Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-b6zl4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-07T07:24:54.564Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Native views of history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Peter Nabokov
Edited by
Bruce G. Trigger  and
Wilcomb E. Washburn
Peter Nabokov
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Bruce G. Trigger
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montréal
Wilcomb E. Washburn
Affiliation:
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
Get access

Summary

On January 2, 1971, a fieldworker for the Doris Duke Oral History Project was collecting narratives in Tuba City, Arizona. To warm up one conversation the interviewer opened John McGregor’s Southwestern Archaeology (second edition) to page 114 and through an interpreter asked an elderly Navajo man what he thought of a map of North America with swooping arrows indicating the routes supposedly walked by Paleo-Indian peoples after they crossed over the Beringia Land Bridge to populate the continent.

When he couldn’t get a straight answer his translator begged for patience, “he’s telling it little by little,” then added, “it doesn’t sound very little to me though.” The interpreter and informant put their heads together. “He said that he would like to tell you,” the translator explained, “but … he will be punished for it … I mean the medicine, he can’t tell how it works … he said that if he told all his secrets like that he would fall to pieces. ….”

As for the migration routes from Western Alaska down into North America, “He said, ‘that maybe some other guys came over like that, but us Navajos came a different way’.” At this the old man launched into what sounded like contradictory origin stories. One was a fragmentary narrative in which cicada-like insects “won this world for us, won this land here, the reservation” after crawling up through the earth’s underlayers. The second account had white corn kernels, “actually the mother of the Navajo tribe,” and the sun, “the father,” talking together, with Navajos born from the corn kernel’s underarms.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas , pp. 1 - 60
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Apess, WilliamOn Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, edited and with an introduction by O’Connell, Barry (Amherst, Mass., 1992).Google Scholar
Bascom, William “The Forms of Folklore,” Journal of American Folklore 78 (1965).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Basso, Keith H. “ ‘Stalking With Stories’: Names, Places and Moral Narratives among the Western Apache,” in Text, Play and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society, ed. Bruner, Edward M. (Washington, D.C., 1984).Google Scholar
Bear, Luther StandingLand of the Spotted Eagle (New York, 1933).Google Scholar
Beck, Peggy V. and Walters, Anna L., The Sacred: Ways of Knowledge, Sources of Life (Tsaile, Ariz., 1980).Google Scholar
Berger, JohnPig Earth (New York, 1979).Google Scholar
Blish, Helen H. “Dakota Histories and Historical Art,” in A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux (paintings by Amos Bad Heart Bull) (Lincoln, Neb., 1967).Google Scholar
Bowers, Alfred C.Hidassa Social and Ceremonial Organization, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 194 (Washington, D.C., 1963).Google Scholar
Brightman, Robert “Primitivism in Missinippi Cree Historical Consciousness,” Man 25 (1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brightman, Robert “Towards a History of Indian Religion: Religious Changes in Native Societies,” in New Directions in American Indian History, ed. Calloway, Colin G. (Norman, Okla., 1988).Google Scholar
Burch, Ernest S. Jr., “From Skeptic to Believer: The Making of an Oral Historian,” Alaska History 6(1) (1991).Google Scholar
Clifton, James A. “The Tribal History - An Obsolete Paradigm,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 3(4) (1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Percy “Theories of Myth,” Man (1969).Google Scholar
