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American Indian Lives and Voices: The Promiseand Problematics of Life Narratives

TERRI CASTANEDA

Anderson, Jeffrey D. 2003. One Hundred Years of Old Man Sage: An Arapaho Life.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Kroeber, Karl and Clifton Kroeber, eds. 2003. Ishi in Three Centuries. Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press.

Kroeber, Theodora 2002. Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian inNorth America. With a new foreword by Karl Kroeber. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Lewis, Herbert S. with Gordon McLester III, ed. 2005 Oneida Lives: Long-Lost Voicesof the Wisconsin Oneidas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

This essay explores the promise and problematics of ethnographiclife stories as products of complex collaboration, both old andnew, between American Indians and anthropologists. Four booksreviewed here represent a range of narrative forms, historicalexperiences, and social settings. I pay particular attention to issuesof voice and subjectivity, as reflected in these Northern Arapaho,California Indian, and Oneida life narratives. I also argue thatthese life stories can and should be read as intersubjective, intertex-tual narrations of shared subject and researcher lives, as they areconstituted, and live on, through the very act of collaborativeengagement.

KEYWORDS biography, Ishi, life narrative, Native Americans,voice

Address correspondence to Terri Castaneda, Department of Anthropology, CaliforniaState University, Sacramento, 6000 J Street, Sacramento, CA 95816-6106, USA. E-mail: tac@csu-s.edu

Reviews in Anthropology, 38:132–165, 2009Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00938150902889724

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Life narratives, while enjoying periods of popularity and decline, have playedan ongoing role in anthropological research for nearly a century, lendingparticular depth to our understandings of gender and sexuality; the processesof enculturation, assimilation, and religious conversion; the life cycle; and theinterplay of culture and psychology, to name but a few areas of importance(Behar 1993; Crapanzano 1980; Gmelch 1986; sKenyon 2004; Lewis 1961;Mintz 1960; Radin 1926; Shostak 1981; Underhill 1979). In recent years, aplethora of descriptive terminologies—life stories, life histories, life docu-ments, oral history, biography, autobiography, autoethnography, personalnarrative, life writing—have become firmly ensconced in the lexicon ofethnographic forms and field techniques (Angrosino 2002; Cortazzi 2001;Plummer 2001; Reed-Danahay 2001). This reflects, in no small measure, morethan two decades of sustained epistemological focus on the relationshipbetween ethnography and the narrative form and process (Bruner 1986;Clifford 1986, 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Crapanzano 1984, 1986;Fischer 1986; Krupat 1989, 1992; Marcus and Fischer 1986, Myerhoff1982; Pratt 1986, 1992).

The term ‘‘life narrative,’’ as used in this essay, is meant to encompassthe full range genres, contexts, and forms—spoken and written—in whichlife stories and histories can be engaged as dimensions of the ethnographicenterprise. By this definition, life narrative refers not only to autobiographicand collaborative narrations of ‘‘othered’’ lives, but also to the intersubjective,intertextual narration of a shared subject=researcher life as it is constitutedthrough the very act of ethnographic engagement with individual and collec-tive life stories and subjectivities (Cortazzi 2001; Reed-Danahay 2001; Water-ston and Rylko-Bauer 2006).

Life narratives comprise a rich topographic landscape on which to mapand contemplate a host of contemporary ethnographic concerns with repre-sentation, reflexivity, and subjectivity. Vincent Crapanzano (1984) drew ourattention to the complex problematics of the life narrative more than twodecades ago, when he remarked that

the main difficulty of life histories, as fascinating as they are, is knowingwhat to do with them. . . . In part, this difficulty arises from our failure toconsider adequately both the genesis of the material out of which the lifehistory is constructed and the status of the constructed material: the lifehistorical text. When we analyze a life history, we are analyzing a text,not social reality, and this text is the product of a complex collaboration.[1984:959]

More recently, some ethnographers have preferred to re-envision thesesame problematics as potentialities, ascribing promise to the life narrativeprecisely because it refuses to enunciate the classic epistemological dividesbetween subjective and objective domains and modes of ethnographic

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inquiry (Biehl et al. 2007; Cortazzi 2001; Plummer 2001; Reed-Danahay 2001;Waterston and Rylko-Bauer 2006).

With a view to working both ends of this spectrum, this essay considersfour recent works that offer insight into both the promise and problematics ofthe life narrative. The following questions guide my discussion:

. What historical circumstances and methodological approaches shapedacquisition of the life history source materials and their translation intoanthropological works?

. Toward what analytic and representational ends has the life narrative beenpressed into ethnographic service? As a means by which to survey andrepresent a diversity of experience and voice? As a portrait of a singularand exceptional life? As a representation of traditional or nontraditionalstatuses, life choices, gender roles, or socialization? As an intimate windowonto a broader cultural landscape? As the subjective experience of other-wise impersonal historical forces or socioeconomic processes?

. How are contemporary concerns with ethnographic voice and subjectivityreflected in, or informed by, these works? In particular, what productiveinsights do these old and new collaborations yield into the long-standingand complicated relationship between American Indians and the anthro-pological discipline—and, by extension, anthropological engagement withsubjects and study communities, more broadly?

As scholars of the ethnographic life history have long argued, these points ofcomparison and contrast inherently overlap and double-back on oneanother; this is a defining feature of life narrative production and analysis(Cortazzi 2001; Crapanzano 1984, 1986; Fischer 1986; Langness 1965;Langness and Frank 1981; Waterston and Rylko-Bauer 2006; Watson andWatson-Franke 1985). I will argue from the outset that these particular lifenarratives, for all their strengths and weaknesses, should be read not simplyas contributions to the ethnographic canon of Native North America or evenas examples of the many representational genres at the ethnographer’sdisposal, but also—and especially—as disciplinary life stories of collabora-tion: individual, collective, and intergenerational.

Here, I am inclined to invoke Waterston and Rylko-Bauer’s (2006) term‘‘intimate ethnography’’ to help clarify my perspective. These narratives,ostensibly windows into other lives and subjectivities, remind us that ourincreasingly globalized world is, nonetheless, one in which intimate andenduring genealogies and webs of collaborative connection are still spunand re-spun—for better and occasionally for worse—between anthropolo-gists and their subject communities. Life narratives shape memory andconstruct moral tales about political, social, and emotional experience(Plummer 2001). The narrative process, whether ‘‘talk or text’’ (Cortazzi2001:388) works to screen and filter lived experience, casting some elements

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aside in favor of others that come to discipline self and social understandingsof the past (Cortazzi 2001; Plummer 2001). As these life stories help todemonstrate, this narrative labor is often performed anew, at each genera-tional turn of subjects’ descendant communities and alongside every refigura-tion of disciplinary sensibilities and subjectivities.

The corpus of lives and voices that emerge from these texts areAmerican Indian, but range across multiple narrative forms, time periods,and social settings. Two of these works are biographical portraits of NativeAmerican men. One Hundred Years of Old Man Sage (Anderson 2003) isthe story of a Northern Arapaho centenarian, while Ishi in Two Worlds(T. Kroeber 2002) chronicles the experience of a California Yahi man. Bothsubjects’ lives straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, but their encounters withsettler society led to radically different ends. The latter account—that of theYahi man, Ishi—is a re-release of an earlier edition, with a new foreword byone of the author’s sons, Karl Kroeber (2002). This new edition dovetails inti-mately with the third book reviewed here, Ishi in Three Centuries (Kroeberand Kroeber 2003), a retrospective anthology of 22 contributions examiningthe 21st century political and ethnographic legacies arising from the relation-ship of this California Indian man with the anthropologists and museum cura-tors in whose company he lived out his final years. The fourth work, OneidaLives (Lewis 2005), is an edited collection of autobiographical narratives ofWisconsin Oneida men and women. Collected in the early 1940s, their storieswere nearly lost to history until their rediscovery in the late 1990s.

