Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North American Indian Oral Traditions

As an historian of the American West, I find myself in the unusual position of writing a review of a book, written by an archaeologist, for an audience of oral historians. But Ronald J. Mason’s elegantly provocative Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North American Indian Oral Traditions cries out for interdisciplinary linkages and understandings. Mason spent his professional years as an archaeologist among anthropologists and is the author of the highly acclaimed Great Lakes Archaeology (1981). In Inconstant Companions, Mason “addresses a fundamental historiographical problem in archaeology, history, and anthropology”: Who “owns” the past, and which “ways of knowing ” are to be validated in any given situation when evaluating the past? (vii). The book’s title fails to fully anticipate the breadth of the work’s coverage, which begins with chapters “On History” and “On Memory ” and then moves quickly from “Norsemen, Trojans, and Ancient Israelites ” to “The Nature of Oral Tradition, ” “ On the Historicity of Symbols and Symbolic Praxis, ” and “ On the Central Siouans Before J. Owen Dorsey. ”

While most of Mason’s complex arguments address the field of archaeology and use archaeological language and literature, oral historians and historians generally will find much of interest within Inconstant’s pages. The chapters on history and memory provide interdisciplinary syntheses of the debates over objectivity, use of nonwritten sources, and the role of oral tradition in relation to written, scholarly accounts of the past. The book’s treatment of oral history provides useful interdisciplinary overviews of recent scholarship that do not exist anywhere else. One of the work’s great strengths is its careful presentation of the conflicting, overlapping, and contested disciplinary definitions of terms such as “tradition,” “history,” and “evidence.”

This will be a controversial book, as Mason notes on the first page of the Preface, for the work situates its arguments in relation to the notion that there is a real past that can be uncovered and understood, if imperfectly, and that written accounts of that past provide the best conduit into history. “Different ‘ways of knowing ’ history cannot be ascribed equal ontological weight, ” Mason writes, “without jettisoning intelligibility” (31). In this sense, he will find many historians cheering him on, for the field of history is predicated on the idea that there is, in fact, a true past —the challenge is not in determining what the past is, or who owns it, but rather in uncovering the “truth” about it, which may or may not be possible, depending on the availability of source material. But the truth is subjective, critics will say, pointing to the misleading historical ideas that were themselves rooted in “objectivity” and are now discredited as racist, elitist, white, and “objective” only in relation to the evaluative questions chosen at the time, rather than to those purposely ignored.

Mason is not refuting the value and significance of native oral tradition to history; indeed, he offers many important examples of how native oral history provided important information that could not be gleaned, or understood, from the written record. Rather, he is asking for a reevaluation and critical reconsideration of the important role played by native traditions and oral history. Few professionals would dispute Mason’s argument that all sources must be rigorously evaluated for accuracy, bias, and agenda, but his underlying premise that “scientific methods” have—in some cases, at least —justifiably replaced oral sources of knowledge may be more contentious. In addition, “those accusing archaeologists of dehumanizing the subject of their discipline, ” Mason suggests, “should reflect on the possibility that the very enterprise of scientific investigations into the human past is a form of homage to that past and the people time has consigned to it” (177).

Mason’s central argument is that oral traditions “inhabit different explanatory worlds” than does “history as reconstructed by professional historians and archaeologists,” and one cannot—should not—be exchanged for another (250). They serve different purposes, and one is “scientific,” while the other is not. Oral historians will find useful Mason’s spirited discussions of the value and dangers of oral accounts. Still, Mason’s thesis depends on a common ground of understanding about objectivity, and his interpretations occasionally lapse into lively defenses of his own position. Many written sources are hampered by the same kinds of problems that Mason cites for oral accounts. Written documents may be more easily verified, but they also have their own problems, including the hidden (and sometimes not-so-hidden) agendas of Bureau of Indian Affairs agents who generated government documents about North American tribal peoples in the nineteenth-century West. Moreover, Mason’s examples and quotations are often themselves representative of a Western-Judeo-Christian, male perspective. When arguing that Native Americans should respect western science’s methods and research needs, he quotes from the Gospel of Matthew: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s ” (18). Mason’s prose, while beautifully articulate, sometimes acquires a denigrating edge, as when he argues that Umatilla religious leaders who lobbied against the scientific testing of Kennewick Man should have known better, for they were “not pre-Columbian or serfdom-bound Medieval illiterates isolated in their own time and place,” but rather “late-twentieth-century literate persons occupying important positions ” (18).

Mason’s writing is a true pleasure to read and a model for interdisciplinary works. For those who disagree with Mason, reading this book might be like showing up at the wrong party, but becoming so comfortable with the luxurious style that they stay, have an interesting time, and learn a great deal while there.