Cohn, Bernard S. “History and Anthropology: The State of Play,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Connerton, PaulHow Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crum, Steve “A Conversation with Vine Deloria,” in Suntracks: An American Indian Literary Magazine, no. 4 (Tucson, Ariz., 1978).Google Scholar
Day, Gordon M. “Oral Tradition as Complement,” Ethnohistory 19 (1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Laguna, FredericaThe Story of a Tlingit Community: A Problem in the Relationship between Ancheological, Ethnological, and Historical Methods, Bulletin 172, Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington, D.C., 1960).Google Scholar
Deloria, Vine Jr., God Is Red (New York, 1973).Google Scholar
Diamond, StanleyIn Search of the Primitive (New Brunswick, 1974).Google Scholar
Du Bois, CoraThe 1870 Ghost Dance, University of California Publications, Anthropological Records 3(1) (1939).Google Scholar
Duncan StrongWilliam, “North American Indian Traditions Suggesting a Knowledge of the Mammoth,” American Anthropologist 36 (1934).Google Scholar
Dundes, Alan “The Study of Folklore in Literature and Culture: Identification and Interpretation,” Journal of American Folklore 78 (1965).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eggan, Fred “Anthropological Approaches to Ethnological Cultures,” Ethnohistory 8(1) (1961).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eliade, Mircea “The Yearning for Paradise in Primitive Tradition,” in Myth and Myth-making, ed. Murray, H. A. (New York, 1960).Google Scholar
Eliade, MirceaThe Myth of Eternal Return (New York, 1954).Google Scholar
Erdrich, LouiseBeet Queen (New York, 1986).Google Scholar
Erdrich, LouiseLove Medicine (New York, 1984).Google Scholar
Erdrich, LouiseTracks (New York, 1988).Google Scholar
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. “Anthropology and History,” in Social Anthropology and Other Essays (Glencoe, III., 1962).Google Scholar
Ewers, John C. “When Red and White Men Met,” Western Historical Quarterly 2(3) (1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Faris, James C. and Walters, Harry, “Navajo History: Some Implications of Contrasts of Navajo Ceremonial Discourse,” History and Anthropology 5 (1990).Google Scholar
Fenton, William N. “Field Work, Museum Studies, and Ethnohistorical Research,” Ethnohistory 13 (1–2) (1966).Google Scholar
Fixico, Donald L. “As Long as the Grass Grows...The Cultural Conflicts and Political Strategies of United States–Indian Treaties,” in Ethnicity and War, ed., Horne, Winston A. and Tonnesen, Thomas V. (Madison, Wis., 1984).Google Scholar
Fogelson, Raymond D. “On the Varieties of Indian History: Sequoyah and Traveller Bird,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 2 (1974).Google Scholar
Foster, George “Peasant Society and the Image of the Limited Good,” American Anthropologist 67 (1965).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foster, Michael K. “Another Look at the Function of Wampum in Iroquois-White Councils,” in The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy, ed. Jennings, Francis (Syracuse, N.Y., 1985).Google Scholar
Fowler, LorettaArapahoe Politics, 1851–1978: Symbols in Crises of Authority (Lincoln, Nebr., 1982).Google Scholar
Fred, Eggan, “From History to Myth: A Hopi Example,” reprinted in Essays in Social Anthropology and Ethnology, The University of Chicago Studies in Anthropology, Series in Social, Cultural, and Linguistic Anthropology, no. 1 (Chicago, 1975).Google Scholar
Gilmore, Melvin R. “The Arikara Book of Genesis,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 12 (1929).Google Scholar
Goldfrank, Esther S. “The Impact of Situation and Personality on Four Hopi Emergence Myths,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 4 (1948).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gubser, Nicholas J.The Nunamiut Eskimos: Hunters of Caribou (New Haven, Conn., 1965).Google Scholar
Hamilton Cusing, FrankZuni Folk Tales (New York, 1901).Google Scholar