A NORTHERN ARAPAHO LIFE STORY

In One Hundred Years of Old Man Sage, Jeffrey D. Anderson chronicles thelife of Sherman Sage (ca. 1844–1943), a Northern Arapaho man whosecentury-long life coincided with a period of dramatic upheaval and changefor the Arapaho and the Plains Indians, more generally. The importance ofthis historical period, as one of rapid change in Northern Arapaho society,figured into Anderson’s decision to tell the story of Old Man Sage, as hewas called in his later years, but other factors were equally compelling.

Sage was more than a bystander to the significant milestones andexperiences that marked this traumatic era. He witnessed historic treatycouncils, defended Arapaho territory against both Indian and white incur-sions, participated in raiding parties and sun dances, traveled twice to seethe Ghost Dance prophet Wovoka on behalf of his band, served on theArapaho Business Council, and debated Northern Arapaho participation inthe Indian Reorganization Act. At the same time, he was neither a chiefnor a ritual leader, lending a unique perspective to his story, since typicallyit is elite individuals rather than everyday people who have been renderedinto significant historical figures through biographical narrative (Angrosino

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1976, 2002; Kingston 2007; Langness 1965). Anderson’s efforts were bothinspired and facilitated by the consistency with which Sage’s words and verypresence can be tied to specific dates, events, and places in the archive ofNorthern Arapaho experience and tradition (ix).

Anderson culls his data from a wide range of primary and secondarysources, including his own fieldwork and interviews with Sage’s descen-dants, archival records and documents specific to the Wind River Agencyand Reservation, classic anthropological accounts of the Arapaho, especiallythose of A. Kroeber (1983[1902]) and Fowler (1982), accounts of the GhostDance—published and unpublished, and perhaps most importantly, fieldnotes and accounts written by a number of individuals who knew andworked directly with Sage.

In the latter category, four principal sources stand out: archival recordsfrom the 1914 Colorado Mountain Club Expedition for which Sage served asone of several Arapaho guides; the 1936 field notes and interview transcrip-tions of Sister Inez Hilger, an anthropologist who consulted extensively withSage for her book Arapaho Child Life (1952); a 1941 article and related notesby A.F.C. Greene, who had interviewed Sage in 1940, three years before hedied; and the autobiography of Tim McCoy (1977), who talked with Sage inthe 1920s about his role in bringing to Ghost Dance prophecy, songs anddance to Wind River, where it quickly spread to other Great Plains peoples.

Through these disparate sources and accounts, Anderson winnows outthe voice and story of a Northern Arapaho man whose life began in a campalong Pumpkin Creek, Nebraska—when buffalo hunts and the men’s age-grade and ceremonial lodge system still structured Arapaho social life—and ended a full century later in 1943, on the Wind River Indian Reservationin Wyoming. The Eastern Shoshone were already settled there, when in 1870,the Northern Arapaho arrived at what was to be their temporary home.Although promised their own reservation, it never materialized and theNorthern Arapaho bands who settled at Wind River in the late 1800s remainthere to this day (59).

Anderson’s subtitle, ‘‘An Arapaho Life,’’ reminds readers that Sage’s storyis just one of many Arapaho lives and experiences. At the same time, hedemonstrates that Sage’s life was somewhat singular by sheer virtue of itslongevity, which in turns allowed him to bridge and embody both old andnew worlds. He served in the late 1870s, along with many other Arapahos,as a scout for General Crook at Camp Robinson in Nebraska, then in 1914,as a guide for the Colorado Mountain Club Expedition. He was able to iden-tify plants, features, and place names he remembered vividly from his youth,thus firmly tying Northern Arapaho history to the landscape of Colorado’sRocky Mountains, and the territory of Estes Park, more specifically.

On the reservation, he worked as a policeman for the Wind RiverAgency. Here, where he spent the last two-thirds of his life, Sage’s presenceis still alive in the memories of very old people. It is also embodied in his

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descendants, in the traditional practices and ways of knowing he held onto,and in the many names he took during his own lifetime that have continuedto be passed down, according to Arapaho custom, through the generations.In the final decades of his life, Sage was a rare personification of bothpre- and post-reservation days, but as Anderson makes clear throughoutthe narrative, his biography of Sage is about how one centenarian managedold age and daily life by simply continuing to live in an Arapaho way.

At odds with the modern Western assumption that society coerces indivi-duals into conformity, Sage found no such conflict in his life. In Arapahotradition, each time one is ‘called on’ by kind, elders, or sacred beings toserve so that others may live well, one’s life distinguishes itself fromothers’. Nowhere does Sage express regret for what he had to do forfamily and tribe. The man called Nookhoos, Sage, Good-to-Look-At,Old Owl, Grandpa Johnny, Sherman Sage and Old Man Sage did nothave to struggle to define his identity. [121]

On the one hand, we see a rather practically minded traditionalist forwhom boarding schools, hospitals, and Western medicine, in general, wereall to be avoided. Yet at the same time, Sage willingly made himself availablein his later years to interviewers who wanted to record information about hislife and traditional Arapaho ways. In so doing, he left a pathway by whichAnderson has been able to contribute at least some Arapaho specificity toour historical understanding of the means by which American Indian peoplessuccessfully navigated the complex and ambiguous boundaries betweenresistance and accommodation to invading peoples. This is historical and cul-tural terrain that biography and autobiography hold unlimited potential toilluminate (Kingston 2007; Senier 2001; Stanley 1994; Zitkala-Sa 2003).

In recent years, many American Indian biographies, autobiographies,and histories authored by non-Native researchers and writers have been criti-cized as overwhelmingly Euro-centric (Clark 2007; Cook-Lynn 1999; Medicine2001; Mihesuah 1998; Valandra 2005). This same criticism has also beenleveled by some indigenous activist-scholars against Native-authored biogra-phies and histories that take the colonial encounter and its consequences astheir principle points of orientation, insisting that the successful decoloniza-tion of Native histories, biographies, and lives rests on the dismantling of a sim-plistic settler=colonized other dichotomy; after all, Native histories preceded,and have continued to unfold outside of, and despite, Indian=White relations(Alfred and Corntassel 2005; Clark 2007; Cook-Lynn 1999; Wilson 2004).

Anderson’s biography of Sage incorporates the historical realities andconsequences of colonialism and settler society on Northern Arapaholife—from General Crook’s unfilled promises of reservation lands to thefailed policies of allotment, assimilation, and reorganization—but it is notthe master narrative. Instead, he orients his work toward a more indigenous

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or ethnohistoric portrayal of Sage’s experience. DeMaille (1993:533–534),explains what ethnohistory in this sense requires:

a commitment to understanding the past in its own terms, of reading therecord of the past in a manner that as fully and verisimilarly as possiblerepresents events as they were perceived by the actors, then uses thisknowledge to write culturally grounded histories and historical ethnogra-phies. Some of these studies are better designed as chronological narra-tives, while others are better served by temporal or topical analysis.

Thus, ethnohistory entails far more than reliance upon archival documents(Brettel 2000; Galloway 2006). In its most ideal and ambitious form, it aimsto produce what Fogelson has called ‘‘ethno-ethnohistory,’’ a Native viewof history that embraces alternative rhythms of time and recognizes theimportance of ‘‘non-events’’ (1989).

Toward this end, Anderson sets forth the general life course and avail-able details of Sage’s experience as a man whose birth, childhood, and youthwere firmly anchored in an Arapaho worldview, with its distinctive notions ofpersonhood, life cycles, and knowledge. This is territory Anderson knowswell, as it forms the core of his previous book, The Four Hills of Life(2001). Gathering together the various sources from which the voice andlived experience of Sherman Sage emerge, he chronicles one man’s move-ment along and within a distinctly Arapaho life course—traversing the fourhills of ‘‘childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age’’—in as traditional amanner as possible, despite the disruption of ceremonial practice and theintergenerational transmission of ritual knowledge that would have shapedhis encounter with the last two ‘‘hills of life’’ (7).

