7

CORRECTING FALSE TRUTHS: ROBERT HEIZER'S VIEW OF THE NEED

FOR ETHNOHISTORY IN CALIFORNIA ANTHROPOLOGY

Polly McW. Bickel

Robert Heizer came to emphasize ethnohistory increasingly in his work in

California anthropology. In this paper, I attempt to set forth Heizer's view of ethno-

history: his perception of the need for it in California anthropology, and what he meant

by "ethnohistory. " I consider the kinds of ethnohistorical publications which he produced
and his suggestions for research, assessing their usefulness not as substantive

accomplishments (which others in this symposium have done) but as stimuli for ongoing
work and work yet to be done, work which might not have been seen as necessary if not
for his efforts. Finally, I suggest that the ethnohistorical studies which he proposed
have some current applications which he might not have anticipated. The paper is

offered from the perspective of someone who was neither a student nor a colleague of
Heizer's, but who has found his ethnohistorical publications a stimulus and an aid in
pursuing anthropological studies in California.

I first met Dr. Heizer when I came as a student from the East and settled on a
dissertation topic involving the archaeology of the San Fmancisco Bay area. Back East,
we thought of Heizer as an authority on California archaeology and people here spoke of
him in the same way, although they also told me that he was no longer doing California
work. When I spoke with him, I found that to be not quite true. He was still interested
and involved in California studies, but his focus had changed from archaeology to a kind
of history.

I remember a long talk with him one afternoon in 1972 or 1973 in the Archaeo-
logical Research Facility at Berkeley. He told me then that he thought that California

archaeology was dead, at least California archaeology connected with Native Californians,
due to a combination of the incredible destruction which development had wrought on

archaeological sites in the state since the early 1900s and the increasingly strong and
effective objections of living Native Californians to archaeological studies. If archae-
ology meant excavation, he didn't see much more of it in the state. He also saw

California ethnography as dead because the aboriginal way of life was gone, though he
didn't deny that sudies of descendants of Native Californians might usefully be done.
In his view, the wave of the future would be ethnohistory: poring through documents

which might contain some information which could correct or add to the record of Native
Californian lifeways in the ethnographies.

One finds this idea formally expressed in Heizer's writings in several places.

For example, in 1975 he advocated a "new ethnography' -- a fancy title for ethnohistory,
but still new in the sense of being not yet done and much needed as a step toward re-

casting imperfectly interpreted data into more correct form" (Heizer 1975: 12). His
proposal stemmed from two concerns, oft-repeated in his introductions to reprintings
of historical documents. One was his conviction that the great population loss among

8

Native Californians after white contact (from about 300, 000 in 1769 to about 100, 000 in

1850, to about 50, 000 in 1870) was accompanied by a tremendous loss of ethnographic fact
and by great and varied cultural changes. The second concern was that anthropologists
from the beginning (and they began to work in California only after 1870) tried to collect
information which applied to the unaltered aboriginal way of life (often referred to as the

timeless "ethnographic present"), while they usually ignored the actual acculturated lives

of their subjects and also frequently neglected to record circumstances such as biographical
data of their consultants which would help the later user evaluate the accuracy of their
data.

In an article in 1974, Heizer worried that "there is a huge amount of incorrect

data about California Indians already in print, and that in the future there may be increas-
ingly less informed judgment applied to this body of report" (1974: 29). He was concerned
that a new generation of workers, unacquainted with California Indians who still recalled
the old ways, would be unable to judge the ethnographic record critically. In many

writings he cited cautionary examples of presumed ethnographic "truths" about Native
Californians which need checking. For example, he noted that many ethnographers

ignored the fact that traditional burial practices were often altered very quickly under the
influence of white contact; thus our ethnographic record of burial practices may reflect
these recent changes more than it reflects traditional practices (1975: 10). He pointed

out that most accounts of long distance trading trips by inland peoples to the coast clearly
apply to times after white contact, leading him to question whether such travel and trade
patterns were relatively new in native California and suggesting the danger of depending
too much on ethnographic analogy in formulating a picture of prehistoric economic

organization in California (1978e: 692-693). He referred to linguistic indications of group
boundary shifts which may have taken place and been forgotten within the century or so
between missionization and the arrival of the anthropologist, predicting that our under-

standing of ethnolinguistic territorial boundaries will continue to be modified as the doc-
umentary record is studied and wondering how many changes might have occurred which
left no evidence in that record (1978b: 5).

While Heizer presented examples and views of this sort in several places in the
California volume of the Handbook of North American Indians, he also made therein
what must have been for him a hopeful prediction:

examination and reevaluation of the assumed aboriginal ethnographic
cultures will almost inevitably come, if for no other reason than that it
offers such rich results. This promise will make such inquiries

attractive to students of Native American cultures that no longer exist
even in the memories of living people. Not only social and cultural
anthropologists will turn to this subject, I predict, but so also will

archaeologists who depend so heavily upon the ethnographic accounts
for hints and leads in their effort to interpret the facts of prehistory.

The "new anthropology" in California is likely to have a strong ethno-
historical orientation (1978b: 4).

9

It is worth noting that Heizer's understanding of ethnohistory was a bit different
from that of at least some historians and some anthropologists. Many of his publications
in the last dec'ade consisted of reprintings of historical documents, sometimes with

little or no introduction or commentary. Many of them were organized around the theme
of white mistreatment of California Indians. An historian reviewing some of the collec-
tions worried that they would be little read, because Heizer had provided only raw data,
not the interpretation which is necessary to transform such data into ethnohistory. His
review contained a definition of ethnohistory: "If non-white history (ethnohistory if it

deals with non-literate peoples) is truly a worthwhile undertaking, it must be more than
a record of white mistreatment. It must examine the activity of non-whites as they

responded to the mistreatment, and it must analyze how this response contributed to the
shaping of history" (Phillips 1975: 135).

I think that Heizer's conception of California ethnohistory included this facet,
but was more broad, with a cultural component as well. In an article which Heizer
often cited and recommended to his students, Wheeler-Voegelin made the point that
anthropologists and historians have different interests in historical documents:

It is not the corpus which marks a difference between the historian and
the anthropologist, but the different interest which the same document
holds for each of them. The historian is interested in documents con-
taining references to American Indians, for whatever information they
contain as to how the Indians affected French Colonial, or British

Colonial, or American cultural and political history. The anthropologist,
on the other hand, is interested in the same documents for what they
tell him about inter-tribal contacts, locations, numbers, movements,

and population of the Indians mentioned therein, for what information they
give him about the culture of the various Indian groups, and whatever

data they supply as to how Indian groups were being moved and manip-
ulated by the Whites in their midst, and how their culture was being
affected (Wheeler-Voegelin 1956: 366).

In other words, the historian uses documents as sources of data regarding the shaping
of history, while the anthropologist uses documents as sources of ethnographic data.

Heizer was certainly interested in the ethnographic data to be obtained from
historical documents. But he was also concerned to point out that the events of

California history had affected the ethnographic fact. And he agreed, I think, with
the implication of his historian-critic's statement quoted above, that the shape of

California history was affected by the actions and responses of the people who became

the ethnographers' subjects. Hence, to participate in the "new California anthropology"
which Ibizer envisioned, the California anthropologist must attend to the historical in-
formation in documents as well as to the ethnographic detail, and must work towards
ethnohistories which are more than ethnographies.

