Coquelle Thompson, Athabaskan Witness: A Cultural Biography, and: Dreamer-Prophets of the Columbia Plateau: Smohalla and Skolaskin (review)

For over one hundred years, the Northwest Coast and Plateau have been perhaps the most productive of Native American culture areas in terms of data collected and research questions addressed. Given the huge amount of material collected by field ethnographers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the relative lateness and hence well-recorded exploration and settlement periods, there is ample documentation to generate continuing investigations, both substantive and theoretical, of the region for some time to come.

A minor genre in the Northwest is the Native American biography. These two recently published books dealing with southern Northwest Coast (Oregon and Washington) Native Americans indicate the potential of this line of research. The authors of each book have written about Native American individuals before: Youst and Seaburg have been concerned with prominent anthropological informants—Youst (1997) in She's Tricky Like Coyote: Annie Miner Peterson, an Oregon Coast Indian Woman and Seaburg in his 1994 dissertation, "Collecting Culture: The Practice and Ideology of Salvage Ethnography in Western Oregon, 1877–1942." Ruby and Brown have dealt with important personalities in both the Coast and the Plateau: Half-Sun on the Columbia: A Biography of Chief Moses (1965), John Slocum and the Indian Shaker Church (1996), and Esther Ross, Stillaguamish Champion (2001). Coquelle Thompson is based on manuscript interviews dictated to ethnographer Elizabeth Jacobs in 1935 by Coquelle Thompson (ca. 1849–1946), a Coquille Athabaskan speaker of the central Oregon Coast. Dreamer-Prophets contains two biographies, pieced together from historical sources, of the native prophets Smohalla (Wanapam, ca. 1815/20–1895) and Skolaskin (Sanpoil, 1839–1922) of eastern Washington. Working with different databases and theoretical/research assumptions, the authors approach their subjects in markedly different ways.

Elizabeth Jacobs, wife of University of Washington linguist/ethnographer Melville Jacobs, was not trained in anthropology, but she accompanied her husband on his field excursions to interview "last speakers" of many western Oregon and southwest Washington Native languages and recorded (in English) traditions of key Oregon Coast peoples. William Seaburg interviewed and collaborated with Jacobs in the few years before her 1983 death, and only now are many of her documents beginning to appear. For over forty years, Nehalem Tillamook Tales (1959, 1990) was the only monograph by Elizabeth Jacobs in print; in 2002, Coquelle Thompson appeared, and 2003 saw the publication of The Nehalem Tillamook: An Ethnography, her long-awaited survey of Tillamook culture based (as are the Tales) on interviews with the productive Tillamook informant, Clara Pearson. Coquelle Thompson's several myth texts still await publication.

Although she did not record in the native language, her three monographs demonstrate that Elizabeth was just as appreciative of native culture and respectful of the words of an intelligent informant as was her husband. In Coquelle Thompson, the editors note that "Indian consultants . . . have seldom received their due as culture brokers, as intellectuals in their own right" (xviii). Melville Jacobs's informants Victoria Howard (Clackamas) and Annie Miner Peterson (Coos) were two of these major Western Oregon "culture brokers/intellectuals"; Coquelle Thompson was a third. Elizabeth Jacobs considered herself just an "amanuensis," or recorder, of Coquelle's words. Unlike other fieldworkers of her time and place, she did not ask pointed questions or steer the discussion in directions that led to answers about topics that she, as researcher, was interested in. In Thompson's case, she trusted her source, let him talk, and recorded what he said. For an accomplished raconteur, raised in an oral culture, this was precisely the right approach. The "biography" that resulted was not so much a record of traditional ways but a chronicle of a life of...