Anderson’s portrait is inspired by the abundance, rather than a dearth, ofmaterial at his disposal, however fraught it may be with issues of linguistic andtextual interpretation (Brill de Ramirez 1999; Hymes 1996; Kroeber 2003b;Krupat 1992). Nonetheless, he fights the impulse to pack every discernable factand voiced narrative into a single linear path. Instead, he offers a series ofchapters that follow Sage through naming and lodge ceremonies, marriages,children’s births and deaths, old age, and so forth. These are then followedby shorter chapters that make use of Sage’s stories about such topics as war,the Ghost Dance, and songs. This narrative strategy allows him to bringtogether in a single source, all instances where Sage’s actual voice emergesin the historical record (xx). Some readers will find this to be a cumbersomeapproach, while others will recognize the freedom this accords Sage’s wordsand narratives to stand on their own and be heard without the heavy-handedinterpretation and even fictionalization that might have been required to fitthem into a more standard biographical treatment (Brettel 2002; Langnessand Frank 1981). A brief chronology at the back of the book helps readerswho may need to follow a more linear, historical timeline.

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In keeping with his desire to be read by a diverse audience that includesthe contemporary Northern Arapaho (ix), Anderson writes in accessibleprose, free of anthropological jargon. He also works to minimize his ownnarrative voice, so that Sage’s words emerge as the authoritative source ofArapaho culture and experience. At the same time, Anderson is not naiveand uncritical about the contexts and occasional contradictions that emergefrom his varied ethnohistorical sources, noting that reservation politics andthe uneven structural relations that characterized much of Northern Arapaholife at Wind River may well have shaped some of Sage’s words and thehistorical sources in which they are embedded. Anderson also takes thisopportunity to correct what he sees in the annals of Wyoming and PlainsIndian history as a general misunderstanding and maligning of the NorthernArapaho as interlopers and less peaceable or progressive than their EasternShoshone neighbors.

Plummer (2001:396) sorts ethnographic life stories into three categories.Naturalistic life stories are those ‘‘naturally occurring’’ in life and as yetunshaped by social scientific analysis; they ‘‘happen in situ’’ and range fromelderly reminiscences to criminal confessions to conversations between jobapplicants and employers. The researched life story is one that requiresassembly by a researcher and would not exist without such effort. Plummerincludes collaboratively constructed life stories here, and cites the story ofRigoberta Menchu (1984) as illustrative of this category. While the work pre-sents as an autobiographical account, the role of Burgos-Debray was centralto its production. The final category is the reflexive or recursive life story.Autoethnography and related forms that are conditioned by a heightenedawareness of narrative production and textual self-consciousness aregrouped here (396).

Anderson’s biographical portrait of Sage is clearly a researched life storyand vulnerable to many of the classic problematics that have come to beassociated with historical reconstructions of American Indian lives (Galloway2006; Mihesuah 1998; Valandra 2005). For instance, Anderson never met hissubject; his source material was principally that of the anthropologist InezHilger, who elicited life history material from a non-English speaking andelderly Sage, whose own sense of subjectivity and degree of collaborativedesire is difficult to ascertain or evaluate.

On the other hand, Anderson is straightforward in his own admission ofthese problems. Hilger’s interviews were conducted with help of an inter-preter and subsequently edited. Where discrepancies between her field notesand the interpreter’s original translations appear, Anderson uses the latter(ix). He also tried to mitigate some interpretive pitfalls by bringing a varietyof Native and non-Native, anthropological and journalistic, reservation andnon-reservation, sources into concert with the Hilger material and the mem-ories of Sage shared by his descendants. Perhaps most importantly, he closesthe text with a very brief but intimate glimpse onto his own sentimentality

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toward ‘‘Old Man Sage,’’ whose portrait has hung on Anderson’s wall since1994, when he left Wind River. ‘‘After living with him every day for a fewyears, I started putting his words together for this book’’ (122).

It is too soon to know how this biography will be received by the gen-erations of Arapaho men and women who will read it in the years to come,although the story of Nick Black Elk might be somewhat instructive here.Black Elk (1863–1950) was a widely traveled Lakota medicine man and—in later years—a convert to Christianity, whose life and prophetic visionswere made famous by the poet John G. Neihardt in Black Elks Speaks(1932), and to a lesser extent in When the Tree Flowered (1951). The colla-borative process, the personal relationship between the two men (and theirfamilies), the multiple linguistic and literary translations and publicationsthemselves, have been subjected to some of the most sustained and criticalanalysis in the annals of American Indian history, literature, and biography(Deloria 1979; DeMaille 1984; Holler 2000). For instance, William Powers(1990:146) argues that while Black Elk’s personage and prophecy haveplayed seminal roles in cultural and spiritual revitalization for non-reserva-tion Lakota, his impact and importance on the Pine Ridge Reservation itselfhave been minimal, in keeping with the nature of traditional Lakota doctrine:‘‘medicine men do not rise above each other. . . . to have a book written aboutthem extolling their virtues above others is unthinkable’’ (cf. Deloria 1979;Stover 2000).

While Black Elk may have attained mythic status through sharing hisstory with Neihardt, Anderson’s ambitions for Sherman Sage’s memory andlegacy among the Northern Arapaho are decidedly more modest. However,as Watson and Watson-Franke (1985) remind us, Ricoeur understood one ofthe primary problems of the text to be its discursive form. The distinctionbetween authorial intention and reader interpretation is critical here: oncethe former is ‘‘fixed as text, that discourse escapes the finite horizon of theauthor, and what the text says now matters more than what the author meantto say’’ (1985:47).

The story of Ishi as narrated by Theodora Kroeber (2002[1961]) providesa classic example of the problematics associated with the discursive quality ofthe biographical text. I begin with a review of the biography itself, and thendiscuss reader reception and reanalysis in the highly charged, emotional, andpolitical context of the late 20th century, when California Natives peopleswere engaged in a struggle to locate Ishi’s brain and have it repatriated(Hinton 2001; Scheper-Hughes 2003; Starn 2004).

ISHI—A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR

While most of the early anthropologists who worked in late 19th centuryCalifornia were museum professionals and natural historians, the bulk of

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those who came after were professionally trained as doctoral students byAlfred Kroeber. Kroeber came to California as a newly minted Ph.D., the firstdoctoral student to graduate from Franz Boas’s anthropology program atColumbia University. He was also fresh from three summers of ethnographicfieldwork (1899–1901) that included visits to the Northern Arapaho at WindRiver, and the Southern Arapaho bands in Oklahoma (Kroeber 1983). Thisresearch, funded by the American Museum of Natural History where Boasheld a curatorial position, resulted in Kroeber’s 1901 dissertation on Arapahodecorative symbolism. Material culture became an important component ofthe work he undertook in 1901, when he accepted the position of instructorfor the Department and curator for the new Museum of Anthropology at theUniversity of California (Jacknis 2002).

It was from this position that his renown as an anthropologist and experton California Native cultures developed and spread across the regional andprofessional landscapes. Thus it is no surprise that on August 29, 1911, whenthe San Francisco Call ran a photograph and story about an Indian ofunknown origins being held in a jail cell in the small town of Oroville, some70 miles north of Sacramento, Alfred Kroeber, and his young colleagueT. T. Waterman, took notice. Two days later Kroeber telegraphed the sheriffto confirm that he understood the situation correctly: ‘‘Newspapers reportcapture wild Indian speaking language other tribes totally unable to under-stand. . .if story correct hold Indian till arrival Professor State University willtake charge and be responsible for him.’’ A final line discloses what hismotivations toward this Indian man were all about: ‘‘Matter importantaccount aboriginal history’’ (T. Kroeber 2002:6).

This telegram set into motion a series of encounters and experiencesthat have yet to play out the full range of historical and political conse-quences. When Theodora Kroeber, Alfred Kroeber’s wife, reproduced thetext of this fateful telegram in Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the LastWild Indian in North America (2002[1961]), she could hardly have antici-pated the emotional firestorm that would erupt in the early 21st centuryaround her husband’s decision to bring this California Indian man to SanFrancisco to interview and live out the last years of his life. When Ishi wasdiscovered by butchers in the corral of their Oroville slaughterhouse, hewas ‘‘emaciated to starvation, his hair was burned off close to his head,he was naked except for a ragged scrap of ancient covered-wagon clothhe wore around his shoulder like a poncho’’ (3).

