-BY

EZUK HOMJ3URGER ERI$KSON,

'UNIVERSITY. OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS IN AMERCAN

ARCHAEOLOGY ANi) ETHNOLOGY

Volume 35, No. 1,pp. vi + 257-302

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LO-S ANGELES

1943

OBSERVATIONS ON THE

YUROK: CHILDHOOD AND

WORLD IMAGE

BY

ERIK HOMBURGER ERIKSON

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES

1943

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNI PUBLICATIONS IN AmERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY

EDITORS: A. L. KRoEBER, R. H. LowIE, T. D. MCCOWN, R. L. OLSON

Volume 35, No. 10, pp. vi + 257-302
Submitted by editors June 16, 1941

Issued November 10, 1943

Price, 50 cents

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND Los ANGELES

CALIFORNIA

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON, ENGLAND

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

EXPLANATORY NOTE

WHEN TOLD of my wish to review some of his data on the Yurok [8] * from the
standpoint of psychoanalytic child psychology, A. L. Kroeber advised caution and
suggested action. "You say you want to interpret," he remarked. "You mean, of
course, you have questions to ask, further inquiries to make." With this he put his
finger on the weak spot in all attempts to interpret observations in which one has
had no part. But he did more. He accompanied me to the Klamath, made me ac-
quainted with the (not extensive) Yurok territory, and introduced me to some of
his old informants.

As I had observed during a similar short stay, with S. H. Mekeel, among the
Sioux [3], native informants, as if having missed such questions, eagerly give in-
formation on the training of children in their culture-a field until recently neg-
lected and now hotly debated in both psychology and anthropology. With some data
on Yurok childhood as it once was, I could return both to Kroeber's Handbook and
to my own sketchy material on Sioux childhood. Since Sioux education emphasizes
the necessity of the dispersing of property whereas the Yurok make a point of
amassing it, it seemed of interest to see in what respect Sioux and Yurok methods
of early child training differ.

An anthropological publication usually aspires to documenting established fact
with theoretical finality. Instead this paper presents one clinical worker's impres-
sions and speculations. His criteria for publication (the same as for his paper on
the Sioux [3] ) were the following:

1. The available anthropological data on the tribe studied suggested a number
of interpretations analogous to some that had previously been found meaningful
in the clinical psychoanalytic study of human motivation.

2. The writer's brief experimental collecting of data on the tribe's child training
seemed to confirm these interpretations.

3. The interpretations and the additional data obtained seemed plausible and
suggestive to the anthropologist most familiar with the intricate folkways of the
tribe.

These admittedly subjective criteria may be expected to seem valid only to anthro-
pologists and clinical workers who share the following interests and assumptions.
Therapeutic work with adult and young neurotics in our culture has made it neces-
sary for the clinical worker to pay attention to the study of social phenomena and
to make suggestive contributions to it: for the analysis of neuroses not only reveals
the intricate ways of neurotic substitute adaptations; it also points to the pathology
of folkways which cease to give meaning and consistency to social strivings.

Child training is the basic regulator of social strivings. The infant's body is the
first training ground. Long before the child has been provided with his culture's
vocabulary, which stamps a selected number and kind of his experiences as official,
he has begun to express himself through the medium of his expanding and maturing
organ systems. His sensory, tactual, muscular, and motoric contacts with his envi-
ronment, the urges of his vital and sensual body apertures and their particular
organ modes (incorporation, retention, elimination, intrusion, inclusion) are unfail-
ingly associated with responses from the selected individuals and small social units
entrusted with his care [4]. These responses encourage, provoke, regulate, modify,
and suppress; they make social events out of bodily sensations. They condition in
the growing body a model configuration of the physical, emotional, and intellectual

* Numbers in brackets refer to the bibliography at the end of the paper.

[ iii ]

attitudes desired by the group. The infant's body thus is not only his first means of
expression, his first experiment in physical existence; it is also the culture's first
means of communicating with him. Since the maturing organism's needs remain
essentially the same, our conscious and unconscious mental life remains ifiled with
urges and aversions, with images and analogies which are the residues of the body's
earliest experiences: this becomes abundantly clear in clinical work. It is the basis
for the many references in this paper to bodily analogies in Yurok thinking. In
fact, Yurok concepts seem more than usually determined by such analogies.

There was a time when even the trained observer could not detect any system of
child training in the primitive tribes he visited. Rather, he observed a lack of restric-
tion, especially in those respects in which he himself had been trained most rigor-
ously; his response was either that of righteous horror or of romantic elation. Both
attitudes made him imperceptive to the systematic methods and aims of primitive
child training.

Our (maybe only slightly less romantic) assumption is that primitive systems
of child training, far from being arbitrarily lenient or cruel, have a logic of their
own. They reveal mechanisms of an automatic mutual regulation of child training,
tribal preservation, and individual mental health. They represent unconscious
attempts at creating out of human raw material that configuration of attitudes
which is (or once was) the optimum under the tribe's particular natural conditions
and economic-historic necessities [4].

Of particular interest to the clinician is the fact that in all their weirdness, which
has such detailed similarities to the imagery of our neurotics, some of these systems
seem able to avoid the early deep estrangement between body and self and between
self and parents which characterizes much of the white man's most civilized and
most neurotic accomplishments.

The conclusive study of these phenomena and their application to child training
in our civilization demand thorough training in anthropology and sociology as well
as intimate clinical knowledge. Since investigators with such well-rounded training
do not yet exist in abundance, I shall not further apologize for this overstepping of
professional lines. Instead, I shall try to make the best of the habits of clinical
description. In the following, each section concentrates on strong personal impres-
sions and pursues them conceptually as far as they will lead.

