Valerie Lambert

Professor

vlambert@unc.edu
919-962-1243
Alumni Building 413
CV

Research Interests

American Indians and other Indigenous peoples; Global Indigeneity; bureaucracy and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs; the federal trust responsibility to Indian tribes; federal-tribal relations in the United States; Indigenous land dispossession; colonialism and imperialism; Indigenous language revitalization; violence toward and the oppression and subjugation of Indigenous peoples; land, water, and other natural resources; tribal sovereignty; Indigenous nation building and tribal governance; the multi-continental land back movement, healing, decolonization, and Indigenization; collective Indigenous land ownership; the impact of capitalism on Indigenous peoples.

Specializations

American Indian (or Native American) and Indigenous Studies

Research Background

My first book, Choctaw Nation: A Story of American Indian Resurgence, is a story of tribal nation building in the modern era. In this book, which won the North American Indian Prose Award, I treat nation-building projects as nothing new to my people. Drawing on field research, interviews, and archival sources, I explore the struggles and triumphs of our Tribe in building a new government and launching an ambitious program of economic development in the late-20th century, achieving a partial restoration of our former glory as a significant political and economic presence in what is now the United States.
My second book, American Indians at Work: An Ethnography of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, is under review and is based upon research I conducted while employed as a cultural anthropologist at the BIA. I explore the experience of work inside the nearly 10,000-employee BIA only two generations after Indians assumed control of the agency, then became more than 95 percent of its workforce. I address the ways Native bureaucrats struggle to come to terms with the agency’s stomach-turning history and forge a new trajectory for the 21st century. Many seek a massive overhaul and reconfiguration of federal-Indian relations, hoping to replace longstanding relations of paternalism and animosity with relations of mutual respect and partnership. The stories I tell are of heartfelt efforts to improve conditions on our reservations, strengthen tribal governments, avert crises, and survive the betrayals that come from within and without. I try to bring to life talented and well-meaning but also occasionally misguided and flawed individuals who are fueled by fierce and noble convictions to create a better future for our people.

Education

Ph.D. Harvard University, 1999; A.M. Harvard University, 1994; A.B. Smith College, 1987