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  • Standing Ground: Yurok Spirituality, 1850-1990
  • Thomas Gates
Standing Ground: Yurok Spirituality, 1850-1990. By Thomas Buckley. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xii + 325 pp., acknowledgments, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

There are two phenomenological tropes useful for understanding human experience: that of movement, or coursing, and that of dialogue, or discoursing. Standing Ground is an ethnographic and ethnohistorical account of an anthropologist's witness to one hundred and forty years of Yurok spirituality, endurance, and survival in the face of genocide, previous anthropological misinterpretation, and debilitating governmental land management. Embarking on the problematic anthropological discourse of human choice and agency as individuals and in groups, Buckley critiques and avoids his predecessors' inabilities to understand Yurok individual spirituality in relation to collective action. In place of previous literature that explains Yurok spiritualists as acting out infantile regression and depression [End Page 834] in minds devoid of the world, Buckley provides witness to the Yurok Jump dance, in which humans (two Yurok camps and any and all spectators) came together with the rest of an animated world, including regalia, "raising in unison the medicine baskets that each male dancer held in his right hand. As they did so . . . a great spiritual force rose from the pit to hang in the sky above" (263). Buckley's witness to this world renewal event provides readers with understanding that effectively combines the two phenomenological tropes in one "standing ground," grounded in this world.

Contrary to teleological religious interpretations that either are out of this world or functionally remain in the world but are imprisoned in subjective minds, Standing Ground, as the title of a book, the title of a painting (appearing on the cover of the book), a Yurok stance of perseverance in a world gone chaotic, and a place in which community stands in prayer to renew or fix a chaotic world, is an account that provides ontological hope that human subjective difference and human indifference with the world can be overcome. The author shares his tutelage under the late Harry Roberts, who, adopted by the Yurok spiritualist Robert Spott, in turn adopts the anthropologist, effectively demonstrating that religious knowledge transcends biological inheritance. In this vein, and done in a way particularly poignant because of my own years of personal experience as an anthropologist who has participated with Yurok standing grounds, is Buckley's exegesis of the human phenomenon of melancholy.

In step with Buckley's narrative, I recall a February night in a tiny cabin perched precariously above a ravenous Klamath River. I and my cabin, all alone, are a tiny blink of light on a huge mountain ravaged by storm, overlogging, and imminent erosion. Keeping company by listening to single-band radio telephone conversations, I hear upriver talk of the death of a great Yurok man who pitied me by spending his time trying to help me, yet another poor white-man anthropologist, understand. That stormy night, he passed to the other side, and a community's lament crackled across the airwaves. Melancholy depleted my ability to stand, yet my suffering was washed over by the community's healing discourse concerning this great Yurok man's life as it was told in the ensuing days between death and burial.

In addition to the healing communal discourse, and contrary to previous interpretation of Indian Doctors as those with tendencies toward schizophrenia, depression, and suicide, Buckley provides insight into the role of Yurok healing embodied in individuals. Yurok sucking doctors, who themselves take on the suffering of the community, obtain knowledge "through the wounding journey to the edge of the deep canyon. The journey is a process analogous to absorption in melancholia. It prepares [End Page 835] her to cure . . . by means of an affirming and communal empathy rooted in the shared human experience of suffering" (241). I bear witness to the anthropological community that Standing Ground is an uplifting account of a peoples' coursing in the world, of an anthropologist's sojourn within that discourse, and of evidence that that ethnography can resonate through cross-personal and cross-cultural empathy.

Thomas Gates
Humboldt State University
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