The methodology of anthropological and psychoanalytic interviewing overlaps
at least in the sense that some experience in one should shorten the discrimination
period and sharpen one's perception in the other. With further conceptual clarifica-
tion of the questions that are practicable and meaningful in work with human
beings, some of the more obvious sources of methodological error will be eliminated.

The tolerance shown by A. L. Kroeber and the Department of Anthropology at
Berkeley was positive and liberal, and I wish to express my sincere gratitude to
them. Also, I am grateful to Jean Walker Macfarlane, who arranged my work in
the Guidance Study of the Institute of Child Welfare in such a way as to permit
my making this investigation.

E. H. E.
Institute of Child Welfare,
University of California,
Berkeley, California.

1V

Explanatory Note

CONTENTS

PAGE
INTRODUCTION .......................................... 257

I. Tim MuTuAL ASSIMILATION Or GEOGRAPHICAL AND ANATOMICAL CONCEPTS IN THE WORLD

IMAGE Or THREYUROK ......................................... 260
The double vector ............................................              260

Two houses, three doors ............................................        267
Centrifugal creation and centripetal law ......................................... 269
The salmon run and the fish dam ............................................  277
II. YUROK CHILDHOOD AND YUROK CHARACTER ........................................ 283

The tradition concerning Yurok childhood ...................................... 283
Traditional childhood and cultural character .................................... 290
REFERENCES CrIED ............                                                     301

[v]

OBSERVATIONS ON THE YUROK: CHILDHOOD

AND WORLD IMAGE

BY

ERIK HOMBURGER ERIKSON

INTRODUCTION

1

SOMIE TWO HUNDRED miles north of San Francisco the Redwood Highway (U.S.
Highway 101) enters the area from which its, name is derived. Here the Pacific's
humidity-creeping inland as fog, or beating coast and mountains with rains-
permits evergreen forests at sea level. Before reaching the Oregon border, the
highway crosses the elaborate estuary of the Klamath River and enters the town
of Klamath. Here is the center of the ancient Yurok territory. The Yurok lived,
and still live, on lagoons and at the mouths of small streams down the coast to
Trinidad Bay and up the coast to Wilson Creek (about forty-two miles in all), and
on ancient river terraces for about thirty-six miles upstream along the ever-narrow-
ing, densely forested valley of the Klamath just beyond its confluence with the
Trinity River. "Their principal highway was the river" [13], which made them
somewhat acquainted with and allowed a certain amount of intermarriage with,
the Karok living on the upper Klamath and the Hupa living on the Trinity, neigh-
bors sharing the essentials of Yurok culture although speaking different languages
and having a different ethnic background. Otherwise the Yurok were not intimate
with tribes that could not be reached by boat. Probably never more than a few thou-
sand people, they lived a centripetal and -exclusive life, refusing the status of a
world to anything beyond that disk of territory of about a hundred and fifty miles
diameter which is recognized in the Yurok inventory of names. They neither ven-
tured into the interior of the country nor on the ocean (except for occasional daring
trips to Redding Rock, five miles offshore). They concentrated much of their tech-
nical and spiritual faculties on the annual salmon run (the periodical gift of food
sent to them from a mysterious source "across the ocean"), which to them meant
not only sportive massacre but also supply for winter storage, fraternization of the
tribe as a nation, and spiritual rebirth.

The ethos and peculiar logic of their life is still reverently and stubbornly con-
scious to a small number of older Indians. At first it seems as strange to our per-
ception and sensation as is the tom-tom in the prairie or the remoteness of Acoma;
but on further study the strangeness diminishes.

The history of these Indians' clash with white civilization is unique. Their modern
frame houses are near the visible and still name-bearing house pits which once
formed the subterranean part of what in its superterranean structure always had
been a wooden frame house. It is true that the salmon today does not stand in the
center of either their society or their economy; like other United States citizens the
Yurok are obliged to accept certain seasonal restrictions and trade limitations. But
unlike the buffalo hunter, who with the extinction of the game and the denudation
of the prairie saw eradicated all the old modes and values of life, the Yurok still sees,
catches, eats, and talks salmon. The modern Yurok, steering a raft of logs down the
river or doing timberwork for the big companies, is a picture of relative historical

[ 257 ]

2University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

and economic health; for his technology had been in large part that of a timber-
man: he had exported dugouts and prepared lumber for his own houses as well as
for those of his neighbors outside the Redwood belt. Yurok women had spent most
of their days in the gathering of acorns, wild bulbs, and grass seeds; they were even
planting tobacco before the white man came; and so to cultivate vegetables and
walnut and apple trees is not too far a step from old custom. Thus, one has the im-
pression that at least in some essentials the Yurok does not have to relearn the A B C
of his ancient economic mind and whatever of the past is still a part of his child
training. Above all, these people had their own kind of money when the white man
came. "The Yurok concerns his life above all else with property. When he has
leisure, he thinks of money; if -in need, he calls upon it. He schemes constantly for
opportunity to lodge a claim or to evade an obligation. No resource is too mean or
devious to essay in this pursuit" [8]. This "primitive" tendency the Yurok need
not forget in the white world, and therefore their grievances with the government
(for example, with the Howard-Wheeler Act forbidding Indians to sell reservation
land except to one another) find other than the inarticulate, smouldering expres-
sion of the prairie man's passive resistance. Where it flares up, it is the voluble
hatred of one group of citizens of the United States against, as they consider them
to be, another greedy group of citizens. As I was to learn, it is expressed openly.
The observing white man, however, who is at first repulsed by the Yurok's money-
mindedness and suspicious compulsiveness, cannot escape the final insight that his
relations with the Yurok lack alleviating romanticism because Yurok and white
man each understands too well what the other wants, namely, possessions.

I shall first report on my contact with a selected group of Indians who had a
high standing among Indians as well as whites. They were living on idyllic spots
above the very mouth of the river, in the town of Requa, once the most populated
of the Yurok towns.

