RUTH KELLETT ROBERTS
1885 - 1967
Not infrequently in the history of their discipline, anthro-
pologists have been rendered invaluable assistance by non-professionals
who, on occasion, have displayed remarkable insights, talents, and pro-
fessionalism. Such an individual was Ruth Kellett Roberts.
Less frequently have these individuals been given their just
rewards or professional recognition by those who have benefited from
their acquaintance and counsel. Some anthropologists have been fair,
even quite generous, in paying due credit to native informants, such as
to the Yurok Robert Spott, or the Papago Juan Dolores. Yet few have had
occasion to honor the efforts of the non-native informant. On this oc-
cation, several ethnologists and humanists concerned with the American
Indian join me in c-ommemorating Mrs. Roberts, who died at Crescent City,
California, on November 15, 1967.
Mrs. Roberts epitomized the best attributes of a long-
standing American tradition, the dedicated historian of
local Indian life. During her lifelong association with
the Indians of northwestern California, she watched the
steady disintegration of native culture, and she determined
to do all she could to preserve a record of the Indians she
knew. She had no anthropological training, but her contact
with Dr. Kroeber and other scholars led her to deepen her
knowledge of the Indians. The Indians knew her and trusted
her (Richard Gould).
Over a span of more than fifty years of acquaintance with the
acculturating natives of northwestern California   and their numerous
problems, Mrs. Roberts assisted ethnological researchers throughout most
of the history of their systematic field study of local Indian ethnog-
raphy. She was notably useful and vital in the ethnological rediscovery
of this region in the last five to ten years of her life.
Mrs. Roberts did not boast of any exhaustive, impractical
knowledge of the totality of local Indian ethnography in an intellectual
1
vein. And she was not a native. Rather, the primary skills which she
brought to bear were her intelligence, intellectual honesty and gentil-
ity, all of unimpeachable, high calibre, and the consequent trust and
confidence which all Indians placed in her. Yet her practical command
of ethnography, extending even to the most obscure technological trait,
was surprising and pleasing to one accustomed to whites, even those who
worked as faithfully and tirelessly as she did for Indian rights and
betterment, who knew little or nothing about Indian life per se.   Mrs.
Roberts had a way of issuing even the most trivial fact coupled with a
captivating anecdote which placed it in human context. It was a de-
lightful contagion we suspect she must have picked up from many years
association with old Indians, who rarely ever set out a fact without a
tale to go with it!
Beginning in 1915, Mrs. Roberts, her husband, the Comptroller
for the Klamath River Packers Association,2 and son spent half the year
on the lower Klamath River of northwestern California, formerly the
domain of the Yurok. Their son made the early friendship of Robert
Spott, adopted son of the last, great charismatic leader of the river
mouth Yurok,3 Captain Spott (d. 1914). Roberts, in turn, was adopted as
his son and as far as we know was the last to be formally trained and
initiated as a high class Yurok man. From these early years on, the
Roberts family also made the acquaintance of numerous scientific
visitors to the region, including A. L. Kroeber, T. T. Waterman, S. A.
Barrett, and many others.
It was many years after hearing a great deal about Ruth
Roberts from my husband, Alfred Kroeber, and from Robert
and Alice Spott, that I actually met her, and I regret that
I saw her only a few times altogether.
Kroeber became acquainted with the Roberts family through
the widow of Captain Spott, Peykah, in 1915...Ruth and Peykah
were already warm friends.
In later years, both in Kroeber's references to anything "on
the River" and in Robert Spott's, Ruth Roberts came into
them. I knew that she was most helpful to Kroeber and that
her life was much involved with the Spotts...
2
It is some measure of the person and the quality of those
friendships that it was only when I met her that I realized
that I had been wholly vague as to whether she was Yurok or
white... (Theodora Kroeber).
During the Depression, Mrs. Roberts and her family were absent
from the River. But even in those difficult times, when they themselves
felt grave financial difficulty, at that great distance, they kept up
their contacts with Indians, and Mrs. Roberts continued the waging of
battles for Indian aid and rights. While the Roberts family was in the
Bay area for those many intervening years (1935-1955), their home in
Piedmont was opened as a refuge and training center for Indian youth.