Highwater, JamakeThe Primal Mind: Vision and Reality in Indian America (New York, 1981).Google Scholar
Holden, Madronna “Making All the Crooked Ways Straight: The Satirical Portrait of Whites in Coast Salish Folklore,” Journal of American Folklore 89 (1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmes Williamson, Margaret “Pocahontas and Captain John Smith: Examining a Historical Myth,” History and Anthropology 5(3–4) (1992).Google Scholar
Howard, J. K.Strange Empire (New York, 1952).Google Scholar
Hudson, Travis and Lee, Georgia, “Function and Symbolism in Chumash Rock Art,” Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Southwestern Anthropological Association, Santa Barbara, March 1981, and the Society for American Archaeology, San Diego, April 1981.Google Scholar
Hudson, Charles “Folk History and Ethnohistory,” Ethnohistory 13 (1966).Google Scholar
Hudson, , “Folk History and Ethnohistory,” Ethnohistory 13 (1966).Google Scholar
Hughes, Stuart H.History at Art and as Science: Twin Vistas on the Past (Chicago, 1975).Google Scholar
Hultkrantz, ÅkeNative Religions of North America: The Power of Visions and Fertility (San Francisco, 1987).Google Scholar
Jacobs, Elizabeth D.Nehalem Tillamook Tales, University of Oregon, Monographs in Anthropology no. 3 (1959).Google Scholar
Johnson, Sir William in 1753, quoted in Morgan, Lewis Henry, League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (Rochester, N.Y., 1851).Google Scholar
Johnston, BasilMoose Meat and Wild Rice (Toronto, 1978).Google Scholar
Johnston, BasilOjibway Heritage (New York, 1976).Google Scholar
Landsman, Gail and Ciborski, Sara, ”Representation and Politics: Contesting Histories of the Iroquois,” Cultural Anthropology 7 (1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leechman, J. D. and Harrington, M. R., “String Records of the Northwest,” Indian Notes and Monographs, series 2, 16 (New York, 1921).Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude “When Myth Becomes History,” in Myth and Meaning (New York, 1978).Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude and Eribon, Didier, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, trans. Paula, Wissing (Chicago, 1991).Google Scholar
Lowie, Robert H. “Oral Tradition and History,” American Anthropologist 17 (1915).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowie, Robert H. “Oral Tradition and History,” Journal of American Folklore 30 (1917).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowie, Robert H.The Assiniboine (New York, 1909).Google Scholar
Lowie, Robert H.The Northern Shoshone (New York, 1909).Google Scholar
Luckert, Karl W.The Navajo Hunter Tradition (Tucson, Ariz., 1975).Google Scholar
MacMurray, Major J. W. “The Dreamers of the Columbia River Valley in Washington Territory,” Transactions of the Albany Institute 11 (1887).Google Scholar
Marks Dauenhauer, Nora and Dauenhauer, Richard, eds., Haa Tuwunaaqu Yis, for Healing Our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory (Seattle, 1990).Google Scholar
Marmon Silko, Leslie “A Conversation with Leslie Marmon Silko,” Sun Tracks 3(1) (1976).Google Scholar
Martin, Calvin “Ethnohistory: A Better Way to Write Indian History,” Western Historical Quarterly 9(1) (1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MartinCalvin, “The Four Lives of a Micmac Copper Pot,” Ethnohistory 22 (1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClellan, Catherine “Indian Stories about the First Whites in Northwestern America,” in Ethnohistory in Southwestern Alaska and the Southern Yukon, ed. Lantis, Margaret (Lexington, Ky., 1970).Google Scholar
McLendon, Sally “Cultural Presuppositions and Discourse Analysis: Pattern of Presupposition and Assertion of Information in Eastern Pomo and Russian Narrative,” in Linguistics and Anthropology, ed. Saville-Troike, Muriel (Washington, D.C., 1977).Google Scholar
McNeill, William H.Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago, 1986).Google Scholar
Meighan, Clement W. and Riddell, Francis A., The Maru Cult of the Pomo Indians: A California Ghost Dance Survival, Museum Paper no. 23 (Los Angeles, 1972).Google Scholar