2

According to habit, we shall proceed on clinical lines. Having read Kroeber's "case
history," and having been led by it to a certain diagnostic impression, we approach
the individuals we interview with the expectation that they will demonstrate in
changes of affect, in gestures, in the selection of words and subjects how much of
the diagnostic preconception deserves to be formulated.

Our preconception is this: Yurok thinking, so far as it is magic, tends to assimi-
late concepts derived from (1) observations of the geographic and biological
environment, that is, (a) the lower part of a river valley with a mysterious periodi-
cal supply of fish, (b) a prey (salmon) with a particularly dramatic biology; and
(2) experiences of the human body as a slowly maturing organism with periodical
needs. In the nonmagical sphere, of course, the Yurok reaches a certain degree of
logic and technique, as do all human beings; but wherever magic behavior seems
indicated-that is, wherever mysterious food sources beyond the Yurok's territory,
technology, and causal comprehension need to be influenced, or whenever vague
human impulses and fears need to be alleviated-the Yurok tries to understand
nature around and within him by blending bodily and geographic configurations,
both of which become parts of one geographic-anatomical environment. In this en-
vironment the periodical affluence of the waterway has a functional interrelation
with the periodicity of vital juices in the body's nutritional, circulatory, and pro-
creative systems. Therefore, the Yurok's main magic concern is that vital channels
be kept open and that antagonistic fluids be kept apart from one another.

Into this unified environment, in turn, the Yurok's ethical orientation is blended.
As we shall see, the groundwork for it is laid by the (unconscious) conditioning

258

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

in early childhood training as well as in the formulated values of verbal education.
(Probably a similar assimilation takes place in the Yurok's orientation in time:
by a projection of typical childhood experiences into "prehistory" a unified time
environment is created which again allows for oriented behavior.)

In demonstrating some configurations of Yurok culture which seem to express
this mutual assimilation of geographic, anatomical, and ethical concepts, we do
not propose to generalize that all people living along rivers with salmon runs do
as the Yurok do, although some might in some particulars. Neither do we overlook
the fact that almost every item of Yurok ethnology on which our demonstration
can be based is shared by the Yurok's ethnic neighbors where it may have the same,
a similar, a transformed, or a different meaning. Here, too, our attitude is clinical:
we would expect an individual ego to synthesize individually experiences typical
for many; similarly, we assume that a group ego (or whatever we choose to name
the organized and organizing core of a culture situated as it is in its constituent
individual egos) tends to take stock of and to synthesize what has been selected,
accepted, and preserved. It is this synthetic tendency which in the following pages
is to be demonstrated within one culture; we believe it to be an essential attribute,
although not the explanation, of culture as such.

Generalizations, if they were our goal, would lead us to the psychology of the
ego [5], and its synthetic functions [6], in the sense that a tendency toward a con-
ceptual synthesis of the inner and the outer environment is a potentiality of the
human mind-a potentiality which is developed as one of the infantile ego's methods
of orientation in the world, and which in adult life either manifests itself in institu-
tionalized human pursuits of magic, intuitive, and artistic character, or makes itself
psychotically independent of cultural and physical reality.1 As a group-psychological
phenomenon, however, we consider it to be neither an argument for the equation of
phylogeny and ontogeny, nor for that of "primitive," infantile, and psychotic
thinking; we merely regard it as the (here well-integrated) use and organization
of a mental potentiality for the sake of orientation, survival, mental economy, and
self-expression.

1 See the case study "Orality in a Boy of Four" [4]. The plumbing system of a house, connected
as it is with food intake and excrementa, in the mind of a child can become an annex of his own
organism as well as an object for the projection of what the child thinks other organisms are and
feel like.

259

I. THE MUTUAL ASSIMILATION OF ANATOMICAL AND

GEOGRAPHICAL CONCEPTS IN THE WORLD

IMAGE OF THE YUROK

THE DOUBLE VECTOR

ONE OF THE FIRST Indians to whom the writer was introduced was in a certain sense
a colleague of his. F called herself, and was called by others, a "doctor." So far as
she treated somatic disorders or used (the Yurok brand of) physiological treatment,
the writer could not claim to be her professional equal. However, she also did
psychotherapy with children, and in this field it was possible to "exchange notes."
She laughed heartily about psychoanalysis, the main therapeutic principles of
which, as will be shown presently, can be easily expressed in her terms. There is a
radiant friendliness and warmth in this very old woman; if melancholy makes her
glance and her smile withdraw behind the stone-carved pattern of her wrinkles,
it is a dramatic melancholy, a positive withdrawal, not the immovable sadness seen
in some faces of other Indian tribes.

As a matter of fact, F was in an acute state of gloom when we arrived. Some
days before, on stepping out into her vegetable garden and glancing over the
scene, a hundred feet below, where the Klamath enters the Pacific, she had seen a
small whale enter the river, play about a little, and disappear again. This shocked
her deeply. Had not Wohpekumeu2 decreed that only salmon, sturgeon, and similar
fish should cross the fresh-water barrier set by the creator ? This breakdown of a
barrier, this disturbance of a vector, could only mean that the world disk was
slowly losing its horizontal position, that salt water was entering the river, and
that a flood was approaching comparable to the one which once before had de-
stroyed mankind. However, she told only a few intimates about it, indicating that
perhaps the event could still become untrue if not talked about too much.

Except for facts bordering on taboo subjects, it was easy to converse with this
old Indian woman because usually she was merry and quite direct. (During our
first interviews Kroeber had sat behind us, listening and now and again interrupt-
ing. On the second day, I noticed that he was absent from the room for some time,
and I asked where he had gone. The old woman laughed merrily, and said, "He
give you chance to ask alone. You big man now.")

What are the causes of child neuroses (bad temper, lack of appetite, nightmares,
delinquency, etc.) in Yurok culture? Yurok children are supposed to be able,
after dark, to see the "wise people," a race of small beings which preceded the
human race. If a child sees a member of this race, he develops a neurosis, and if
he is not cured he eventually dies.

