The Navajos as borrowers: Stewart culin and the genesis of an ethnographic theory

New Mexico Historical Review

Volumn 79, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 319-351

  Bsumek, Erika Marie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950490990     PISSN: 00286206     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (76)

1. Jean Reed, "Navajo and Pueblo Indian Crafts," Brooklyn Museum Quarterly 19 (April 1932): 67
2. Hubert Howe Bancroft was probably one of the first historians to use the term "diffusion" in relation to Navajo language grouping. However, his notion was not necessarily the same kind of "borrowing" that Franz Boas and others later articulated. Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1875), 3:583
3. Washington Matthews, coll. and trans., Navaho Legends (1897; reprint, with a foreword by Grace A. McNeley and orthographic note by Robert W Young, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), 17
4. George Dorsey of the Field Columbian Museum explained the history of what he termed Navajo "infusion" in his booklet, Indians of the Southwest, published in the same year during which Stewart Culin went on his second collecting trip to the Southwest. George A. Dorsey, Indians of the Southwest (Topeka: Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway System Publisher, 1903), 166-67
5. See Margaret Jacobs, Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999)
6. Eliza McFeely, Zuni and the American Imagination (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001)
7. and Robert A. Trennert, "Fairs, Expositions, and the Changing Image of Southwestern Indians, 1876-1904,"
8. New Mexico Historical Review 62 (spring 1987): 127-50
9. William H. Lyon, "The Navajos in the American Historical Imagination, 1868-1900," Ethnohistory 45 (spring 1998): 239
10. and Washington Matthews, "Navaho," in The Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, pt. 2, ed. Frederick Webb Hodge (1910; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 41-45
11. William Edwardy, "The Navajo Indians," Harper's Weekly 5 July 1890, p. 530
12. M[ichael] J. Riordan, "The Navajo Indians," Overland Monthly, October 1890, p. 373
13. Riordan's brother, Denis M. Riordan, was probably the source of this information. Denis was a Navajo agent at Fort Defiance from 1882-1883
14. See Lyon, "Navajos," 241
15. Riordan, "Navajo Indians," 380
16. Hazel E. Cummins, "The Bayeta of the Navajos: Examples of a Vanished Art, the Memory of Which Is Fast Disappearing," House Beautiful, May 1929, p. 644. Cummins also asserted that Navajos had since become better craftsmen than the Pueblos
17. Other articles also tell of how the Navajos borrowed the art of weaving from the Pueblos. See John L. Cowan, "Bedouins of the Southwest," Outwest, February 1912, p. 113
18. Wick Miller seems to be paraphrasing from Stewart Culin's "Guide to the Southwestern Indian Hall," The Museum News 2 (April 1907): 106. Museum News is an internal publication of the Brooklyn Museum
19. For Miller quote, see Reed, "Navajo and Pueblo Indian Crafts," 67
20. Culin, "Southwestern Indian Hall," 107
21. Marta Weigle and Barbara Babcock, eds., The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway (Phoenix, Ariz.: Heard Museum, 1996)
22. and Trennert, "Fairs," 147-50
23. and Robert W. Volk, "Barter, Blankets, and Bracelets: The Role of the Trader in the Navajo Textile and Silverwork Industries, 1868-1930," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 12, no. 4 (1988): 53
24. Regna Darnell, Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 7
25. David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 48
26. Frederick Hoxie, A Final Promise: A Campaign to Assimilate the Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 19-21
27. and Lewis Henry Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, Contributions to Knowledge, no. 17 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1870)
28. Franz Boas, "The History of Anthropology," Science, 21 October 1904, p. 515
29. See also Ira Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method of Anthropology," in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George Stocking Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 75-111
30. Boas, "History of Anthropology," 513
31. Thomas, Skull Wars, 69
32. Franz Boas quoted in Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits," 100
33. Frederick Ward Putnam quoted in Curtis M. Hinsley, "The World as Marketplace: Commodification of the Exotic at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893," in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 347-
34. David Jenkins, "Object Lessons and Ethnographic Displays: Museum Exhibitions and the Making of American Anthropology," Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (April 1994): 250
35. Robert E. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian: The Early Years of American Ethnology (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 14
36. Ira Jacknis, "The Road to Beauty: Stewart Culin's American Indian Exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum," in Objects of Myth and Memory: American Indian Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Diana Fane, Ira Jacknis, and Lise M. Breen (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Brooklyn Museum in association with the University of Washington Press, 1991), 29-44
