Over the past several decades, there has been some remarkably progressive, and controversial, work done in the social sciences exploring the value of oral tradition for understanding the distant past of Native North Americans. Indigenous archaeology now routinely employs oral histories in working with and for tribal communities—a true challenge to the exclusivity of the methods and privileged status of archaeological practices of the past century. Judicial decisions addressing indigenous land claims will forever be impacted by the legal acknowledgement of oral narratives in Canada’s Delgamuukw case (1997), in which an ancient and sacred genre of lineage history (kungax for the Wet’suwet’en) was deemed admissible as evidence of rights and title to aboriginal territory. Indeed, it is increasingly common—and ethically responsible—for scholars, courts, and heritage management professionals to consider the multiplicity of means to narrate and interpret the past through archaeology, ethnohistory, and oral tradition, with the collaborative potential of science and indigenous people working together.
Robert S. McPherson’s recent book, Viewing the Ancestors, makes a distinct contribution to these advances. The author, a professor of history at Utah State University, has produced a thought-provoking study that attempts to give oral tradition “equal footing with the sciences” (14) while recognizing that both bring different assumptions and means of understanding the distant past. While archaeology provides an alternative perspective on the materiality of cultural change over time, the study of oral tradition—the intangible teachings of longstanding indigenous communities that are too often minimized in archaeological explanations—can illuminate why events from “deep history” may have happened, and why the sites and stories of these events continue to be meaningful to new generations.
To explore these issues, McPherson examines the diverse people and places of the Four Corners area of the American Southwest. He focuses primarily on the nonpuebloan views of the Anaasází, especially the perspectives of the Navajo—generally characterized as the more recent arrivals in the Southwest—in contrast to views held by the Hopi, direct descendants of Anaasází who migrated from Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and Canyon de Chelly about 1300 BP under circumstances that are still debated. However, the author also includes the cultural perspectives of neighboring Ute and Paiute for further insight to regional complexity. Unlike many archaeologists, McPherson argues that Navajo oral traditions reveal that the Diné did, in fact, interact substantially with Anaasází after entering the region, and that this body of orally expressed knowledge helps us understand why the Anaasází departed, leaving an abandoned collection of cities to become ruins.
Through seven chapters, the author describes what oral tradition and archaeological evidence reveal about the people the Navajo call Anaasází, the Hopi call Hisatsinom, and Ute/Paiute call Mokwi?. Chapter 2 details creation stories and the time of emergence to show how relations between Navajo and Hopi began “before the world was created,” proceeding from a state of harmony to eventual estrangement. However, Diné benefited from enough early interaction with the Anaasází to co-participate in clan formation and learn significant information about successful agricultural and religious practices. Chapter 3 outlines how Navajo and Hopi accounts of the Anaasází acknowledge them as “gifted people,” heavily invested with spiritual power that was used for good or evil, but how a combination of hubris, sorcery, and even artistic excess lead to the drought, chaos, and downfall of ancestral Puebloans as punishment by the holy people. According to the commentary of elders interviewed by McPherson, the causes of this collapse provide moral and practical lessons for today, especially given the tendencies of a modern Anglo-dominated world. The following chapter focuses on the similar lessons of a single story, central to Navajo oral literature, on the Great Gambler (Noqoilpi), associated with Chaco Canyon. The Gambler’s compulsive behavior leads to self-destruction and, ultimately, to a “societal rot” (123) that consumed Anaasází life.
Chapters 5 and 6 describe the material remnants of the Anaasází landscape and their continuing spiritual and pedagogical uses by Navajo. Ruins and rock art are enduring reminders of how the Ancient Ones broke the rules, profaned the sacred, and suffered the consequences. These sites, and related artifacts (e.g., pottery, arrowheads, medicine bundles) are approached carefully and with great respect by their Navajo caretakers, as they are still inhabited by holy people (good and evil), and thus are potentially resources to access power ritually, through prayer, thoughtful interaction with petroglyphs, or the cleansing of an Enemy Way ceremony.
The final chapter addresses more recent forces and politics of indigenous and Anglo uses of the Anaasází past. For over a century, both traders and archaeologists facilitated popular interest in, and a market for, the Ancient Ones; they profited commercially or professionally, and threatened to alter and profane sacred space permanently. During the past thirty years, laws and practices have changed: looting is prosecuted, and archaeologists are sensitive to Native concerns. With these evolving attitudes, we might look to the Navajo’s ongoing spiritual relationship to, and respectful use of, such sites as a guide for how all Americans might interact with Anaasází space.
Part of the persuasiveness of this well-written and well-illustrated book is the author’s impressive command of an immense range of previous scholarship on an area of North America that has been central to anthropology’s professional and theoretical development for over one hundred and twenty-five years. More importantly, his research is based on long-term fieldwork involving interviews with numerous Navajo elders, conducted with the approval and support of Navajo officials and scholars. Folklorists will certainly appreciate the discussions of oral tradition—as oral history, sacred story, and personal narrative—and its role is constructions of history and place, especially ancient and now iconic landscapes that are culturally complex and in need of both physical protection and public interpretation. Deliberately putting archaeology and oral traditions in conversation can only enhance theoretical insights and provide a model for similar discussions, wherever scholars are debating interpretations of the past and their significance to living communities. Here in the U.S., in the politically charged era of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990), McPherson’s work is the kind of study that will help us further develop the ethical and professional potential of collaborative scholarship involving diverse academic opinions and indigenous cultural perspectives.
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[Review length: 1027 words • Review posted on December 8, 2016]