Waterman traveled to Oroville by train, arriving the very same day asKroeber’s telegram, carrying with him a vocabulary of words that had beencollected from speakers of Northern and Central Yana dialects. After consid-erable effort to communicate using the Yana vocabulary, Waterman had abreakthrough. Ishi, as it turns out, was Yahi, the last speaker of the southern-most dialect of the Yana—one Kroeber thought had already become extinct.Waterman wrote to Kroeber from Oroville, ‘‘Phonetically, he has some of the

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prettiest cracked consonants I ever heard in my life. He will be a splendidinformant, especially for phonetics, for he speaks very clearly (7). A ‘‘splen-did informant’’ he did indeed become. Kroeber provided Ishi with perma-nent living quarters at the museum, housed at that time in a four-storybuilding on Parnassus Heights in San Francisco—the University’s old lawschool—located directly across from the Medical School. His room hadearlier housed other Indian visitors to the Museum who had come to workas cultural informants for several days at a time. Museum caretakers also livedonsite, protecting the valuable collections that had yet to be opened to thepublic, an event that took place within weeks of Ishi’s arrival, and at whichhe made one of many public appearances (134).

The first half of Kroeber’s biography sets the stage for Ishi’s appearancein Oroville. The second half chronicles the four years and seven months hespent in San Francisco and its immediate surrounds, where he became acelebrity of sorts. Before an equally fascinated general public and communityof anthropologists who romantically longed for a pre-contact vision ofCalifornia aboriginal life, he fashioned bows and arrow shafts, knappedarrowheads and other tools of obsidian and glass, recorded Yahi songsand stories, rode street cars around the city, earned and saved a small fortuneworking in various capacities at the Museum, visited local bakeries and mar-kets, learned to cook himself a simple repast on the museum’s gas stove, andtook walks in San Francisco parks and on the undeveloped lands aroundBerkeley, where the University classrooms were located and the Watermanfamily lived.

Beyond the company he kept with anthropologists, curators, and custo-dians, Ishi regularly spent time with Dr. Saxton Pope, a physician associatedwith the nearby medical school and hospital. The two men formed a strongbond that Theodora Kroeber suggests was likely based on their shared inter-ests in archery and healing (152–153). Ishi would have had particular respectfor this latter realm of knowledge and talent given the important roleaccorded to doctoring in his own society.

Unfortunately, his friendship with Pope facilitated not only the opportu-nity to observe surgeries and the like, but also his ability to roam freelyaround the hospital in an era when tuberculosis was a prevalent and deadlypathogen. Kroeber’s first wife had died of this disease shortly after he metIshi, and it would claim Ishi’s own life on March 25, 1916, while Kroeberwas away on sabbatical in Europe and New York. During his absence,Kroeber maintained communication with both Waterman and EdwardGifford, the curator he left in charge of the museum. When he learned ofIshi’s impending death, Kroeber wrote to Gifford reminding him of theirprior agreement that Ishi’s body was not to be autopsied nor were his bonesto be added to the museum’s skeletal collections which, Kroeber noted in amoment of anthropological candor, already numbered in the hundreds, yet‘‘nobody ever comes near to study’’ (235). However, when Ishi’s death came,

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these wishes were only partially realized; Saxton Pope conducted an autopsyand Ishi’s ‘‘brain was preserved’’ (235).

Theodora’s narrative ends with Ishi’s death. However, some eightyyears later, Kroeber’s decision to forward Ishi’s brain to the SmithsonianInstitution after he returned from sabbatical to find it encased in a specimenjar and awaiting some final deposition, came back to cast a pall over hisprofessional legacy, the Berkeley Department and Museum, the professionof museum anthropology at-large, and most especially, an already fru-strated and long-suffering California Native community (LaDuke 2005; Starn2004). The story of Ishi’s brain and the struggle to locate and have it repa-triated brought renewed scrutiny to bear upon the biographical narrativethat Theodora Kroeber had penned. It called into question not only hercharacterizations of Ishi’s life and subjectivity during his years at themuseum, but seemingly, on a much larger scale, the future of any pro-ductive relationship between contemporary anthropology and CaliforniaIndian communities (Starn 2004).

While Alfred Kroeber read his wife’s manuscript just months before hedied in October of 1960, it was at the encouragement of California archaeol-ogist Robert Heizer—Kroeber’s protegee and colleague—that Theodoradecided to undertake the project of chronicling Ishi’s life. Heizer’s urgingcame at the close of his own long and arduous years of preparing and deli-vering testimony on behalf of California Indians before the Indian ClaimsCommission, with the now elderly Alfred Kroeber by his side (Kroeber2002). The research for this task was monumental and sobering, to say theleast. California’s aboriginal populations had been decimated by disease, vio-lence, and disenfranchisement from their lands and means of subsistence.The gold rush, followed by land-hungry farmers and ranchers, brought indi-genous populations to their knees by all manner of direct and indirect force;this is well documented in local newspaper and archival accounts from themid- through late-1800s (Hurtado 1993). The plight of Ishi, the last memberof his band to survive the decades of savagery that had been practiced uponNorthern California Indians generally, and the Yana very specifically, nodoubt brought a very personal tone to Kroeber’s testimony.

The story Theodora Kroeber recounts is still shocking on multipleplanes of sensibility, even five decades after its initial release. Hers wasone of the first accounts to bring the racism and genocide of the late 1800sto a popular audience. She wrote with skill and grace, recounting detailsof Ishi’s, Waterman’s, Pope’s, and Kroeber’s lives that might otherwise havelargely gone unrecorded had she not produced a biography of Ishi. Shepresents a poignant portrait of this man, who having been completely andviolently dispossessed of nearly everything but his life and his language,nonetheless managed to adapt to an entirely new environment with skilland dignity. Her narrative gives us a strong sense of the humor and curiositythat clearly helped to animate his post-Oroville life.

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But Theodora Kroeber, who never knew Ishi, also infused her story withspeculative and romantic imaginings about his personal feelings andresponses to his own condition (125, 150, 210, 229). At times she qualifiesthese poetic imaginings well enough, but at others, she clearly gives herpen over to representations of his emotional well-being that neither shenor Alfred Kroeber could have known for certain, and that inevitably erron the side of casting a positive and sensitive light on her husband andthe living and work arrangements he provided for Ishi (151, 205). Was hereally contented and better off in the museum than he might have beenhad he been re-settled into another Native community or on a reservation?Was he commodified, patronized, and exploited as a live museum exhibit?Overworked by zealous ethnographers and linguists? Knowing as they did,that Native Americans were particularly vulnerable to tuberculosis and otherdeadly pathogens of the day, how could Pope—a physician—and Kroeber—whose own wife had died of tuberculosis—allow him to frequent a hospitaland the bedside of patients who had TB? What were they thinking? These arejust a handful of the criticisms and interrogations to which TheodoraKroeber’s narrative and the individuals associated with it have beensubjected in the past decade—both before and after newspaper headlinesacross the county brought the contemporary disposition of Ishi’s preservedbrain into the national spotlight (Adams 2003; Biestman 2003; Huhndorf2001; LaDuke 2005; Starn 2004; Thomas 2000; Weaver 2003).

Karl Kroeber (2002) responds to some of these concerns and condem-nations in ‘‘Ishi in Two Worlds: Forty Years Later,’’ the new Foreword tohis mother’s now classic book. In particular, he reminds readers that newcontexts and standards for historical understanding emerge with each newgeneration, something of which he believed his mother to have been highlycognizant. ‘‘She recognized her telling to be but one version, one perspec-tive, because historical circumstance and personal interest inevitably deter-mine how any past event is perceived and assessed’’ (xix). He argues thather ‘‘writerly’’ inclinations to develop Ishi’s personality and psyche for thereader were sufficiently held in check by an appreciation of what she clearlycould not know. ‘‘Her account of Ishi, though never superficial, never deniesan ultimate core of which we know nothing. . . . Again and again she suggestspossibilities without asserting the kind of definitive conclusions common inmany later commentaries by both Indians and whites’’ (xiv).