37. Deborah Wythe, archivist of the Brooklyn Museum, writes, "The Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1823 as the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library. It was reorganized in 1843 as the Brooklyn Institute. In 1890 it was renamed the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences which became the parent organization of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Botanic Garden, Academy of Music, Children's Museum, and Department of Education. The Institute was dissolved between 1970 and 1980[,] leaving the various divisions independent." Deborah Wythe, letter to author, 24 July 2003
38. McFeely, Zuni and the American Imagination, 111
39. and Diana Fane, "The Language of Things: Stewart Culin as Collector," in Objects of Myth and Memory: American Indian Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Diana Fane, Ira Jacknis, and Lise M. Breen (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Brooklyn Museum in association with the University of Washington Press, 1991), 13-27
40. Daniel Brinton was professor of ethnology at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and professor of American archaeology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Robert E. Beider, "Anthropology and History of the American Indian," American Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1981): 314
41. On the relationship between Culin and Brinton, see Fane, "Language of Things," 15, 24
42. Fane, "Language of Things," 13-25
43. and Jacknis, "Road to Beauty," 38
44. George Dorsey, "Stewart Culin," American Magazine, 19 June 1913, 5.2.016, Research and Writing, CAC, BMW
45. and Stewart Culin, "Games of the North American Indians," in Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1902-1903 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1907), 3-804
46. Stewart Culin, "Report on the Department of Ethnology," in Report on the Condition and Progress of the Museums of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences for the Year Ending December 31, 1904 (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum Publisher, 1905), 21
47. On Vanderwagen, see Frank McNitt, The Indian Traders (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 241
48. Stewart Culin, Collecting Expedition Report (1903), pp. 101-2, 2.1.002, CAC, BMAA
49. Culin, Collecting Expedition Report (1903), p. 10, 2.1.002, CAC, BMAA
50. Stewart Culin, Collecting Expedition Report (1902), p. 3, 2.1.001, CAC, BMAA
51. Campbell Grant, Canyon de Chelly: Its People and Rock Art (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1978), 81-87
52. See also Frank McNitt, Navajo Wars: Military Campaigns, Slave Raids, and Reprisals (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973), 37-46
53. Stewart Culin, "The Indians of the Southwest," 1904, pp. 57-58, 5.3.007, CAC, BMAA
54. Charlotte J. Frisbee, Navajo Medicine Bundles or }ish: Acquisition, Transmission, and Dispossession in the Past and Present (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 108
55. He was probably referring to Robert L. Wilken, who authored Anselm Weber, O.F.M., Missionary to the Navajo, 1898-1921 (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Bruce Publishing Company, 1955), 129
56. Charlotte J. Frisbee notes a connection between the men. Frisbee, Navajo Medicine Bundles or Jish, 232
57. Culin, Collecting Expedition Report (1902), p. 24, 2.1.001, CAC, BMAA. Given such analysis, it seems likely that the larger community to which Culin is referring is the United States itself
58. On forced assimilation in the early twentieth century, see David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 263-69
59. Darnell chronicles the ways that anthropological theory was changing at the turn of the century. See Darnell, Invisible Genealogies, 33-40
60. Culin, "The Indians of the Southwest," 1904, p. 1, 5.3.007, CAC, BMAA
61. Culin, "The Indians of the Southwest," 6
62. Culin, "Indians of the Southwest," 35
63. Stewart Culin, "Southwestern Indian Hall," 107
64. Raymond Friday Locke, The Book of the Navajos, 5th ed. (Los Angeles: Mankind Publishing Company, 1992), xv
65. Washington Matthews, "Navaho," 41-45
66. Ruth Underhill, The Navajos, Civilization of the American Indian Series, vol. 43 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956)
67. and Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorthea Leighton, The Navaho, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 35
68. Underhill, The Navajos, 3
69. The literature on cultural hybridity is expansive, and scholars of Latin America, Africa, Asia, North America, and the Middle East have noted the interplay between products, ideas, people, and culture, especially under colonial regimes. Recent discussions focus on how the process of borrowing skills, trades, or ideas continues in the ethnic-art market. See Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999)
70. and Michael Chibnik, Crafting Tradition: The Making and Marketing of Oaxacan Wood Carvings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003)
71. Globalization as a force that alters cultures and facilitates "borrowing" is also being discussed by scholars. See A. G. Hopkins, Globalization in World History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002)
72. and Tyler Cowan, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2002)
73. Mauricio J. Mixco, "Spanish Loanwords in Indigenous Languages: The Story of Early Hispanic-Indian Contacts in La Nueva México" (forthcoming)
74. Scott Rushforth and James S. Chisholm, Cultural Persistence: Continuity in Meaning and Moral Responsibility among the Bearlake Athapaskans (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991)
75. and Joel Sherzer, "Areal Linguistics in North America," Current Trends in Linguistics 10 (1973): 784-86
76. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)