Oral History of the Yavapai by Mike Harrison and John Williams (review)

We people don’t come from nowhere across the ocean. We were raised right here in this country. We come out at Sedona, the middle of the world. This is our home.

—JOHN WILLIAMS, ORAL HISTORY OF THE YAVAPAI

IN 1974, community activist Carolina Butler brought Sigrid Khera, a new anthropologist at Arizona State University, to the Fort McDowell Indian Reservation, thirty minutes outside Phoenix. There, Khera began her nearly decade-long relationship with two Yavapai elders, Mike Harrison and John Williams. Through the oral tradition, the two Native historians shared stories, dances, histories, and songs with the scholar in the hope of preserving them for posterity. Williams shared his knowledge with Khera “so that when he was not around, we could listen to it and it would make us feel better and help us to think in the right way” (32). It was a good thing they did, for within a decade of their first meeting, all three had passed, leaving their oral histories unpublished. Enter Butler, who, after nearly thirty years, recently completed what for her became a labor of love. The result is a fine blend of the Yavapai’s own tribal history and non-Native historic and ethnographic information.

Though the book stumbles out of the gate with some oddly short thematic chapters, it quickly hits its stride as Khera begins to tell of her sessions with the Yavapai elders. In chapter 4, the book adeptly addresses issues of authenticity in both a Western and a uniquely Native manner. Khera explains that the two elders, working in tandem, not only added knowledge to each other’s accounts, they also fact-checked the other’s stories. The anthropologist also recounts a time when an elderly relative joined in the conversations and contributed to one of the sessions. Harrison later revealed that his relation did not believe the pair knew what they were talking about and came along to verify the accuracy of the tribal history (25–26). Readers will greatly appreciate the brief but adroit passage on the general nature of the oral tradition and a small community’s relationship to their history, one that includes each member’s forbearers.

The subsequent brief chapters contain ethnographic and historical information on the Yavapai. These include information on diet and territory followed by a history of early Spanish contact. A short section touches on Yavapai attitudes regarding the inseparable link between the past and the dead with a quote from John Williams. Western estimates of precontact population, subgroups of Yavapai speakers, and neighboring Nations follow before Butler turns to the American period. Her activist zeal is evident throughout the overview; however, the reader is left wanting deeper examination of topics central to the work, such as Yavapai perceptions of the past, the dead, and history itself. The editor’s inclusion of anthropological dating of the arrival of the Yavapai in Arizona between 900 and 1200 CE brings conflict to a work on a people whose oral history begins with their coming into the world at Hahgithgyvah (Montezuma Well) within their present homeland.

Harrison and Williams’s oral history begins with the Massacre at Skeleton Cave instead of Creation, as the former was a watershed moment in Yavapai history. Fascinating, informative, and invaluable information fills the Yavapai history that follows. One particularly interesting story tells of the election of a chief, Yuma Frank, and his trip to Washington, D.C., to secure his peoples’ lands. Though the basics of the story are common in current scholarship (obstruction by the local agent, raising money to deal directly with the federal government on a nation-to-nation basis), the Yavapai history reveals the terrifying nature of the whole endeavor for the chief. By pure chance, the chief, who spoke no English, found a Mexican man that could translate his Spanish. The man set Frank up in a hotel where he stayed in his room day and night for three days...