SOURCE: "Indian Sacred Materials: Kroeber, Kroeber, Waters, and Momaday," in Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature, edited by Brian Swann, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 283-300.

[Brumble is an American educator and nonfiction writer with a particular interest in the relationship between Native Americans and the anthropologists who often tell their stories. In the excerpt below, which is taken from an essay that first appeared in the Spring 1980 issue of The Canadian Review of American Studies, he expresses deep reservations concerning the ethics and accuracy of Waters's descriptions of Native religions.]

One of the threads that bind the bundle we are coming to call American Indian Literature is that of the Indian caught between two cultures; there are, to name but a few, Abel in Momaday's House Made of Dawn, Martiniano in Waters' The Man Who Killed the Deer, S. B. in Radin's Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian, and, in a muted way, the unnamed protagonist of Welch's Winter in the Blood. Probably this preoccupation with personal identity and the impingements of culture is one of the major reasons for the rising popularity of American Indian books in a country which is stirring its melting pot ever more gingerly. But as the protagonists of such books writhe about in the nets cultures weave, they might be comforted to know that their creators share some of their problems—that the nets are there for authors as well as for heroes.

One of the knottiest problems confronting these authors, Indian or white, is that of deciding upon which side of the culture line to take their narrative stance. Waters, for example, is one-quarter Indian, but, of course, white-educated. He is obviously in sympathy with the Hopis about whom he writes, but is he to write as an Indian, or about Indians? Waters is typical of many writers on Indian subjects in that he is fascinated by Indian religious and symbolic systems, but for many Indian peoples—certainly for Waters' Hopis—such matters are thought to be profaned by mere discussion, let alone commercial publication. Should one write on such subjects or not? If one does choose to write of the Indians' sacred things, what use is intended therefor? Why should the Indian lore be published at all? For preservation?—for whom? For entertainment? For moral instruction?—whose moral instruction? These are frequently obtrusive problems for authors who claim to be very much in sympathy with their Indian subjects.

I would like to discuss various responses to these problems, most particularly those of A. L. Kroeber, Frank Waters, Theodora Kroeber, and N. Scott Momaday. I hope that this will serve as an aid to the understanding and appreciation of these writers, of course; but, in suggesting a brief history of the attitudes toward the problems implicit in the use of Indian materials, the main purpose of this essay is the erection of one fragile framework upon which we can begin to piece together a coherent account of the development of American Indian literature in the twentieth century.

The earliest response to these problems could perhaps best be characterized as obliviousness. In 1907, for example, when J. W. Schultz wrote My Life as an Indian, his account of his years among the pre-reservation Blackfeet, it did not occur to him that his sometime hosts might have had "rights of privacy" which could restrain him from telling about their ceremonies. Neither did it occur to Schultz, then, that he had in some way to justify his use of Indian materials. This non-apologetic use of Indian materials is, of course, typical of a great many such narratives….

The work of A. L. Kroeber, [Franz] Boas's most famous pupil, is an interesting example of the non-apologetic use of Indian materials. Off and on, throughout his long career, Kroeber had worked with the Mohave Indians of the lower Colorado basin. Late in his life he turned again to the Mohaves. In his introduction to the resultant More Mohave Myths he wrote:

I have long pondered to whom we owe the saving of human religious and aesthetic achievements as are recorded here. It is probably not to the group that produced them. Why should we preserve Mohave values when they themselves cannot preserve them, and their descendants are likely to be indifferent? It is the future of our own world culture that these values can enrich, and our ultimate understandings grow wider as well as deeper thereby….

Since Kroeber was one of the most influential anthropologists at work in the first half of this century, it is not surprising that Frank Waters reflects many of Kroeber's assumptions about the uses of the study of cultures. Waters' The Man Who Killed the Deer, filled as it is with the details of Tiwan life and religion (Waters' La Oreja is, of course, a thinly disguised Taos), is certainly not designed to convince us to become Tiwans. In fact, the book is a kind of dialogue between cultures, the Anglo, the Tiwan, the Spanish, the Peyote, the Navajo, the Apache each having their say. In fact, the point of the book would seem to be that hide-bound insistence upon the forms of any single culture is wrong, is deadening. Waters writes, for example, of Palemon: "Palemon was a good man. Though he belonged to the old ways, he believed in the substance of life more than in the forms." Palemon is Tiwan and one of the novel's normative characters. And then there is Byers, the white trader, the "buyer," the trader in cultures, the cultural polymath, the man who takes from the Tiwan, the Anglo, the Spanish, enough to make his own roughshod, serviceable culture. With his Tiwan Indian proclivity for dirt, silence, and the mystic; with his Spanish wife and tableware and lace; and with his white rationality; with his insistence upon taking no culture whole; with all of this Byers is something like a fictional realization of Kroeber's ideal—but with a difference. Presented with the poles of a cultural dialectic, Byers does not ascend to synthesize (as Kroeber would have him do) he picks and chooses: a bit of rationality here, a bit of Spanish lace, a bit of mysticism there….

