By 1930, Navajo studies were ready to enter a new era. The first generation of scholars, beginning in 1880 with Washington Matthews, had laid the foundation to the Navajo world. That generation had conducted field work, recorded myths and vocabulary and published some of its findings. Building on that foundation, the second generation, which included four university scholars (Sapir, Reichard, Kluckhohn and Wyman), a trader’s wife (New-comb), a philanthropist (Wheelwright), a novelist-anthropologist (La Farge), and finally, a priest (Haile), discovered the edifice of Navajo culture as we know it today. Much of the work of these scholars has not been placed in perspective, and awaits the assessment of historians. Although these Navajo students communicated with each other, they did so with an uncommon myopic vision, not only in their views of their colleagues, but also in their appreciation of their own place in the history of things. The time has come to assess their significance and the contributions they have made to Navajo scholarship. The most remarkable of these discoverers was Father Berard Haile, whose long career actually spanned the first and second generations, and whose contact with the Navajo world grew so intimate and profound that he became for all the others a great fount of knowledge and wisdom. We need to know the extent of his writings, the fields in which he specialized, the limitations of his scholarship, his academic alliances, his academic controversies, the degree of acceptance of his publications-in short, the significance of Father Berard to Navajo scholarly studies.

The writer of Native American history faces many vexing problems: the lack of aboriginal documentary or published sources; the reliance on subjective, oral Indian testimony; the need for internal tribal histories; and the investigation of non-Western aboriginal cultures, which is refractory to the methods and concepts of the modern social scientist. Among the problems of writing Indian history is the lack of communication between historian and anthropologist. Although ethnohistory developed as a separate entity in the 1950s, history and anthropology have not successfully merged. As Reginald Horsman has pointed out, the two have divergent interests in the writing of Native American history. These divergent interests involve different methodologies and emphases. Historians write about (recent) Anglo-Indian contacts and federal Indian policy; anthropologists write of precontact existence. Historians approach native biography from the printed sources, anthropologists from the oral testimony of informants. History does not use, or rarely uses, the primary method of research of anthropology-fieldwork. Historians view the aboriginal cultures from afar, the anthropologist from within the hogan. The historian writes narrative prose, free of jargon; the anthropologist writes highly technical, deductive analyses that sometimes are hard for his fellow anthropologists to understand.

Through White Men’s Eyes; A Contribution To Navajo History: A Chronological Record of the Navajo People from Earliest Times to the Treaty of June 1,1868. J. Lee Correll, editor, Window Rock: Navajo Heritage Center, Sponsored by the Dissemination and Assessment Center for Bilingual Education of the U.S. Office of Education, Department of Health Education and Welfare under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and by the Arizona Bicentennial Commission, 1979. Prologue, Acknowledgments, Line Illustrations, Photographs, Bibliographies, Indices, Documents (reprinted in volume VI). Six Volumes. $225. Now available from the University of Arizona Press. I Until the 1950s the profession of history had been remarkably derelict in the re-telling of the Navajo and Hopi past. Beginning in the 1880s self-trained scholars, such as the army surgeon Washington Matthews, intensively studied Navajo culture. He was followed by institutional or university scholars of the Boasian school-Gladys Reichard, Clyde Kluckhohn, Edward Sapir, themselves students of Franz Boas, but also Leland Wyman, Franc Newcomb, and Father Berard Haile, who were not trained as anthropologists, but who nevertheless belong to the second generation of Navajo scholars. However, they evinced little interest in Navajo history. Boas insisted on the collection of a vast body of contemporary data which did not lend itself to historical analysis. Meanwhile, except for Frank Reeve in the late 1930s, historians did not enter the field.