While he argues that she did not definitively ascribe feelings to Ishi, KarlKroeber does concede that his mother understood ‘‘the writing of history isfinally an imaginative act, and that the holism of narrative is the only mode ofdiscourse able to account for both the coherence and contingencies that con-stitute specific human experiences. . . . the full historicity of any person canbe recovered only through some imaginative understanding of that person’sindividualized wholeness’’ (xv). This ‘‘imaginative understanding’’ wasclearly appreciated by Samuel Barrett (1962:393), who reviewed the newly

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released book for American Anthropologist, praising it for ‘‘its record of psy-chological reactions.’’

But anthropologists like Barrett, who had already spent a lifetime work-ing among California Indian peoples, and knew intimately the sad history oftheir encounter with settler society, were not Theodora’s intended audience.Neither was her aim to represent Yahi culture or society; this was the realmof Ishi and the anthropologists with whom he interacted (152). Her goalwas to bring to the public a portrait of this man whose plight was iconic ofthe social and economic disenfranchisement and human suffering that Califor-nia Indians had endured. The extraordinary circumstances of his later years inSan Francisco provided her narrative with a sensational and engaging plotlineand helped to popularize both her husband’s work and the field of anthropol-ogy, but her telling of Ishi’s life story did serve to educate a public still largelyignorant of the history and conditions of California Native peoples.

Kroeber intended the first half of her text, with its story of private militiaand vigilante ranchers, to represent northern California Indian experiencewrit large. But, with the passage of time, including the enactment of NativeAmerican Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) legislation andthe saga of Ishi’s brain, it is the latter half of her text—the story of Ishi’s lifein the museum and his role as a cultural informant—that has come to be readand critiqued as emblematic of California Indian and Native American experi-ence with anthropology and museums, writ large (K. Kroeber 2002, 2003a;LaDuke 2005; Scheper-Hughes 2003; Starn 2004; Thomas 2000; see also Bray2001; Harper 2000).

ISHI AND KROEBER IN RETROSPECT: REMAKING AND MAPPINGOLD NARRATIVES ANEW

Ishi in Three Centuries, co-edited by Karl Kroeber and Clifton Kroeber(2003), sons of Theodora and Alfred, brings a variety of voices and perspec-tives on Ishi’s life story into dialogue with one another. The title of thevolume plays off Theodora’s title, Ishi in Two Worlds, and explores theimpact that Ishi’s life and memory have had, from the precarious 19th centuryworld of fear and hiding into which he was born, to the dawn of the 21stcentury, when his remains were repatriated and finally laid to rest in his ances-tral homelands (Starn 2004). The volume includes 22 essays organized in fiveparts: ‘‘Ishi in San Francisco,’’ ‘‘The Repatriation of Controversy,’’ ‘‘Ishi’s WorldRevisited,’’ ‘‘Ishi’s Stories,’’ and ‘‘Ishi as Inspiration.’’ An appendix containingan excerpt from the report ‘‘The Condition of California Indians, 1906,’’ byBureau of Indian Affairs Special Agent C. E. Kelsey, is an especially valuableaddition to the book, as it provides a primary source window onto the stateof California’s indigenous peoples just a few short years before Ishi cameout of hiding—frightened, starving, and absolutely alone.

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Part One, ‘‘Ishi in San Francisco’’ (3–64), adds new dimensions to Ishi’slife and the social milieu in which he lived. This section is comprised of fouressays and an introduction by Clifton Kroeber (2003), who also addresses atopic of lingering concern for many who have read Theodora’s biography orheard Ishi’s story: under what circumstances did the Museum become a finalhome to Ishi? Correspondence between Kroeber, the Commissioner ofIndian Affairs in Washington, D.C., and Special Agent C. E. Kelsey whovisited with Ishi at the Museum in September 1911, and then later at hisown home in San Jose, seems to bear out the claim that considerable effortwas made to determine the best possible options for Ishi.

Kelsey had surveyed the poor conditions of Northern California’s fewreservations and rancherias (small, collectively owned and occupied home-steads purchased by the federal government in the early decades of the20th century in an effort to provide housing for California’s many landlessIndians). He knew these living conditions were deplorable. Given Ishi’sseemingly satisfactory adjustment to the museum, stated desire to continueliving there, and Alfred Kroeber’s efforts to help him become at least partiallyself-supporting through odd jobs around the museum, he saw no reason toforce his removal.

It is clear from Clifton Kroeber’s archival research and related essay(2003) that then as now, a fair number of individuals worried about whetheror not Ishi was being properly cared for. To the extent that anyone had anyreal grasp of Ishi’s desires or the realities offered by alternative possibilities,he apparently was, even if some motivation for this involved a kind of ‘‘intel-lectual property’’ rights protection on the part of Kroeber (Hinton 2001).

The most charming and enlightening contribution in this group is aremembrance of Ishi written in the 1960s to Theodora Kroeber followingthe publication of her book. As a young boy, Fred H. Zumwalt, Jr. (2003)lived in the Presidio area of San Francisco and played with Ishi, makingtoy bows and arrows, stalking ducks on the lake, and learning to walksilently in the woods. Zumwalt’s parents often drove the two of them totown, including the state fair one year, where Ishi saw a movie of himself.

The popular construction and consumption of Ishi’s image and personawas a complex phenomenon that Alfred Kroeber struggled mightily to con-trol during the Yahi man’s early years in San Francisco. As Rachel Adams(2003) demonstrates, the journalistic and popular envisioning of Ishi as astone age relic in the midst of modernity bothered Kroeber not only for itsfactual inaccuracy, but also because it challenged the still fragile authorityand professional boundary he was building around the new discipline ofanthropology. Jace Weaver’s (2003) contribution provocatively situates Ishi’sexperience as museum spectacle within the comparative frame of otherexhibited indigenous people, from Minik to ‘‘Wild West Indians’’ to Ota,an African pygmy on display alongside Geronimo at the 1904 World’s Fair.Grace Wilson Buzaljko (2003) offers compelling historical evidence that

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Kroeber was deeply troubled for many years over the death of Ishi andPope’s cavalier treatment of his remains.

The six essays in Part Two (65–154) refract the issues, stories, andemotions that swirled around the 1999 discovery that Ishi’s brain was floatingin a common tank of preserved brains in the Smithsonian’s warehouse inSuitland, Maryland. This was breaking news on several levels.

Although Theodora’s book documents Pope’s action in removing thebrain, many Native and non-Native people alike had forgotten—or likelynever known in the first place—that Ishi’s brain had been kept as an artifactof museum science. In the mid-1990s, Art Angle, Concow Maidu and Chair ofthe Butte County Native American Cultural Committee (BCNACC), began asearch for the brain as part of a broader effort to have Ishi’s ashes repatriated.Around this time, he also met Duke anthropologist Orin Starn, who wasresearching and writing about Ishi. Starn, with the help of Nancy Rockafeller,a medical historian at the University of California, San Francisco, soughtarchival clues as to the whereabouts of Ishi’s brain. Although Rockafellerfound no records, she was led by one individual associated with theSmithsonian Institution to believe that the brain might be in the possessionof Berkeley’s Anthropology Museum, information she passed on to Starnand the BCNACC, who made a formal request for repatriation. The Museumconducted a fruitless search and declared its doubt that the brain still existedas a specimen.

In 1999, while conducting research at the Bancroft Library where thehistorical records of the Anthropology Department’s archives are curated,Starn finally located correspondence documenting that the brain had notbeen retained by the Museum, but rather, sent by Kroeber to the Smithsonianand then formally accessioned into its collections (Hinton 2001). Angle andthe BCNACC immediately began efforts to have it repatriated, along withIshi’s cremated remains, which were resting in a Puebloan pottery urn atMt. Olivet Memorial Park in San Francisco. Stuart Speaker (2003), repatriationofficer for the Smithsonian Institution, penned the formal report and recom-mendations for repatriation of the brain. He also outlined the various eviden-tiary findings that resulted in the repatriation of Ishi’s remains.