Kroeber, as we have seen, did not assume that his readers should learn directly from his Mohave myths. Waters does want his readers to learn directly, to pick and choose after the fashion of Byers. Waters may not want us to become Tiwan, but he does urge us to espouse some of the most important aspects of Tiwan religion. We do not have to learn Tiwan dances; we do not have to send our sons off for kiva initiation; but we should learn that there is a kind of knowledge not available to our reasoning intellect, and we should cultivate within ourselves the source of that knowledge, as do Waters' Indians. Waters makes this clear in the introduction to his Book of the Hopi, a book which Waters claims is a veritable Hopi bible, compiled by himself with the aid of many elders of the Hopi nation:

That these Hopis have revealed their conceptual pattern to us now, for the first time, imparts to their gift a strangeness unique in our national experience…. They evoke old gods shaped by instincts we have long suppressed. They reassert a rhythm of life we have disastrously tried to ignore. They remind us we must attune ourselves to the need for inner change if we are to avert a cataclysmic rupture between our own minds and hearts. Now, if ever, is the time for them to talk, for us to listen.

We can be saved, then, by Waters' exposition of a "worldview of life, deeply religious in nature, whose esoteric meaning they have kept inviolate for generations uncounted"—up until, that is, their collaboration with Waters. Waters argues that there really are self-validating truths in the system he describes, that he writes, that is to say, as a believer. I quote again from his introduction to Book of the Hopi: "To these doubts and denials of the professional anthropologist my only answer is that the book stems from a mythic and symbolic level far below the surface of anthropological and ethnological documentation. That it may not conform to rational conceptualization … does not detract from its own validity as a depth psychology different from our own."

In his attempt to straddle the line between his own "rational" culture and the instinct-dependent Pueblo cultures, Waters personifies a powerful tendency of modern Americans to see the Indian cultures as the obverse of our own, as lost Edens. Given this assumption it becomes one's duty to preach to the washed masses the gospel of Indian innocence. And especially one's duty to believe in the saving grace of Indian mysticism. This is to be guilty of two errors at once. First, to assume, as Waters does, that the problems of twentieth-century America are the result of our collective refusal to listen to our hearts is a monumental oversimplification. Second, and potentially more damaging, is the notion that Indians are not rational, that they (and it is remarkable how easily we can lump "them"—all one kind of Indian) are essentially anti-rational, which is next door to irrational. In this regard, though his books are less sensational, Waters is really not far from Carlos Castaneda's ever so earnestly intended hocus-pocus.

Waters is thus a kind of partial believer, and so he involves himself in problems Kroeber avoids. As a non-believer, Kroeber, like most anthropologists of his day, felt but little restrained by the taboos of cultures not his own. Waters, on the other hand, wants to have it both ways. He wants to write from the perspective of the Pueblos, but he also wants to publish all the details of the religious and symbolic system which he feels is so important to the "rational" culture which he so much wants to change. Meanwhile, the reader is hard put to distinguish between Waters' publication of sacred Hopi and Tiwan material and the anthropologist's publication of the "thin paper-backed booklet" which evoked such profound indignation among the Tiwan in The Man Who Killed the Deer. This booklet contained "a few photographs, a description of customs" and, much more seriously, a list of family names, an account of origin myths, descriptions of kiva ceremonies—all sacred matters: "It was not a question of how much or how little the contents of the book approximated the truth…. To them spoken words robbed a thought of its power, and printed words destroyed it entirely. They never looked at or pointed to an object or person being discussed; never spoke another's name … lest direct reference rob the one of this power."

Waters quietly derides this booklet—Byers laughs at it—but how can Waters' own books be distinguished from the object of his derision? The Book of the Hopi contains photographs; The Man Who Killed the Deer, Pumpkin Seed Point (1973), and Book of the Hopi all contain descriptions of customs; the first section of Book of the Hopi is devoted to the Hopi origin myth; the kiva plays a prominent part in The Man Who Killed the Deer. I am certain that Waters considers his own accounts to be more accurate than those in "the booklet," but "it was not a question of how much or how little the contents of the book approximated the truth."

