Writing Discussion

University of Washington Press

Chapter Title: Wung-xowidilik Concerning It—What Has Been Told ANTHROPOLOGY AND SALVAGE ETHNOGRAPHY Book Title: We Are Dancing for You

Book Subtitle: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies

Book Author(s): CUTCHA RISLING BALDY

Published by: University of Washington Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcwn2cz.8

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7 3

Ch a P t er 3

Wung-xowidilik Concerning It—What Has Been Told

AnthroPologY AnD sAlvAge ethnogr APhY

[The revitalization of the Flower Dance] was a big project

because it hadn’t been done in the actual village for eighty

years—the village we are from, Ta’k’imił-ding. It had been done

previously thirty years before, I believe—I don’t know what

village that was. The last documented one was eighty years

prior. So it was a big project to even understand all the parts

and the pieces that were supposed to be a part of this dance.

There was a lot of research that had to be done. And when I

say research, I mean talking to people who had been a part

of those ceremonies and remembered them or had watched

them when they were little. I think that even though the cere-

mony hadn’t been done for a long time, parts of it had survived

within people who knew songs or had the sticks or maybe did

demonstrations of this for many years. . . . And then also, of

course, you can look to the anthropological texts. But you have

to extract from them and disregard the biases of the anthro-

pologists and their interpretations. That’s a process as well.

—Kayla Rae Begay (Hupa, Yurok, Karuk)

At the uni v er sit Y oF c A liFor ni A, Ber keleY, Dr. A lFr eD kroeBer is a much lauded part of campus history. Kroeber Hall, built in 1959, sits very near the center of campus and houses the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthro- pology and the Worth Ryder Art Gallery. The Alfred Kroeber papers are housed

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74 c h A P t e r 3

in Bancroft Library on campus, along with the Kroeber family papers, includ- ing correspondence with his daughter, renowned writer Ursula K. Le Guin.1 Kroeber is often spoken about as a legendary, larger-than-life anthropologist, almost like a more dignified and scholarly Indiana Jones. He seemed to fit the part well, a tall, bearded, refined, yet adventurous professor of anthropology. Kroeber is often described as leading the way in anthropological study of Native people, especially those in California. He taught from 1901 to 1946 at UC Berkeley, where he founded the Anthropology Department and built the collections for the anthropology museum, which was primarily supported by philanthropist Phoebe Hearst.

According to many contemporary scholars, Alfred Kroeber was, and in many ways still is, the single greatest influence on the study of California Indian peo- ples.2 Kroeber is a complicated figure in California Indian history and ethnog- raphy. Tony Platt writes that Kroeber “looms biblically large” and is thought of in California Indian communities as both a “redeemer” and a “nemesis.”3 Noted Hupa scholar Jack Norton writes of Kroeber, “The ignorance and arrogance of most anthropologists have always dismayed Indian people. ‘They lie about us,’ is a commonly held belief by many California Indian people. And, perhaps, the worst perceived ‘liar’ is A. L. Kroeber, known as the Dean of California Anthro- pology. . . . While Kroeber can be recognized for his post-contact gathering of data on California Indian culture, his interpretations of social, economic, and religious factors need to be reevaluated as ethnocentric, anthropocentric and in some cases, in regard to the principle of cultural relativity, racist.”4

Kroeber’s work became world renowned, and he was touted as the foremost expert on California Indian cultures during his long, prosperous career, but it would take a number of years before his work was criticized for some of the erroneous assumptions in his observations and conclusions. Julian Steward, one of Kroeber’s students, describes Kroeber’s work as “marked by his bent for natural history” and notes that his preferred methodology “presented certain difficulties because, like all relativistic approaches, it is essentially subjective and intuitive. Each scholar can devise his own terms and view culture accord- ing to his own interests.”5 Like many of his predecessors, Kroeber believed that after contact with white European settlers, Native peoples and their cul- tures had become fragmented, and he hoped to find some way to re-create “pre-contact” Native American cultures and societies.6

Kroeber was classically trained under Franz Boas. While anthropology had come into existence as a discipline in the nineteenth century, Boas, a German- born scholar and the founder of Columbia’s Anthropology Department,

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A n t h roP olo gY A n D s A lvAge e t h no gr A Ph Y 7 5

significantly influenced the direction of anthropological study through his belief in “cultural relativism.” Boas believed the challenge for an anthropolo- gist was to “succeed in entering into each culture on its own bases.”7 Boas’s influence on anthropology would span the entirety of the twentieth century. His students included Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Melville Herskovits, Edward Sapir, Paul Radin, and many others who would go on to develop anthropology departments at other universities. This is the trajectory that Alfred Kroeber followed as well. Though Boas attempted to entice Kroeber to stay at Columbia, Kroeber left for California, where he became the chair of the Anthropology Department at Berkeley.8

Kroeber’s work, in the public imagination, was impeccable. He was the consummate anthropologist, adhering to objectivity and positivism, which often see the Western male perspective as the best informed and most trusted voice in anthropological discourse. Kroeber demonstrated consistent attempts to discipline Native peoples and their cultures through his scholarship. Kroe- ber was (at first) intent on proving his early anthropological theories of culture areas, tribelets, migration, and primitiveness, which he thought could be codi- fied through observation and analysis of California Indian cultures. Kroeber was not interested in toiling away as a lonely genius in his stuffy office writ- ing articles that nobody would ever read. He had quickly become a leading anthropologist and one of the best-known intellectuals at UC Berkeley.9 This meant he was able to raise large amounts of money for the Anthropology Department and museum and draw crowds to his classrooms, lectures, and social appearances.

During the early twentieth century, anthropological studies of so-called primitive, exotic cultures of Native peoples were widely popular and were embraced by the larger nonacademic society.10 Anthropologist George R. Stocking Jr. writes that “the academicization of the discipline . . . was in the later 1920s reinforced by substantial support from major philanthropic groups.”11 These groups were investing in what was, at the time, a lucrative discipline. The general public was hungry for anthropological exhibits and wanted to hear from anthropologists about their adventures among these so- called primitive cultures.12 In 1911, Kroeber brought a living California Indian Yahi man called Ishi to become a display in the UC Berkeley museum. Ishi quickly became an international celebrity: “The Last Wild Indian.” Ishi was not his real name; in fact he refused to tell Kroeber his real name and instead became known as Ishi, which meant “man” in the Yahi language. Ishi spent the last five years of his life working with Kroeber. He lived in the Berkeley museum

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76 c h A P t e r 3

and spoke at length about stories, songs, tools, and culture of his tribe. Many of his recordings are still housed in the museum collections. Ishi was so widely popular that the San Francisco Call, one of the highest daily circulating papers in the city, began publishing weekly articles about him.13

Ishi died of tuberculosis on March 25, 1916. As per Ishi’s express wishes, Kroeber had requested that no autopsy of Ishi’s body be done after his death. Though Kroeber had made the request that Ishi’s remains be treated with respect and dignity, he was informed shortly thereafter an autopsy had been performed in which Ishi’s brain was removed and preserved for scientific research. Ishi was cremated (without his brain), and his ashes were sent to a cemetery. Kroeber sent Ishi’s brain to the National Museum. Eventually it ended up in Washington, where it is kept at the Smithsonian. It would be returned and reunited with Ishi only in 1999, after the people of the Redding Rancheria and Pit River Tribe worked tirelessly to bring Ishi home.14