10

Heizer did not, in fact, produce any such ethnohistories. I do not think that he
intended to, himself. One purpose of his historical publications, specifically those

documenting the white mistreatment of California Indians, was a reflection of his anti-war
sentiments and his dismay at the violent and antagonistic behavior which he came to see

as a continuing characteristic of the new Americans who had displaced the native inhabi-
tants of this continent. He hoped, it seems, that some Americans. might respond with a

revolt against the legacy of the past if they were shown that events such as the Indochina
war fit a pattern of brutality and inhumanity with roots reaching back many generations
(Heizer 1974a: ix-x). A second purpose of Heizer's studies of California Indians, em-

bracing more than his concern for their historical mistreatment, was to contribute to the
understanding of "how an abundance of people living in a small area could survive for

many thousands of years;" he saw the Anerican Indians as a "source of information on
the human experience of learning to live together" which might be helpful to present and
future generations of peoples of the world trying to survive together (1974: 28). This

sounds simplistic and perhaps naive, yet it is the basic justification, I think, for the work
of most of us who are historians, anthropologists or other kinds of students of human
beings.

To this end, then, to contribute to an understanding of California Indian lifeways
as it might somehow enrich and inform other people, Robert Heizer became concerned,
especially in the last decade, with ensuring that the ethnographic record be as full and
correct as possible. He did not make many specific corrections himself, nor did he

write any ethnohistories, but he did lay the groundwork for much corrective ethnohistorical
work, indicating potential sources of information and providing suggestions as to how the
work might proceed.

I would like to mention some work in northwestern California which has used some
of the materials published by Heizer, to show how those materials and his research

suggestions are contributing to anthropological work in California today. For purposes
of discussion, I crudely lump the ethnohistorical materials into three categories:

1) compilations of various documentary historic sources (which are not definitive
collections of all relevant sources, but just indicators of the kinds of nuterials available
to be examined),

2) presentations of previously unpublished or hard-to-get work of ethnographers
(here I think of his annotated publication of Powers' Tribes of California, his partial

publication of the C. Hart Merriam materials, as well as his interest in and approval of
the current work being done with the J. P. Harrington materials), and

3) extractions of information from existing ethnographic data which can serve
as a check on the record, and which can be applied to some questions which the ethno-

graphies as written do not address (here I think most of his work with his student Karen
Nissen on the Human Sources project, a list of names and biographical data about the
individuals who supplied the ethnographers with their information, a list which Heizer
intended to place in the California Handbook volume, as Dr. Sturtevant has mentioned.)

11

The work to which we applied Heizer's materials had two facets. One was

archaeological survey in ethnographic Chilula territory (the Redwood Creek basin), an

area for which there is relatively litte "old" ethnography and wrhere almost no archaeology
had been done prior to our efforts. The other was a kind of contemporary ethnography,
in which we conferred with living descendants of Chilula, Yurok and Tolowa people to

learn what their concerns are today for lands and resources within the area of Redwood
National Park, concerns ranging from cemetery protection to gathering rights for
basketry materials.

Let me offer three examples of the use of Heizer's ethnohistorical materials

in this work, one from each of the categories listed above. In one of the historic sources
he reprinted, a journal written on a treaty-making expedition in the 1850s, we found a

dated reference to the burning of prairie grasses in ethnographic Chilula territory (Gibbs
1853: 134). This had several useful applications. It added specific data for the Chilula

to the ongoing compilation of California Indian practices of burning for land management,
practices which had become quite limited by the time ethnographers were working, but

probably a very important force on the landscape before white contact (see Lewis 1973).
It provided information for natural scientists who have been trying to understand the
mechanisms by which the prairies were formed and maintained, and it may help the

National Park Service botanists who are trying to restore native vegetation on the prairies.
Finally, it may be useful to the local Indian basketmakers who still retained the know-

ledge that they needed to burn over beargrass in order to have appropriate materials for
basketry, but who had lost the memory of the proper time of year to do the burning.