The "wise people" are described as not taller than a small child. They are always
"in spirit," because they do not know sexual intercourse. They are adult at six
months of age, and they are immortal. They procreate orally, the female eating
the man's lice. The orifice of birth is unclear; however, it is certain that the "wise"
female has not a "woman's inside," that is, vagina and uterus, with the existence
of which, as will be shown later, sin and social disorder entered the world.

2 Anything preceding the human race and the world as it is now is alternately attributed to the
doings of Wohpekumeu the "widower across the ocean," sometimes called "the creator"; and of
the woge, a race of "first people" or "spirits" or "wise people." We shall come back to them.

[ 260 ]

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

We observe that the "wise people" are akin to infants: they are small, oral, and
magic, and they do not know genitality, guilt, and death; they are visible and dan-
gerous only for children because children are still fixated on earlier stages and may
regress when the stimulation of the daylight is waning-then becoming dreamy,
they may be attracted by the "wise people's" childishness and by the narcissism with
which they thought they could be wise and be magic without social organization.
For the "wise people," as we shall see, were creative; but they knew not genitality
and, consequently, what it meant to be "clean." (In this case a phylogenetic fan-
tasy seems to symbolize ontogeny: the "wise" men, I think, are the projection of the
[pregenital] state of childhood into prehistory.)

If a child shows disturbances indicating that he may have seen "wise people,"
his grandmother goes out in the garden or to the creek (wherever she has been
informed that the child has played after dark), cries aloud, and speaks to the
spirits: "This is our child; do not harm it." If this is of no avail, the grandmother
next door is asked to "sing her song" to the child; every grandmother has her own
song. (American Indians in general seem to have a fine understanding of am-
bivalence, which dictates that in certain crises near-relatives are of no educational
or therapeutic use.) If the neighbor grandmother does not avail, F is finally
appealed to and a price is set for the cure.

F says she often feels that a patient is coming:

Sometimes I can't sleep; somebody is after me to go and doctor. I not drink water, and sure
somebody come. "F, I come after you, I never sleep last night, I come after you, I give you ten
dollars." I say, "I go for fifteen dollars." "All right."

The child is brought by his whole family and put on the floor of F's living room.
She smokes her pipe to "get into her power." Then, if necessary, the child is held
down by mother and father while F sucks the first "pain" from above the child's
navel. These "pains," the somatic "causes" of illness (although they, in turn, can
be caused by bad wishes), are visualized as a kind of slimy, bloody materialization.
To prepare herself for this task F must abstain from water for a given period. "As
she sucks, it is as if her chin were going through to your spine, but it doesn't hurt,"
one informant reports. However, every "pain" has a "mate"; a thread of slime
leads F to the place of the "mate," which is sucked out also.

We see that to the Yurok disease is bisexual. One sex is represented near the center
of the body, which is most susceptible to sorcery, while the other has wandered to
the afflicted part, like the uterus in the Greek theory of hysteria or the displaced
organ cathexis in the psychoanalytic system.

Having swallowed two or three "pains," F goes to a corner and sits down with
her face to the wall. She puts four fingers (omitting the thumb) into her throat
and vomits slime into a basket. Then, when she feels that the "pains" she has
swallowed are coming up, she holds her hands in front of her mouth, "like two
shells," and with spitting noises, which I cannot characterize phonetically, spits
the child's "pain" into her hands. Then, as she dances, she makes the "pains" dis-
appear. This she repeats until she feels that all the "pains" have been taken out
of the child.

Then comes the "interpretation." She smokes again, dances again, and goes into
a trance. She sees a fire, a cloud, a mist, then sits down, fills her pipe anew, takes
a big mouthful; and then has a more substantial vision which makes her say to
the assembled family something like this: "I see an old woman sitting in the Bald
Hills and wishing something bad to another woman. That is why this child is sick."
She has hardly spoken when the grandmother of the cliild rises and confesses that

261

2University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

it was she who on a certain day sat in the Bald Hills and tried to practice sorcery
upon another woman. Or F says, "I see a man and a woman doing business [having
intercourse] although the man has prayed for good luck and should not touch a
woman." At this, the father or the uncle gets up and confesses to his guilt. Some-
times F has to accuse a dead person of sorcery or perversion, in which event the
son or the daughter of the deceased tearfully confesses to his misdeeds.

It seems that F has a certain inventory of sins which, like many a psycho-
pathological system of interpretations, simply attaches, under ritualistic circum-
stances, one of a given number of explanations to a certain disturbance and makes
people confess tendencies which, in view of the structure of the culture, can be
predicted, and which to confess is profitable for anybody's inner peace. Having an
exalted position in a primitive community, F is, of course, in possession of enough
gossip to know her patients' weaknesses even before she sees them and is experi-
enced enough to read her patients' faces while she goes about her magic business.
If she, then, connects a feeling of guilt derived from secret aggression or per-
version with the child's symptoms, she is on good psychopathological grounds, and
we are not surprised to hear that neurotic symptoms usually disappear after F
has put her finger on the main source of ambivalence in the family and has pro-
voked a confession in public.

2

When I asked F to tell me how she happened to become a shaman, she quickly and
seriously said, "This cost twice a dollar." Anyone not prepared for the Yurok
mentality could easily mistake this request for what it would mean among other
Indian tribes, namely, an attempt to capitalize on what seems most interesting to
the white man. Here, however, one receives the impression of a superindividual
eagerness, a wish not for money but for the establishment of a certain ritual
atmosphere. Like all activities of a higher importance, doctoring is highly paid
among the Yurok: in American money, F receives as much as a psychiatrist (but
has to return the fee when she is unsuccessful). Once the sanctity of the situation
was established, a more intense level of Yurok experience opened up: F's seeming
interest in money abruptly and surprisingly changed into "pity and terror." Soon
she shed tears in recording how she was forced to become a doctor. However, we do
well to restrain our sympathy until we understand more of the magic function
of tears in Yurok culture.

