Greg Sarris Talk

The video is long, but the beginning especially speaks to some of the questions many of you are writing about in your current papers regarding how Native authors represent issues of belonging and identity. Sarris is also pretty funny.

Interview with the director of We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee

Some Closing Thoughts on Thompson

Lucy Thompson, or Che-na-wah Weitch-ah-wah, closes her 1916 book, To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman by stating that “All classes of my people can, on meeting his white brother, sit down and tell these fairy tales as part of our religion, with a twinkle in his eye, and let him pass on” (284). For several years, the Yurok, also known as the Lower Klamath, people of Northwestern California received a fair amount of attention from anthropologists and linguists. Euro-American field researchers collected numerous tales and traditions from Yurok consultants. In a testament to the extensive work of these scientists, history remembers the names of Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir, T.T. Waterman, and J.P. Harrington as men who spent countless hours recording many American Indian peoples’ way of life. By contrast, it is rare that anyone outside of the Yurok community remembers Lame Billy, Mack, or Domingo of Weitspus; or Julia Wilson or Kate from Wahsek; or even Lucy Thompson. American Indian linguistic and cultural scholarship typically emphasizes the linguists and anthropologists who collected Native stories, words, and descriptions. Comparatively speaking, much less attention has been paid to those Native Americans who generously gave of their time by working as narrators, interpreters, and consultants for these vast ethnolinguistic projects. In many ways, this difference of scholarly attention enables a continued obfuscation of lived American, and specifically California, Indian existence by centering Euro-Americans as the originators of traditional stories.

As quoted in an earlier post, Thompson suggests that interpreting Native California life and culture requires more than simply collecting stories. Collected stories do not necessarily transmit an accurate picture of Native life, religion, or culture to the Euro-American researcher. To position men such as Kroeber and Sapir as authoritative sources about Yurok life denies that Yurok culture and spirituality comes from within the community. Lucy Thompson’s autobiography works against this Eurocentric assumption. She subverts the dynamic that obfuscates American Indian informants in three ways. First, her autobiography acknowledges how Yurok people have often intentionally or unintentionally misinformed Euro-American collectors. Second, Thompson re-works “traditional” European Biblical stories in a Yurok context. Finally, through narration, she creates an original white people who derive from the Yurok tradition; this contrasts with the Euro-American researcher who “creates” Yurok culture via collection and distribution. These three elements of To the American Indian resist an encroaching white American culture at a time in the early twentieth century when much of Native California was viewed by non-Natives as a quickly vanishing past.

It is useful to consider that Thompson’s use of Biblical stories enacts a subversion of Euro-American Christianity. Thompson states explicitly that, “Our traditions and religion are too sacred to be expounded upon before strangers of another race” (197). If we take this statement seriously as readers, then we have to question why and how Thompson uses the Biblical stories to her own ends. These chapters can be read as indictments against a Euro-American Christianity that depends upon an evangelical tradition. They could also be seen as Thompson’s way of inverting the dynamic between Yurok narrators and Euro-American collectors. Whereas researchers had co-opted Yurok culture by collecting and re-telling Yurok stories, Thompson turns the tables by collecting and re-telling the Euro-American myths, effectively casting herself as a cultural anthropologist of the encroaching foreign culture.

Even if Thompson’s Biblical tales derive from her assimilation into the local Presbyterian Church, it is irresponsible to dismiss them as not part of her “native culture.” Instead of evidence of Thompson’s absorption into Euro-American culture, the tales can be read as her syncretic combination of Christian and Native religions. Thompson’s combining of these traditions highlights the problematic dynamic that occurs when one pre-determines Native culture by searching for expected or “true” Native stories. Scientific work that pre-determines Native culture fails to recognize the ways that Native people have adapted in order to survive. Kroeber’s lamentations regarding the contamination of the authentic American Indian way of life reflect nothing more than a fantasy that occludes the Yurok peoples’ continuation. Whether a rhetorical tool, an act of subversion, or even a form of assimilation, Thompson’s use of the Bible demonstrates, not that the Yurok people are disappearing, but that they are surviving.

