“Rothstein’s First Assignment” tells an important, dark, and largely unknown story of the ‘modernizing’ and ‘civilizing’ of Americans by Americans. We might have thought that such colonial practices were restricted to Africa and Asia, but ‘primitives’ in our own midst got the same treatment. The film, as it intends, makes us think about the role of ‘honest journalists,’ including anthropologists, in the dispossession of land, culture, and identity.

Jack David Eller Anthropology Review Database