Kroeber had joined a long line of scholars, entertainers, and philanthro- pists who would put living Indigenous people on display for curious viewers. This included his esteemed mentor Franz Boas, who in 1897 brought six living Inuit people to the American Museum of Natural History. They became instant celebrities: “During their first two days in town, some 30,000 New Yorkers paid twenty-five cents each to view them.”15 They stayed for eight months. During that time three of them died of tuberculosis. The youngest was a boy named Minik, whose father died and left him orphaned. Minik would stay and live with the museum curator. He visited his father’s grave often. When he was fifteen, he found out that Franz Boas had authorized the autopsy and study of his father’s remains and that the body Minik had buried in the grave was not his father but instead “an imitation corpse from a man-sized log.”16

The curiosity of the public when it came to Indian people was met not only by the academic pursuit of information about these “living people of the past” but also by entertainment and artistic pursuits. By this time Indian people in the Americas had been participating in reenactment of Wild West battles as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and some of the first motion pictures featured scenes of cowboys fighting Indians.17 Many of those doing work in salvage ethnography were not only participating in a scholarly pursuit but also responding to the interests of their benefactors and the curious public. Attracting public interest was important to generate monetary support from philanthropists and business magnates. The assumed “objective” viewpoint of anthropologists and ethnographers erases how these many outside influences

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A n t h roP olo gY A n D s A lvAge e t h no gr A Ph Y 7 7

quite possibly affected findings by anthropologists hoping for popular accep- tance from the viewing public and further support by donors. Because of the presumption of objectivity in these studies, the observations and findings by these popular ethnographers would go on to become cultural truisms adopted by scholars, government agencies, and organizations as the final word on Native culture and history.

In California, scholars like Kroeber, linguists Pliny Earle Goddard and Edward Sapir, and photographer Edward Curtis, among others, worked with numerous tribes to build a portrait of California Indian society as it existed in the early 1800s, ostensibly before the genocide and attempted destruction of California Indian peoples. The numerous texts available on California Indians are arguably most influenced by Kroeber, who was instrumental in document- ing California Indian cultures and languages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kroeber’s Handbook of the Indians of California is still used today to build expert opinions, theories, and ideas about California Indians.

This chapter engages in a critical historiography of salvage ethnography in California to intervene in anthropological discourse and demonstrate how Native peoples negotiate ethnographic refusal (a term popularized by leading Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson).18 In enacting this methodology of critical historiography, I aim to (re)write, (re)right, and (re)rite the historical record to highlight the presence of undeniable, tenable Native feminisms in ethno- graphic accounts. I draw from Renya Ramirez’s work, where she insists on “a sustained critique of classic anthropological approaches” and works to “chal- lenge the naturalizing of the Western, masculine gaze by placing Native peoples’ narratives and analysis in the foreground.”19 Like Ramirez, this chap- ter turns “the gaze back onto anthropology itself in order to undo the damage of its colonial past.”20

I am fascinated by how anthropological records, though written and col- lected by Western male anthropologists with no investment in documenting women’s ceremonies, feature specific (and sometimes lengthy) descriptions of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies. I see this as a continued negotiation of refusal and as demonstrating self-determination. This negotiation of refusal is an important acknowledgment of the “mode of sovereign authority over the presentation of ethnographic data,” which Simpson articulates.21 While the historical record could have silenced women’s ceremonies and episte- mologies, Native peoples demonstrated their deftness at negotiating the poli- tics of refusal through their documented stories. To me, this is particularly

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78 c h A P t e r 3

demonstrative of how important women’s coming-of-age ceremonies are to Native cultures and (in my mind) an effort to leave a documented trail for future generations of Native people to one day reclaim our women’s ceremo- nies. It is not that Native consultants wanted recognition from anthropolo- gists and ethnographers in regard to the importance or centrality of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies but rather, in my view, that they insisted on docu- menting these ceremonies because they were leaving a record for future Native peoples to utilize, reclaim, and (re)write, (re)right, and (re)rite. After having survived brutal attempts to annihilate their culture and ways of life, Native people must have been conscious of how women’s ceremonies were continu- ously threatened by settler colonial policies of genocide, assimilation, and termination. The ethnographic record became one way for them to build an informed documentation of these ceremonies.

In regard to Northwest California, the adolescence/puberty ceremony for girls is included in most Native consultants’ stories, starting in 1871 with the publication of journalist Stephen Powers’s Tribes of California to later studies completed by anthropologists Thomas Buckley and Les Field. What I find most illuminating is that no early ethnographic account in California escapes mention of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies, even though there would have been a deep-seated prejudice against these ceremonies on the part of ethnographers and anthropologists at the time. Even with the insistence by a number of ethnographers that this ceremony was “no longer practiced” or had been given up by Native peoples, the continued engagement with the epistemologies of these ceremonies is ever present in the stories and philoso- phies shared by Native consultants. In fact, in some cases Native consultants insisted on documenting songs from the Flower Dance, instructing their listeners that they hope one day these songs would be sung in a ceremony. This chapter explores how Native peoples reclaim ethnographic accounts, negotiate ethnographic refusal, and continue to interrogate ethnographic records to (re) write, (re)right, and (re)rite the feminist foundations of stories and memories of women’s coming-of-age for future generations.

sA lvAge et h nogr A Ph Y A n D t h e n egot i At ion oF et h no gr A Ph ic r eF usA l

Anthropology has had a tremendous effect on modern Indian nations. Sara- Larus Tolley argues that Indians battle for their identities through anthropol- ogy.22 In many ways, anthropology has mediated the very existence of Native

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A n t h roP olo gY A n D s A lvAge e t h no gr A Ph Y 79

people by being used as a primary source to determine federal recognition of Native nations. Audra Simpson critiques anthropology as having “dealt almost exclusively with Indigenous peoples in an ahistorical and depoliticized sense, innocent or dismissive of the strains of colonization and then settler colonial- ism on their politics, looking instead for a pure culture and pure interlocutors of that culture.”23 Tolley writes that in regard to the anthropological record, “it easily comes to equate authentic Indianness with cultural stasis. The result is that the government looks for static Indians, and the tribes do their best to present themselves as such, despite, in both instances the obvious contradic- tion.”24 Anthropological theories and scholarship have also affected land claims, land ownership, and land stewardship, as Native peoples continue to be faced with challenges to their sovereignty and land rights.

In 1969 Vine Deloria Jr. wrote a scathing response to anthropology in his book Custer Died for Your Sins, where he held that “the massive volume of use- less knowledge produced by anthropologists attempting to capture real Indi- ans in a network of theories has contributed substantially to the invisibility of Indian people today.”25 This invisibility not only delegitimizes modern Native people’s issues in regard to land, treaties, sovereignty, and self-determination but also delegitimizes their rich, storied, and ancient histories. Designations like primitive, prehistoric, wilderness, or hunter-gatherer created and main- tained a certain image of Native peoples and their societies, which also affected US policies and even the basic tenets of federal Indian Law.26 The first written use of the word primitive “in its anthropological sense” was in 1781 during the American War of Independence. Before this, European scholars had desig- nated theories of cultural development (formulated since the early 1750s) that included hunting, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial.27 In 1781 Edward Gibbon wrote that the Native American was firmly in the hunting category and that the condition of these “savages” was “perhaps the primitive and uni- versal stage of mankind.”28 Thus, the Native American became thoroughly tied to the primitive, and the designation was adopted as a means to separate primitive Native peoples from “civilization,” ensconcing Native peoples firmly in the past. In Red Earth, White Lies, Vine Deloria Jr. notes that the entrenched belief that “all peoples began as primitives and inevitably moved toward West- ern forms of organization, which in turn were guaranteed by Western religion and philosophy,” successfully created scholarship that was “laudatory of West- ern accomplishments” while “tribal peoples were given a marginal status as human beings.”29

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80 c h A P t e r 3

Anthropology was also deeply heteropatriarchal, which clouded analysis of Indigenous cultures, whose complex systems of gender, identity, politics, and spirituality were often oversimplified, ignored, or actively erased from the anthropological record. Trinh T. Minh-ha, a feminist scholar, sees anthro- pology as deeply racialized and gendered: “It seems clear that the favorite object of anthropological study is not just any man but a specific kind of man: the Primitive, now elevated to the rank of full yet needy man, the Native.”30 There was a consistent focus on Native men and their experiences in the anthropological record but very little analysis of how this reflected a particular perspective of shared stories or memories.