Much of how one might read Thompson depends upon her intended audience. In his introduction to the 1991 edition, Julian Lang writes, “The audience to whom she is writing is the local Anglos” (xvii). This may very well be true. Thompson’s own words regarding setting the record straight about her people clearly imply that this project targets an audience unfamiliar with Yurok culture. However, this notion of the implied Euro-American audience is complicated by two elements of the book. First, the title, To the American Indian, clearly indicates the American Indian as the perceived recipient of the text. Second, Thompson states, “It is now my desire, after many years, thinking, to write it all out so it may be preserved for the American Indians, that they may know something of their religion and the teaching of our forefathers” (162). Considering this statement together with the title, it is not easy to say with certainty that Thompson writes only for her contemporaneous Euro-American society. To assume so once again places the Euro-American at the center of the American Indian text. It is impossible to retrace Lucy Thompson’s authorial intention, but it is possible to acknowledge the multifaceted nature of her text as speaking to divergent audiences through rhetorical strategies that enact the sharpest subversion against Euro-American hegemony. However, it is not just for her acts of subversion or her descriptions of Yurok culture that Thompson deserves scholarly attention. Her formal and rhetorical dexterity alone should ensure Thompson’s place within American literary history.

To the American Indian is a complex work from a woman living in a complex time. It reminds both Native and non-Native audiences of American Indian literature that registering subversion against colonialism is crucial, including, and especially, when texts seem to be at the assimilationist end of the spectrum. Thompson demonstrates the ways in which Native Californians resist and survive within Euro-American colonialism. Her text also foregrounds cultural complexity, not just among American Indian people at large, but also within individual tribes. By resisting the reported scientific knowledge about her people, Lucy Thompson calls into question what, at that time, must have seemed to be the most authoritative of institutions regarding American Indian life. She complicates the project of anthropologists such as Kroeber by highlighting class differences and the Native consultant’s ability to subvert Euro-American attempts to “know” American Indian culture. In doing so, and perhaps with a twinkle in her eye, she manages to re-center the Native person in Native American studies.

Lucy Thompson & the Yurok People Today

Some thoughts on To The American Indian:

With its publication in 1916, To the American Indian stands as one of the first self-authored, self-published works by an American Indian woman. However, the text has received little scholarly attention when compared to contemporaneous texts by Nakota author Zitkala-Sa. This is in part due to the many years Thompson’s autobiography was out-of-print. However, even since its re-publication by Heyday Books in 1991, it has yet to generate a significant amount of scholarly interest. Thomas Buckley, an anthropologist working in the field of religious and spirituality studies, reviewed the 1991 re-publication for Ethnohistory, and he also includes a discussion of Thompson’s descriptions of religious ceremonies in his 2002 book, Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850-1990. Aside from Buckley’s attention, Thompson’s autobiography remains woefully under-examined.

Alfred Kroeber reviewed the text in 1921 for American Anthropologist, focusing primarily on the autobiography’s “definite scientific value” (Kroeber 220). His focus is understandable considering his review’s publication venue. Kroeber validates Thompson’s text by comparing it to other anthropological work stating that, “A comparison with Goddard’s ‘Life and Culture of the Hupa’ establishes agreements on hundreds of points, very few discrepancies, and many elaborations by Mrs. Thompson” (220). He continues, “Yurok sounds are difficult to render in modern English spelling, yet with the aid of Waterman’s recent ‘Yurok Geography’ virtually all of her proper names can be transformed into scientific orthography” (220). Here Kroeber suggests that the value of Thompson’s text lies in its corroboration of Euro-American knowledge of Northwestern California Indian culture. Kroeber dismisses the elements of the autobiography that do not match what he deems as authentic Yurok spirituality and tradition, saying of Thompson’s descriptions, “The mythology has not the same value as the remaining material: it is blended with Christian elements” (220). He praises the stories that do match his own collections and understandings of Yurok, calling them “purely native” (Kroeber 221). Though written over eighty-five years ago, this review remains relevant as an example of the on-going ways in which American Indian culture is perceived as existing within the Euro-American imagination instead of originating from American Indian people and their lived existence. Ironically, Kroeber perceives himself as evaluating Thompson’s work, yet To the American Indian constitutes a sharp and clear critique of his own project. Through her deft rhetorical moves, Thompson anticipates and subverts the prevailing cultural attitude that informs Kroeber’s review.

