Sarah Dees earned her PhD in Religion in the Americas from Indiana University in 2015 and obtained a Professional Certificate in Museum Studies from Northwestern University in 2018. Since 2019, she has worked as an Assistant Professor of American Religions in Iowa State University’s Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. Dees is a well-decorated scholar within the faculty that the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities (CEAH) supports, as she was a 2020 CEAH Research Grant Recipient and a 2021 CEAH Symposium Grant Co-Recipient. Dees’s most recent professional pursuits have included teaching her course “Introduction to American Religions” and serving as an editor the journal Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief.
The two individual CEAH grants that Dees received have helped support her research on the history of museum practices related to the collection and display of religions objects. She initially applied for CEAH funding to support her ongoing book project, which is tentatively titled The Materialization of Native American Religions: The Smithsonian, Settler Colonialism, and the Study of Indigenous Lifeways. The main tension that Dees’s book project explores is how a U.S.-funded research agency attempted to produce knowledge about Native American religious traditions that the federal government was actively targeting.
“This project examines the legacy of government-funded research on Native American religions conducted by the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), a Smithsonian agency. I focus on the Bureau’s origins, methods, and the theories about Indigenous religions they promoted, with case studies on Zuni landscapes, Cherokee language, and Lakota ceremonial practices. The Bureau’s research on Native American beliefs and practices was conducted during the “assimilation era” of U.S. Indian policy, a devastating period in which many Native traditions were targeted by the federal government. Bureau contributions increased knowledge of Native American traditions among policymakers, scholars, and the general public—but often at a great cost to the Indigenous communities they studied.”
Through ethnohistorical textual analysis, Dees ultimately examines how the production and dissemination of knowledge about Indigenous religions affected Native American populations. Dees’s book will offer insights that can benefit understandings and of Indigenous religions of the past and present. The book will be published as part of the Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology Series from the University of Nebraska Press.
When COVID disrupted archival research plans in 2020, Dees turned to related projects. She has published chapters and articles on US Federal Indian policy and religion, assimilation-era cultural and religious change, the appropriation of Native American medical and healing practices, the production of knowledge about Native religions, the theory of cultural evolution that shaped Bureau of American Ethnology’s research agenda, and historical anthropological understandings of Indigenous religious ethics.
Reflecting on the role of humanities research at Iowa State, Dees states:
“On a campus that’s very focused on science, technology, and agriculture, I think that sometimes there’s less of an understanding of what humanities research really is. Much of the work that we do in the humanities is solo-authored work, and it takes a lot of time, and it doesn’t look like going into a lab and doing experiments. But we also require research support, such as summer support or course releases, that the CEAH offers—it’s essential in order to for us to do the work that we do.”
In addition to her work on the history of religions, museums and anthropology, Dees has recently begun exploring art history and contemporary museum practices. She has published “Rituals of Erasure and Transcendence: Exhibiting Indigenous Objects in Art Museums” and was invited to write a journal introduction for a special issue on Indigenous art. Dees explains, “[Support from the CEAH] provides a chance for you to explore different topics and take your work in new ways. Sometimes you just need time and space to be imaginative and puzzle over things.” Most recently, in November, Dees presented new CEAH-funded research on the Smithsonian’s Office of Historic Religions at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting.