And so, my child’s-eye picture of the American Indian was colored by this interpretation of Native American historical lore.  It was the first in a long series of such interpretations.  I didn’t understand, in those early days, about the diversity of Native American culture.  Over the years, my parents took me to museums, parks, and events from Alaska to Florida to California.  Little by little, I built ideas of Native Americans based on representations from advertising, movies, television, books, and occasionally from real life.  When I reached my teen years I had a few Indian friends, I even went to the siege of Alcatraz Island with a Hopi boyfriend in 1968.  These friends allowed me to see a wider view of Native people, as folks living in the 20th century, individuals with families, histories, traditions, and futures.  It was an ideal situation in which we could interpret ourselves for each other, in a natural, logical way, using feedback, building relationships of trust or going our separate ways as our attitudes and ideas developed.  It was an ideal way to learn about Native American cultures, on a one on one basis.

            The trouble is this situation applies to the smallest portion of those learning about other cultures and the people who animate other cultures.  The trouble is that the vast majority must rely on media, advertising, books, and anthropology.  The trouble is that once the study of something begins, it is no longer merely what it was before.  It acquires added value as an object of study.  Bit by bit, the object undergoes commoditization.  The academic, technical, and scavenging industries which have grown from the study of human culture make this amply apparent.  As the value of discrete cultures as objects of study increases so does the vested interest of those involved with the spin-off value.  What stands in the balance for those in academia has amply been described by Bourdieu as “academic capital,” that heady elixir which can determine one’s position in the academic pecking order, guarantee a fine position at a top University, or confer Guru status upon those who drink deeply of the draught.   Stakes so high impel fierce competitors into headlong battles where data are gathered and support technologies are developed to shatter opponent’s arguments as paradigms are forged, hammered out, blow by blow, in a life and death struggle.   The process is seldom, however, as dramatic as my description implies, it is accomplished in a kind of slow motion, accumulating bit by bit as theories coalesce and dissolve, schools of thought rise and fall, and  personalities emerge and recede. 

            And what then about the cultures that provide the fodder for the cannons of academic war?  What about the thoughts and lives of those who constitute the populations with anthropologic value?  What about their stories?  They have been used endlessly as material for research and comparison, the fill material for careers made and broken in publication.  Many, many academic-native friendships grow from cross-cultural contact, even when the natives are suburban, American, mall rats.  We are, after all, social animals. Sometimes the friendships span years and the relationships become filial.  Even in these cases, the dilemma is still there, at some point in the process commoditization has taken place, aspects of the relationship increasing in value directly in proportion to the anthropologic value of the friend’s cultural knowledge.  This statement is not meant to necessarily cast anthropologists as villainous users of the powerless, although little prevents anyone who wishes to proceed in this manner from doing so.  We have all heard infrequent but sickening stories of exploitation of the weak and vulnerable by our colleagues.  Ask any Native informant if they have ever been ripped off by an anthropologist.  If they say they haven’t personally, they offer anecdotal evidence from a friend or family member.  Publicly, we state our intentions are pure, devoted to “science.”

            When I brought this manuscript to those wiser and more experienced than I for comment, they universally asked, “Where is your interpretation of what these people have to say?”.  “Did you  forget to include it?”   “It is after all the most important part!”  I tried to explain. “Look,” I said, “This was supposed to be an opportunity for these people to speak for themselves, without interpretation.”  “Hmm,” was the unilateral response, “maybe you should talk about that.”  Then I realized, how correct these wise men were, few people in this industry make a living helping others speak for themselves.  Even the ethnographic texts recorded by linguists have the larger agenda of language salvage and recording.  But a pure forum, a stage for the expression of self, has been a rare thing.  There have been a few autobiographies and biographies which tell individual stories, those of Kumeyaay Delfina Cuero and Juaneño man, Pablo Tac, come immediately to mind.

