American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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 broad results of political and economic processes are often far clearer in Native American ethnohistory than are the specific local mechanisms which brought them about. In the Great Basin, native groups lost control over land and the resources it contained between 1850 and 1870 through a relatively peaceful process without large-scale military conquest, and those groups were forced to find ways to adapt in order to survive. One common means of adaptation is often referred to in the literature as the “attachment” by Indian families to ranches and farms, where they performed wage work for non-Indians. Yet there remains a great gap between our knowledge of this general cultural re-orientation and our understanding of the human actions which produced it, between the overall historical pattern and the specific human reality as it was lived by Indians themselves. Tokens of this period remain in the many Indian family names which were “taken” from ranch employers. Historic archaeology has uncovered the remains of a distinctively non-Anglo way of life on some ranch sites, such as the grinding of coffee on manos and metates, and circular willow houses associated with historic period tin cans, buttons, and broken leather harness. This much we know, but little more. In an attempt to fill in some of the details of the relationship between white employers and Indian laborers, I have examined the account books of the Stewart Ranch, one of the earliest and largest in the Las Vegas area.

The release of Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow in 1950 represented a turning point in Hollywood’s portrayal of American Indians. Often cited as Hollywood’s first sound film to depict the American Indian sympathetically, Broken Arrow appealed to an ideal of tolerance and racial equality that became prominent in later Westerns. The film took a major step in the breakdown of conventional stereotypes, and in doing so made an emphatic statement about America’s racial attitudes. The motion picture industry has traditionally portrayed Native Americans in a variety of stereotyped roles. The silent films offered both positive and negative images, since movie stereotypes were still forming and there was more diversity among tribes depicted and roles of Indians in the story. Titles such as Attack on Fort Boonesboro (1906) and The Renegades (1912) suggest that negative stereotypes began early. The silent film era, however, showed a significant number of pro-Indian movies: during the early 1900s, the noble Indian often preceded the cowboy as the Western screen hero. Some of the silents were especially sympathetic to Indians, and while their depictions had a childlike simplicity, they touched upon crucial issues in race relations and government policies. D. W. Griffith’s Ramona (1910) pointed toward white hostilities and injustice; Heart of an lndian (1913) depicted an Indian woman’s grief over her deceased child; and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man (1914) showed the tragic fate of an Indian/white marriage, These films, as well as later silent features like The Vanishing American (1925) and Redskin (1929) acknowledged the Native American’s social plight but demarcated differences between Indian and white cultures.

In volume 7, number 1 (1983) of this journal there appeared three reviews of People of the Sacred Mountain, a book by Father Peter J. Powell. The reviews raised a number of controversial questions. For a student of Cheyenne culture and history, these reviews point to at least three important issues that warrant commentary. First, there is the question of what constitutes supereminent Native American historical scholarship. Second, there is the question of ethics associated with the collection and dissemination of ethnographic data about Native American communities. And last, there remains a related issue surrounding the ethics of reviewing books. That is, should the reviewers extend their analysis of a book to address personal questions about the author’s relationship with the Indian community and the world of publishing? All too often, controversial issues that are brought forth in a scholarly context are either ignored or, if debated, reduced to a personal diatribe. In either instance, critical questions are never adequately addressed. It is in this context that this commentary is written, with the hope that the more significant issues brought forth in these reviews will be generally productive for Native American scholarship.