By the time early anthropologists began to gather ethnographic informa- tion, many Native communities had confronted genocide and were contending with continuing policies meant to assimilate or eradicate their peoples. Women, who were clearly targets of these policies and had been targets of depraved violence throughout invasion, may have been unwilling to work with white males and thus practiced “ethnographic refusal.” Men may have similarly refused to share specifics about women’s lives, ceremonies, and knowledges in an effort to protect women from further violence and degrada- tion. Simpson explains that her notion of refusal “articulates a mode of sover- eign authority over the presentation of ethnographic data, and so does not present ‘everything.’ This is for the express purpose of protecting the concerns of the community.”31 Native people understood the many dangers of allowing outsiders into their communities, especially as they continued to contend with policies of assimilation like boarding schools and allotment, intended to tear their communities apart.

In the case of the ethnographic record, however, I am not only exploring how the politics of refusal may have affected the way this record was built, but I also want to critically engage with how Native peoples negotiate refusal. Though there is a clear bias against women’s ceremonies in much of the anthropological observations, and many anthropologists seemed uncomfort- able with writing about or discussing elements of these ceremonies (like men- struation), many anthropologists and ethnographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who worked with tribes in California include discus- sions of the importance of women’s coming-of-age to tribal peoples. Some go so far as to extend the practice of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies to all Native nations, who they say had some sort of women’s ceremony or women’s customs that paid special mind to menstrual customs and practices. I see these moments of documentation as powerful negotiations of ethnographic refusal

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A n t h roP olo gY A n D s A lvAge e t h no gr A Ph Y 81

because these ceremonies were becoming less practiced as a result of the con- tinued assault on Native women and their ceremonies. I marvel at this docu- mented record for Northwest California tribes because it would be over sixty years before the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk would revisit these documents to (re)write, (re)right, and (re)rite their women’s coming-of-age ceremonies. This speaks to an ever-present notion of survivance among Native consultants working with anthropologists while negotiating refusal and ultimately leaving a foundation for what would become the reclamation of women’s coming-of- age ceremonies in California.

sA lvAge et h nogr A Ph Y i n c A liFor n i A

Alfred Kroeber’s Handbook of the Indians of California was published in 1925 and quickly became the primary text used by anthropologists and scholars to study California Indian peoples. Kroeber’s Handbook was the outcome of “seventeen years of acquaintance and occupation with the Indians of Califor- nia.”32 Much of Kroeber’s work was based on oral interviews with “informants” or personal observation; he does not refer to other written or archived accounts in this text. Julian Steward, one of Kroeber’s students, notes that “probably no anthropologist has spent as many years as Kroeber collecting and dealing with original cultural data or furthering field research programs.”33 Considering the wealth of information available at the time in terms of government correspon- dence, diaries, newspapers, and first-person accounts, Kroeber’s decision to use only the information that was given to him by Indian consultants, or those activities that he observed, speaks clearly to his preferred methodology.

Kroeber lived most of his life in Berkeley, although he also owned a small cabin in the heart of Yurok country in Northwest California. He had done his fieldwork in Yurok country beginning in 1900 and ended up purchasing his cabin in 1923 near the Yurok settlement of Oreqw (Orick), where he met several Yurok people who would work with him over the years.34 Tony Platt, in Grave Matters, provides a thorough and thoughtful account of Kroeber’s relationship with the Yurok people and concludes that because of this close, personal rela- tionship with several Yurok, “it is not by accident that Kroeber’s thousand-page, encyclopedic tome, Handbook of the Indians of California, . . . begins with an account of the Yurok. His survey of the Yurok takes four chapters and is ‘the most exhaustive of the descriptions within the book.’ ”35 Platt also notes that Kroeber’s relationships extended beyond interviews and research that he was doing for academic purposes. Kroeber “kept in touch with his informants and

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82 c h A P t e r 3

some, like Robert Spott, came to Berkeley to collaborate on projects.”36 In addi- tion, “Kroeber went out of his way to try to find local jobs around the Klamath for his Yurok contacts. . . . In the early 1930s, for example, he explored with Ruth Roberts, the possibility of getting Yurok hired in canneries and garages, and in the growing business of recreational fishing.”37 Wailaki and Concow scholar William Bauer notes that Kroeber’s relationships with his informants “forged social relationships . . . which sometimes lasted for decades.”38

Kroeber’s constructions of the Native people in California primarily focused on ceremonies, stories, and cultural life as artifacts rather than as complex philosophies. Kroeber’s work engaged very little with the deep spiritual and philosophical ideas that were built into oral histories and instead focused intently on material culture and physical interactions with the environment. Thomas Buckley, a noted anthropologist, critiques Kroeber’s view of culture, which “made no reference to individuality, experience, or intra-cultural varia- tion” and instead treated Indian people as “tokens of a timeless, ahistorical cultural type.”39 This is another way in which Kroeber’s affinity for a natural historical approach essentialized Native peoples and cultures and portrayed them as without history, education, or even emotion, thus reducing a complex society to a primitive culture and people, or what Tony Platt calls “a century of public information” that “is one of dehumanization and inferiority, swaddled in romanticism.”40

Kroeber’s work in California would be particularly misrepresentative because of his disengagement from the genocide of California Indian peoples. Buckley describes Kroeber’s California Indians as “perennial, not post- holocaust,” and notes that Kroeber’s work objectifies Native people by negating their history and writing about their cultures and societies with “cold, scien- tific distance and disinterest.”41 Kroeber’s influence over anthropological dis- course in California would be undeniable. His “hands-off tone” would make it easier to frame the “[California Indian] near extermination in the imagery of natural history subject to inevitable processes of erosion and decline” rather than as a genocide.42 These observations would become part of the cultural lexicon and would build a history that continues to affect Native people to this day. Karuk scholar Julian Lang writes that “while Kroeber collected myths, material artifacts, and ethnographies, he never introduced us to the living people, focusing instead on the past.”43 Thomas Buckley, most tellingly, notes that when Kroeber was asked why he “had not attended to recent Yurok history and acculturation, Kroeber replied that he ‘could not stand all the tears’ that these topics elicited from his Yurok informants.”44

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A n t h roP olo gY A n D s A lvAge e t h no gr A Ph Y 83

