New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations

9. Native Authorship in Northwestern California

KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 211 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [211], (3) Lines: 40 to 80 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [211], (3) 9. Native Authorship in Northwestern California thomas buckley In 1976 I returned to northwestern California, where I had already spent some time with Native people, to undertake my first formal field work as a graduate student of anthropology. Since I was now there as a professional in training I thought it best to announce myself formally. The Yurok Indians, who were my first interest, had no tribal council in the 1970s (they were not fully, federally acknowledged as an Indian tribe until 1993, despite having been a federally recognized tribe since 1851). I went instead to the Tri-county Development Agency in McKinleyville, a government-funded Indian service organization, where I spoke with Christopher Peters (Yurok), who was then on the agency’s staff. I told him about my plans to do anthropological research in the area. “I won’t try to stop you,” he said, “but I won’t help you, either. You’re on your own. Maybe you’ll find people who’ll talk with you. We’ll see.” Peters paused, then continued: “We want to do our own anthropology now. We may not do it as well as white people from the universities, but we’ll do it as well as we can.” Chris Peters’s position—neither friendly nor unfriendly that day— reflected locally a growing sentiment and an incipient movement in Native North America. Vine Deloria Jr. had long since condemned “anthros” as necromancers and parasites, asking that they do something for living American Indians or get off the reservations (1969). Delmos Jones, an African American, had called for a new, “native anthropology”— anthropological research to be carried out by marginalized peoples within their own societies (1970).1 Although Jones acknowledged that such practice contradicted then common assumptions about the inability of insiders to achieve social scientific objectivity, he argued that there were important new perspectives to be offered by “native anthropologists” and that KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 212 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [212], (4) Lines: 80 to 96 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [212], (4) anthropological objectivity was not all it was cracked up to be anyway. My own anthropological mentor, Raymond D. Fogelson, had noted, by 1976, the increasing numbers of published Native American–authored accounts of their authors’ own culture histories that questioned the right of non-Indian historians and ethnographers to “possess” the native past (Fogelson 1974). Fogelson is well known for his “exasperated” formulations of “ethnoethnohistory ” and of “ethno-ethno-ethnohistory” (1974, 1989:134). The writing in his cumulative historiography, beginning in about 1966 (Fogelson 1971), gives us a glimpse of Fogelson’s characteristic whimsy, humane warmth, and astonishing erudition (from kitchen packaging here to particle physics there), which he has delighted, instructed, and inspired his many colleagues, students and friends with for years. Yet his formulations were and remain serious contributions, for all the tongue-in-cheek quality with which he has couched these concepts. And while these parodic formulations themselves are now familiar to many Americanists, it is worthwhile to outline the historiographic concepts that gave rise to them. Fogelson’s intention has been to formulate an alternative to a Eurocentric historiography that remains oblivious to native points of view as it pursues its own ends, even under the guise of “ethnohistory” that, in its most common version, is little distinguished ideologically from the received “history” it seeks to augment (1989). To fulfill its promise, Fogelson argues, ethnohistory needs to attend to native historical consciousness and native theories of history, as “embedded in cosmology, in narratives, in rituals and ceremonies, and more generally in native philosophies and world views” as well as in less obvious matrices like kinship systems and architecture (1989:134–135). Such “ethno-ethnohistorical...