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(1934–2025)
William K. Powers, scholar of Lakota life and culture, died on January 5, 2025, at the age of 90. Though he recovered strongly from two strokes in recent years, Bill became immobile in his final months, and he passed peacefully at home in the company of his family.
At the time of his death, Bill had participated in Lakota (Teton Sioux) culture for 75 years. He was born in St. Louis in 1934 to a show-business couple. When he was not quite fourteen, Bill met a troupe of Sioux dancers at the 1948 International Folk Festival who invited him to visit the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He went to Pine Ridge time and again and learned to dance, sing, and drum in the traditional styles and to speak Lakota fluently. Three Indian families adopted him: the Redcloud, Afraid of Horses, and White Calf families. He earned a Lakota name, Wanbli Waste, Good Eagle. He kept a diary, made field recordings of Lakota singers, and took scrupulous notes, which reveal a disciplined mind and aptitude for cross-cultural understanding.
In 1957 he married Marla Powers, a professional dancer, who became a steadfast partner in his work. In the mid-1960s he published the magazine Powwow Trails and began authoring books for general audiences, including: Indian Dancing and Costumes, Indians of the Northern Plains, Indians of the Southern Plains,and two children’s books, Crazy Horse and Custer and Young Brave.
His writings brought Bill to the attention of professional ethnographers, notably Gertrude Kurath, who arranged for him to lecture at Columbia University and encouraged him to earn academic degrees. After obtaining a GED, he earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology at Brooklyn College and a master’s degree at Wesleyan University under David P. McAllester. Dell Hymes then invited him to pursue his doctorate in the University of Pennsylvania Anthropology Department. He completed his PhD while working for the Boy Scouts of America as an editor and publicist for Boy’s Life magazine. Bill’s Penn dissertation was published by the University of Nebraska Press as a book, the highly regarded Oglala Religion, and in 1975 secured a faculty position at Rutgers. Marla earned an anthropology PhD at Rutgers and authored publications with Bill and, on her own, Lakota Women: Myth, Ritual and Reality. As a married team with children, they were especially effective in studying social life on the reservation.
At Rutgers, Bill’s specializations in myth, ritual, language, music, and dance and interests in structural and symbolic analysis complemented Rutgers’s strengths in evolutionary anthropology and human ecology. He established the university’s Native American Studies program and with Marla founded the Lakota Books imprint. From 1991 to 1997 the Powerses conducted a summer field school at Pine Ridge centered on community service projects, which enabled each student to interact with Lakota people on a personal as well as professional level. Bill had a lively lecture style, continuous engagement in professional correspondence and meetings, and a steady publishing agenda. He was at times outspoken at meetings, especially concerning the inclusion of Native voices.
In 1997 Bill faced allegations of misconduct, including sexual harassment, from three graduate students, after admitting to an affair with one of the graduate students. He in turn sued the university for defamation. The following year he resigned from Rutgers in a settlement that included no admission of wrongdoing and monetary compensation. After a decade of further litigation, the three students who testified in the university’s hearings on the case received settlements from Rutgers after the university acknowledged “the personal and professional trouble, emotional distress, pain and suffering” that Powers had caused the students.
Through his academic articles and books, Powers made several enduring contributions to the discipline. In addition to his thorough documentation of Lakota ritual and symbol, he devised an influential classification of Plains Indian music and dance styles, explained the function of sacred language and numbers, and explored dual religious participation. His books Oglala Religion, Yuwipi, War Dance, Sacred Language, and Beyond the Vision were praised by leading anthropologists such as Mary Douglas and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the latter of whom wrote the preface to the French translation of Yuwipi (indeed, several of the books have been translated into French, Italian, and other European languages). Together his writings form much of the literature assuring preservation of traditional Lakota knowledge and worldview.
Bill is survived by his wife; sons William J. “Jeff” Powers of Cleveland, Tennessee, and Gregory V. Powers of Kendall Park, New Jersey; one grandson; three granddaughters; and two great-granddaughters.
(Daniel J. Gelo, Dean and Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, University of Texas at San Antonio)
