How To Take What Indians Say
Once upon a time the anthropologists came to visit the Indians and they collected their myths and stories and their folklore telling how one ought to live. The anthropologists collected the myths and stories and folklore telling about how one ought to live into collections, or they published them in separate books, and when they did this the anthropologists who did the collecting put their names on the myths and stories and folklore telling how one ought to live, and the anthropologists received credit, lines on their vitae, promotions and tenure, recognition for contributing to the discipline. Some people read the myths and stories and accounts of how one ought to live, and thought, how interesting, how exotic.
Here comes the first plot turn: Some of the Indians and some friends of the Indians looked at the published works with the pictures of the anthropologists on the backs of the dustjackets, and their reactions were confused and then grouchy. Anthropologists who went back to visit found cool receptions. It's rumored that among the Siletz, for example, they found a new ritual, a purification ritual for any tribal member who had shaken hands with an anthropologist. It took some time for the anthropologists to figure out that they had been demeaning to Indians--that in presenting these myths and stories and folklore telling how one ought to live they, the anthropologists, had thought of themselves as the authorities with the knowledge and they had thought of what the Indians told them as specimens about which one might come to know, rather like collections of butterflies about which one might consider their beauty and their relations to each other for the purpose of deriving taxonomies and doing dissections. They had thought of their science as an absolute arbiter and authority and of what Indians had said as material to be judged, objects to know. Indians and friends of Indians told the anthropologists off. "Look at the vocabulary," the anthropologists were told--"you tell us about science and truth, and then you tell of our folklore--and the implication behind all these words, myths, stories, folklore, is that they are false, primitive, crude, non-science, non-serious, non-knowledge. What we told you is not the same in your retelling. The context is all wrong. Your retelling of what we offered in friendship is done in bindings with your name, your picture, your science held up in contrast to what we told you. What we told you is surrounded by your apparatus. You make us look like children who know nothing."
Many anthropologists took these rebukes seriously--one has to admire the discipline for this--and vowed to reform. They thought hard about describing, about facts, and about judging, about values, and decided they were against all of it. They thought about provincialism, about ethnocentrism, about knowledge claims, and decided they were against those too. They had entertained values unawares and resolved to stop it. They took workshops. They appointed committees. They amended their ethics. They worked very hard. They reworked their curriculum. They sweated. They purified their vocabulary. They began to call the Indians with whom they worked their collaborators and culture teachers. They began to think of themselves as like the Indians. They abjured a story they had believed about science as the attempt to describe reality, and thought about it as a story, a story about scientific knowledge, and began to regard that story as no better than the stories they had collected from the Indians. They thought of themselves as among peers or equals when they went to talk to Indians. Now, rather than as modern knowledgeable men collecting examples of savage behaviors, they were postmodern men and postmodern women exchanging interpretations with their peers. The anthropologists rigorously pruned their accounts of talk that might imply evaluation of what they were being told, and so the word myth, the word story, the word folklore, all began to disappear as if they were an Indian tribe's language. They found other vocabulary. Instead of creation myths we have origin accounts. Instead of folklore we have cultural practices. Instead of stories we have understandings.
The next chapter is not such old news because it is not yet complete, but it is becoming clear that the chapter being written now is still filled with dismay. Many Indians are not yet happy, and my task here is to tell why. The why has to do with one alternative not yet considered by anthropologists because it is not yet understood by them as an alternative. This alternative is particularly hard to understand because the retreat from absolutism to relativism in the social sciences is still going on. Anthropologists have given up on a goal of one absolute knowledge and endorsed a goal of many constructed knowledges or interpretations. But in this retreat anthropologists have not made progress but have moved further away from any ability to come to terms with what Indians have to tell them. And that part of the world which depends on anthropologists to tell them about tribal cultures must wait for a different understanding, though the anthropologists are not waiting and their students are going out into the world with a defective understanding.
Alternative? Alternative in answer to what? The issue is, how are we to take the things Indians tell anthropologists (and through anthropologists the rest of the academic world)? In the face of this question, we have taken absolutism and relativism as our only possible answers.
We could tell the story above over again from the point of view of a left-out alternative. That would go as follows: the first alternative, the discarding of which is old news, is that we take what Indians tell us as myths in the old paternalistic sense of that word, much as we ourselves used to have myths back when the world was young and before we had science to tell us the truth about reality. Perhaps it is widely recognized now that this is a demeaning account of what Indians have told anthropologists, and that it is to anthropology's credit that many anthropologists have distanced themselves from this, even though perhaps the issues are not settled so much as evaded. This first one is the absolutist alternative of taking the anthropological discipline, the scientific discipline, as some kind of absolute authority over truth, and taking the myths, stories, and folklore of Indians as limping candidates come to stand before the scientific authority, granted only enough of a voice to be judged.
And the second alternative is to regard all, Indians and scientists alike, as offering interpretations of their own realities, all with equal and uncorrectable authority because we are all imprisoned within our own cultures' understandings. No longer is there a judge which is science before whom Indians are permitted to tell their accounts--instead the scientists too tell their accounts on the same stage and then we all judge only what we have told. Who are we to judge anyone else? No one, that's who. No one has a right to judge the accounts given by others. All must judge only themselves. The scientific paradigm is one world view. It has some charms, but then so does the Navajo Blessing Way and the Karuk Jump Dance, the story of Coyote stealing a baby and the floodwaters rising. No pedestal is higher than any other and no one can tell any other to change their views.
What further alternative could there be? What more could anyone want?
Anthropologists and the world can be forgiven for being baffled, for asking for more clarity, because it would seem that knowledge must be either absolute or relative. How else could we take what Indians tell us? We've stopped viewing them through the paternalistic microscope. We've taken ourselves off our pedestal and denied the legitimacy of that pedestal. We are free to exchange our interpretations.
Here's a sketch of a missing possibility--or perhaps by now it's an impossibility. I say this as shortly and cleanly as I can, but there is much more to say than this sketch. We have not taken Indians as offering arguments for us to take seriously. We have not taken them to be engaging issues. We have not taken their accounts of human origins to be backed by arguments, we have not taken their stories about how we ought to live seriously, we have not supposed they have advice or policy or insights into our pathologies, or things to tell us about how to shape our values, or what makes a good human being, or what we need to pay attention to, or how to get the world into a good relationship with us, or how a family or clan can be a source of strength, or how our landscape tells us our identity, or the divinatory nature of the world around us, or the duties incurred when we strike out in rage, or what is needed if we forget the position of the moon, or what we need to do if the birds or salmon refuse to return. Now surely Indians cannot always be right about these matters, and when they are wrong it may be hard on them, but we have not bothered to hear, to look and see, or to think about what they say. We are being offered wisdom and we used to regard it as myth and now we regard it as another interpretation. It's a mystery to me that Indians still bother to talk to non-Indians.
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John W. Powell
Humboldt State University
(707) 826-5753