They provided a channel for domestic and other employment opportunities,
for education, for pan-Indian social life, and for a general broadening
to alleviate the economic hardships brought about by the whites' system-
atic destruction of the Indian's old way of life. Mr. and Mrs. Roberts
returned north in 1955 to Crescent City, where Mrs. Roberts single-
handedly assembled one of the most remarkable local Indian museum col-
lections in the State, with notably fine basketry. There she was Cura-
tor of the Del Norte County Historical Society Museum, and worked tire-
lessly to the very week of her death.
Mrs. Roberts will be sorely missed...Her genteel, but per-
suasive, approach is no more easily duplicated than her
broad command of local history, both European and Indian...
To her Indian friends, there can, of course, be no equal.
Each elderly Yurok seemed, most personally, to speak of her
in the same way:  "She was my friend."   One lady said of a
project which Mrs. Roberts did not finish, the only one of
her attempts at the preservation of Indian history which she
left incomplete: "But who will do it now?" (Arnold Pilling).
Mrs. Roberts unabashedly utilized her many and prominent social
contacts to the benefit of Indian friends, in a wholly unself-conscious
and unpatronizing manner. She once influenced the Commonwealth Club of
San Francisco to invite Robert Spott as their annual prominent speaker.
Spott, in ceremonial Jump Dance regalia, addressed and impressed the
body, presenting the scope of Indian problems with intelligence and
seasoned oratory, his great gift.
3
Long before I met Mrs. Roberts, nearly twenty years ago, I was
aware of her. She was a legendary person, though I knew not
her name. I had even referred to her in lectures on culture
change. Those who were familiar with the details of Yurok
culture history in the first half of the 20th century knew
that there had been a society lady from Piedmont, who had for
years arranged for young Yurok women to work in Piedmont
homes...That legend was Mrs. Roberts. Shortly after 1915, she
began her one-woman battle for California Indian rights, using
as one of her approaches this exposure of Yurok young ladies
to the wealthy homes of the East Bay of the San Francisco
area. In 1927, she worked also for the law to guarantee
California Indians the right to vote (Arnold Pilling).
Those professionals exist who will accomodate eulogistic prose
which aims without human sentiment or wavering at the narrow mark of
professional reputation and capacities, and who will dismiss or even
scorn as irrelevant or unprofessional any human or humanistic concern in
their estimation of individual worth. So much for the insecurity of our
professionals. What Mrs. Roberts accomplished that would--or will--be
recorded as a professional, literary testament is small indeed.
Mrs. Roberts occasionally published short articles for travel
magazines in order to attract attention to local Indian history and
problems. Other than a brief article, "Conservation as practiced by the
Indians of the Klamath River,"   I know of nothing she left to purely
academic posterity. Yet she possessed a set of notes, taken during long
years of friendship with the last prominent Yurok leaders, Robert and
Alice Spott, which would be the envy of any ethnologist pursuing Yurok
ethnography.   Mrs. Roberts wrote almost the entirety of the Indian
section which she instigated in the monthly Historical Society Bulletin,
which she edited. She was constantly urged to write more, but modesty
and a faithful commitment to the imminent exigencies of Indian problems
and promotion, and Museum and Historical Society work, intervened.
I know anthropologists who have spent years with one or
similar tribes and believe they have learned much, and who
have tirelessly pumped out one bibliographical item after
another on that one tribe or its close congeners. But I
have never known one who could as facilely enliven a culture
in the ears and eyes of school children and adults alike in
4
the manner which Ruth Roberts did so effortlessly in her work
at the Museum, her arrangement of collections and her lectures
on them.
In times when it would have been easy to blame society's ills
on the corruption and wastage of the upper classes into which she was
born, Mrs. Roberts' modest and prudent example shone through with wisdom
and ease that would startle a person of this generation, one prone to
think his lot in participating in gloomy times unimaginable to a person
of that generation. Possessed of a truly novel spirit of noblesse
oblige, Mrs. Roberts calmly and courageously took up causes which would
otherwise have amounted to costly ruptures in the social fabric into
which she was interwoven.
Hardly arrived at Requa, where canneries were located at the
Klamath River's mouth, Mrs. Roberts was a naive city girl, a
proper graduate of Mills College, and about to be educated.
She had never even heard profanity, she told me years later,
let alone seen grown men fist-fighting in a drunken pay-day
brawl in the provincial streets. Almost at once, due to her
instantaneous friendship with Indians, she was upbraided by
a biddy hen of the local socio-moral establishment, who, it
turns out, wrote the "Society" notes for the provincial pre-
tenders:
"Why, Mrs. Roberts!" exploded the Society journalist, "that
woman you call your friend has had several illegitimate
children, furthermore, by NO-GOOD whites!"