Thompson registers the possibility that at least some native informants have actively misled Euro-American collectors. Throughout her autobiography, she makes a clear distinction between Yurok tales and Yurok religion, defining the former as what Euro-Americans might consider fairy tales and the latter as a sacred thing, which no Yurok person would share openly with an outsider. Thompson narrates several of these fairy tales but she includes this caveat, “Any Indian will tell his white brother this story as a true part to their religion, as calmly and as seriously as if it was the truth, and perhaps some of the lower class really believe it. Yet it is only a fairy tale” (281). This statement, combined with the later image of the storyteller maintaining the “twinkle in his eye” works to deny projects such as Kroeber’s that claim objective discovery of a culture’s “truth.” Thompson suggests that the truth is a complicated entity and that at least some American Indian informants are willing to share a truth, but they are less inclined to reveal sacred cultural information, or the truth, that people such as Kroeber desire. While Thompson does not imply that the Yurok informants maliciously misguided the collectors, her account leaves space for Native people to refuse the continual Euro-American takeover of their existence by retaining certain cultural information. Statements such as Thompson’s reflect moments of resistance by Native Californian people at a time that written history asserts involved little more than the continual victimization of their lives and cultures. This alternative framework allows ways for Native Californians to conceive of themselves, and to be acknowledged, through their acts of survival rather than their moments of defeat.

Thompson’s autobiography further problematizes much of earlier anthropologists’ work by continually insisting on class differences among Yurok people and on the ways that these differences influence the knowledge that community members can and do share with outsiders. Many Euro-American perceptions of Native people and culture depend upon a monolithic idea of all American Indians. Views of a single tribe such as the Yurok are no doubt influenced by the assumption that their community is not a socially stratified group. By foregrounding the class distinctions of her people, Thompson contradicts such an assumption. Thompson’s claim to be “of the highest birth” influences her own perception of Yurok tribe members whom she would identify as lower class (xxix). She assesses the ways that class may influence the collection of knowledge about her people. For example, she writes:

Our traditions and religion are too sacred to be expounded upon before strangers of another race; therefore the white man has received most of his allegory from the lower classes of the Indians. This type of Indian readily gives the fairy tales of the tribe, such as mothers and grandmothers tell to the little children for their amusement; and these are the stories that the white man is made to believe as the true traditions and religion of the Indian. These stories are no more like the traditions and religion of the Indian than daylight is like the night. (Thompson 197)

In this passage Thompson indicts both the Yurok lower class and the Euro-American collector for the exchange of misinformation. It is possible that Thompson’s own prejudices color her appraisal of the situation, yet this does not negate the fact that the Euro-American researchers fail to register any significant differences among the people whom they study.

In another example of Euro-American’s lack of attention to cultural complexity, Thompson critiques the then current state of the White Deerskin Dance. Due to what she believes to be the lack of trained spiritual leaders called Talth, Thompson views this sacred ceremony as having been finished, or “closed,” for more than two years at her time of writing (144). She acknowledges that the dance was continuing but only, she says, in an imitation of its former spiritual significance. However, she asserts that, “the white man sees it and does not know the difference” (Thompson 144). Through this critique of the “white man’s” ability to see and know Yurok culture, Thompson calls into question the authority of Euro-American knowledge production that renders her people as monolithic, static entities whose ceremonies have not adapted over time in response to the enormous pressure of invasion.

Some links on the Yurok Language and Nation:

Yurok Language Project

Yurok Tribe

First Full Week

I've been thinking a lot about our conversation from last class. I'm intrigued by the common position in class discussion that perhaps views Boudinot so sympathetically. It's interesting to consider how we might read him now, and how our readings have to maintain the knowledge of his eventual actions. Perhaps it's unfair to judge his situation, and perhaps he really did think what he was doing was the best. I wonder, however, if we see a bit of foreshadowing of his eventual decisions within his earlier writings. Many of you noted that it seemed difficult to take him at face value and that the idea of audience probably changed everything in how one might approach his texts. I wonder, too, about Mayra's point that the fact that he didn't stay and work with the people instead of going ahead to Oklahoma to set up his own home says something about his intentions. I'm also curious about Claudia's point that his later actions seem in direct contradiction to his rhetoric of democratic nationalism. I'm not ready to join the pro-Boudinot crowd, but don't take this the wrong way. Disagreeing with me on matters of literary and rhetorical interpretation certainly don't preclude one from getting a good grade in this class. Conversely, agreeing with me doesn't necessarily result in a better grade, either. :)
I'm curious to see how y'all respond to Apess. His Eulogy on King Philip was published in 1837, the same year that Cherokee Removal was reaching it's ultimate pinnacle of public controversy. Apess is writing from New England, and even though the texts seem wildly divergent in terms of subject matter, I wonder if we can draw any connections. Here are two good links on some of the history we have discussed so far:

Film on The Trail of Tears Episode Three, Trail of Tears

Film on King Philip's War Episode One, After the Mayflower

new class blog

new blog. yay!