"A Balance of Authority": Ponca Women's Cultural Autonomy through the Appropriation of the Ethnographic Interview

In 1976, James H. Howard, an anthropologist in the department of sociology at Oklahoma State University, oversaw a project to conduct cultural and language preservation research with the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma. Out of this project came the "Ponca Tribe Historical Anthology" which contains roughly 17 hours of ethnographic interviews conducted over the course a few months by unnamed non-Native student ethnographers under the guidance of Howard.¹ At the beginning of the series the ethnographer tells us that he is in the Ponca Tribal Affairs Building with six Ponca elders whom he identifies by name and all as advanced in age. The elders present, three women and three men, are all fluent speakers of Ponca (linguistically Siouan and closely related to Omaha) and are the last living persons to have specific forms of Ponca language and cultural knowledge. Sitting in a circle around the ethnographer's tape recorder-as one can imagine the scene, with old people leaning on canes, women wrapped in shawls and men wearing bead-band trimmed cowboy hats—the elders comply with every information request of the researchers. I can imagine my own elderly Cherokee/Chickasaw grandmother shaking from age and politely engaging the curiosity of the researchers. Cordial and compliant, during the first seven or so hours of the interviews, the subjects respond with stories and details about current social practices, culture lost, and one word pronunciations of Ponca vocabulary words. By the mid-point of the collection, we begin to sense the elder's increasing agitation with the ethnographer and eventually with one another. Besides revealing the inevitable fatigue of research subjects, the interviews begin to uncover the ways the ethnographic interview, as a speech event external to community social relations, functions as a contested space of knowing. Knowledge produced by ethnography and its methods is continually and extensively critiqued in social sciences and epistemological history. The ethnographic interview in and of itself, however, can be or provide a productive space where authority is reified or decentered; where power struggles otherwise masked by local custom are revealed and made evident. As Katherine Pratt Ewing points out, "The individual, I argue, is often ambivalent and caught in conflictual positioning that leave traces in the interview process as the individual seeks to both reveal and conceal at each turn in the conversation. Specific utterances, as a result, are hybrid constructions expressing multiple voices" (2006: 93).

Hilarious at times and sad at others, the recordings give a particular insight into community life. As a listener and anthropologist, in these 'multiple voices' I discovered the intersection of male and female forms of cultural authority with attempts at unevenly recognizing women's knowledge of cultural and linguistic practices. Listening to the conversations and interviews, we hear the women and men discussing topics simultaneously in either an argumentative manner or ignoring one another, and both groups attempting to muddle the recording. Changes in volume conjure images of the elders moving closer to the tape recorder to be heard over the others and the continual shuffling of chairs reveals a restless group of subjects. These strategies and movements centered around conflicts associated with who has the authority to identify the "proper" translations from English to Ponca and who, based on gender lines, possessed the authority to speak about Ponca tradition. Requests for cultural and linguistic knowledge from the elders were divided according to gender by the ethnographer where women's descriptions, translations, and conversations are exclusively solicited when the interview involves domestic topics and men's perspectives are solicited when the interview involves tribal history, ceremonies, and the confirmation of correct translation. However, as I will fully illustrate later, the women used such strategies as ignoring, interrupting, and loud talk as a means to subvert and divert the males' personal narratives. As the interviews progressed throughout the year, we see the women appropriating the ethnographic interview as an unregulated space within their tribe's physical and cultural territory whereby they have the potential to disrupt male authority.

The recordings demonstrate the ways in which ethnographic interviews...