Mrs. Roberts found herself at a crucial crossroads, but her
reply was characteristically calm and intelligent: "Yes, I
know. But she has raised and loved every one of them. And,
if I am not mistaken, the father of at least one of them is
your brother-in-law."
Needless to say, the intimate knowledge of Indian "affairs"
which she acquired and masterfully collocated has made Mrs. Roberts of
inestimable aid to anthropologists surveying the social structure of the
historic period. Alongside the payroll records in her husband's company
safe, Mrs. Roberts cheerfully preserved the tender records of the Indian
underground community: birth records, deeds and land titles, and other
valuables entrusted to her keeping by Indians.   This trust permitted her
to open doors to inquiry which otherwise would have remained shut.
5
An introduction from Mrs. Roberts opened doors. The Indians
of northwest California are probably more open and friendly
than Indians in other areas, but they, like so many, still
have a lingering and well-founded distrust of whites. Mrs.
Roberts overcame this distrust through long hours of impartial
efforts to settle land claims and other disputes, through her
friendly visits to elderly Indians, and through her care and
display of Indian artifacts...It was Mrs. Roberts' drive and
devotion to Indian traditions that led to the excellent re-
construction of a Yurok Indian dwelling-house at the site of
Requa [Yurok reeWoi--Ed.], near the mouth of the Klamath
River (Richard Gould).
Her knowledge and contacts penetrated social and personal
barriers which few professionals have ever been successful in approaching.
Thus she was invaluable to all of us. She was ever a gracious and help-
ful hostess when visited by us. She was always able to provide more in-
formants, on a wide range of topics, than one could feasibly use at the
moment; and, almost without exception, Mrs. Roberts was accurate in her
estimation of both their character and competence in any given field in
which the investigator needed to inquire.
I personally recall having tried, at first with great
difficulty, to open up an old Tolowa man to inquiry on
a delicate subject: white massacres of his fellow tribes-
men in the early historic period. Here was an embittered
old man, otherwise friendly to his own, who had effectively
refused to so much as speak to whites for at least three or
four decades, likely longer. Then, the mere mention of
Mrs. Roberts' name as a mutual friend gained another and
quite useful informant.
Despite her class and accumulating years, Mrs. Roberts always
threw herself into social work, as eloquent lobbyist in Sacramento or ad
hoc midwife at Requa, without that toilsome, martyrial gloom of Christian
stereotypy that characterized many of her position. She was raised a
staunch Presbyterian, and was once instructed in suspicion of her cousin,
a Methodist(!). Her thoroughgoing conviction of the basic worthiness of
all Mankind, and her observation of Yurok spirituality tempered any po-
tential, to us unimaginable, inclination towards smugness. She never
fought for Indian rights and betterment with that self-righteous pity
and underlying contempt for the unfortunate common enough to reformists.
6
The cruel and neglectful manner in which so many white men
have treated these conquered peoples appalled her over half
a century ago, and she spent the greater part of her life
trying to rectify these injustices.
To understand the Indians, she often lived with them. She
fought for legislation to allow them to live on some of the
land on which they and their forefathers were born. She
helped provide them with the basic necessities of life.   She  6
respected them. She believed in human dignity (Helen Williams ).
She fought for people she knew personally and intimately and
she observed at first hand urgencies of the human condition which others
either intellectualized or bemoaned with the crocodile tears of the ex-
ploiting class. Still, she never surrendered her rational scrutiny or
compromised her intellectual honesty to accomodate facile generality or
excess of sentimentalism. Often pondering tales of Indian witchcraft,
treachery and murder heard from Indian lips, Mrs. Roberts, perhaps giving
the local whites the benefit of the doubt they did not deserve, would
philosophically conclude: "Well, the Indians here never were as badly
mistreated by the whites as they were by each other." Perhaps the
whites were less imaginative.
