethnographic objects from tribes in their collections, many of which were collected without consent from tribes, according to Smythe.

Smythe’s job in the repatriation office was to develop summary reports about how these objects were collected and other information about the objects. These reports would help inform tribes that the Smithsonian had objects of theirs. If a tribe requested an object back, he would work with them to determine if they could take back materials under the Native American Graves, Protection, and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).

Sometimes, the repatriation office had to be innovative. The office got requests for all the items from the Wounded Knee massacre, but it could not return the objects because they were no longer used in present-day religious practices, which was a requirement under NAGPRA.

“Our curator at the time said, ‘We have to find a way. We have to do what’s right. We have to figure this out,’” Smythe recalled. “It came down to the fact that these Sioux warriors and their families had been taken into protective custody, and they weren’t prisoners of war. So the distinction is, if they were prisoners of war, then … they wouldn’t have any rights to their property. But because they’re in protective custody, the army had to protect them and their belongings. So it wasn’t legal for anything to have been picked up.”

They returned the items to the tribe.

“We were doing what everyone else in the museum hated … which [was] enabl[ing] items to be taken out of the collection and returned [to] where they came from,” Smythe said.

Smythe noted that even if people did not like his work, they were very respectful to him and open to discussion.

He enjoyed working at the Smithsonian, but he was a temporary employee, and after six years, his position was eliminated. Smythe said if offered a permanent position then, he probably would have said yes, but now, he is happy that the position ended when it did.

“It was a burden to work … in an institution that didn’t support what you were doing,” Smythe said.

National Park Service

Smythe returned to Alaska after the end of his Smithsonian job, but after six or seven months, he became a regional anthropologist and manager of the ethnography program at the National Park Service in Boston. His role had many responsibilities.

Smythe ran the ethnography program, which documented the tribes, people, and cultures that were driven out when national parks were established. He also was the NAGPRA coordinator for national parks from Virginia to Maine. His predecessor did not focus much on NAGPRA-related issues, which meant that when NAGPRA regulations became more complex, many projects that would have to adjust based on them just stalled out. But Smythe focused a lot more on NAGPRA, and finished stalled projects. A major one was the human remains found on Liberty Island and Ellis Island. Smythe organized a reburial of the remains, and the three main Delaware tribes contributed a burial marker for the site.

Smythe also worked with parks and wrote policies so that they would comply with new regulations from the National Historic Preservation Act. According to Smythe, the law required agencies to consult with “tribes and anyone who put cultural or religious significance onto resources or historic places or other resources that might be impacted by a development project that a federal agency might want to carry out.”

One time, then-President Obama had an energy project that would run power lines across the Northeast. One part of the project would go through Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, which has tribal graves on the land. Smythe brought in two Delaware tribes that currently reside in Wisconsin and Oklahoma, but previously lived on the land, and got their input on how to implement the project while being respectful to their culture and without harming the burial sites.

Another time, staff from Acadia National Park asked Smythe to help them decide what to do about traditional fish houses that lobstermen used to store their equipment in.

“The park didn’t want them on their land because they interfered with a view of the landscape,” Smythe said. “I did an initial research study on them, and then based on that, the park agreed to do a more in-depth study. [Based on the studies], the park decided to leave it standing.”

Smythe worked at the National Park Service for 12 years and was proud of the things he accomplished, particularly of the monographs he commissioned. Eventually, he decided to move on because he was frustrated by the bureaucracy.

“It became harder just to [hire people easily] and track everything,” Smythe said. “And all this rigamarole that you’d have to go through to get funding and carry out these projects just became more and more administrative.”

Sealaska Heritage Institute

In 2013, Smythe moved back to Alaska to work at the organization Worl was president of, the Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI), which works to research, promote, and commemorate Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian cultures. While SHI does many things, Smythe focuses on the administration and research side.

Smythe just finished administering a project about the cultural relationship between Alexander Archipelago wolves and Tlingit. There was a request to designate the wolf as an endangered species by an environmental group, so Smythe hired an anthropologist to document and describe Indigenous knowledge to supplement information a Species Status Assessment was based on.

“[Tlingit will] hunt and trap [wolves], but they’ll always try to maintain this balance between the humans and the deer and the wolves, because if the wolves have been added to the endangered species list, then the communities wouldn’t have been able to hunt them or trap them, so [the wolves] would have done away with all the deer. And the deer are [a] really important protein source for these villages,” Smythe explained.

Now he is doing a similar project on sea otters and how a new regulation allowing only Native people to hunt the sea otters will impact marine life and coastal communities.

Smythe also worked on a linguistic project to preserve the Tlingit language, which started as an exhibit, but will also be online.

“150 gestures we have made videos of,” Smythe said. “And we’re going to put that online for people … as a means to help educate and use gestures as a means of … teaching English-speaking people how to learn Tlingit.”

His proudest achievement at SHI is the book he wrote: “Doing Battle with the Halibut People: The Tlingit, Haida, & Tsimshian Halibut Hook.”

“[It] sounds very esoteric … but there’s so much embedded in the hook. So much knowledge and practice, it’s fascinating,” Smythe said.

Smythe said that while preserving Indigenous knowledge was not always prioritized in the U.S., people are recognizing the importance of this work more now.

“What we do [at SHI] gets a lot of publicity and a lot of support,” Smythe said. “I mean, [Biden] issued his memorandum to executive agencies saying, ‘You have to integrate Indigenous knowledge into federal decisions now.’ So it’s getting traction.”

Looking Forward

Smythe expressed concerns that fewer young people are going into the field of anthropology.

“We can’t find younger cultural anthropologists to work for us,” Smythe said. “[Amherst], send us some interns to get people involved in anthropology!”

“[Anthropology is] really needed up here [in Alaska], where cultures are still very active. There’s a lot more cultural knowledge in practice,” Smythe said. “Don’t give up on anthropology.”