Meredith, Howard L. and Milam, Virginia E., “A Cherokee Vision of Eloh’,” The Indian Historian 8(4) (1975).Google Scholar
Morrison, Kenneth M. “Towards a History of Intimate Encounters: Algonkian Folklore, Jesuit Missionaries, and Kiwakwe, The Cannibal Giant,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 3(4) (1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nabokov, Peter and Loendorf, Larry, Every Morning of the World: Ethnographic Resources Study of the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, National Park Service, National Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management (1994).Google Scholar
Nabokov, PeterIndian Running (Sante Fe, N.M., 1987).Google Scholar
Nelson, Byron Jr., Our Home Forever: A Hupa Tribal History (Hoopa, Calif., 1978).Google Scholar
Nelson, RichardMake Prayers to the Raven (Chicago, 1983).Google Scholar
Novick, PeterThat Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York and Cambridge, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko ed., Culture through Time: Anthropological Approaches (Stanford, Calif., 1990).Google Scholar
Opler, MorrisMyths and Tales of the Jicarilla Apache Indians, ,Memoirs of the American Folklore Society 31 (New York, 1938).Google Scholar
Ortiz, Alfonso “Some Concerns Central to the Writing of ‘Indian’ History,” The Indian Historian 10(1) (1977).Google Scholar
Parks, Douglas R. A.Jones, Wesley, and Hollow, Robert C., Earthlodge Tales from the Upper Missouri: Traditional Tales of the Arikara, Hidatsa, and Mandan (Bismark, N.D., 1978).Google Scholar
Parks, Douglas R.Traditional Narratives of the Arikara Indians: Stories of Alfred Morsette: English Translations, vol. 3, Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indians (Lincoln, Nebr., 1991).Google Scholar
Polly, and Schaafsma, Curtis F., “Evidence for the Origins of the Pueblo Katchina Cult as Suggested by Southwestern Rock Art,” American Antiquity 39 (1974).Google Scholar
Pratt, Kenneth J. “Some Navajo Relations to the Past,” in Papers from the Third, Fourth, and Sixth Navajo Studies Conferences, ed. June-el, Piper (Window Rock, Ariz., 1993).Google Scholar
Quam, AlvinaThe Zuni People, trans. The Zunis: Self Portrayals by the Zuni People (Albuquerque, N.M., 1972).Google Scholar
Radin, Paul “Reconstruction from Internal Evidence and the Role of the Individual,” in The Method and Theory of Ethnology: An Essay in Criticism (South Hadley, Mass., 1987).Google Scholar
Ramsay, Jarold “Retroactive Prophecy in Western Indian Narrative,” in Reading the Fire: Essays in the Traditional Indian Literatures of the Far West (Lincoln, Nebr., 1983).Google Scholar
Rasmussen, KnudIntellectual Culture of the Copper Eskimo, 5th Thule Expedition, vol. 9 (Conpenhagen, 1932).Google Scholar
Revard, Carter “History, Myth, and Identity among Osages and Other Peoples,” Denver Quarterly 14(4) (winter 1980).Google Scholar
Ridington, RobinTrail to Heaven: Knowledge and Narrative in a Northern Native Community (Iowa City, Iowa, 1988).Google Scholar
Robinson, Harry compiled and ed. Wickwire, Wendy, Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller (Seattle, 1992).Google Scholar
Rodriguez, Richard “Mixed Blood, Columbus’s Legacy: A World Made Mestizo,” Harper’s Magazine 283 (November 1991).Google Scholar
Russell, Frank “Pima Annals,” American Anthropologist 5 (1903).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Russell, FrankThe Pima Indians, 26th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1904–1905 (Washington, D.C., 1908).Google Scholar
Sahlins, Marshall “Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of ‘The World System’,” in Cultural Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Dirks, N. B., Eley, G., and Ortner, S. B. (Princeton, N.J., 1994).Google Scholar
Sahlins, MarshallIslands of History (Chicago, 1985).Google Scholar
Sam, and Bingham, Janet, Between Sacred Mountains: Navajo Stories and Lessons from the Land (Tucson, Ariz., 1984).Google Scholar
