American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Wasichus have put us in these square boxes. Our power is gone and we are dying. For the power is not in us any more. You can look at our boys and see how it is with us. When we were living by the power of the circle in the way we should, boys were men at twelve or thirteen. But now it takes them very much longer to mature. Hehaka Sapa (Black Elk) I. Forced into a situation of total dependence by the destruction of their traditional economic bases during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Native Americans on reservations abandoned their houses and traditional building technology as they tried to "assimilate." The existing housing deteriorated. Unable to afford anything resembling conventional market housing in the twentieth century. reservation Indians have been compelled to rely almost entirely upon the federal government, with what most observers concur has been a poor-to-indifferent response. In 1969, three major designated agencies met to examine needs, and to determine future responsibility, for housing production. In the tri-agency agreement thus reached among the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Indian Health Service, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD committed itself to producing 30,000 new Indian housing units during fiscal years 1970-74 but fell short of reaching this goal by nearly 50%. The glaring gap sparked Thomas Stanton, Director of the Housing Research Group of the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, to write an assessment of this and other failures in HUD's Indian Housing programs. The main findings of this report are worth reiterating, and are summarized in the following paragraphs.

American Indians in large numbers began to move off the reservations into urban centers at the end of World War II. The Bureau of Indian Affairs in the early 60s estimated 40 percent of the Indian population lived in an urban area. In 1970 that figure had risen to over 50 percent; today the estimates reach 60 percent or more. The Bureau of Indian Affairs contributed to this migration through their relocation program, Joint Resolution 108. This program was initiated in the 50s and, along with termination of tribal recognition, "assisted in moving one-third of the People to the cities. The government could assimilate the Indians faster by removing them from their traditional background into a totally urban area. They would either sink or swim. However, without proper orientation, problems in successful adaptation occur. A strong Indian identity and the attainment of adaptation skills insures urbanization without serious difficulty. But many People have clearly had a bitter experience to their attempt to urbanize. Some indigenous people have urged their children to forget the Indian part of themselves in order to become White; others have taken pride in the Indian spiritual tradition and have drawn upon this strength to aid their urban adaption; still others remain torn between two worlds. This synthesis of the Old Way and the American Way in Los Angeles is the main topic. This paper proposes spiritual adaptation in contrast to materialistic capitalism, as a way of life. Characteristics of spirituality include an inner balance of the self, harmony with creation, the awareness and understanding of urban pressures. This is a traditional way of life for the Peo-

In the ancient bardic tradition the bards sang only of love and death. Certainly these twin themes encompass the whole of human experience. Loving, celebrating, and joining are the source of life, but they necessarily occur against a background of potential extinction. Thus, these themes become the spindle and loom of the poets' weavings, for our most significant understandings of ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our tradition, our past, come from the interplay of connection and disconnection. The American Indian women who write poetry write in that ancient tradition; for like the bards, we are tribal singers. And because our tribal present is inextricably bound to our continuing awareness of imminent genocide, our approach to these themes, love and death, takes on a pervasive sense of sorrow and anger that is not easily reconciled with the equally powerful tradition of celebrating with the past and affirming the future that is the essence of the oral tradition. We are the dead and the witnesses to death of hundreds of thousands of our people, of the water, the air, the animals and forests and grassy lands that sustained them and us not so very long ago. We are the people who have no shape or form, whose invisibility is not visual only but of the voice as well; we can speak, but we are not heard. As Laguna poet and writer Leslie Marmon Silko writes in Ceremony, "(We) can't talk to you. (We are) invisible. (Our) words are formed with an invisible tongue, they have no sound." "Blessed are they who listen when no one is left to speak Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan writes in her poem "Blessing." The impact of genocide in the minds of American Indian poets and writers cannot be exaggerated. It is an all-pervasive feature of the consciousness of every American Indian in the United States, and the poets are never unaware of it. Even poems that are meant to be humorous get much of their humor directly from this awareness. American Indians take the fact of probable extinction for granted in every thought, in every conversation. We have become so accustomed to the immediate likelihood of racial extinction in the centuries since Anglo-European invasion, that it can be alluded to in many indirect ways; it's pervasive presence creates a sense of sorrow in even the funniest of tales.

Franz Boas chose as his particular field of study the sea-oriented cultures of the Pacific Northwest. In his lifetime as a working anthropologist he produced, according to Helen Codere, more than 10,000 printed pages about that region. He penned his last statement on folklore in 1938, and his last book was entitled Primitive Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1955). Commenting on this massive body of material, Melville Jacobs said that for twenty years and more it has been comparable to a storeroom filled with "incomprehensible miscellanea." Incomprehensible, he suggested, because the collecting, translating, classifying, and cross-referencing of Indian myths never gave way to a theoretical statement of meaningful content. Essentially Boas arrived at the conclusion that this mythology of the Northwest had no systematic order and that it must be understood simply as a species of literature which reflected the concerns of the village and the culture. Other anthropologists and other thinkers have since revisited this "storeroom" to peruse and reshuffle the seemingly disconnected stories again to see if some clue or some meaningful pattern had not been overlooked. From their writings and from the pioneering work of Boas, certain explanatory ideas and useful approaches have emerged, and over a period of time they have come to seem more promising or more basic than others. First, the idea of similarities and differences in myths was a concept that Boas inherited from earlier investigators but also one which he criticized and helped to redirect. Second, the concept of ethnocentrism, or the question of cultural relativity, was an important theoretical point in the writings of Boas. And third, the matter of a language code, or of a sensory language associated with myth, was only dimly glimpsed; the idea was left for others to develop.

Koeber's Yurok Myths: A Comparative Re-Evaluation Richard Keeling Yurok Myths. By A. L. Kroeber. Foreword by Theodora Kroeber. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. xi + 488 pp. $18.50 cloth., $6.95 paper. In a prefatory essay to this volume entitled "Kroeber and the Yurok, 1900-1908," Timothy H. H. Thoresen describes some of the circumstances surrounding the collection of the narratives in Yurok Myths. In this brief historical sketch, with hardly an ounce of overt criticism, Thoresen quietly dissolves any illusions which a reader may have had concerning the humanistic intentions of turn-of-the-century anthropology. We are told that Kroeber first visited Yurok territory as a museum ethnologist, when he was only twenty-four years old and had just completed graduate study under Franz Boas at Columbia. His task was to collect things: not only material specimens but also linguistic and mythological evidence: Within the ethnological theory of the day, ethnology in practice meant everything and anything that could be collected [Thoresen's emphasis] as illustrative of the life and nature of the Indian-from baskets and mortars to measurements of crania to vocabulary lists to texts of mythological material. (Thoresen, 1976:xx-xxi) Narratives such as the ones which would find their way into Yurok Myths were not only analyzed for linguistic content but also studied as evidence of indigenous lifestyle and belief. They were analyzed for patterns of what Kroeber and his peers understood as "ethnic psychology." Basically, then, Thoresen describes a situation in which cultural and religious materials were wrested from one cultural milieu and interpreted from the viewpoint of a materially dominant civilization. Even considering the important background information which it provides, it is curious that Thoresen's essay should have been included in this volume. It raises sensitive issues in a posthumous and celebratory book that is otherwise presented in the spirit of a monument to Kroeber (1876-1960), considered by many as the dean of American anthropologists and probably the last in that field whose interests and contributions ranged over the whole array of anthropological subjects.