Kroeber’s personal beliefs are reflected in his observations and classifica- tions, though he claimed to aim for objectivity in his work. In particular, his close working relationship with the Yurok inspired his belief that the Yurok were “superior” to the other tribes in California.45 Whether to establish the superior- ity of the Yurok or because he could more easily find ways that the Yurok culture fit his own ideas of “civilization,” Kroeber argued that there was a hierarchical organization to California Indian cultures, and in Northwest Cali- fornia the Yurok were the most advanced in terms of material culture, mone- tary systems, and an “elaborate and precise code of law.”46 Kroeber’s approach to establishing the superiority of one Native culture over another included his designation of women’s coming-of-age and menstruation ceremonies as “a mark of inferior cultural development.”47 Kroeber wholeheartedly believed that tribes who practiced public celebrations of women’s first menstruation were less advanced. He further believed that tribes who continued to practice public puberty rites well into the contemporary period would never be able to reach the same level of civilization as tribes who had “never” had public puberty rites or who had given them up altogether. Buckley notes that Kroeber’s “selec- tion of female puberty rituals as diagnostic of limited cultural achievement” was “reflective of historically and culturally specific limitations.”48

Kroeber felt particular discomfort in writing about women’s ceremonies and women’s cultural practices. His scholarship is deeply ingrained with a Western patriarchal belief that menstruation is dirty and polluting. This meant that Kroeber was particularly critical of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies and practices associated with women, menstruation, and power. While rarely mentioning or engaging with California Indian menstrual practices, Kroeber also actively avoided the words menstruation, period, or even menarche, pre- ferring instead to refer to menstruation as a “periodic illness” or “physiological function.”49 Hupa scholar Jack Norton argues that Kroeber’s training and cul- tural background did not allow him to recognize the structures of spirituality, culture, politics, and education that sustained the complex society of Native people and instead caused him to treat Native people, their culture, and their traditions as primitive.50 This included an active erasure of women’s experi- ences, the roles of women in the culture and society, and also the epistemolo- gies central to women in Native culture.

Because Kroeber was working with a postgenocide population of Native people, the availability and openness of consultants was skewed toward “older, male leaders.” Tony Platt notes that “nowhere does [Kroeber] explore the extent to which his subjects’ recollections were mediated by their age.”51 Nor does

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8 4 c h A P t e r 3

Kroeber reflect that his information was primarily collected from men, who for any number of cultural or societal reasons may not have felt comfortable, com- pelled, or even informed enough to share specifically about women’s cultural practices or the role of women in California Indian cultures and societies.

Kroeber’s relationship with Native people would continue to be complex as he grew older and became much more involved with the politics of recogni- tion and California land issues. In 1946, Alfred Kroeber testified in the Cali- fornia Indian Land Claims on behalf of California Indians who were bringing a suit against the United States for “taking land without just compensation, specifically the lands and compensation lost because the United States Senate shelved, rather than ratified, the eighteen treaties made with California tribes.”52 Kroeber testified on behalf of the Indian plaintiffs to “demonstrate the fact of aboriginal ownership, exclusive use, and occupancy of lands lying within tribal boundaries.”53 He argued for the tribes in this case as he believed that “ecologically based understanding of land use” supported “ownership” of that area.54 During the case Kroeber was sometimes at odds with his own students, who were testifying for the US government and utilizing his methods and scholarship to support their claims in court. In the end, California Indians were awarded approximately forty-seven cents per acre when funds were actu- ally distributed.55 This, wrote Kroeber’s wife, Theodora, was “just the sort of expensive but meaningless denouement that Kroeber had most feared.”56

It is perhaps Theodora Kroeber who reflects best on Kroeber’s complex relationship with his work and subject matter, and also on the personal conflict and balance he had to maintain between the population he chose to study and the academic discipline he helped create. Theodora Kroeber, in writing her personal configuration of Alfred Kroeber, notes:

Kroeber believed ultimate answers or causes were rarely come by, and was

not disconcerted when he failed to discover them. . . . Kroeber wrote no text-

book. . . . He had strong feelings about textbooks: he considered them the

prop of the routine and not-too-interested teacher; and a straitjacket for

their author, forever fixing and confining his formulations and scope. He

never taught the Indians of California course after the Handbook was com-

pleted except for an occasional lecture, although it was his own course and

had been a favorite one. He no longer had the freedom to range, to change

directions. . . . For this reason he never wrote the Culture Growth course

into a book—it was his favorite teaching course and he wanted to keep it

free-flowing and alive.57

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Alfred Kroeber worked with several other scholars who would publish foun- dational texts on California Indian peoples. Stephen Powers began working in California Indian communities in 1871. He was primarily a journalist who pub- lished most of his work in the Overland Monthly and The Atlantic for several years after studying California Indians in 1871 and 1872.58 He then collected his articles to be published as a report for the U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region in 1877. Powers’s book, Tribes of California, was compiled by Robert Heizer and published in 1976, long after Powers’s death. Though Powers was not considered a leading scholar in the field of anthropology, he would have a continued influence on studies and publica- tions on California Indian life and culture. Alfred Kroeber referred to Powers as “my one predecessor in this field” and wrote that Powers’s work “with all its flimsy texture and slovenly edges, [will] always remain the best introduc- tion to the subject.”59 Powers’s work has been criticized because, like Kroeber, he did not discuss the current lives of Native people or their experience of the attempted genocide from just a few years before. Powers instead focused on an idealized version of the people that did not reflect the “shattering experi- ence of contact.”60 Hupa scholar Jack Norton writes that despite Powers’s “obvious dedication and talent, his lack of academic training caused his work to be regarded by most scholars as sentimental and melodramatic.”61

Pliny Earle Goddard, a missionary and linguist, and Edward Sapir, also a linguist, were both colleagues of Kroeber’s at Berkeley. Goddard had previ- ously served as a missionary in the Hoopa Valley, where he “learned enough Hupa to preach.”62 It was because of this interest in the Hupa language that he returned to graduate school to complete a doctoral dissertation on the gram- mar of the Hupa. Goddard’s work was linguistically focused, and he gathered numerous creation stories, prayers, and formulas from the Hupa people he worked with. Jack Norton notes that “Goddard’s writings contain their share of inaccuracies which have led, in some cases, to erroneous conclusions” but that he “more than most anthropologists, recognized that within the total lifestyle of the Northern California Indians, religion was a dominant force.”63 Goddard and Kroeber would eventually disagree on the direction the Anthro- pology Department should take in studying California Indian peoples. God- dard wanted a department focused more on linguistics and had little interest in ethnographic fieldwork. He would ultimately leave the department to work with Franz Boas at the Museum of Natural History in New York.64

Edward Sapir was never officially employed at UC Berkeley, but he was called in on occasion to work with Kroeber, who respected his talents in linguistic

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research. Sapir is credited with the creation of twentieth-century American linguistics (along with Leonard Bloomfield).65 He devoted much of his work to studying American Indian languages, and his research focused closely on Cali- fornia. Sapir spent eighteen months researching in California and Oregon, and after he left in 1908 he only returned twice, once in 1915 to work with Kroeber on documenting the Yana language and once in 1927 to work with a student on documenting the Hupa language.66 After his work in the Hoopa Valley, Sapir wrote to Alfred Kroeber to recommend that he “get in closer and closer contact with the Hupa Indians and take a good look at their religion,” because he would see that it was “a most exciting and rewarding task.” Sapir did not publish extensively. Linguist Victor Golla writes that “his primary motive seems to have been to provide others—primarily Kroeber—with a detailed phonetic record, and to make suggestions for future investigation.”67