The tragic history of the Yana led to the virtual destruction of the tribe andthe deaths of nearly all its members. Although the Yana tribe no longerexists as a social unit, and although people of Yana descent are scatteredamong several federally recognized tribes in northern California, as wellas among the unrecognized Native Americans, the Yana legacy continuesto be a vital part of the Redding Rancheria and the Pit River Tribe. [Speaker2003:84]

Political and emotional turmoil rocked the Berkeley AnthropologyDepartment in 1999 when the news broke that Ishi’s brain had been donated

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to the Smithsonian. The faculty was fractured along two general lines: thosewho attributed Kroeber’s actions to an alternately grieving and practicallyminded man and those who believed the act transcended any personal orhistorical specificity and demanded a departmental apology to NorthernCalifornia Indian communities with no excuses or qualifications whatsoever(Foster 2003; Scheper-Hughes 2003). In the final analysis, compromise lan-guage was reached for a letter of apology that appeared in AnthropologyNews (Brandes 2003).

In ‘‘Ishi’s Brain: Ishi’s Ashes,’’ Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2003) reflectsupon her own response of deep disappointment and pain, and upon theshifting standards of anthropological ethics and scientific objectivity, notingthat Kroeber was neither the first nor last anthropologist (counting herselfamong many others) to make choices that later generations might be quickto condemn. But while granting that Kroeber must be understood in hisown era, she also reminds us that contexts of genocide and ethnocide arenot merely facts of the ethnographic past and calls for a public anthropologythat recognizes and writes against such actions.

Karl Kroeber’s (2003a) contribution to this section, ‘‘The Humanity ofIshi,’’ was first delivered at Berkeley’s ‘‘Anthropology of the Body Confer-ence,’’ held in September 2002. That lecture was animated by deep angerand frustration over the negative, and to his mind presentist, interpretationsof his parents’ actions and motives in working with and writing about Ishi.Karen Biestman’s (2003) essay closes out this section by raising a host oflingering and unanswered questions about Ishi, Kroeber, and Theodora’sportrait of the two. She also offers a thoughtful appraisal of the repatriationprocess that unfolded around Ishi, rightly noting that ‘‘Ishi has personalizedthe debate between research and human interests and challenged scientiststo think and act beyond institutional boundaries’’ (Biestman 2003:153).

The next two sections of the book bring forward new discussions,interpretations, and analyses of the rich corpus of ethnographic material thatIshi produced in his museum demonstrations and as a cultural and linguisticinformant. Part Three, ‘‘Ishi’s World Revisited’’ (157–158), includes a re-analysis of Ishi’s stone tool technology (Shackley 2003), a discussion of theSpanish words in Ishi’s vocabulary (Starn 2003), and an analysis of the manyfield notes Edward Sapir recorded during his linguistic work with Ishi (Golla2003). These essays delve into timely questions of Ishi’s social, cultural, andlinguistic origins, unsettling the essentialized notions that adhere in theromantic identification of Ishi as ‘‘the last Yahi’’ (Heizer and Kroeber1981), an ancestral affiliation ascribed to Ishi that may well belie the intercul-tural nature of the ravaged social landscape into which he was born (Luthinand Hinton 2003a, 2003b; Shackley 2003).

The essays grouped under Part Four (228–354) expand upon this topicthrough an impressive illumination of ‘‘Ishi’s Stories.’’ These bring tremen-dous substantive insight into Ishi and his world, with several of them also

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reading like historical ethnographies of the production of anthropologicalknowledge. For instance, Ira Jacknis (2003) focuses upon the 148 waxcylinder recordings of Ishi’s voice, songs, and Yahi tales, reminding us ofthe limits and possibilities of these as reflections of Yahi culture and as a oncenew medium for sound recording and preservation. Jean Perry (2003) trans-lates two of Ishi’s Yahi tales, guiding her readers through the narrative meansby which the human and supernatural realms were made to unfold and takemeaningful shape in Ishi’s and many California Indian stories. Two separateessays co-authored by Herbert Luthin and Leanne Hinton, ‘‘The Story ofLizard’’ (2003a) and ‘‘The Days of a Life: What Ishi’s stories can tell us aboutIshi’’ (2003b) are absolutely spell-binding, not only for what they revealabout Ishi’s repertoire of stories, their substantive content, and the varyingdegrees of facility with which he deployed the classic conventions of oralnarrative, but also for the fascinating methodological window they open ontothe scholarly practice and craft of linguistic anthropology.

The final series of essays are gathered under the heading ‘‘Ishi as Inspira-tion.’’ Contributions by Justice Gary Strankman (2003), Gerald Vizenor (2003),Louis Owens (2003), Rebecca Dobkins (2003), and artist Frank Tuttle (2003)provide a small sampling of the powerful role that Ishi has played as a sourceof inspiration and symbol of resistance among contemporary California Indiansand other Native Americans. The essays by Gary Strankman, Gerald Vizenor,and Louis Owens give contemporary voice and expression to the raw mix ofAmerican Indian anger, ambivalence, and admiration that has come to beassociated with Ishi’s post-Oroville life and death. All three writers unpackthe ironies and symbolic meanings that have come to be attached to Kroeber’schoice of ‘‘Ishi’’ as a name for this man who would never divulge his Yahi iden-tity, thus ensuring his iconic status as a ‘‘wild,’’ ‘‘generic,’’ and ‘‘authentic’’ Indian.Strankman (2003), former Presiding Justice, First Court of Appeals in SanFrancisco, evokes the courtroom milieu of the late 1800s to remind readers ofthe legal strictures that systematically denied equal rights under the law to any-one labeled as ‘‘Chinese,’’ ‘‘Mulatto,’’ ‘‘Black,’’ or ‘‘Indian’’ in late-19th centuryCalifornia (359). He then maps this ‘‘power of naming’’ onto Ishi’s refusal to giveKroeber his name, envisioning an act political and personal resistance, whereKroeber assumed mere Yahi cultural convention:

He had a name, but they could not know it. And with unintended ironythey named him ‘‘Ishi.’’ This is in Yahi: Man, ‘one of the people,’ Adam,Everyman, No Man. To call that name is to call for Godot. Godot, Ishi: noone comes; everyone comes. The tribal man, holding the power of hisname to himself becomes Ishi—one of the people, a people of one, atribe of one, all others having been destroyed by the namers. [2003:361]

Vizenor (2003) narrates an exilic history of Ishi and the comic drama offakery and charades that derailed his own efforts to have a building on the

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Berkeley campus renamed to memorialize Ishi. Owens (2003) pays tribute, inturn, to the inspirational role that Ishi has played in Vizenor’s prolific oeuvre.Dobkins (2003), the only non-Native contribution in this section, exploresthe late Maidu artist Frank Day’s rendering of Ishi as healer, whileConcow-Maidu artist Frank Tuttle (2003) talks about Ishi as a subject andsource of light in his own life and work.

As Biestman (2003), Weaver (2003), Vizenor (2003), and Owens (2003)argue, in the final analysis, there is very little about Ishi’s real apprehensionof his own experience, pre- or post Oroville, or Kroeber, or Pope, of whichwe can be certain. His language, voice, and Yahi stories are preserved onwax cylinders, but he kept his personal history and name to himself. His‘‘voice’’ and story, like those of Sherman Sage, emerge from the historicalrecord in a fragmentary fashion. Yet their voices and stories are able toemerge, at all, to be shaped into life histories and read by others, found tobe accurate and insightful or not, re-narrated and re-read anew—as wholeor partial truths, because these men chose (under circumstances that rangedfrom extenuating to relatively routine) to convey at least some portion oftheir experience and traditional knowledge to anthropologists and others.

In the same way that Sage made the decision to collaborate with Hilgerin order to create an anthropological portrait of Arapaho child life, Ishi’sagency must be recognized as having extended well beyond his decisionand ability to withhold his personal name and details about his traumatic,recent past. His years of cooperation with Kroeber, Waterman, and Sapirwere surely the result of a complex personal struggle to survive and makemeaning of his old and new worlds. If we recognize his agency with regardto the issue of his name, we must grant him, by equal measure, the agency tohave willingly shared or foreclosed on other aspects of his past life—thefleeting Yahi world—that anthropologists sought to learn from him and torecord.

Ishi in Three Centuries brings this collaborative dimension of Ishi’s voiceand subjectivity into new focus that bears our thoughtful consideration forwhat it can tell us about the history he must surely have decided to narratethrough his work with anthropologists—one that elided the traumas of hisown experience in favor of a perhaps more nostalgic and memorializing lifestory of the collective Yahi self (cf. Kroeber 2003b; Vizenor 2003).