My mother says, "You be doctor." I say, "No." She say, "You much money, beautiful clothes;
if not doctor, will have nothing." I again say, "No." She scold, she scold too rough; I go away
from home, stay out at night, sleep with Nancy over in other village.

F's rejection, of course, concerns the more material aspect of Yurok doctoring,
namely, the sucking from sick persons' bodies of "pains," which are described as
being slimy and bloody and looking like a polliwog.

There I dreamt a woman is coming, her hair is long, she has grass skirt and small basket. She
say to me, "Come with me in there." I say, "All right," and she holds a basket. She say, "You
look in there." I look, mist closes sky, water dropping out of sky, white yellow black bloody
nasty. [I later verified this as meaning: Through the mist I saw the sky come together. Out of
the cleft I saw water dropping, white, yellow, and black. It looked bloody and nasty.]

She hold little basket out so water dropped in it; she turn around, I see stuff in basket, I kind
of afraid, I turn around. She say, "You stay there." I go, I look back; she throw basket on me,
it hit me on mouth; I swallow stuff, I no sense any more; I wake up with noise, Nancy wake
me up. "You crazy," she says. I never tell I dreaming that night; not sleep again.

F knew why she did not tell Nancy about the dream, for in the dream she had
swallowed the stuff of which pains are made. We see here one of those interesting

262

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

mechanisms which are active in the institutionalization of what seem hysterical
or psychotic phenomena. People, so I heard later, had predicted for years that F
would be a shaman "because she slept so much," that is, had contact with prehistory,
night, and death. In her dream F already submits to the social pressure which says
that a woman of her personality make-up, being the daughter and granddaughter
of doctors, should also become a doctor. By her terrified awakening she probably
had already communicated her conflict to Nancy; but a dream is still a private
symptom which one is able to keep to oneself. She does not dare go to sleep again,
afraid as she is of the inner voice which, in the morning, forces her to speak a
clearer language, namely, that of an organ symptom which cannot be hidden.

In the morning when eating breakfast I feel sick. I want to go outside, found huckleberry
[a berry red, soft, and sweet, and of the size of a nipple]. Ate little bit, feel sick, worse; three
o'clock fellow bring crabs, I cook and I eat, I vomit. Other women say, "Maybe you dreaming
bad." "Why, I did." "Well, then you not drink water or else you never get well."

Water,-so we can paraphrase,-water, one of the most common Yurok taboos,
should not touch the inside of the body, if anything goes on or is going to go on
which implies a transmutation in the service of biological or spiritual change.

"Maybe you get [to be] doctor if [you] go to sweat house." "No." Ate crabs, all come out
again, can't eat nothing; men-folk in sweat house make big fire; evening, women cook acorn.

The community has accepted the verdict of her symptoms and she in turn accepts
their verdict as expressed in the preparations for her novitiate. Here F is at the
crossroads of psychopathology and privileged social career.

The life history of another Yurok woman, now deceased, of which I was able to
secure only fragments, indicates that flight at this moment may mean (or already
signifies) lifelong neurotic suffering. The story paralleled F's up to the point
reached in our account. Here, however, the woman objected and ran away. She
became a very neurotic woman, with chronic indigestion. She vomited whenever
she saw traditional Indian food such as acorn soup or salmon. One of her daughters
acquired the mother's symptoms as a child, constantly needing laxatives, being
finicky about food, and beginning to vomit at adolescence. Many factors may enter
here: however, the old woman is said to have spoken incessantly of her interrupted
novitiate: she had, psychologically, never developed beyond the point where it
broke up.

If F took the alternative road to a social position of prestige and wealth, it has
to be kept in mind that manifestly she did so with trembling and that even today,
when she is by far the richest, best-dressed, and most esteemed Indian woman in
her community, she has to call on her reservoir of pity and terror when relating
the story.

Note the interplay of inception and ejection in this story. The mother had sug-
gested curing, which means sucking and becoming rich. The daughter is overcome
by loathing and runs away. In her dream she is forced by an old woman to swallow
down into her stomach what she repudiated when awake. Awake again, she vomits
involuntarily. Now, as we shall see, under a trance induced by the excitement of
the community this involuntary vomiting of stomach content is transformed into
an ability voluntarily to vomit the first "pain," then to swallow it again (but this
time only deep enough to imbed it in slime), and to produce it again without
throwing up food with it-a mastery over the oral-nutritional canal which will
give her the power to cure people. This is common enough throughout primitive
medicine. In Yurok culture, however, it seemed to be specifically related to other
"double-vector" situations, that is, configurations in which an object entering a

263

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

canal turns around and leaves it and by doing so creates a magic event of either
beneficial or dangerous character. In geographic dimensions we saw such a double-
vector arrangement in the behavior of the little whale who entered and left the
mouth of the Klamath.

Three women and I; women make four acorn soups; I say put away; old men go to sweat
house, pretty near dark. I get sick again, commence throw up, tell women I going outside. She
says, "Put your head in there and maybe [it will] all come out [of you]." I say no; she says
again; she give me her cap. I put my head in: oh, sick, sick; after while lots of stuff come out,
spit, that's all. [She means she already vomits slime, not food.] Men in sweat house yet; when I
get through [vomiting] I tell women, "I feel good now, maybe it come out"; put it on fire [light
up the fire to see]; was dark; put it on fire and she holler, she says, "aw-w-w-w, you look, it is
like worm, black." [F demonstrates that the worm, meaning the "pain," was as big as half her
index finger.] Slimy, she gets neighbor woman doctor too; doctor she says; old man says,
"Sweat house is too hot yet, dance in house, take it on hand" [he means the "pain"]; other woman
put pain on his hand. Henry was boy, he see me that time.