Ethnographic exploration and documentation declined in the early 1930s during the Depression and World War II. Kroeber retired in 1946 and was suc- ceeded by Robert F. Heizer, a graduate of Berkeley’s Anthropology Department who specialized in Northwest California Indian tribes. Heizer assembled writ- ings from various scholars on California Indian peoples, including Stephen Powers’s Tribes of California and an edited collection called The California Indians: A Sourcebook, which included essays by Kroeber, among others. According to Golla, Heizer “understood, long before the rest of his twentieth- century colleagues that the ethnography of California Indians had become a historical discipline. . . . [H]e devoted a significant part of his intellectual energy to locating and publishing neglected gems of the nineteenth and early- twentieth century documentation of California languages and cultures.”68 In 1978 Heizer worked with editor William C. Sturtevant on the Handbook of North American Indians, a twenty-volume series that was “planned to give an encyclopedic summary of what is known about the pre history, history, and cultures of the aboriginal peoples of North America.”69 Heizer was the editor for volume 8 of the series, which is dedicated to California and furthered what Kroeber had explored in his Handbook because, as Heizer wrote, “Kroeber’s monumental work is a most authoritative treatment of California Indians in one volume, although it is obviously ‘dated.’ ”70

Several modern studies of California Indian peoples and cultures have been published over the past few decades, some an outgrowth of Kroeber’s scholarship and theories, and others that challenge his findings or critically redress some of his more controversial statements. Thomas Buckley became a vocal critic of Kroeber’s work, utilizing his own scholarship to complicate

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analyses of California Indian cultures and spiritualities. His texts Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850–1990 and Blood Magic: The Anthropol- ogy of Menstruation, as well as articles like “Kroeber’s Theory of Culture Areas and the Ethnology of Northwestern California” and “Suffering in the Cultural Construction of Others: Robert Spott and A. L. Kroeber,” provide a critical lens by which to view Kroeber’s work while foregrounding Indigenous epis- temologies. Buckley’s work also has a clear focus on the power of menstrua- tion, and he provides a foundation for exploring how menstrual customs and women’s coming-of-age ceremonies shaped anthropological discourse in California and beyond.

Do cu me n t i ng Wome n ’s comi ng - oF-Age ce r e mon ie s

According to cultural historian Harold Driver, rituals for menstruation and coming-of-age are nearly universal for North American tribes. However, Driver also notes that the public celebration of women’s coming-of-age is restricted to three areas: the Hopis; the Takic Uto-Aztecans of Southern Cali- fornia, and most groups of Northern California and southern Oregon.71 Driver notes that in California puberty ceremonies were integral parts of Athabascan cultures, and the puberty rites of Southern California cultures were fairly distinct from Athabascan cultures of California and the Southwest. Driver believes that group puberty rites were more common than individual rites in Southern California, and he speculates that the individual focused rites of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies originated on the Northwest Coast and spread to California and the Southwest. Driver’s goal in studying the preva- lence of puberty ceremonies was to demonstrate how similarities and dif- ferences among various tribes can help establish a timeline of migration and cultural exchange among tribal peoples in the Americas. Driver was not the first scholar to utilize the puberty ceremony in this way. Alfred Kroeber believed that this ceremony was the oldest of the Northern California region. Driver concluded that the women’s puberty ceremonies “must indeed be extremely ancient” because of their shared characteristics among various tribes throughout the Americas.72 Driver also argued that “public recognition of girls’ puberty was a relatively late development and one which originated among tribes of the North Pacific Coast.” Driver concluded that “tribes of that region placed relatively great emphasis on publicization of individual crises or changes of status,” which meant “that the public girls’ puberty ritual origi- nated there and then spread southward.”73

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The problem with attempts to codify ceremonial practices in this way is that often anthropologists and scholars are constrained by the tenets of the Bering Strait land bridge theory, which posits that Native peoples are immi- grants to the Americas and that the Athabascan language groups are descen- dants of recent migrations dating back 1,500 years and stemming from groups in northern Canada and Alaska. The Bering Strait theory was most famously interrogated by Vine Deloria Jr. in 1995, when he wrote Red Earth, White Lies, and the interrogation continues today as new evidence found by scientists leads scholars to question the validity of assumptions by those still attempting to justify the Bering Strait theory.74

Kroeber, Driver, and others were attempting to support the theorized migration of Native people over the Bering Strait land bridge through their interpretations of puberty ceremonies and their shared traits. Kroeber believed that cultural elements gather in various territories and can demonstrate time- lines of when these elements were adopted as part of cultural practices. He made several efforts to quantify and describe these element distributions to show how elements that were widespread in certain regions must be the oldest ones of that region and elements that were individualized to particular tribal groups must be newer to the area. Kroeber theorized that puberty ceremonies throughout the Western Hemisphere were given the most emphasis by groups that were stationary and immobile, conservative in their cultural borrowings and exchanges. These ceremonies were “attenuated or absent in those areas where the post-Archaic cultural continuity had apparently been disrupted by migrations or other strong outside influences.”75 This theorizing of Native cul- tural elements and migration patterns did not, however, fit well with the Atha- bascan peoples in the western United States, who practiced very rich and complex women’s coming-of-age ceremonies. Because the Athabascan groups are considered by Western scientists to be “fairly new” arrivals to the Ameri- cas, the theory posits that they should have less focus on girls’ coming-of-age rather than positioning these ceremonies as a central part of their culture and cosmologies. Linguist Victor Golla writes, “If Kroeber is correct, it must be assumed that the Pacific Coast Athabascans and their Apachean kin both borrowed the ceremony from other groups at a fairly late time, either during or after their migrations south. Nevertheless, extensive borrowing of a conser- vative trait that seems otherwise to atrophy in situations of cultural fluidity, is puzzling.”76 Even more “puzzling” is that it is not just one group of Atha- bascan peoples that centralizes women’s coming-of-age and puberty to its culture and cosmologies, as this includes the Hupa, Navajo, Western Apache,

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Mescalero, and Chiricahua, as well as “most all of the Athabascan cultures of California and the Southwest,” who have very well developed and central puberty and coming-of-age ceremonies.77

Driver offers a counterpoint by delineating two types of coming-of-age ceremonies present in the western United States. The first type is found in Central and Southern California, which he distinguishes because of the prac- tice of “group” ceremonies for girls, where, in his view, women’s ceremonies shared many common traits with men’s coming-of-age ceremonies in the same region. Driver distinguishes a second type of ceremony which is found principally on the Northwest Coast, western Oregon, Northern California, and the Southwest. These coming-of-age practices are distinguished from the Central and Southern California practices because they tend to focus on per- formance of the ceremony for an individual girl. Driver calls these ceremonies a “true menarche rite” and notes that they have few traits in common with any male-focused coming-of-age ceremonies in these tribal groups.78 Driver believes that the girls’ puberty ceremony originated on the Northwest Coast and was adopted by the Pacific Coast Athabascans and the Apacheans before they migrated to the Southwest. These subsequent Athabascan migrations to Southern California and the Southwest, which Driver puts at around 1,200– 1,600 years ago, spread the puberty rites to these areas and to non-Athabascan groups.79 Golla calls Driver’s conclusions “inconsistent with the linguistic and archaeological facts.”80

Golla, who did extensive work with the Hupa, has offered his own inter- pretation of how and why women’s coming-of-age ceremonies vary across cultures, especially in California. Golla focuses on the instruments used in the ceremony, in particular the use of a “dance staff,” which he says is “missing” from the Athabascan ceremony of Northwest California: “For the Atsugewi, Maidu, Washo, and Wintu, there is specific mention of the girl using it as a cane to lean on during the ceremony. Among the Maidu, Washo, and the Honey Lake Paiute, the girl left the dance with the staff, chased by one or more young men who tried to capture it from her. The Washo and Wintu explicitly regarded the dance-staff as a talisman, and after the ceremony it was carefully hidden in the woods.”81