The voices in this volume collaborate to re-story Ishi’s life and subjectiv-ity, finding both coherence and conflict between Theodora Kroeber’s narra-tion of Ishi’s life in San Francisco, the ethnographic record embodied in Ishi’swork as a cultural informant, and Kroeber’s donation of Ishi’s brain to theSmithsonian’s Ale�ss Hrdlicka. And so it is that Ishi’s story continues to unfoldalongside a growing corpus of California Indian autobiographies and life nar-ratives (Bahr 2003; Sarris 1993; Shipek 1968; Thompson 1916; Wilson 1998).The fourth work reviewed here, Oneida Lives: Long-Lost Voices of theWisconsin Oneidas (Lewis 2005) offers an entirely different, but equally

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complex, window onto Native American experiences of modernity and lifenarrative production. More importantly, it brings a sense of promise aboutthe future of collaborations, old and new.

ONEIDA AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVES

Between October 1940 and March 1942, eight bilingual members of theOneida Nation of Wisconsin filled 180 stenographic pads, of 80 pages each,with more than 500 first person narratives, maps, and survey responsescollected from their family and community members. These accounts tookthe form of oral interviews and autobiographical writing that were firstrecorded in longhand and later transcribed in triplicate on a typewriter. Theychronicle memories of childhoods spent on the reservation outside GreenBay and in the off-reservation boarding schools of Carlisle, Haskell, andHampton; intergenerational attitudes toward kinship, family, and child-rearing; the socioeconomic perils and challenges of alcoholism, allotment,World War I, the Depression, and the New Deal’s Civilian ConservationCorps and Works Progress Administration; the joys and anguish of birth,death, marriage, divorce, and widowhood; new churches and fadingmemories of the old False Face religion; and work in factories, hospitals,white households, the timber industry, farm fields, and on road crews.

In 1998, six decades after these stories were collected, Herbert Lewisstumbled upon them in the Anthropology Department storeroom at theUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison, where they had apparently rested forgot-ten and undisturbed since 1948. This is the date that cultural anthropologistH. Scudder Mekeel, the last faculty member in the Department to have first-hand knowledge of the notebooks and their origin, died suddenly of a heart-attack. Lewis recognized their social and historical value immediately. Hearranged for photocopies of the notebooks to be transferred to the posses-sion of the Oneida Tribe (the original manuscript copies are today curatedat the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison), and with the assistanceand guidance of Oneida historian and tribal member L. Gordon McLester,III, began the research project that would bring their publication to fruition.

This rich archive, so remarkable for its breadth of authors and subjects,is the result of the Oneida Ethnological Study, sponsored by the New Deal’sWorks Progress Administration (no. 9476), a federally funded programdesigned to alleviate the widespread poverty brought on by the GreatDepression. Funds for the project were applied for and granted to theUniversity of Wisconsin’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Thiswas the Department’s second experience sponsoring a WPA study with theOneida. Many of the Oneida who were employed to collect stories for theEthnological Study had also worked on the earlier Oneida Language andFolklore Project, organized by Morris Swadesh and completed in 1940, under

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the supervision of Floyd Lounsbury. This latter project continues, some sixdecades later, to provide an indigenous historical and linguistic foundationfor Oneida cultural revitalization. The Oneida Ethnological Study was devel-oped as a follow-up study that would chronicle the process of acculturationwithin the modern community of the Oneida (xxxiv–xxxv).

In the Foreword to Oneida Lives, Gerald L. Hill (2005), member and for-mer chief counsel of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, writes of the impor-tance of these accounts and of Herbert Lewis’s ‘‘honorable scholarship’’ inediting the volume. ‘‘The detailed information that had been lost to us forseveral generations is incalculably more directly connected to us becausethe informants, transcribers, and translators were of our own living families,both direct and extended. This is our community speaking to us from recentgenerations’’ (ix).

Occasional appearances of nostalgia about boarding school adventures,former sweethearts, or days of youthful revelry and competition are evenlytempered by honest reflections about the hard work of marriage, land andlanguage loss, staying one step ahead of poverty and hunger, and worry thatchildren might not find their way in the world. Readers will be struck not sim-ply by the multitudinous diversity of voices, educational backgrounds, andpersonalities, but also by the unselfconsciousness with which these storieswere spoken and written. Eighty-six year old Mason Wheelock recalled thefollowing information to his Oneida interviewer:

As far back as I can remember, and that’s when I was a boy about sixyears old, living was altogether different than what it is now. I wouldsay that the people were rather poor because everything was hard toget and nobody had money. I remember that all the Oneidas made bas-kets. You could hear someone pound the ash timbers for splints all overthe woods. They made these baskets and sold or traded them off forsomething to eat. [41]

Lewis’s Introduction to the collection (xvii–xii) presents a brief historyof the Oneida. One of the five nations of Haudenosaunee, also known asthe Iroquois Confederacy, they once controlled the territory now compris-ing upstate New York. Lewis traces their journey west after the AmericanRevolution, when they were one of two Iroquois nations to fight on theside of the American settlers—a decision that offered no later reward wherethe maintenance of their ancestral lands was concerned. With the splinter-ing of the Confederation during and after the war, and the pressures ofassimilation and Euro-American settlement bearing down upon them, theOneida suffered significant internal factionalism. In the 1830s, theyaccepted re-settlement on land that would become Wisconsin. Formallyestablished in 1838 through the Treaty of Buffalo Creek, the Oneidareservation originally encompassed 65,400 acres of land, although many

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of these lands and associated timber resources were later lost through theallotment and sale.

The Introduction also describes the larger corpus of narrative accounts interms of their gendered, linguistic, and stylistic variations. Lewis explains thathe decided upon the 65 published selections because ‘‘they seemed to me themost interesting and the most substantial and because they offered a widerange of topics and a well-rounded view of Oneida life by men and womenof different ages’’ (xxxvii–xxviii). Lewis also tells us what concerns guidedhis editorial hand and voice, and what conventions of anonymity and identi-fication were used in both the initial study and in the published collection. Thispassage conveys just a few of the challenges associated with his editorial role:

To begin with, there are fifty-three different voices here, each with its dis-tinctive style, and written down by ten different people. Most of thesewere rapidly transcribed recordings of extemporaneous speech, whichmust have contained false starts, incomplete sentences, and numerouslapses. Some of the narrators were monolingual Oneida speakers, andmany interviews were given in the Oneida language and then translatedby the bilingual workers. The knowledge and education of even thosewho spoke in English varied considerably, and the translator-writersthemselves varied in their level of formal education and their control overwritten English. [2005:xxxviii]

The narratives are grouped under nine broad chapter headings (the firstof which contains a single account): ‘‘A Brief Economic and Social History,’’‘‘Recollections and Opinions of Elders,’’ ‘‘Working, Earning a Living, andStruggling Through,’’ The Lives They Lived,’’ ‘‘Marriage and Families,’’ Reli-gious Life and Beliefs,’’ ‘‘Boarding Schools and ‘Outing’,’’ ‘‘Sports and Recrea-tion,’’ and ‘‘Four Memorable Days.’’ An appendix reprints three letters thatdeal with the WPA funding of the Oneida; these provide some sense ofhow the project was politically perceived within the larger Green Bay com-munity. Menominee Advisory Council Chairman James Frechette’s letter(391–394) to Congressman Joshua Johns in defense of his Oneida neighbors,their WPA employment, and the Ethnological Study, in particular, eloquentlysums up the racist undertones that drove much of the criticism of New Dealfunding in Wisconsin Indian Country.

Lewis prefaces each collection of Oneida stories with a concise,one-page introduction. Most of these explain unfamiliar terminologies or ideasappearing in the narratives, demographic details about the narrators, or histor-ical traditions and practices that, as shared knowledge among the Oneida,might require further clarification to outside readers. Each individual narrativeis also preceded by a small introductory paragraph, clearly set apart in italics,explaining when, how, and by whom the narrative was collected or written,and briefly abstracting the topics or issues developed in the narrative.