            Nowhere before had I seen a book written by an anthropologist who went to a tribal group and asked what they wanted said about themselves and how they wanted it said.  This I believed was polyphony constituted in its most pure form.  I knew that many people were unable to write for a book of this nature for a wide variety of personal reasons.  I had no model for what I had so innocently done, I had simply presumed that the best people to know what to tell and how to tell it were the people doing the telling, a very unanthropological approach I was later to find out.  I had forgotten that people talking about themselves didn’t recognize the frequent inaccuracies in what they said.  Much anthropologist’s sweat had been poured over observations and data showing that people do not know the truth about themselves, as if truth were a destination to be reached by the vehicle of science.   This explained the confusion of my mentors.  I had forgotten a key principle, I was not merely a channeler for other people’s words, I was a highly trained observer, alert to every insinuation of culture.  I was primed to interpret what I saw.  My success hinged not only on my ability to interpret an other’s culture but to convince my colleagues of the veracity and significance of my analysis.  An uninterrupted representation of culture was not appreciated.  What these people had to say wasn’t enough to fill the cultural gap between the covers.  It lacked authority.  It lacked academic capital.  My professors had been telling me implicitly that the material in the book was in some sense my intellectual property; the story of these people was mine to put into context for posterity, ante for the pot in the game of academic capital if only I would mark the work as mine by laying my interpretation over all, an academic form of a more primal urge to mark territory.  Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989:6) would say it more poetically, that I was being invited to join the dance of academia through “...language which partakes in the white-male-is-norm ideology and is used predominantly as a vehicle to circulate established power relations.”

            Now that I know the difference, I am tainted.  It is this difference which is uniquely critical.  In a lecture I attended during graduate studies at Syracuse University, a famous German-American physicist/mathematician gave a lecture on the nature of the relationship between art and science.  His conclusion after a long and illustrious career as a peer and colleague of Edward Teller and Albert Einstein was that art and science were born of the same impulse, they were driven by the same engine, but as presently comprised they were separated by a gap measurable by their significant differences.  He illustrated the point by comparing a human and a tree to a rock.  The tree and the human are more alike than not when their differences to the rock are compared.  It is the similarity of their differences to the rock which define their nature.  Put another way, humans and trees are different from rocks in many of the same ways, they both need water, have chromosomes, metabolize nutrients, and have an ectoderm branching structure.  Rocks do not.  His point was that art and science can be characterized by the similarity in their differences to other sorts of human endeavor. 

            This analogy works in anthropology, too.  Although two forms of anthropologic writing may appear at first to be similar, their minute differences define their true nature.  Imagine ideal ethnology, an ethnology where no one needs translation, one where the listener and speaker are as one, information flowing freely with feelings and tradition in place.  This is the ideal against which to compare this work and any other ethnographic text about California Indians which has appeared previously.  How do the two differ from the ideal?  Are their differences similar?  Not very, I think.  None were conceived as a vehicle for members of a California Indian tribe to tell their own story their own way.  The general organization of the book was designed by the elders, the number and subject of the chapters, and the order in which they occur.  They defined the chapter content, specifying which materials could and could not be included for personal, political or religious reasons.  They provided 99% of the material for the chapters.  They provided direction when I was lost, torn, and frustrated.  They proof read the text.  It is their product.  They trained me to do the work that was needed, by taking me into the field, introducing me to family and friends, teaching me their ways on a one-to-one basis.  They enabled me to become a channeler instead of an interpreter.

            Given my predilection for not relying on science, I can feel you, the reader, tensing in fear I will launch into a New Age diatribe promoting crystals and extraterrestrial astronauts.  Although I do not find New Age explanations sufficient to satisfy me, we may be on the threshold of a new age in anthropology.  The planet has become a literate place and the barriers which once slowed and confounded the relationships between anthropologists and others have been somewhat breached.

            All profits from the sale of this book, including a percent from the publisher, Malcolm Margolin go into an endowment fund for scholarships for Native Indian Californians,  Thank God I did the manuscript while I was naive, when I still saw through my own eyes, when I still worked purely from the heart.  Nothing I ever do in the future will be so free of the tainting hand of knowledge.