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Introduction and Note on Orthography
- University of California Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The eleven chapters of this book came together over the past decade, although the idea of writing a book about the Yurok Indians goes back to my first meetings with Yurok people, in 1971. The year before, I had met Harry Kellett Roberts, then living in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco . From about 1912 until the mid-1930s, Harry had been the adoptive nephew and student of Robert Spott, a Yurok man from the village of Requa, at the mouth of the Klamath River in northwestern California. By 1973 I was spending time in the Klamath region myself, eventually coming to know a fair number of Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, and Tolowa people. It was Harry Roberts, by 1972 my own adoptive uncle and teacher, who suggested that I go back to finish college and study anthropology, so that I could “set the record straight on the Yuroks.” My casual stays on the Klamath turned into graduate anthropological field work in 1976–78, and 1 Introduction and Note on Orthography then into my 1982 doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, “Yurok Realities in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” (the present book bears little resemblance to it). I have stayed in touch with people in northwestern California ever since, returning there when time and money allow, for weeks or months at a time when that is possible. Today I continue to visit as a friend and a witness, occasionally doing some advocacy work, but my systematic research in the area tapered off after 1990, about the same time that the Yuroks became fully engaged in achieving a federally acknowledged tribal organization. Since 1993, full federal tribal status has spurred a chain of dramatic changes in the Yuroks’ material world. The period since 1993 is not of immediate concern in this book—hence the second date in its subtitle. All along, my primary interest has been in men’s and women’s spiritual training, in the ways people think about the world and act in it, and in the ways that these things vary and reemerge changed through time. Finally, after these many years, I have a good sense of what I want to say about all of this and about Yurok Indian people whom I’ve known over the course, now, of more than half my lifetime. By the 1980s, my work had branched out to include the study of the history of anthropology and particularly the work of Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876–1960) and his junior colleagues in California between 1900 and the Second World War. I have published much of this research elsewhere and very little of it is repeated in Standing Ground. Yet I came to understand that I could not write Yurok ethnography and ethnohistory without enfolding a dialogue with Kroeber within this writing. Kroeber’s influence has been that powerful, both among potential readers of my work and within ever-emergent Yurok culture itself.1 Dialogue in fact became the dominant theme in Standing Ground: dialogues between Kroeber’s understanding and my own, between Yurok and other regional native individuals and myself, between contemporary Yuroks and their historical past, and among Yurok individuals, particularly in ritual contexts. Indeed, dialogue provides a metaphorical basis both for my method and, by the end of the book, for a theoretical understanding of how Yurok culture has emerged through time. It is here, I believe , that Standing Ground pans out from a tight focus on the Yuroks (and to a lesser degree, on Kroeber’s and others’ “salvage” ethnology of clas2 i n t r o d u c t i o n [18.188.142.146] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 13:00 GMT) sic—that is, pre-1849—Yurok culture in native California) to hold broader methodological and theoretical implications for the practice of cultural anthropology (see also Buckley 1987). Standing Ground is not a particularly technical work, however. I’ve tried to keep stories and their tellers in the foreground. These stories range from transcribed tape recordings and extensive field notes that I compiled with Yurok teachers in the 1970s to my own stories about my times on the Klamath (although the latter are fewer than the former; this is not a confessional book). In part, my emphasis on stories, left to speak for themselves rather than to support distantiated analyses, grew out of and allowed me to center my inquiry on the relationship between individuals and the “culture ” that they share. Doing this, I approach...