This witness could not be reached; however, as mentioned before, another informant
reported Henry as testifying that the "pain" looked like a clot of black blood and
had the form of a polliwog.

Had to learn make noise. [F, far back in her throat made a noise the repeated production
of which ought to be sufficient to produce some blood.] Henry say, "I dance with you." Other
women put it [the "pain"] back in my mouth; throw it in like that; it inside again; I fight, fight,
mess up fire, spill aeorn, no sense, just like no sense at all; after while I stop. Old man, mother's
first cousin, take me to sweat-house dance; too dark in sweat house, everybody come in singing;
I guess eleven o'clock [at night] I stop, time I feel tired; rest go back into house; I sleep in
sweat house tired; one o'clock at night he says, "I going to wake up wife"; all women come back
again singing again, oh I feel sick again, dance and dance, oh just daylight quit, I cover up face
with hands like in house. [Here big tears roll down her cheeks, and her face expresses a reliving
of what must have been the hardest days of her life.] Never drink no water. [Here she coughs.]
Eat nothing. [Here her voice indicates a climax of her self-pity.] Noon go back to sweat house;
well, I dance again, nothing come; I dance, tired in evening, I quit, go into house again. Old
man my uncle says, "One o'clock you start again." Oh everybody so glad to sing. [Here, when
she reports how her uncle tells her of the community's approval and joy, her face begins to light
up and she looks like a little child who smiles abruptly with tears in her eyes.] One o'clock,
woman she wake me: "Come on." I dance again. [F's expression again becomes tired and re-
signed, but it changes abruptly.] But two o'clock I feel different, shaking inside, I like to dance;
have basket, put hand in mouth again. [She demonstrates that she put the three middle fingers
of her right hand into her mouth.] I throw up. I told, "Light, candle." I put in hand, two pains,
slimy, black. [With joy in her voice:] Well, you know Indians; when see it, cry; singing again,
I stand up, I hold it again. [She demonstrates that she holds the two "pains" in her clasped
hands.] Again I crazy; boy jump on me, hold arms around my body, makes me dance. Henry's
mother pat my chest, pat my shoulder, make sound with pipe, pain come out [of me] again. If it
come out four time, all right. Well, one fellow go after miy mother. Mother says, "Won't come.
She not be doctor, she not ask for money, she send patients away." [The mother indicates her
doubt, probably ritually required, that the daughter will ever develop the self-confidence neces-
sary to ask for a high fee.] He says, "You don't know what you say, you doctor yourself." Well,
mother coming, father coming, and I see every time; I start again one o'clock at night, kick
dance, I spit again, and oh my mother and father were crying so hard and my sister coming
and her husband and old Spott, sweat house just full, all singing, and I never feel tired when
all the fellows singing; looks [as if] I never get tired; eat acorns, never drink no water; used
to be that way, everybody liked to singing, so from Johnson's up-river they coming, lots of work
to feed them. I dance, dance, dance, sweat and hot, I again sick, I do it again that way. [She
means she vomits.] After a while it comes out again. [This is the third "pain," and she now
speaks with deep satisfaction.] Old Spott worse, cried; eight days blood he coming, all bloody
over here into basket; next morning, four o'clock, pain is again and blood with it. [This is the
fourth and final "pain."]

Six months never drink water; sleep in sweat house, not when blood comes out. [She means
except when she menstruates.] Sometimes in sweat house I feel somebody no clean, he get out.
[She means she feels that a man had intercourse with his wife at a time when she menstruated
and therefore should not be near her. This taboo we shall explain later.] All winter I dance, go

264

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

up to woods, clap hands [and say], "I will get lot money for doctoring" [that is, she prays in
the Yurok way, stating, with or without tears, as a fact that which she wants to become true].
He say, "Now you doctor this rock. Just play this rock is sick, just as if doctor pretends." All way
back past sweat house everybody sing, I dance; that's the time I drink water again.

As if asking for a fellow therapist's sympathy, F concludes:

Two years I doctor I get nothing. One time Johnson fellow says, "I give you three dollars."
[Laughs merrily.] Three dollars ! oh, I so proud.

3

One element, and a decisive one, is missing in F's story. Other Yurok say that her
trouble began with her grandmother's taking a "pain" out of her mouth (the grand-
mother's) and making F swallow it. Why did F not mention this?

Several explanations are possible: either the grandmother story is something
which the community only infers from the dream, according to which an old woman
makes F drink blood or dirty stuff out of a basket; or there is an amnesia for the
original trauma, and this either in the primary sense that F has actually repressed
the occurrence represented in her dream, or in the secondary one, that the occur-
rence (although she did not choose to remember or at least to verbalize it at the
moment when she started her story) is in F's preconscious mind and could be
ascertained. Finally, the "amnesia" may be only an official one; that is, this most
real and quite conscious aspect of her story is suppressed by a taboo.

