Ohio History Journal

AN ETHNOHISTORIAN'S VIEWPOINT

 

by ERMINIE W. VOEGELIN

 

During the past half century, or throughout the period that

anthropology has been an academic discipline in American uni-

versities, all branches of the subject--physical anthropology, eth-

nology and archaeology, anthropological linguistics and folklore--

have put much emphasis upon original field research. No student

of anthropology is considered professionally fully trained until he

or she has had actual experience in the field collecting original data

on a field problem. For the ethnologist this usually means field

work among primitive or, today, semi-literate peoples having a

culture different from his own.

All anthropologists recognize the two-fold value of field ex-

perience--not only does it serve to educate the novice by affording

him contact with a contrasting culture but field work also provides

most of our present-day knowledge of primitive peoples. However,

anthropologists would be a brash lot indeed if they were to insist

that their entire corpus of knowledge rests in field reports. This

is especially true, as it happens, for ethnologists, who are concerned

not only (a) with describing cultures, in whole or in part, but

also (b) with analyzing them in terms of pattern, structure, or

growth and change.

It is on this latter point that I wish to speak for a moment. The

dynamic problem of culture growth and culture change is one which

has engrossed many culture historians, several of whom have made

notable attempts to deal with it in long range terms by such

means as the comparative method. Various postulates, such as that

of age-area, have been used--and their validity controverted--in

efforts to reconstruct historically the culture-history of primitive

peoples within particular areas over long periods of time. Although

trained American ethnologists have consistently refused to consider

the problem of origins, they have not hesitated to occupy them-

selves with problems which the trained historian refuses to con-

sider, namely, problems of historical reconstruction based on in-

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ferential evidence. In 1916 the anthropological linguist Edward

Sapir devoted an eighty-six page monograph to exposition and

criticism of various methods for establishing a time-perspective in

aboriginal American cultures.¹ This monograph, which was in a

sense mainly programmatic, commanded widespread attention and

respect among anthropologists for several years after it was pub-

lished; yet it has had curiously little influence in shaping the work

of historically minded American anthropologists. Some eighty-one

of the eighty-six pages of the Time Perspective are devoted to ex-

position (and criticism) of various methods of inferring historical

changes. As Lewis and Fenton have pointed out, only five pages

are given to discussion of the use of direct historical evidence, and

of these five pages, only one is devoted to the use of documentary

evidence for ethnological studies of culture growth and change.²

There was, however, in Sapir's day, and there has always been

since, a small group of American ethnologists who were not at-

tracted to inferential long-range historical studies, but whose in-

terests were none the less definitely historical. For such ethnologists,

control over the data relating to growth and change in particular

cultures was of primary importance, rather than the length of

the time-span for which a historical perspective could be obtained.

The farther back in point of time the perspective extended the

better, but only if it could be actually controlled. Inferential his-

torical reconstructions done in the grand manner and covering

hundreds or thousands of years, hold little interest for such

ethnologists. For them, documentary sources, which Sapir passed

over so lightly in his monograph, provide the corpus which, when

competently handled, can yield historical perspective, and also can

be controlled. Therefore, it is to such documentary material that

historically minded ethnologists interested in something more than

the flat picture obtained through field work, realize they must turn.

1 Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture, A Study in Method (Canadian

Department of Mines, Memoirs, No. 90, Ottawa, 1916).

2 Oscar Lewis, The Effects of White Contact upon Blackfoot Culture (American

Ethnological Society, Monographs, No. 6, New York, 1942), 2; William N. Fenton,

"The Training of Historical Ethnologists in America," American Anthropologist, N.S.,

LIV (1952), 328-329.

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Recently, historically minded ethnologists of this ilk have become

tagged by their professional brethren as "ethnohistorians." When

the term ethnohistorian was first used I do not know--it has

analogies, of course, with "ethnogeographer" and "ethnobotanist,"

both of which have now attained dictionary respectability. Since

"ethnohistory" has not as yet appeared in either of two dictionaries

consulted (the Merriam-Webster Unabridged, and the Funk and

Wagnalls New College Standard), I shall attempt a working

definition of ethnohistory as: the study of identities, locations, con-

tacts, movements, numbers, and cultural activities of primitive

peoples from the earliest written records concerning them, onward

in point of time. This is, I realize, an extremely broad definition; I

have purposely tried to make it as inclusive as possible. Culture

historians may be critical of it because it includes "cultural ac-

tivities," which they may regard as their own peculiar province.

However, I see no reason why a dichotomy should exist in historical

ethnology between ethnologists primarily interested in identities,

past location, contacts, numbers, and movements of primitive

peoples, and ethnologists interested in the cultures of these same

peoples. The likelihood is that in practice the historically minded

ethnologist will be interested in all of these things; and since in

American usage ethnohistory is the more general of the two terms,

it would seem to be the more preferable.

For North American Indian peoples and cultures, primary source

material written by European and American travelers, missionaries,

army officers, bureau of Indian affairs employees, traders, and so

forth, is available for time periods varying between one hundred

and four hundred years, depending on particular cultures. For some

native North American cultures, historical material exists in abund-

ance; for others the corpus is extremely limited. An example of such

contrast is the large body of seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-

century primary material available for the Shawnee, an Eastern

Woodlands tribe, as contrasted with the ten or a dozen (at best)

late eighteenth and nineteenth-century primary source references to

the Tubatulabal, a small Shoshonean-speaking group in east-central

California. To attempt a reasonably complete ethnohistory of the

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Shawnee and their culture, presenting contemporary field data and

giving it historical depth, is a task calling for several years of in-

tensive work in the field, in the library, and at one's desk. To attempt

an ethnohistory of the Tubatulabal would be virtually to attempt

the impossible, because of the paucity of the historical record for

this group.