Sando, Joe S.Nee Hemish: A History of Jemez Pueblo (Albuquerque, N.M., 1982).Google Scholar
Scollon, Ronald and Scollon, Suzanne B. K., Linguistic Convergence: An Ethnography of Speaking at Fort Chipewayan, Alberta (New York, 1979).Google Scholar
Sheehan, B. “Paradise and the Noble Savage,” William and Mary Quarterly 26 (1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simmons, William S. “Of Large Things Remembered: Southern New England Legends of Colonial Encounters,” in The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology (CRC Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Simmons, William S. “The Mystic Voice: Pequot Folklore from the Seventeenth Century to the Present.” Paper prepared for The Mashantucket Pequot Historical Conference, October 23–4, 1987, Norwich and Ledyard, Connecticut.Google Scholar
Sioui, Georges E.For an Amerindian Autohistory: An Essay on the Foundations of a Social Ethic (Montreal, 1992).Google Scholar
Smith, Marion “Mandan History as Reflected in Butterfly’s Winter Count,” Ethnohistory 7 (1960).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spence, Donald P.Narrative Truth and Historical Truth (New York, 1982).Google Scholar
Stirling, Matthew W.Origin Myth of Acoma and Other Records, Bulletin 135, Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington, D.C., 1942).Google Scholar
Storm, HyemeyohstsSeven Arrows (New York, 1981).Google Scholar
Strickland, Rennard and Gregory, Jack, “Emmett Starr, Cherokee, 1870–1930,” in American Indian Intellectuals, ed. Liberty, Margot (St. Paul, Minn., 1978).Google Scholar
Tedlock, DennisFinding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians (New York, 1972).Google Scholar
Turner, Kartherine C.Red Men Calling on the Great White Father (Norman, Okla., 1951).Google Scholar
Turney-High, Harry Holbert “Two Kutenai Stories,” Journal of American Folklore 54(213–14) (1941).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Baaren, P. “The Flexibility of Myth,” Studies in the History of Religions 22 (1972)Google Scholar
van Baaren, P.Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, ed. Alan, Dundes [Berkeley, Calif., 1984]).Google Scholar
Vansina, JanOral Tradition as History (Madison, Wis., 1985).Google Scholar
Vennum, Thomas Jr., “Ojibwa Origin-Migration Songs of the Mitewiwin,” Journal of American Folklore 91 (1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vizenor, Gerald “Three Anishinaabeg Writers,” in The People Called Chippewa: Narrative Stories (Minneapolis, 1984).Google Scholar
Warren, William W.History of the Ojibways, Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society, vol. 5 (Minneapolis-St. Paul, 1885).Google Scholar
Washburn, Wilcomb E. Review of Noon Ne-Me-Poo (We, the Nez Percés): Culture and History of the Nez Percés (1973), in Idaho Yesterdays: The Quarterly Journal of the Idaho Historical Society 18(2) (Summer 1974).Google Scholar
White Face Wisecarver, Charmaine “Wounded Knee: Mending the Sacred Hoop,” Native Peoples (spring 1990).Google Scholar
White, David R. M. “Native American Religious Issues … Also Land Issues,” Wassaja, The Indian Historian 13(3) (1980).Google Scholar
White, HaydenMetahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973)Google Scholar
White, HaydenTropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978).Google Scholar
White, Leslie A.The Acoma Indians, Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1929–1930 (Washington, D.C., 1932).Google Scholar
Wiget, Andrew O. “Truth and the Hopi: An Historiographic Study of Documented Oral Tradition Concerning the Coming of the Spanish,” Ethnohistory 29 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Witherspoon, GaryLanguage and Art in the Navajo Universe (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wooley, David and Waters, William, “Waw-No-She’s Dance,” American Indian Art Magazine 14(1) (1988).Google Scholar
Young, Jane M.Signs from the Ancestors: Zuni Cultural Symbolism and Perceptions of Rock Art (Albuquerque, N.M., 1988).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×