Talbot, Steve 1930-

views updated

Talbot, Steve 1930-

PERSONAL:

Born 1930. Education: University of Arizona, M.A., 1967; University of California at Berkeley, Ph.D., 1974.

CAREER:

Writer, educator. University of California at Berkeley, acting assistant professor of Native American Studies, 1971-74; University of California at Davis, lecturer in Native American Studies, 1988-90; San Joaquin Delta College, Stockton, CA, retired instructor of sociology, anthropology, and Native American Studies; Oregon State University, Corvallis, part-time adjunct professor of anthropology. Previously worked for the American Friends Service Committee, San Carlos Apache Reservation, AZ, as an Indian community development fieldworker.

MEMBER:

Intertribal Friendship House (Oakland, CA).

WRITINGS:

(With Mary Ann Smith) The Dissemination of a Teacher Handbook: A Case Study, Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development (Berkeley, CA), 1968.

Roots of Oppression: The American Indian Question, International Publishers (New York, NY), 1981.

(Editor) PEXlib Reference Manual, O'Reilly (Sebastopol, CA), 1992.

(Compiler, with Susan Lobo) Native American Voices: A Reader, Longman (New York, NY), 1998, Prentice Hall (Upper Saddle River, NJ), 2001.

Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines, O'Reilly Media (Sebastopol, CA), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Steve Talbot has spent years studying and researching the Native Americans of the United States, delving into their history and also working for their rights in modern society. Talbot spent time during the early part of the 1960s working for the American Friends Service Committee, where he served as a fieldworker in the program designed to stimulate the development of Indian communities, and worked primarily in Arizona on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. In 1967, he earned a master's degree in anthropology and community development from the University of Arizona and then went on to earn a doctorate in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1974. He also served on the board of the Oakland Intertribal Friendship House, in the San Francisco Bay area. While working on his doctorate, he participated in a number of on-campus activism groups that were involved in working for Native American rights, as well as the addition of the Native American Studies program to the curriculum. Ultimately, he spent several years as the acting assistant professor of Native American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, an experience that led to his teaching at a number of universities both in the United States and in Europe, including the University of California at Davis, where he was part of the faculty from 1988 to 1990.

Over the course of his career, Talbot has written and edited a number of books addressing issues of oppression in the history of the Native Americans, some of which are general histories or compilations, and some of which are designed to use as textbooks in Native American Studies programs. Some of his titles include Roots of Oppression: The American Indian Question, Native American Voices: A Reader, which he compiled with Susan Lobo, and Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines. Native American Voices offers readers a wide range of works by Native American writers and about the Native American way of life and how it has altered over the centuries. The book includes not just literary or scholarly materials, but examples from various journalistic sources, poetry, maps, art, songs, and recordings of oral history. They address a range of issues faced by Native Americans and convey the information in an accessible manner. Christopher Teuton, in a review for the American Indian Quarterly, remarked that Native American Voices "provides a number of different perspectives on contemporary indigenous critical studies, and therein lies this collection's strength."