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Additional biographical information is also provided here, particularlyany kinship the narrator might share with other individuals whose accountsare included in the book. Despite these editorial contributions and contex-tualizations, Oneida voices are never overwhelmed. They are the substance,rather than the occasionally supporting evidence in this work. The OneidaEthnological Survey participants left a remarkable record of everyday lifeand memories; these men and women did not shy away from telling theirstories or being heard by one another. From both an ethnographic and his-torical perspective, these autobiographical narratives make an invaluablecontribution toward our understanding of the mid-20th century experienceand self-expression of progressive-era ideology among American Indianpopulations.

Many of the project’s methodologies and goals—both in the collectingand publication phase—speak directly to current concerns with culturalself-representation and the collaborative development, versus mere execu-tion (see Harrison 2001), of projects attuned to using social science in serviceto the study community (Champagne and Goldberg 2005; Harris 2005;Jameson and Baugher 2007; LaDuke 2005; Mihesuah 1998; Smith 2002;Zimmerman 2001), such as those embodied in the collaborative, commu-nity-based ethnography that Luke Lassiter (2000, 2005) and a growing num-ber of anthropologists have successfully enacted in the last decade (Bonneyand Paredes 2001; Cervone 2007; Hansen and Rossen 2007; Kerber 2006;Rossen 2006; Wray 2002).

This collection of Oneida stories and voices tells us a great deal aboutthe wide variations in experiences and subjectivities that it is possible to elicitfrom autobiographers and cultural informants of the same society, and underwhat conditions of life-story collection and narration ethnographers might beable to document that breadth of difference. By all appearances, the Oneidaparticipants related to their interlocutors as fellow community members whoshared at least some of their own perspectives on the changing socialcontours of Wisconsin Oneida life prior to and during the Great Depression.

But other questions we might ask are not addressed within the folds ofthe book, although these details may well be available for future analysis. Forinstance, while we are told that the Oneida Ethnological Study interviewerswere trained and paid through the WPA grant (xxxiv), and some of theseemployee-interviewers wrote their own life narratives, how were the othercontributors—family and friends—approached and convinced to participatein the project? Were they, too, remunerated for the contributions they madeto the study? What percentage of Oneida men and women declined to parti-cipate, and why? How will descendants of those who narrated their stories asnamed individuals feel about the candor with which their ancestorsapproached such sensitive topics as alcoholism and traditional religious prac-tices? Did the interlocutors self-edit their life stories precisely because theywere friends with, or otherwise related to, their interviewers?

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Given the sheer volume of narratives produced by the project, this latterissue may not be particularly relevant to the collective portrait that hasemerged in this text. And while all life stories embody biases, those underconsideration here would seem to transcend many of the problematics thathave come to be associated with life histories collected and narrated bymissionaries, boarding school teachers, colonial personnel, and other figuresof authority over subjugated or traditional peoples undergoing conditions ofrapid socioeconomic and linguistic change (Mirza and Strobel 1989; Senier2001; Stanley 1994; Wright 1984).

Of course, anthropologists have not altogether escaped categorizationas authority figures in lives of subjugated and subaltern peoples (Asad1973; Deloria 1969; Harrison 1991; Jacobs-Huey 2002; Marcus and Fischer1986; Medicine 2001; Mihesuah 2003; Said 1979; Smith 2002; Smith andWobst 2005; Stans 2001; Watkins 2000, 2005; Zimmerman 1997, 2001). Butthis project of anthropological and Oneida cooperation—begun in the earlypart of the 20th century, and bearing new fruit in the early 21st century—offers one model of respectful collaboration across peoples and generationsthat can serve as a positive foundation for continued ethnographic partner-ship and life narrative production.

CONCLUSION

The life narratives of Sherman Sage (ca. 1844–1943), Ishi (ca. 1860–1943),and the Wisconsin Oneida (1940–1942) provide a complex portrait of NativeAmerican lives and voices. They enhance our ethnographic and historicalunderstanding of the lived experiences of the Northern Arapaho, Yahi andCalifornia Indians, and early 20th century Wisconsin Oneida men andwomen. As genres of the life-story (Plummer 2001), they all representresearched life-stories, although the autobiographical narratives collectedby Oneida participants in the WPA Ethnological Study also have attributesof reflexive and recursive life-stories.

Of all the reviewed texts, it is the Oneida autobiographical stories thatprovide the most significant window onto the subjective experiences andexpressions embodied in the narrative process. Where Sage’s and Ishi’ssubjectivity is concerned, both biographer and reader must rely on theinterpretive process. Narrative form and strategy bear upon this latter point.Anderson (2003) uses an ethnohistoric framework to create a portrait of Sagepassing through the four hills of Arapaho life. Theodora Kroeber (2002)relied upon her husband’s memory, his personal papers, archival news stor-ies, and literary license to produce a more linear narrative of Ishi’s life. Lewis(2005) brings topical structure and sociocultural context to the otherwiseminimally edited autobiographical narratives published in Oneida Lives,but these lives and voices are heard in full chorus. Anderson privileges

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and foregrounds Sage’s voice in his narrative, but as a historical reconstruc-tion, his voice is present alongside that of Sage. Theodora Kroeber occasion-ally quotes very brief phrases of Ishi’s, but her own voice is omnipresent,narrating Ishi’s experiences, feelings, and attitudes. Ishi in Three Centuriesprovides new historical insight, a partial remedy, and a re-storying of Ishi’sexperience, by bringing an array of voices into critical dialogue, to interro-gate and reflect upon the nature of Ishi’s pre- and post-Oroville life—andupon his status as an iconic figure, alternatively tragic and heroic, inCalifornia Indian and Native American experience.

All four books involve new and old forms of collaboration betweenanthropologists and American Indians and remind us that anthropology’s dis-ciplinary futures and pasts are also narrated in these works, as is the sharedsubject=researcher life narrative that emerges most clearly in the cases of Ishiand of the Wisconsin Oneida. Ishi’s story—and the struggle to control, re-narrate, and make sense of it across cultural and generational divides remindsus that while life stories often narrate the subjective embodiment of broadersocial and historical experience, they can also become emotionally and politi-cally inscribed upon the collective social body. One domain where we caneasily see how the collective body is inscribed by the shared researcher=study community life narrative is that of contemporary American Indian landand federal acknowledgement claims (Campisi and Starna 2004; Davis 2001;Field 1999; Field and Muwekma Ohlone 2003; Hansen and Rossen 2007;Laverty 2003). More often than not, these cases are won and lost on the basisof anthropological work that took place with and among American Indiansnearly a century ago.

These cases call to mind both the promise and problematics of ethno-graphic life stories, their production and analysis, and their ongoing interpre-tation in descendant communities, disciplinary hallways, and even courts oflaw. They also remind us that, for those researchers, subjects and study com-munities who manage to successfully embrace and negotiate the intersubjec-tive and intertextual nature of life narrative and other forms of ethnographicproduction and analysis, partial truths can emerge through the collaborativeprocess that become meaningful and concrete reflections of historically situ-ated specificities and subjectivities (Biehl et al. 2007; Cortazzi 2001; Haraway1988; Harrison 2001; Plummer 2001; Reed-Danahay 2001; Waterston andRylko-Bauer 2006). As Raymond Fogelson (2001:x) has written, ‘‘may thedelicate dialectic continue.’’

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to Brian Baker, Liam D. Murphy, andErin Stiles for their support and suggestions. I also offer my sincere thanksto Roger Lohmann, Brooke Hansen, and an anonymous reviewer for theirvaluable scholarly insights and commentary on an earlier draft.

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TERRI CASTANEDA is Associate Professor and Museum Director atCalifornia State University, Sacramento. Her research fields include thehistory of museum anthropology, the politics of indigenous identity, andthe relationship between California Indian land claims activism andmid-20th century cultural revitalization. Recent publications include‘‘Making News: Marie Potts and the Smoke Signal of the Federated Indiansof California,’’ in Women in Print, University of Wisconsin Press (2006)and ‘‘Salvaging the Anthropologist-Other at California’s Tribal College,’’American Indian Quarterly (2002).

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