Rietz, Robert

Robert W. Rietz (1914-1971) was an anthropologist known for his work among Native American populations in Iowa and North Dakota, as well as the highly-esteemed Director of the American Indian Center in Chicago, where he served from 1958 until his death. Rietz was a veteran of World War II and pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Sol Tax without having attended High School. In the summer of 1948, Rietz was one of the original six members of the “Fox Project” to be sent to Tama, Iowa, alongside Lloyd Fallers, Grace Gredys, Walter Miller, Davida Wolffson, and Lisa Redfield Peattie. In his mid-thirties and as one of the most experienced members in the group, Rietz left a long-lasting impression amongst his peers and the population he worked with. Gredys recalled Rietz as lacking “respect for authority, age, and all those great things,” but as a “serious person” that nurtured with his colleague Miller a “persona of wise-cracking.” Years after he left Tama, students from the University of Chicago sent to work on the Fox field school still registered inquiries about Rietz from people he had met years earlier.

After finishing his Master’s thesis at the University of Chicago in 1950, he moved with Robert Merrill to the Indian Reservation at Fort Berthold, North Dakota. The new Fort Berthold research project, devised as part of the “action anthropology” project, was meant to assist the members of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Hidatsa, Mandan, Arikara) in relocating from their lands following the construction of the Garrison Dam, approved in the late 1940s and concluded in 1953. While Merrill pursued a strict research project and left only a few months later, Rietz remained in the Reservation as the Agency’s “community analyst.” Two years later, he was designated the Agency’s “relocation officer.” Over the course of these four years, Rietz gained the respect of the different parties of the reservation, from the Indian community to the officers of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1952, he refused to be transferred to the Sioux Cheyenne River reservation in South Dakota to start a new relocation project, stating that it was not his intention to help implement official policy on Indian Affairs that clashed with his own beliefs. Despite some reservations from fellow anthropologists, Rietz managed to strike a balance between his work as a researcher and his responsibilities as a federal agent. According to Sol Tax, Rietz’s “greatest problem turned out to be avoiding moving ‘up’ to higher positions in the B.I.A.!”

Upon his resignation from Fort Berthold, effective October 1954, Rietz returned to Chicago and the “Action Anthropology” group, taking up a research affiliation at the University of Chicago. Over the next three years he pursued a close working relationship with Native American populations in the Tama Indian Project and its summer field training school. Until becoming the Director of the American Indian Center in 1958, Rietz would remain engaged in a number of other educational and health care projects meant to provide for Native American populations, including an arts and crafts cooperative (Tamacraft), and the Summer Workshops for Native American Indian College Students, of which he was a founder, both in Colorado and in Canada. In the late 1960s, Rietz was also responsible for a course on the “History and Culture of the American Indian” at Northeastern Illinois State College.