Mrs. Roberts' deportment was typically modest and reflective,
even in a presence in which she was indisputably the authority. Only
when prepared did she offer her opinions, or her vast knowledge and ex-
perience. The dignity of her bearing rang true, and was utterly lacking
in pettiness or false pride. She was often, in front of our very eyes,
taken advantage of by Indian and white alike, and knew it. Her wisdom
and detached spirit, so very zen in appearance, overpowered any incli-
nation on our part to protest. Her exemplary life demonstrated the
great potential of how fruitfully both the interaction with and objec-
tive study of human behavior might be combined. The anthropologist who,
as Conrad described Lord Jim, "craved anonymity," and shrank from sub-
jecting his intuitions and convictions to the human test was probably
mortified by her sparkling objectivity and intellectual sensibilities at
once combined with a sense of utter, humanistic involvement.7
7
Often I was easily disheartened by her woeful tales and tribu-
lations, and, missing for a moment the spark of her sublime
and inalienable optimism, I would ask her why she did not let
me take her "home" to the Bay area. In good, practical form,
Mrs. Roberts would remind me that all the people she once had
known in and out of her Piedmont home (which Jack London and
his cronies had built on weekends) were dead or departed.
"Besides," she would remark, "there is still so much that
needs to be done here."
Dale Valory
University of California,
Berkeley
TRIBUTES TO RUTH KELLETT ROBERTS
I am grateful to have known her, even a little. I am
sure her life was full of good deeds done, but it was the
friendship she gave which made her so special: it was ab-
solute, unsentimental, always discriminating. Her affection
for these Yurok friends, her respect for them and their ways,
her pride and pleasure in them were among the good things of
this earth, and they are good to recill on a dark day.
Theodora Kroeber
Berkeley
I was deeply saddened by the news of the death of Mrs.
Roberts...Ethnologists, archaeologists, and linguists had
long made it a habit to call on her...and she was unstinting
in her efforts to give them whatever assistance they needed.
I first made her acquaintance in the summer of 1966 and she
went with me to call on a number of Yurok Indians, all of
whom were helpful to me in my linguistic studies. Her last
words to me were, "Hurry back! I won't be here to help
much longer.''
Mary R. Haas
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
Stanford, California
8
I can still recall my first visit to the Indian Shaker
Church at Smith River, California. Mrs. Roberts patiently
introduced me to the people there, carefully indicating
afterwards the factions and stresses within the community.
In my studies there later this information proved invaluable
in keeping a balanced view of the situation and avoiding
unnecessary friction. Mrs. Roberts was always generous with
her advice and help in this way, and many scholars as well
as Indians and relatives will mourn her passing.
Richard A. Gould
American Museum of Natural History
New York C'ity
During the fall of 1967, Mrs. Ruth Roberts was of in-
valuable aid to my wife and me in the early stages of our
field work on changes in Yurok law... My pleasant association
with Mrs. Roberts was not terminated by the onset of her
final illness. She continued her role as a warm and highly-
informative local historian and ethnographer until a few
hours before her death.. .My debt to Mrs. Roberts remains
great.
Like the great departed singers and dancers of the
Yurok and Hupa ceremonies, each was unique. Each had his
own style. The old Yurok cry in memory of a great performer.
Arnold R. Pilling
Wayne State University
Detroit, Michigan
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NOTES
1 These tribes included the Yurok and Wiyot (of the Macro-
Algonquian Phylum), the Tolowa and Hupa (of the Athapaskan family), and
the Karok (Hokan Phylum).
2 Until the closing of the Klamath to commercial fishing in
1935. This action of the Federal Government (provoked, it is believed,
by would-be utilities monopolists) plunged the Indians, already feeling
the hardship of the Depression but still employed and eating, into
greater despair and near-starvation circumstances.
Cf. Robert Spott and A. L. Kroeber, "Yurok narratives," Uni-
versity of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology
35:143-156 (1942).
California Fish and Game Bulletin 18.4:(October, 1932)283-
298.
These notes are now in the possession of her son, Harry
Kellett Roberts, of Sebastopol, California.
6 Mrs. Williams, now of Crescent City, California, is Mrs.
Roberts' successor as editor of the Historical Society Bulletin, and was
a close friend in the last year of her life (quoted from the Del Norte
County Historical Society Bulletin, November 28, 1967, p. 2).
7 I regret that limitations of time and space prohibited the
printing of parts or the whole of contributions to the memorial, which
were kindly contributed by Mrs. Francesca Fryer of Redding, California,
and Dr. Arnold Pilling. I am indebted to the contributors to this
memorial for their thoughtful consideration and co-operation.
10