Golla hypothesizes that because Athabascan groups do not use a staff in their ceremony, they could not have migrated to the area with the ceremony, nor originated the ceremony, but instead must have come into contact “with groups for whom this ceremony was the central ritual event” and “borrowed the essence of it.” Golla does note that several staff-like elements are used in

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the Athabascan ceremonies, including a “dance rattle” stick for keeping time while singing and a staff-like stick that is used by the men in the ceremony, though he labels this a “much less symbolically potent stick rattle.”82

The findings of these Western theorists rest on their understanding of shared or differing aspects of the women’s coming-of-age ceremonies across tribal cultures. The cosmologies and epistemologies of the tribal people who not only hold this dance very sacred but also see it as part of their essential rituals to balance and build their futures are never considered. Golla acknowl- edges in his work that after reading through and studying the many facets and recollections of the Flower Dance, he has concluded that the ceremony is very old and very complex. He writes that “Athabascan-speaking immigrants very quickly adopted an old and complex trait, the girls’ puberty dance, and incor- porated it so seamlessly into their virtual life that it is difficult to believe it was not always theirs.”83

The idea that ceremonies foundational to a group’s culture and spirituality can also adapt over time is never engaged by anthropological scholars. How- ever, the creation stories and epistemological framework of these ceremonial practices shed further light on how Native peoples understand a history much longer and more complex than theorized “migration” and “conservative cul- tural borrowing.” Take, for instance, the origin stories offered by two Hupa elders to Pliny Earle Goddard, specifically concerning the Jump Dance and the Flower Dance. The Jump Dance story was told in November 1901 by McCann. Goddard writes, “The narrator called it one of his choicest stories, but said nothing of its ceremonial use.”84 The story follows an Indian from Ta’k’imił- ding who became a K’ixinay. He “went over the world looking at dances” and “went around the world” until he saw a dance he liked because “they danced ten places near together.”85 He brings this back to the Hupa people. Here we see an example of a story about the K’ixinay learning and utilizing dance ele- ments inspired by other peoples and cultures. This could mean that the Hupa see no fault in this type of cultural adaptation, but it also demonstrates that within these stories there are clear ideas of cultural sharing that are not mys- terious or hidden; instead they are talked about openly. The Flower Dance story does not mention any type of cultural sharing or adaptation from other cultures but instead firmly roots the creation of the Flower Dance among the Hupa. The dance originates with the K’ixinay people, who come to Yima:ntiwinyay and his daughter when he begins to sing and dance over her because she has become a woman. The dance is then brought into the K’ixinay world above, along with the first Kinahłdung.86 Theorizations of migrations and cultural borrowing are

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not part of the creation of this dance; instead, the Hupa stories speak of the Flower Dance as originating among the Hupa First People.

What is missing from these theories is critical engagement with the source material. Many of these theories are based on written documentation of cer- emonial practices by Kroeber and his fellow linguists and ethnographers. This takes for granted that the conclusions drawn by these ethnographers are correct, rather than providing a critical analysis of the ways their assump- tions are informed by their own cultural biases. Kroeber wrote that these women’s ceremonies were part of the “generic or basic stratum of native cul- ture,” yet he also insisted that “it has decayed among those nations that suc- ceeded in definitely evolving or establishing ceremonials whose associations are less intimately personal and of a more broadly dignified import.”87 Kroe- ber’s unwillingness to discuss how this observation could reflect Native peoples’ postgenocide status undermines his findings. Upon further review and study, it is clear that even in cultures where Kroeber was not privy to detailed information about women’s coming-of-age or women’s customs, within the stories of these many tribes can be found obvious nods to the impor- tance of women to Native cultures and societies.

Kroeber would go so far as to erase the practice of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies from one tribe in particular, the Yurok of Northwest California. Kroeber wrote that there was no nightly dance for young women at their first menstruation among the Yurok, as there was among the Hupa. Instead, a young girl would “[sit] silent in her home for 10 days with her back turned to the central fire pit” and follow a number of prescribed actions. Kroeber insisted that the Yurok’s lack of a nightly ceremony demonstrated that “the Hupa stand one slight grade lower than the Yurok in the scale of civilization by one test that holds through most of California: the attention bestowed on the recurring physiological functions of women.”88 However, Kroeber’s field notes contradict his claim that the Yurok had no coming-of-age ceremony, or even that they paid little attention to “recurring physiological functions of women.” One of Kroeber’s Native consultants was Susie of Weitchpec, a Yurok woman who spoke at length with Kroeber about women and coming-of-age.89 In these notes Susie outlines not only the many things a newly menstruating young woman would do, including running, bathing, and fasting, but also how there were prayer formulas and medicine designed specifically for women to harness the power that came with menstruation. In Susie’s description of this ritualistic ceremony for a young woman at her first menstruation, she describes the many young children who would run behind the young woman and the women who

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would come to help the young girl and to bring sticks, which shows community involvement in these ceremonial practices.90 Susie mentions briefly that there is no Flower Dance on “this river,” although it is unclear if she means there has never been such a custom or that there had not been one in quite some time when Kroeber was speaking with her.91 She does elaborate slightly that there are Flower Dances in Hupa, in Crescent City (north of the Yurok), in Karuk country (north of the Hupa), and maybe at Requa (which is a Yurok village).92 In addition, Susie shares with Kroeber some of her Flower Dance songs, which he translates. Susie tells him that these songs are for luck.93 As Susie of Weitchpec claims, there may have been a Flower Dance at the Yurok village of Requa, and Kroeber’s refusal to engage with why there may or may not have been a Flower Dance along the river during Susie’s time, or at the time they were working together, reflects a refusal to engage with how the culture and spirituality adapted to the changing world where these women’s ceremo- nies were particularly targeted for eradication.

Kroeber’s theories that the Yurok somehow pay little or less attention to menstruation or young women as they come of age erases the power of their ceremonial practices, regardless of whether they mirror the nightly dancing that happens among other tribes. The Yurok also valued menstruation as a powerful and spiritual time.94 And they had a number of important ceremonial and spiritual elements that they practiced to demonstrate this. In her 2013 article “She Bathes in a Sacred Place: Rites of Reciprocity, Power, and Prestige in Alta California,” Mary Virginia Rojas explores another element of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies on the Northwest Coast. Like Golla, she focuses on a particular element of the ceremony, namely the ceremonial scratching stick that could be made of antler or abalone. Rather than try to make a cross- cultural analysis and attempt to argue which tribe was the first to utilize this kind of scratching implement, Rojas focuses on why this scratching stick is important to the spiritual practice of Yurok women. She argues that the scratch- ing stick “may be seen as a tool that moves energy, a technology that makes the intangible concrete.”95 They are important for empowering women as well as being “the source of autonomous religious activity for Yurok women, illumi- nating a different way of thinking and a different way of being in the sacred.”96 Here Rojas introduces an analysis that engages with Indigenous epistemol- ogies. A cross-cultural analysis would show that there are many tribes throughout California in which women use scratching implements during their coming-of-age ceremonies and also as part of their menstrual practices. Determining which tribe used these first negates how each tribe builds its

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epistemologies and methodologies based on a deep and personal knowledge of not only spirituality but also the psychosocial and physical well-being of their people and the environment.