As another example, let me mention the usefulness of the Merriam ethnogeo-

graphic and ethnosynonymic data which Heizer published (Merriam 1976). We were in-
terested in relating the archaeological sites which we found to recorded ethnographic

village sites where appropriate. Merriam's village lists for the Chilula added locational

information to what was available in the published ethnography by Goddard (1914). Simply
put, three people describing a village location, or even one person describing it three
separate times, may help one find the place easier. Merriam's lists contained entries
which at first glance seemed redundant, as one village would be listed under several

different spellings, but there were slightly different bits of information in the different
entries which were useful for our identification problems.

In addition to Goddard's and Merriam's information, we also had another set
of information regarding one village site, the memories and oral traditions of some

people who were born at the spot but who left as small children. Their information fits
one set of information in Merriam by location, and another set by village name. We
may have a case here which crosses the historic time line when an old village, aban-

doned in response to white contact, gave its name to another place, probably a former

seasonal camping spot which had been used when the old village was occupied. This other place
was a location to which people returned after an initial exodus from the Redwood Creek

basin and occupied year-round for a few years in an attempt to return to their traditional
lands. While we are still uncertain if we have correctly reconstructed the sequence of

12

events, it seems clear that we would never have been alerted to this case if we had not
used the combination of multiple ethnographic sources as well as the testimony of living
people in the course of our work.

As another exanmple of our use of Heizer's ethnohistorical materials, let me

mention the listing of informants in the Human Sources compilation (Heizer and Nissen
1973). After working with the Goddard and Merriam materials, we became curious
about their sources of information: were they using the same consultants? how old
were these people? what were their traditional lands within Chilula territory? were

our present day consultants related to these people? It was a surprise to find that the

published Human Sources account did not include data on either Merriam's or Goddard's
Chilula informants, but it was a reminder that the project is incomplete and that

researchers today should continue to extract biographical data from the ethnographic

sources and add to the file. The compilation did include information on 13 people of the

Chilula/Whilkut linguistic group who had contributed to several ethnographic works which
we had not previously considered as potential sources of data. One table in the Human
Sources compilation was both useful and sobering. It tabulates consultants by birth year
where known. For our area of interest, there was one consultant born in the 1870s, one
in the 1880s, and the rest in the 1890s. We may find that some of Goddard's and

Merriam's informants were older than these consultants, but it is sobering to realize

that most of our ethnographic information was collected from people who were born after
the 1850s and 1860s, the decades when all the Chilula were forced out of their traditional
lands in the Redwood Creek basin.

Real ties to those traditional lands were sustained, however, and we find records
(again, published by Heizer) which can help us follow those ties back from the people

alive today who are our consultants. For example, Heizer published the Kelsey census
of non-reservation Indians conducted in the early 1900s (Kelsey 1971), and among the
people listed in Redwood Valley we can recognize some relatives of our present day

consultants. Documents like the Kelsey census could be used as an aid to oral history
efforts to work back, through genealogical connections and memories and stories, to

piece together and fill in from the minds of different people a history of the Chilula for

the postcontact period. Work of this sort by the neighboring Hupa people has contributed
to the compilation of a meaningful tribal history for them (Nelson 1978). Aside from its
meaning for the people themselves, w find this kind of documentation of continuity

important in working with federal agencies who may be skeptical of the validity of the
claims of our consultants about their traditional territories and practices.

As a result of our experiences in the northern California work, we will

routinely incorporate historical research, use of manuscript ethnographic information
and unpublished photographs, and a consideration of the biographical circumstances of

both old and new ethnographic consultants in any future work we do in California anthro-
pology. I know that similar integrative and corrective efforts are underway by other

Californianists, some stimulated by Heizer's example, some by others'. The need still

continues for an approach about which Heizer wrote almost forty years ago (Heizer 1941),

13

an active interdigitation of the data of archaeology, history and ethnography and the use
of the three separate sources as mutually corrective of one another. I think that we

are carrying things a bit further than Heizer might have expected in applying the work
not just as a corrective to the record of the past, but also to present day concerns of
Native Californians. However, I think that he would have approved of this application
of ethnohistory in California anthropology and I am grateful that he steered us in this
direction.