Interestingly enough, however, this important omission has a certain configura-
tional similarity with the very first issue which, as we observed, affected F's emotions
deeply-the whale's entering of the river mouth. In both occurrences the wrong
object took possession of the vector of permissible objects: the whale came in where
only salmon (in Yurok: "that which is eaten") is permitted; the "pain" (a slimy
substance looking like a polliwog) came in where only food should come in. Are
we confronted here with an individual's complex? As we shall see, strong recurrent
taboos among the Yurok concern the "contamination" (either by an inversion of
vectors or by the meeting of antagonistic objects in the same aperture) of what
floats in the water, what passes the nutritional system, and what flows in the body's
veins. The "pain" swallowed by F forbids her to drink water. Venison, too, being
"bloody," is antagonistic to water; after having eaten deermeat one ought not even
to wash one's hands, but merely to wipe them. Salmon, water-born, would avoid a
house which contained a menstruating woman. Money, the product of another
"stream," is the successful antagonist of sexual intercourse: husband and wife meet
outside the house to avoid its criticism. A man's oral contact with a woman's vagina
(her "inside") will keep the flow of salmon and of money from the river, and will
make all the Yurok weak: it is this perversion, small children are taught, that makes
the mud hens so weak that they cannot fly. We see, therefore, that what the grand-
mother tries to make the girl do on the manifest (historical) as well as on the latent
(dream) level somehow goes against the whole Yurok training of the mutual exclu-
sion of what floats in the channels of geography and anatomy. If not easily refused
and well repressed, this seduction therefore can only lead either to psychopathology
(incomplete repression) or to sublimation in connection with a high social goal. The
dream's disguise shows the force of repression. Not the grandmother, but a most
impersonal "old woman," is offering the blood, which does not come out of her mouth
but out of a gigantic cleft in heaven. Above all, F does not accept it, but is forced
to swallow it.

A cleft dripping with an ugly and bloody substance does not, as could be sus-
pected, represent a part of the sucking situation, since in reality (in Yurok reality)

265

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

no slit or wound indicates the place on the body out of which a "pain" has been
sucked. At worst, this place may show slight tooth marks. This dream element,
therefore, must represent loathing of an opening other than the mere zone of "pain"-
sucking. If it is the grandmother's mouth, then its "gigantic" ugliness still calls for
explanation.

Under questioning, F stated that she was just about to menstruate at the time of
her novitiate; and indeed the psychotherapist of our culture is accustomed to meet
her symptoms in preadolescents. Certain hysterical girls are apt to express loathing
of certain foods, of certain aspects of the maternal or paternal bodies, or of the
bulging aspects of adolescent growth itself. However, the object of loathing main-
tains a strange attraction; it is sought with eyes and imagination until its perceived
image causes vomiting. Such symptoms point to an (ontogenetically) primitive level
of bodily experience in which the female genitals, as a newly developing organ sys-
tem of inception, are unconsciously associated with the infantile model of inception,
namely, the oral-nutritional system. Thus both the first embarrassing rush of incep-
tive eagerness and the repudiation of the idea of inception are experienced and
dramatized in oral addictions and aversions. In the dripping cleft, therefore, we see
a condensation of a kind common in dreams of the menstruating girl's "inside which
drips blood," the grandmother's mouth which sucks bloody "pains," and the pros-
pective patients' insides in which "pains" wait to be sucked out.

Let us see what modes of behavior the Yurok culture would have forced on F had
she matured like any other girl. When menstruating the first time, she would have
had to sit silent in a corner of the home for ten days, with her back turned to the
fire pit. She would have been under an obligation to move as little as possible. On
one daily trip to bring in firewood, she would have been obliged to look neither to
left nor right. She would be forbidden to eat at least the first four days, and longer
if possible. If then overcome by hunger, she would have to take her food to a spot
where any sound of man and animal, and even the song of birds, would be con-
founded by the noise of the river. In other words, when showing the signs of female
maturation, that is, the readiness to conceive, the adolescent girl is forced to drama-
tize a general closing up to any substance (be it even a sound of nature) which may
reach her from the outer world. At the end of this period her mother shows her
what her inceptive organization is meant for: putting twice ten sticks in front of
her, she calls half of them sons, the other half, daughters [8].

So far, we come to the conclusion that in F it is (1) the premenstrual stage and
(2) a hysterical anticipation of shamanism (increased by an ambivalent attitude,
probably of an oral character, to grandmother and mother) which make her react
with loathing and with flight to the grandmother's suggestion of capitalizing on
the magic potentialities of her oral system. But she receives help from the com-
munity which lifts her oral desires and aversions to a plane of magic usefulness.

4

As Kroeber points out, even such typical stories as that of F's novitiate are indi-
vidually owned; the individual only does his duty if he puts his personal stamp on
a story which he has inherited as a culture pattern. The comparison of such stories,
then, shows especially clearly what elements remain consistent for the culture or
the individuals concerned. In the following short comparison of F's story with the
account of another novitiate, given in Kroeber's report [8], I shall underline con-
sistent elements.

Kroeber's shaman is married when the novitiate is "imposed" on her. However,
this does not seem typical; she must have provoked this imposition by some kind of

266

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

devious behavior (comparable to F's inclination to sleep a great deal) in adoles-
cence or childhood. In accordance with the dreamer's status and age, the dream
content also differs: the tempter appears to this married woman in the image of an
unknown, short-nosed man, who forces her to eat deermeat which is black with
blood and at a later stage of the dream appears to have been salmon. Salmon drip-
ping with the blood of venison: again a reversal of a basic Yurok avoidance. The
morning after this dream, this woman too is ill, cannot eat, and dances in the
sweat house until she is unconscious. The fact that she does not try to flee before
she dances in the sweat house may be related to the fact that, more mature, in the
Yurok sense, than the adolescent F, she more consciously wanted to become a
shaman because she desired the doctor fees. But she, too, in a sudden craze flees
through the smoke hole, runs to another sweat house, and goes on dancing. On the
tenth day she so far gains control over her "pain" that she can swallow it even if
it is put in a basket on the other side of the room. Then for her, too, there came a
period of daily walks to gather sweat-house wood, while all through the winter she
sleeps in the sweat house. She, too, "thought of money"; facing the door of the
sweat house, she would say, "A long dentalium is looking at me" (dentalium shells
are the ancient Yurok money, graded according to size) ; or, walking by the river,
she would take pebbles in her mouth, spit them out, and say, "Pains will come into
my mouth as cool as these stones; I shall be paid for that." She, too, refers to men-
struation, although only indirectly: during her ten-day periods of sweating and
refraining from water she would gash herself-an activity which to my knowledge
is required only of men contaminated by intercourse with a menstruating woman.
But then, as has not been emphasized yet, sleeping in a sweat house and praying
for money are strictly male activities; similarly the sign and privilege of a shaman,
namely, her pipe, is otherwise only used by men; so that, all in all, we may suspect
that it is not only conflict over the inceptive role, but also a strong ambition to share
male prerogatives, which makes a woman behave in such a way that the community
will force her to become a shaman.

