Best known perhaps for their habitation on the floor of one of tributaries of the Grand Canyon, the Havasupai had only sparse contact with Europeans and Euroamericans until the beginning of the twentieth century. The first European visitor came to Supai in 1776, but his visit apparently had little impact. A few Euroamericans made contact during the nineteenth century, but because of their confusion about community identities, they often conflated the Havasupai with some of their Yuman-speaking neighbors. Late in the century ethnographer Frank Hamilton Cushing, photographer Ben Wittick, and regional author George Wharton James visited Supai. A book by the last generated some tourist interest, and in 1900 the Indian Bureau established a school there with Flora Gregg Iliff as its teacher. Writings and recollections by these figures comprised virtually all the information on this isolated population until the ethnographic work of Leslie Spier, a student of Franz Boas, began in 1918. Spier returned for further research the following year and in 1921 was accompanied by his wife Erna Gunther, another Boas student, who carried out her own researches.
Like other Boasians, Spier and Gunther were interested in collecting traditional stories, primarily for what those tales might reflect about the rest of culture and often for extended examples of indigenous spoken language. During the three trips, the ethnographers recorded what they characterized as the complete repertoires of two storytellers. The total of some fifty narratives, several of which represent different versions of the same story, comprise the most extensive collection of Havasupai oral narratives available. Except for a couple of texts which Spier published in the International Journal of American Linguistics (Native-language texts, interlinear translations, and free translations with no commentary) in 1929, this rich body of what the current editors, following the wishes of the Havasupai people, call “the sacred oral tradition,” has not been easily available to either scholars or to the local community itself. Spier passed the collection on to his student Robert C. Euler, who used some of the material in his ethnographic work on the Havasupai but did not publish the entire collection. Frank D. Tikalsky, Catherine A. Euler, and John Nagel have thus made an important contribution not only to the available published archive of Native American verbal art but to the heritage of a particular American Indian community.
Spier and Gunther organized their material to highlight the two narrators whose repertoires they tried to exhaust: Manakaja and Sinyella, both elders whom Spier referred to as “chief.” Their stories were translated on the spot for Spier and Gunther by younger men who knew English, and the two ethnographers wrote exactly what they heard. Apparently, they transcribed Native-language versions only of the two stories that appeared in IJAL. Consequently the reader has no ingress into the literary style of the originals. But Spier and Gunther occasionally supplied clarifying glosses for some references in the stories; the present editors have sometimes supplemented the information in the resulting footnotes. Of course, much is missing from these story “texts” from the point of view of modern-day ethnopoetic approaches to presenting orally performed verbal art in print. But we and the Havasupai people, who heartily endorsed the publication of this material, are fortunate that Spier and Gunther were as punctilious as they were in respecting the translator’s words, in carefully connecting storytellers and their stories, and in attempting to clarify points of potential cultural obscurity. We are also fortunate that the current editors resisted the temptation to “improve” the material to meet modern expectations. The importance of getting this Havasupai sacred oral tradition into print cannot be overstated.
The editors have provided, with varying success, introductory material to place the stories in the contexts primarily of Havasupai culture but also, to some degree, of the history of ethnographic research among the Havasupai, of ways of thinking about orally expressed verbal art and written literature, and of theoretical approaches to its interpretation as myth. Short essays by the late Robert C. Euler, Spier’s student and a longtime specialist in the anthropology of the Grand Canyon region, and by Douglas W. Schwartz, an anthropologist who headed the School of American Research in Santa Fe, provide overviews of the prehistory of Havasupai territory and of changes that have occurred there. Then Catherine A. Euler offers an exemplary introductory survey of the history of Havasupai studies and an ethnographic overview. An important strength of her introduction is that she connects the points she raises about such matters as Havasupai politics, economics, and linguistics with specific stories in the collection, thus making the relevance of her introductory information clear. The fourth introductory essay, “An Overture to the Scientific Study of Myth,” by Frank D. Tikalsky and John Nagel, is less successful. Only ten pages long, it spends part of that space dealing with meanings of the terms theory, fact, and hypothesis before glancingly touching on a few more or less contemporary approaches to the study of myth. Since these issues are not taken up elsewhere in the volume, this cursory essay seems unnecessary.
Folklorists may wish for some additional material about the texts themselves, especially regarding these English-language versions’ relationship to the sacred oral tradition in the indigenous language. Comparative notes using standard folklore reference works and even other publications of Havasupai and other Southwestern narrative repertoires would provide a more comprehensive sense of how this material fits into the literary landscape of the region. But, one can argue, these are matters for future researchers. Meanwhile, we should be grateful for what these editors have done. With the approval of the Havasupai Tribal Council they have made available an important body of material that neither the Havasupai people nor the community of scholars of and enthusiasts for American Indian literature could fully appreciate before their efforts. The editors have recognized that this material belongs first to the Havasupai, representatives of whom agreed to share it with anthropologists almost a century ago and whose current leaders have generously allowed it to be made generally available.
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[Review length: 1002 words • Review posted on August 25, 2011]