PREFACE The original of this manuscript on acculturation in Round Valley was based on field work done in the summer of 1937 when I was one of eight candidates for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology at Columbia University. Funding was provided partly from the Works Progress Administration, Federal Writer's Project. Ruth Benedict and Ralph Linton were the faculty advisors. The purpose was to study and compare ac- culturation in eight tribes; the final result was the published volume Acculturation in Seven American Indian Tribes, editor Ralph Linton, Appleton Century, N.Y., 1940. Round Valley Reservation was an example of minimal ac- culturation, if by acculturation one understands the adaptation of an aboriginal culture to that of a dominant group. Deci- mation, transplantation and systematic exploitation had reduced the Northern California tribes in this area to remnants, living on a tiny reservation in dire poverty and cultural disarray. On our return from the field, there were seminars in which the data were presented and in due course my dissertation was accepted along with the others. Although my material did not readily lend itself to the outline we were asked to follow, I did the best I could. Clearly, Round Valley did not represent a single integral culture adapting itself to the White mores. The manuscripts were forwarded to the publisher. Suddenly, and without warning, I was called in by Dr. Benedict, Acting Head of the Department, who told me that my chapter could not be included because some of the material might be challenged in court as libelous. To the best of my recollection it was not suggested that the data were incorrect but simply that a legal challenge would delay publication of the whole volume. I was asked to withdraw my chapter rather than risk the careers of seven colleagues, since Columbia required printing of the dis- sertation before conferring the degree. At 22 I was not about to flout the editorial authority of Ralph Linton. It was implied, or I felt that it was implied, that I might have been less than objective, that I had allowed my emotional reaction to the horrors I had heard from my in- formants and had read in old San Francisco newspapers and Bureau of Indian Affairs reports to color my presentation. Genocide and exploitation of native peoples to the point of slavery were not, I suppose, popular subjects in 1937. In retrospect it seems to me that no one could have chal- lenged my conclusions until they were printed, and by then all the degrees would have been conferred. Furthermore, the manuscript shows typographical errors and marginal requests iv for page references that had not been met, indicating that I did not see the manuscript for proofreading, but that it went directly from typist to publisher. As evidence, there appears immediately following this Preface Professor-Editor Linton's summary which was, of course, also not published. Be that as it may, it was pointed out that I was also in- terested in linguistics and that Professor Boas, then Emeritus, could find funds for me to do a language study and get my de- gree with a dissertation on a linguistic, presumably safer, subject. This is, in fact, what happened. To round out the story, though it does not directly concern the Round Valley manuscript, I may add that it had been planned that I would go to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to work on Winnebago with Paul Radin's in- formant "Crashing Thunder", whose English name was Sam Blow- snake. Sam Blowsnake's Winnebago name was "Big Winnebago", appropriate for a man who stood over six feet tall and was solidly built. However, Radin had borrowed the more dramatic name "Crashing Thunder", actually that of Blowsnake's brother, for the biography. We located Blowsnake on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, where, with his wife, Evening Star and his daughter, Whirling Eagle, he was earning a meager living with his appearances in full regalia, his wife's beadwork and his daughter's dancing. After several months of delay while he became gradually disillusioned with the promises of riches that had brought him to Atlantic City, Blowsnake agreed to move to an apartment in the Borough Hall area of Brooklyn, where other Indians (Mohawks I recall) were also living. Daily I took a subway to the apartment and paid the current informant pay rate of 35?/hour. My advisors were Franz Boas and George Herzog. After the dissertation "Accent in Winnebago" had been defended*, I was again up against the problem of publication. In the last year of his life, Boas, as I recently learned from his November 16, 1939. The date would have escaped me had I not found it mentioned in the letter of November 17 from Boas to Benedict: "Amelia passed her PhD examinatinn yesterday". Writinfs of Ruth Benedict: An AnthropoloQist at Work by Margaret Mead, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1959, p. 415. v microfilmed correspondence, was still trying to find funds for publication of my dissertation. Just the other day I was told by Edward Kennard (who was instrumental in the Federal Writer's funding of the acculturation study write-up) that most, if not all, of the reprints of dissertations published in the International Journal of American Linguistics in that era were in fact paid for by Boas' private funds. In 1943, after the death of Boas (December, 1942), while I was a member of the Women's Army Corps, I spent many evenings typing the dissertation and at my own expense had it printed (in photo-offset, $300 for 75 copies, which by that time Columbia had come to accept as a substitute for reprints) and received the degree. After the war I entered the field of social work, having found no position in anthropology, and was "discovered" about two years ago at the University Hospital, where I have been employed since 1960 by Jay Miller, of the Department of Anthropology, University of Washington. Contact with young anthropologists renewed my interest in the field and with the help of a hypnotist I located the long mislaid Round Valley manuscript and found with it extensive handwritten and typed notes which document the historical events. When, in 1975, I set about preparing the manuscript for possible publication, I found only slight revision necessary. For one thing, .I added page references which Appleton and Professor Linton seemed to find of crucial importance, but which had not apparently seemed so to me. Perhaps I thought everyone knew that the Bureau of Indian Affairs reports are organized alphabetically by state and by reservation within the state so that they are easily found, and the Round Valley report comprised about two pages each year, so that checking any reference would be no problem. If the omission of page references was a real reason for rejecting the manuscript, it could as easily have been made good in 1937 as I found it to be in 1975. If there was con- cern that I was using real names of individual informants, I had perhaps neglected to mention that the names I used were fictitious. If, as is more likely, the compelling fact was that the publisher feared Collett, who was at that time re- presenting many Indian tribes in Washington, D.C., and had started suit against Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, ,for libel, I could easily have deleted references to him. I doubt whether any living white resident of Round Valley would ever have seen the volume or felt the need to defend his forebears. vi All in all, I am inclined to think that the material was not comparable to the other seven papers, since the aboriginal material was scanty, several tribes were involved, and the history was not one of gradual assimilation or meaningful re- sistance. Ethnohistory was not then a subject in its own right. The Indian point of view was not regarded with as much seriousness as it is today. Finally, I accepted only too readily the appeal to my altruism. The chief difference between the original manuscript and the present one arises from the fact that the material most interesting to me was to be found in the notes that I found, by the shoebox full, with the manuscript. Portions of these I quote in extended addenda. The photographs were taken by me with a postcard size folding Kodak, purchased at the suggestion of Professor Boas. He wanted pictures of California Indians for a project in physical anthropology, concerning especially the shape of ears. Whether these photos were ever used by him or have been printed or analyzed by anyone else, I do not know. Amelia Susman Schultz Clinical Research Center University Hospital University of Washington Seattle, Washington vi.