Waters responds directly to but one aspect of these problems in The Man Who Killed the Deer, namely, how can one print the ineffable? If there are, as the novel assumes, truths which can be known only to the heart and the instincts, if "spoken words robbed a thought of its power, and printed words destroyed it entirely," what is Waters to do? His solution is to distinguish typographically between two levels of communication: for the ineffable, for the silences that communicate, for the thoughts whose power utterance would weaken and printing would "destroy … entirely" there are italics. For normal speech and narration there is roman. For example:

Silence spoke, and it spoke the loudest of all.

There is no such thing as a simple thing. One drops a pebble into a pool, but the ripples travel far … nothing is simple and alone. We are not separate and alone … we are all one, indivisible. Nothing that any of us does but affects us all.

This is, of course, no real solution. Even to afford the ineffable the benefit of italics is to dispute its ineffability. Whatever Waters may have felt in his heart, such sentiments on the printed page are but aphorisms. Even the device of italicization, however, is missing from such forthright presentations of religious matters as Book of the Hopi and Masked Gods: Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonialism (1970). Mind, I am not castigating Waters for his lack of piety. I am no believer. Nor is the question whether or not Waters is really a believer. The problem here is in the disjunction between Waters' profession on the one hand that there are truths of the "heart" which can be communicated only mystically, and, on the other hand, his printing of those supposed ineffables.

Given his stance as a partial believer, it is not surprising that Waters is not content with such a justification as Kroeber provided. Waters certainly hopes, with Kroeber, that the Indian materials he publishes will help to shape a "world culture," but in his ambivalence Waters evidently feels that no such justification can suffice. Waters feels compelled to claim that what he writes he writes for the Indians themselves. He makes this claim in his introduction to Book of the Hopi. Publication of materials previously jealously guarded is suddenly right and proper, Waters assures us, because each of his informants "regarded the compilation" of the book "as a sacred task." The book is to be "a monumental record that would give their children a complete history of their people and their religious belief." The argument would seem to be that there is no profanation because, first, the Hopis themselves wrote the book, with Waters as a kind of amanuensis, and, second, that the book is really intended for the Hopis. It is the Hopis themselves who have allowed us to read the book over their shoulders, as it were.

There is evidence that no such collaboration as Waters describes ever took place. Albert Yava, a Tewa-Hopi, writes that "the old-timers around Oraibi" gave Waters' Indian middleman "a lot of misinformation … just to get rid of him." This is quite possible. In fact, Waters describes just such a peddling of misinformation in The Man Who Killed the Deer. But whatever the nature of Waters' collaboration with the Hopis may have been, Waters nowhere provides an explanation of why the culture he had described as so remarkably stable in The Man Who Killed the Deer should suddenly be so fearful of the continuance of its religion that its secrets must be entrusted to Waters and the Viking Press.

And again, the problem is not that Waters does not show proper respect for the sacred, or that he wants to publish sacred things. The problem is that he claims to regard it as sacred and he wants to publish it. His solution to the problem is to convince us that he really is doing it for the Indians themselves.

Now even among the most devoutly relativist of the professional anthropologists, there are few who ever seriously consider converting to whatever religious system they might study. Consequently, however much they may yearn for primitive innocence they generally escape the kinds of self-contradictions which are the results of Waters' apologetic stance and partial conversion. When Cora DuBois did her research on the Ghost Dance, the fact that there was "everywhere … a deep-rooted fear of the risk incurred to one's health and well-being by speaking of one's personal dream experiences" ["The 1870 Ghost Dance," Anthropological Records (1939)] was an impediment to her work, but certainly no bar to publication. Isabel T. Kelly recalls the reluctance of her informants to speak on shamanism as a research problem to be overcome, not as a source of personal embarrassment or guilt.

And there is a further difference between Waters and the anthropologists. Every one of the twenty-seven "spokesmen" whom Waters lists "regarded the compilation" of Waters' Book of the Hopi "as a sacred task." When, on the other hand, the anthropologists tell about their informants' motives, we are presented with all the variety we would expect from hundreds of individuals from many different cultures. Some speak to the anthropologists because they are paid; some speak because they feel themselves to be competing with the anthropologists in their knowledge of their culture; some will not speak because they feel themselves to be competing with the anthropologist; some will not speak because they are embarrassed to have been associated with "crazy" movements; some will speak about games and baskets, but not about sacred matters; some simply will not speak; some want whiskey; at least one … was persuaded to speak in order to demonstrate to later generations the errors of the old ways; and some want to help to preserve their culture. One enterprising anthropologist even gets people talking by beginning as a census taker. One Hopi, Don Talayesva, informant to a whole generation of anthropologists and the hero of numberless Ph.D. dissertations, spoke for money—and for the prestige which his association with the anthropologists gained for him. He always insisted, however, when questioned by worried members of his tribe, that he never revealed tribal secrets.

