Morris Edward Opler

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Morris Edward Opler

Morris Edward Opler (May 16, 1907 – May 13, 1996), American anthropologist and advocate of Japanese American civil rights, was born in Buffalo, New York. He was the brother of Marvin Opler, an anthropologist and social psychiatrist.

Opler's chief anthropological contribution is in the ethnography of Southern Athabaskan peoples, i.e. the Navajo and Apache, such as the Chiricahua, Mescalero, Lipan, and Jicarilla. His classic work is An Apache Life-Way (1941). He worked with Grenville Goodwin, who was also studying social organization among the Western Apache. After Goodwin's early death, Opler edited a volume of his letters from the field and other papers, published in 1973.

Opler earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1933. He taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and the Claremont Colleges in Claremont, California, during the 1940s^[1] and later taught at Cornell University and the University of Oklahoma.

During World War II, Opler worked as a community analyst at the Manzanar concentration camp, documenting conditions in camp and the daily lives of its Japanese American inmates. Arriving in 1943, he was sympathetic toward the displaced Japanese Americans and frequently butt heads with camp administrators, covering the so-called "Manzanar Riot" and resistance to the unpopular "loyalty questionnaire" and conscription of men from camp.^[2]

He also aided the defense of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu in their (unsuccessful) cases challenging the legality of the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, writing an amicus brief for each case that argued the military necessity cited by Western Defense Command head John L. DeWitt was in fact based "on racial grounds."^[2]

In his published works, he challenged the way American public schools teach about Japanese Americans, and fought to improve the way they were viewed by Americans.^[3]