History Is in the Land: Multivocal Tribal Traditions in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley (review)

The San Pedro Ethnohistory Project is a collaborative research initiative between the Center for Desert Archeology and four Indian tribes whose ancestors lived along this ancient natural travel route (4). Realizing the substantial data about the San Pedro River Valley reflected few native voices, a team of archeologists and anthropologists designed the project to include participation from four area tribes with ties to the area—the Tohono O’odham, Hopi, Zuni, and Western Apache. Each of the tribes have “distinct oral traditions that provide an anthropological context for interpreting the history and archeology” of the valley (6). The project included fieldwork at archeological sites, research in museum collections, and interviews to collect traditional information that would help fill the “interpretive silence.” The National Endowment for the Humanities provided funding (7).

In the fieldwork, the research teams looked at how sites figured into tribal history, the specific interpretation of the site features and artifacts, how the landscape related to history, and tribal values for cultural resources (17). Museum research included recording native names and terms for artifacts, identifying functions of artifacts, similarities between artifacts and material culture items in use today, and discussions about how social identity is expressed in material form (17). The teams collected additional perspectives about tribal history in the interviews (19).

Interviews with tribal members began in 2002, two years into the project, and continued through its end in 2004. Tribes were interviewed separately. A list or schedule of questions guided the interviews. People were interviewed individually or in groups, according to their preference. Interviewers documented the interviews with handwritten notes which were transcribed and sent to tribal research teams for review. Maps and pictures, including photos of petroglyphs and pictographs of sites too remote for fieldwork, were used as visual aids. Research participants signed an informed consent that “reviewed project goals and how the information would be used”; informants were given the option of not answering questions if the answers could contain culturally sensitive information (20). Many interviews were conducted in native languages not spoken by non-native researchers. Tribal researchers fluent in the languages provided a translated summary and written record of these interviews.

Tribal members also took notes, photographs, and videotape of the interviews for personal use and for their archives. As the authors said, “We found that the Indians were studying us as anthropologists, trying to figure out how and why we come to believe what we do, as much as we were studying Native peoples and their history in the San Pedro Valley” (21).

The organizers designed the project to model a fundamental change in the practice of archeology by including traditional information in the research process. Information collected from tribal participants is described in the book, one chapter per tribe. As an example, the Western Apache identified the strong bond between themselves and the land. The Hopi said that visits to ancestral village sites recalled Hopi songs and thus their history (148). Tohono O’odham said that although they had known their ancestors lived in the valley, experiencing it firsthand was like “coming home” (93). And the Zuni made it clear that the origin and migration traditions documented by the anthropologists do not “encompass the entire history of the Zuni people” (156).

Project organizers are to be commended for the thoughtful, well-reasoned outreach to the Indian tribes and for their commitment to obtaining information from the descendant communities. The interviews are referred to as oral history (24) which can cause oral historians to look for more information about several key elements in the oral history process. Transfer of copyright, for instance, is based on Western intellectual property laws. Indigenous information, on the other hand, is the product of generations of common ownership. The four tribes agreed to participate and the research participants, chosen to represent the tribes, signed an informed consent...