Given this diversity it is remarkable that, beginning around 1930, so many of the popular anthropologists, like Waters, seem to have so many informants whose only motive, crisply pure, is the preservation of their culture. I do not think that it is accidental that these remarkable informants allow the popular anthropologists to say: "True, I am in sympathy with my subjects; true, I write from their perspective, though I write of sacred matters; but they really wanted me to write it down. I do so in their behalf and at their behest." Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks provides a nice case in point. In his introduction to the 1961 Nebraska Press edition, Neihardt wrote that it was Black Elk who had urged upon Neihardt the writing of the book in order to "save his great vision for all men." The 1979 Nebraska Press edition, however, prints a letter from Neihardt to Black Elk. We read:

Now I have something to tell you that I hope and believe will interest you as much as it does me…. I feel that the whole story of your life ought to be written truthfully by somebody with the right feeling and understanding of your people…. I would, of course, expect to pay you well for all the time that you would give me.

It would seem, then, that there is some measure of fiction in Neihardt's description of himself as having played wedding guest to Black Elk's ancient mediciner….

This is not to say that every Indian enthusiast who claims that his informants helped him in order to preserve their culture is necessarily a liar. I am saying that there are scruples which must be overcome in studying, especially at first hand, Indian cultures. It is easy to see field work as analogous to mining on Indian lands—much taken, little left behind; lots of government money for studies, very little of this money finding its way to the often hard-pressed people being studied. Theodore Kroeber, Waters, Neihardt, and others convinced themselves that such work can be anti-exploitationist assumptions of the American civil rights movement began to be applied to the plight of the twentieth-century American Indian; as antipaternalistic, anti-exploitationist assumptions began to be popularized by such persons as Vine Deloria and insisted upon by such forces as the American Indian Movement; as such assumptions gained currency, apologies like those of Waters and Theodora Kroeber and Neihardt began to ring ever more hollow, while the non-apologetic appropriation of Indian materials for the advancement of A. L. Kroeber's "world culture" became to many an embarrassment. As Indian informants became more and more recalcitrant, anthropologists began to speak more and more of the utility of their work, not in saving the Indians' culture for them, but rather in the achievement of much more immediate ends….

If there is a new respect for the Indians' rights to recognition and privacy among those who write about Indians, it is certainly due in part to the increasing likelihood that what gets written about Indians will be read by Indians—and responded to by Indians. See, for example, the cries of blasphemy which greeted Harper and Row's 1972 publication of Hyemeyohsts Storm's Seven Arrows, a lavishly illustrated book intended to impart the traditional wisdom of the Plains Indians by telling of tales, the explication of allegories, and the exposition of the Sun Dance, the Medicine Wheel, and so forth. The remarkably heated response of Rupert Costo [in "Seven Arrows Desecrates Cheyenne," The Indian Historian (1972)], then president of the American Indian Historical Society, was typical. "The recent best-selling book Chief Red Fox, brought disgrace to McGraw-Hill. Its author was exposed as a fraud. This book, Seven Arrows, will bring disgrace to Harper and Row…. Its content falsifies and desecrates the traditions and religion of the Northern Cheyenne, which it purports to describe…. The color plates are a solid disaster…. to many Cheyenne people … the reaction to Seven Arrows was disbelief and anger."

Now it is interesting to note that this book is really rather close in intent and execution to Waters' Book of the Hopi: both detail Indian religious and symbolic material; both books seek to move readers to adopt certain "Indian ways"; there are some errors in both books; each is, in fact, a deeply felt, non-professional account of traditional Indian materials colored and reshaped by the moral-aesthetic concerns of an Anglo-educated individual intelligence. The main difference is that Waters' book precedes Storm's by nearly ten years, and so Waters' errors are mentioned in obscure book reviews, and his "blasphemy" is mentioned not at all. Nine years later, on the other hand, the cries of the Cheyenne and their sympathizers, cries of Storm's "desecrations" and "falsifications" were sufficient to cause Harper and Row temporarily to cease distribution of Seven Arrows—a book which had otherwise been warmly received.

There is, then, a more and more widespread concern for the rights of privacy of Indians, more and more vocal unwillingness on the part of Indians to suffer violation of the sacred, and more and more concern that what is written about Indians have some more tangible effect than the preservation of culture.