American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Through White Men’s Eyes; A Contribution To Navajo History: A Chronological Record of the Navajo People from Earliest Times to the Treaty of June 1,1868. J. Lee Correll, editor, Window Rock: Navajo Heritage Center, Sponsored by the Dissemination and Assessment Center for Bilingual Education of the U.S. Office of Education, Department of Health Education and Welfare under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and by the Arizona Bicentennial Commission, 1979. Prologue, Acknowledgments, Line Illustrations, Photographs, Bibliographies, Indices, Documents (reprinted in volume VI). Six Volumes. $225. Now available from the University of Arizona Press. I Until the 1950s the profession of history had been remarkably derelict in the re-telling of the Navajo and Hopi past. Beginning in the 1880s self-trained scholars, such as the army surgeon Washington Matthews, intensively studied Navajo culture. He was followed by institutional or university scholars of the Boasian school-Gladys Reichard, Clyde Kluckhohn, Edward Sapir, themselves students of Franz Boas, but also Leland Wyman, Franc Newcomb, and Father Berard Haile, who were not trained as anthropologists, but who nevertheless belong to the second generation of Navajo scholars. However, they evinced little interest in Navajo history. Boas insisted on the collection of a vast body of contemporary data which did not lend itself to historical analysis. Meanwhile, except for Frank Reeve in the late 1930s, historians did not enter the field.