Another example of contemporary anthropological discourse that engages with spirituality and Native perspectives is Abalone Tales: Collaborative Explo- rations of Sovereignty and Identity in Native California by Les W. Field, a profes- sor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico. Field interviewed Native people to provide space for them to speak at length in their own words through transcriptions and even artwork: “My intention is to show how collaborative ethnography paves the way for anthropologists to pursue different kinds of methods with respect to different sorts of questions and to validate these dif- ferent methods’ capacity to produce knowledge.”97 Field demonstrates what has become a contemporary effort in ethnography to foreground Native peoples as collaborators: “While the anthropologist may initiate research with her or his own questions, as I did, ultimately the research process must focus on those issues of importance within the Native Community and give voice to multiple perspectives from that community.”98 Field also includes a section specifically about the “revivification” of the Flower Dance, speaking to Callie Lara and Hupa medicine man Merv George Sr. In Field’s analysis of the wom- en’s coming-of-age ceremony, he takes to heart the lessons passed on to him by his Native collaborators. “Merv,” he writes, “talked about how many of the old people wanted to criticize but not to help get the dance started again. So Merv and his daughter researched and learned; they also made up new songs. This went to the heart, he observed, of how he understands and organizes the rituals—there are rules, to be sure, but there is also a wide range of possible creativity and innovation. Composing and singing new songs brings the dances to life, brings them into the present.”99

Native peoples have remained conscious of bringing their ceremonial practices and epistemologies into the present, knowing how important this is to sovereignty and self-determination. For example, the preamble to the Yurok Constitution (adopted in 1993) very clearly states that they have always and will always come together to perform ceremonies, including the Flower Dance, which “have always drawn hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of Yuroks and members of neighboring tribes together for renewal, healing and prayer.”100 This participates in (re)writing, (re)righting, and (re)riteing of assertions like Kroeber’s that this dance was not part of Yurok culture. The section of the preamble concerning the assertion of their women’s coming-of- age ceremonial practices reads as follows:

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Our people have always carried on extensive trade and social relations

throughout our territory and beyond. Our commerce includes a monetary

system based on the use of dentalium shells, Terkw-term and other items

as currency. The Klamath River was and remains our highway, and we

from time beginning utilized the river and the ocean in dugout canoes,

Alth way och, carved from the redwood by Yurok craftsmen, masterpieces

of efficiency and ingenuity and have always been sold or traded to others

outside the tribe. Our people come together from many village[s] to per-

form ceremonial construction of our fish dams, Lohg en. Our traditional

ceremonies—the Deerskin Dance, Doctor Dance, Jump Dance, Brush

Dance, Kick Dance, Flower Dance and others—have always drawn hun-

dreds, and sometimes thousands, of Yuroks and members of neighboring

tribes together for renewal, healing, and prayer. We also have always trav-

eled to the North and East to the high mountains on our traditional trails to

worship the Creator at our sacred sites—Doctor Rock, Chimney Rock, Thkla-

mah (the stepping stones for ascent into the sky world), and many others.

Do cu me n t i ng t h e h u PA Wome n ’s comi ng - oF-Age ce r e mon Y

While Kroeber actively attempted to erase the centrality of this ceremony from certain tribes (like the Yurok), other scholars attempted to document the detailed instructions for performing this ceremony. Edward Sapir offers a par- ticularly lengthy description and analysis of the women’s coming-of-age cer- emony in his collected writings. Sapir worked mostly with six Hupa speakers, including Sam Brown, Emma Frank, John Shoemaker, Mary Marshall, Jake Hostler, and Oscar Brown.101 Linguists Victor Golla and Sean O’Neill provide biographies for each Hupa consultant in their edited edition of The Collected Works of Edward Sapir (vol. 14, 27–28). The narrated text that Sapir transcribes provides detailed instructions for performing the ceremony. The translated text is nine pages long, one of the longest featured in Sapir’s work.102 The story was narrated by a Hupa man, Sam Brown, during the summer of 1927. Sam Brown was “chief consultant and interpreter” for Sapir and is described as “unusually knowledgeable and articulate.”103 Sam Brown was Sapir’s source for thirty-nine texts. He had earlier worked as an interpreter for Pliny Earle Goddard and would continue to work with anthropologists after his time with Sapir.104 Golla and O’Neill describe him as such: “A [bachelor], he often wore a (woman’s) basket cap and excelled in such traditional female occupations as

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basket weaving, acorn processing, and cooking. By middle age, when Sapir knew him, he had become one of the chief authorities on World Renewal matters, as well as for a number of other rituals. Although his father was White, his mother came from a branch of the family that owned the [xontah- nikya:w ] in [Ta’k’imił-ding]. He died in 1959 at the age of 80.”105

Brown’s narration of the Flower Dance (Text 10 in Sapir’s volume) includes detailed instructions for performing the ceremony. Brown’s narrative includes specific Hupa terms for when a girl menstruates for the first time (kina’k’iłday) and when the newly menstruating girl is part of the Flower Dance ceremony (kinahłdung). In their work, Powers and Heizer had suggested that the puberty ceremony was mainly done for girls from “wealthy” families. However, the translation of Brown’s account affirms, “Whenever someone menstruates for the first time, everyone says, ‘They will have the Flower Dance for her.’ ”106 This demonstrates that the dance was a part of every young girl’s life and was important to the entire community, not just those who were from wealthy families. Brown provides additional information on a lot of important aspects of the ceremony, like the name of the “tim” bathing spots, which are the ritual bathing spots for menstruating women.

Brown dedicates a second text, “The Origin of the Flower Dance,” to the Flower Dance ceremony, which differs from a creation story of the Flower Dance offered by Robinson Shoemaker, who was a consultant for Goddard in 1901.107 Brown relays that he learned this story from Lily Hostler, whose mother was from Redwood Creek country, and Golla suggests that “this may be the Redwood Creek version of the story.”108 In this version of the Flower Dance origin story, a K’ixinay man and woman come into existence, and they have two girls. Their father marries a new woman “in a blue dress.”109 The father begins to ignore the first wife and “stopped eating (what his first wife) cooked.” He then beats up his first wife. The girls’ mother (the first wife) tells the girls they are leaving and “going back home!” They walk until evening, when they stop at a house and find an old man “with a pot-belly” who invites them in. He cooks them acorn mush and brings them venison and salmon. The girls’ mother tells her story, and in the morning they leave. As they are leaving, the old man says, “I wish that girl would become a kinahłdung.”110 They get to Orleans (a place in Karuk country), and the older girl realizes that they are kinahłdung, so she starts singing a song. (While she declares that both she and her sister are kinahłdung, Golla later clarifies that only this first girl was actually menstruating for the first time at this point.) Silver-Gray Fox, Hum- mingbird, and Frog Woman, as well as others, come to begin a Flower Dance.

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The old man also comes to the dance, but now he is a young man, and one of the girls declares that she is going to marry him. The other girl is taken to the K’ixinay world, and she becomes the perpetual kinahłdung. In contrast to God- dard’s text, it is two girls that are responsible for the creation of the first Flower Dance. As these two young women come of age and have their first menstrua- tion, it is immediately celebrated, even though they are in the midst of escaping their father. This is how important the ceremony is to a young woman’s devel- opment, but it is also a clear demonstration of how this power could perhaps help these young women as they start new lives without their abusive father. The fact that this is an origin story of the Flower Dance means that it will be repeated generation to generation and probably told to each young woman as she comes of age in her community.

