(Posted January 15, 2007)

HUNTINGDON, Pa. -- Paula Wagoner, associate professor of anthropology at Juniata College, will give a talk on "An Experiment in Democracy: The Politics of Impeachment on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation," at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 17 in Neff Lecture Hall in the von Liebig Center for Science on the Juniata campus.
The lecture, which is part of Juniata Bookend Seminar Lecture Series, is free and open to the public. The Bookend series features afternoon lectures each month by Juniata faculty.
Wagoner's lecture will center on an incident in 2006 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In the Summer of 2006, Cecelia Fire Thunder, the first female president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, was removed from office because of her stand on women's reproductive rights. Fire Thunder had argued that South Dakota's restrictive ban on abortion could not be extended to the Pine Ridge Reservation and other reservations in the state. The Oglala Tribal Council removed her from office because the council considered her actions beyond her sphere of influence.
Wagoner will discuss the 2006 case and explain how U.S. federal policies on Indian affairs from the 1880s, 1930s and 1950s contributed greatly to the outcome of the 2006 political controversy. Wagoner's research centers on American Indian ethnohistory, particularly within the Great Plains tribes.
Wagoner earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Smith College, in Northampton, Mass. and an associate's degree in modern language from Sheridan College, in Wyoming. She went on to earn a master's degree and doctorate in anthropology from Indiana University, in Bloomington, Ind. In pursuing her education and research, Wagoner received many fellowships, scholarships, and grants from organizations such as the National Science Foundation, the John D. and Catharine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship at the Indiana Center on Global Change and World Peace, and the American Indian Studies Research Institute.
In addition to Indian ethnohistory, she also has researched colonial processes, anthropology of law and 19th and 20th century Great Plains ethnohistory. Wagoner also has research interests in cultural pluralism, U.S. treaties with American Indian groups, and cultural connections to place and land tenure policies in the Americas.
She holds memberships with the American Anthropological Association, Society for Cultural Anthropology, Law & Society Association, the American Society for Ethnohistory, Central States Anthropological Association, the Society for the Anthropology of North America, and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.

Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.