The question may well be asked here as to what sort of in-

formation the ethnohistorian hopes to find in the documentary

sources. A categorical answer to such a question cannot, of course,

be given; some ethnohistorical research is extremely comprehensive,

and some is sharply focused on particular problems. An example

of the latter comes to mind. Throughout the Eastern Woodlands

the concept of a male supreme deity prevails among all Eastern

Woodlands tribes, except among the Shawnee, who at the present

time, as contemporary ethnological field work has established,

worship a female supreme deity. This female deity is generally

referred to by the Shawnee as "Our Grandmother." As an eth-

nologist, accustomed to regard traits with a wide distribution as

possibly (but not certainly) older than traits with a limited dis-

tribution, I suspect that the Shawnee female deity may be a recent

innovation in Shawnee culture. But this surmise is based purely

on inference; it is of value only as a point of departure. My next

task is to review all the documentary evidence I can find, not, as it

happens, on Shawnee summer bark houses, or on Shawnee popu-

lation figures, or on historic locations of Shawnee groups in the

late seventeenth century, but specifically on Shawnee religious be-

liefs and practices. And in an 1825 rather remarkable source I

find my surmise verified. A hundred and twenty-five years ago all

groups of Shawnee, apparently, acknowledged and worshipped a

male supreme deity, and "Our Grandmother" was a distinctly

subordinate member of the Shawnee pantheon.

How or why the change from male to female deity came about

in the case of the Shawnee is a question which still remains to

be answered. If the answer can be found, it can only be found

in documentary material; Shawnee informants of the present time

are convinced that ever since the Shawnee were created, "Our

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170     Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

 

Grandmother" has had them under her special surveillance and

has figured as their supreme deity.

An example of extremely comprehensive ethnohistorical research

is one which is now being undertaken for the United States De-

partment of Justice by the anthropology department of Indiana

University. That the immediate goal of such research is applied is

of small consequence here, because out of the research it is expected

there will come not only applied results but a large corpus of

ethnohistorical material for all the historic tribes of the Great Lakes-

Ohio Valley region, which can be used as a basis for studies of

culture growth and change among the tribes of this region. Re-

search on this project is focused on aboriginal occupancy and land

tenure in the Great Lakes-Ohio Valley area, and involves iden-

tification, movements, and so forth, of thirteen so-called tribes or

confederacies--Chippewa, Delaware, Fox, Huron, Illinois Con-

federacy, Kickapoo, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Sac, Shawnee,

Winnebago, and Iroquois (Six Nations).

Since North American Indian concepts of land tenure and actual

use of land differed materially from our own concepts and practices,

the cultures of all the American Indian groups under examination

must be considered, as well as the movements and population of

these groups, their relationship to their environment, and their

contacts with each other. Research on the project during the next

three years will necessarily be both extensive and intensive; at

least a dozen large cultural categories, such as basic subsistence,

shelter, warfare, social and political organization, and so forth,

will have to be covered before analysis can be attempted and

conclusions drawn.

Therefore in closing I would like to emphasize two points.

First, ethnohistory, as its name implies, involves at least two

academic disciplines: ethnology and history. Few anthropologists

have as yet been trained in historiography, either general or as

applying to a particular area. Whatever training they acquire is

at the present time largely autodidactic, and while such self-imposed

training can be extremely valuable, it cannot by an means be re-

garded as an entirely satisfactory substitute for more formal in-

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Ohio Valley Historic Indian Conference        171

 

struction. The historically minded ethnologist needs to learn from

the historian not only the assumptions which historians make in

dealing with documentary data, he is also badly in need of learning

techniques and methods for locating and controlling the body of

primary source material for the specific area in which he is

interested.

What the ethnologist does with the relevant source material

he unearths or is helped in unearthing is his responsibility, but

whether he covers the sources thoroughly, and evaluates them com-

petently, will depend largely on whether he has been able to

establish a successful liaison with professional historians. However,

as in any liaison arrangement, the ethnologist also stands ready to

make his contribution. On the theoretical level, the assumptions

which professional anthropologists make may be of interest to

historians; on the more practical plane, the ethnologist commands

a knowledge of ethnographical bibliography and depositories for

ethnographical material, which the historian concerned with primi-

tive groups would probably like to become familiar with.

This brings me to my second point, which in one sense at least

is a practical one. It is our hope that the liaison between ethnology

and history will start, not next month or next year, but imme-

diately. The Indiana University-Justice Department ethnohistorical

project is a three-year research project which began this fall. It

carries its own research staff of anthropologists and graduate

assistants, who are responsible for carrying the project through to

a successful completion. If to the contributions which this nuclear

research staff is making, can be added the contributions of other

historians and anthropologists who are concerned with the Great

Lakes-Ohio Valley area and its native peoples, a unique body of

material will ultimately be amassed. Such material, housed in a

central location, would serve scholars in two disciplines admirably

over a period of many years. More analysis of the data could be

undertaken, for one thing, if individual scholars were freed from

the need of each collecting all of the data upon which analyses are

based. This, individuals must do at the present time; it is our hope,

however, that they will not always have to do so in future.

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