Like Sapir, Goddard also offers a translated origin story of the kinahłdung dance (Flower Dance or puberty ceremony). The story was told in Hupa in June 1901 by Robinson Shoemaker. Goddard describes Robinson Shoemaker as “a man about 30 years of age. His father and mother, both quite old, are unusually well supplied with myths and formulas.”111 Shoemaker was the con- sultant who would provide Goddard with the origin of the women’s coming- of-age ceremony in June 1901.

In this story the ceremony is created by a K’ixinay person to mark the awak- ening of his daughter. Thus, this dance is directly tied to the K’ixinay people and implies that when a girl is doing the dance, she is directly tied to the K’ixinay, effectively representing or becoming a K’ixinay’s daughter. It shows the power that youth have, as the young women must take a central role in “calling” the dance to them. For the Hupa, the power of kinahłdung in this situation must be celebrated and acknowledged as a means of helping them understand their new roles in society.

Stephen Powers also offers a personal recollection of a Hupa Flower Dance ceremony in his book. He does not do this for any other ceremony from the tribe. This highlights the importance of this dance, as Powers was specifically told a story or experienced the ceremony while in the Hoopa Valley (this is not made clear in his text). In the story a young girl, whom Powers identifies as Nish-Fang, desperately tries to return to the valley to perform her puberty ceremony “in order that she might be duly ushered into the sisterhood of women by the time-honored and consecrating ritual of the puberty dance.”112 While Nish-Fang’s story includes a reference to her first menstruation, Powers simply refers to it as “that mysterious and momentous occurrence . . . which announced her arrival to the estate of womanhood.”113 Because Nish-Fang is

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living with a white family on the Mad River, once she has her first menstrua- tion she immediately makes plans to return to the Hoopa Valley so that she can have a Flower Dance. Nish-Fang goes through a lot to have a Flower Dance, including a long journey to the valley from the coast while fasting and having to avoid the gaze of the white onlookers she comes into contact with because, as Powers writes, “though these were the hereditary enemies of her race and she might have destroyed them by a single glance, she lifted not her hands from her face.”114 It is interesting how Powers documents the perceived power of Nish-Fang during her first menstruation. His reflection, however, that she could have “destroyed” onlookers is misleading, as it focuses on Nish-Fang’s power as somehow being about the power to destroy and ignores the luck or blessings that Nish-Fang’s menstruation would have brought to people around her. There is no way to know if this reflects what Powers learned from Nish- Fang or other Hupa people, or if this reveals Powers’s own assumptions based on his cultural and social background. It is clear, however, from Hupa cultural epistemologies that part of what comes from these women’s coming-of-age ceremonies is the ability to harness, understand, and properly access the power that comes from menstruation and coming-of-age. This is why Nish- Fang works so tirelessly to avoid the gaze of others: she has not yet learned how to best approach the power she has during this time.

Nish-Fang travels for many miles, avoiding the gaze of onlookers, until finally she collapses, and her traveling companions carry her the rest of the way into the valley. There she has a dance performed over her. “Then,” Powers writes, “the chief lifted her by the hand, and the maiden Nish-Fang became a woman of her tribe.”115 Powers does not relay whether this story was told to him, if he witnessed the dance himself, or exactly who Nish-Fang was. Interest- ingly, however, he does provide a sketch of a young girl he identifies as Nish- Fang.116 Nish-Fang has shoulder-length hair and is drawn wearing a ceremonial dress and long dentalium strand necklaces. There is much that can be inferred about Nish-Fang from this picture. As Powers’s visit was in the mid to late 1800s, very close to the genocidal policies, massacres, and violence perpe- trated against Native peoples, Nish Fang’s shoulder-length hair is quite telling. Traditional Hupa girls and women wore their hair long and parted in the middle. Hupa people usually cut their hair in times of mourning, and hair that was growing back (shoulder length, like Nish-Fang’s) could represent that she was coming from a time of loss and mourning. It could also have been a func- tion of her living with a white family, as noted by Powers, among non-Natives in a small town many miles from the Hoopa Valley. In Powers’s sketch she is

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98 c h A P t e r 3

wearing a traditional xo’ji-q’osta:n (basket cap), and she is obviously a young girl with no facial tattoos.117 She is also not wearing any of the markers of a kinahłdung, which would usually include a scratching instrument around her neck, bear grass anklets and bracelets, or blue jay veil. Had Powers attended Nish-Fang’s ceremony, it would be no stretch of the imagination to assume that he would have wanted to draw her in the ceremonial dress of the Flower Dance. It could also mean that Nish-Fang’s ceremonial regalia did not include all implements of the dance because of her hasty return, yet both she and her community still insisted on having this ceremony performed for her.

None of this is meant to question the validity of Powers’s story about Nish- Fang. That he included a picture of her and recalled the story of her Flower Dance speaks to how important this ceremony was for Nish-Fang and to the many ways Native women like Nish-Fang participated in documenting this importance by sharing stories about the dance with those attempting to write this historical record. There would have been many negotiations made by Native people in these interviews, especially considering that women had been targeted during colonization for violence and these ceremonies and cul- tural practices were used by settler colonial society to justify violence. The sharing of these stories, epistemologies, and memories reflects powerful moments of self-determination. Why tell these stories? For me, it is because Native people are always thinking about future generations. They must have known there would be people who could remember these stories without Kroeber or Goddard or Sapir writing them down, but they also wanted to make sure that somebody wrote them down. Maybe they wanted to show these white male ethnographers that they were not ashamed of their culture or beliefs. Maybe they hoped to leave a record that we could find one day. Even if Kroeber or other ethnographers hadn’t planned for it, the scribbly handwritten notes of Native people telling stories became part of how we (re)write, (re)right, and (re)rite our Native feminisms and futures.

conclusion

In the nineteenth century, as anthropologists attempted to gather historical information on Native cultures, Native peoples were faced with policies of assimilation designed to regulate their intimate lives, relationships, and bodies. Even with the continued enforcement of these policies, many Native peoples worked closely with scholars like Alfred Kroeber, Pliny Earle Goddard, and Edward Sapir to share the stories, methodologies and practices that were

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A n t h roP olo gY A n D s A lvAge e t h no gr A Ph Y 99

a part of enduring Native cultures. While the women’s coming-of-age cere- mony was particularly targeted for eradication by outside influences and gov- ernment agents, these Native consultants participated in creating a historical record that would contribute to the cultural revitalization of these ceremonies many decades later. While they built this cultural revitalization, the women of the Hoopa Valley Tribe would explore the anthropological and ethnographic records from the early nineteenth century. As my mother, Lois Risling, says,

We looked at any place where we could find a reference to the dance; like

we looked in Kroeber’s, Alfred Kroeber’s handbook, and there was a refer-

ence in there to Flower Dance, that it was done. We looked in Sapir’s works

and there was a reference there. But we also looked in the original notes that

Kroeber took because one of the things we noticed is that he might have two

or three lines mentioning the dance, depending upon the tribe that he was

talking about, but that his notes were more extensive. He had actual inter-

views with women, so we read those notes.118

Bringing this revitalization to fruition was not just a reclaiming of memo- ries, stories, songs, and ceremony; it was also a reclamation of the historical ethnographic record. It was here that Native women would push back against narrative of the vanishing, dying Indian, demonstrating not only that we are still here but also that the Flower Dance had never disappeared and would never disappear, go extinct, or be forgotten. The ceremony could be none of those things because this ceremony was in the memories of our elders, in the records and stories left by our ancestors in the ethnographic record, and being danced for all time in the heavens above, waiting for us to recall it.119

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