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Introduction
- University of Nevada Press
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Introduction Corbett Mack: The Life ofa Northern Paiute is an as-told-by (rather than -to) life history or "Indian autobiography" of Corbett Mack (1892-1974), my primary Northern Paiute informant. A "contradiction in terms," as Arnold Krupat has recently defined this genre, Indian autobiographies are collaborative efforts jointly produced by some white who translates, transcribes, compiles, edits, interprets, polishes, and ultimately determines the "form" of the text in writing, and by an Indian who is its "subject" and whose "life" becomes the "content" of the "autobiography" whose title may bear his name. [in Swann 1983:272] Another literary critic who has made important contributions to this longstanding field of interest to anthropologists (cf. Kluckhohn 1945; Langness 1965; Mandelbaum 1973) is H. David Brumble III. According to Brumble (1988: 10), the Indian autobiographer "will try to elicit stories about his subject 's childhood, because his literate, western audience expects autobiography to answer [these questions]." This results, Brumble writes, in texts in which it is "the Anglo editor, who decides, finally, what is to get the shape of his subject's 'autobiography'" (1988:11). Emphasizing what Krupat has termed their "bicultural composite authorship" (in Swann 1983:272), Brumble significantly also adds: "The editors of life-history materials almost always arrange things in chronological order (whatever may have been the sense of time implicit in the autobiographical tales themselves)" (1988: 16). By his count, more than 600 such narratives have thus far been published (Brumble 1988:76): 43 percent of them collected and edited by anthropologists , another 40 percent edited by (other) non-Native Americans. The life 2 Corbett Mack histories or Indian autobiographies of Sam Blowsnake, Winnebago (Radin [1920] 1963), Chona, the Papago woman (Underhill [1936] 1979), Don Talayesva , arabi Hopi (Simmons [1942] 1971), and, of course, Nicholas Black Elk (Neihardt 1932; DeMallie 1984) immediately come to mind. Yet for the Great Basin, and Northern Paiutes particularly, only a handful of these exist: the Humboldt River Paiute "Princess" Sarah Winnemucca's "heavily edited" (by Mrs. Horace Mann, cf. Brumble 1988:37,61) influential plaint (Hopkins [1882] 1969; Canfield 1983), factually, among the earliest of this genre; two (brief) life histories of the Owens Valley Paiutes Jake Stewart and Sam Newland, as collected and presented by Julian Steward in 1934; and that of Lovelock Paiute Annie Lowry (b. 1856), as told to Lalla Scott in 1936 (1966). More recently, autobiographical sketches of well-known Great Basin Indians have been admirably drawn by the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada and published as Life Stories ofOur Native People. This life history or Indian autobiography of Corbett Mack, then, fills an obvious void. Because I neither systematically collected this information nor ever even remotely thought of publishing the life story of Corbett Mack as such, the questions how and why this work came to be "transcribed, edited, polished, interpreted, [and] thoroughly mediated" (cf. Krupat in Swann 1983:272) by me can serve as a useful starting point. To begin with, I first went-actually I was assigned by lots-among Corbett Mack's people, the Tabooseedokado or 'Grass Nut Eaters' of Smith and Mason valleys, Nevada (Stewart 1939:143), a federally recognized modem tribe of Northern Paiutes known today as the Yerington Paiute Tribe (Hittman 1984), in 1965, after being selected to participate in the Tri-Institute Field Training Project in Anthropology. This was a National Science Foundation summer program designed to train beginning graduate students in techniques of ethnographic field research. Located at the University of Nevada, Reno, a dozen of us were trained by Warren L. d'Azevedo, Don Fowler, Wick Miller, Wayne Suttles, and William Jacobson and were sent to different reservations and Indian colonies, mostly throughout Nevada, with Franz Boas's historic anthropological mission: to collect ethnographic data from elderly informants as a way of preserving what remained of traditional Great Basin people's cultures, that is, "salvage ethnography." On the 9.45acre Yerington Indian Colony in Mason Valley, and on Campbell Ranch, its 1,400-acre companion reservation eight miles to the northeast, I, by the luck of the draw, or fate, was privileged to interview elderly Northern Paiute men and women about beliefs and practices appertaining to the collection and [54.175.5.131] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:49 GMT) Introduction 3 preparation of plant and animal foods, what I called foodlore (Hittman 1965). Having been preceded in the field by another student, I duly took note of the praise heaped upon Corbett Mack by Eileen Kane...