This conflict by no means seems permanently solved when the novitiate is com-
pleted. Both women report anxiety dreams. Kroeber's shaman says that she dreams
in a sweat house of an uma'a (a mysterious thing with which one destroys others
by sending it to them, sometimes by shooting it on the end of a miniature arrow).
The uma'a had one leg straight, the other one bent at the knee. He walked on the
knee as if it were a foot, and he had only one eye. (Remember that her male guardian
spirit was "short-nosed.") The shaman shouted, fled, and was finally brought back
unconscious.

F reports that sometimes she is disturbed by "nasty" dreams, dreams of snakes,
which make her feel sick all over again.

I dream I live here. Why I there is house, all doors that way. I think I will go around look in,
see Indian house, all doors that way, to river. I run around. Oh! snake all over; I hit them; all
over my arm, I bite them; I like crazy; I go to sweat house, I dance, everybody sing.

Thus she sometimes has to repeat her novitiate.

Let us see what the house doors in the dream may signify.

Two HOUSES, THREE DooRs

There are two distinct Yurok house forms: the big or living house, where women
and children sleep and are joined by the men only when oral or genital needs
compel them, and a somewhat smaller sweat house, where men and boys above a
certain age spend the time "meditating," purifying themselves, and trying to raise

267

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

their spirits above the attractions of the female sex. Of these two house forms, the
living house can have its only door on either side, as the house names "Doorway
Up-river," "Doorway Down-river," "Doorway toward the Ocean" indicate. The
entrance to the sweat house, however, always faces a creek or the river or the ocean.
If F dreams with so much emotion of a house which had its doorway toward the
river, it probably was a sweat house, that is, forbidden to women and harboring
male secrets (snakes). This meaning becomes clearer if we concentrate for a moment
on the structure of the two types of Yurok houses.

From outside, both houses present the view of a gabled roof of weathered redwood
planks almost at the ground level since the real room is subterranean. One enters by
creeping through a rounded hole about 2 feet in diameter cut through a strong end
plank which alone bears ornamentation (wood carving). In creeping through this
hole, one holds on (if a stranger, advisedly so) to a pair of stones placed inside the
door, where a slippery, notched ladder leads down into the dugout, a dark, dis-
orderly, and populated octagon. In the center of the floor of this octagon, which
may be from 2 to 5 feet below the ground outside, there is a fireplace. The only ray
of light comes from the "chimney," an opening in the roof (effected by the mere
putting aside of one plank) above the fireplace. Underneath the roof is a huge criss-
cross of poles on which salmon is hanging in all possible states of age and eatenness,
while a shelf bench between the dugout and the side walls is loaded with enormous
baskets full of acorns and utensils in various states of use. The total impression
is that of darkness, crowdedness, and endless accumulation. This is where women
and children live; the man who comes to visit his home is careful not to sit on the
floor, but on a block or stool of the form of a cylinder or mushroom. Otherwise, his
place is in the sweat house, where he takes the older boys; there is one sweat house
to six or seven living houses.

While similar in: structure and in its exterior, if possible even more ragged than
the living house, the sweat house is somewhat smaller and has no provision for
storage. It is lighter because its entrance hole is horizontal. Its floor is all paved
with carefully selected slabs of stone and is kept scrupulously clean. There is a
sacred post near the center of the house, and a central fireplace. The only furniture
consists of a few block pillows of redwood. In contrast to the one-doored living house,
however, the sweat house has an additional exit at one of its small ends: an oval
opening of not more than from 10 to 14 inches in diameter, at some 4 feet below the
ground. This leads into a kind of well set with cobbles, from which one emerges-if
indeed one can get through the hole. This little oval is the spiritual test of the Yurok
world: only a nude man, moderate in his eating habits and supple with the per-
spiration caused by the sacred fire, can slip through this hole and, as is required,
jump into the creek, river, or ocean in order to perfect the purification necessary
for a successful fisherman or hunter. A woman, a fat man, or a bad sweater would
not be able to get through the hole. A man who wishes to be successful and to add
to the success of the tribe will pass this test every morning; if contaminated by
contact with a corpse or by intercourse with a woman, he will do so on two or more
consecutive mornings, being careful not to mingle with the purified workers in
the meantime.

As we shall see, these two house forms not only serve woman and man, respec-
tively, but also symbolize what the man's and the woman's insides mean in Yurok
culture: the family house, dark, unclean, full of food and utensils, and crowded
with babies, the place from which a man emerges contaminated; the sweat house,
lighter, cleaner, more orderly, with selectivity over who and what may enter, a
place from which one emerges purified. If it is true that the male sex envies the

268

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

female her birth-giving function as she envies him his life-spending one, the Yurok
succeeds in symbolically reproducing himself from a male womb every morning.
This womb, however, as a configuration, is a tube with an entrance and an exit;
not a sacklike form like the living house and like the woman's inside with its periodi-
cal blood flow: which to the Yurok is the dark side of anatomy as death is of life,
night of day.

What do the Yurok women think about this dichotomy? They do not seem to
question it or to be dejected about it. Rather, they do what women do everywhere:
they manage in daily reality to exert a power which is officially denied them in
special places and at special times. On the other hand, there are Yurok fables which
find it necessary to impress on the little Yurok girls the ugliness of "masculine
protest" in woman.

The quarrelsome blue jay who scoldingly jumps from branch to branch is a jealous woman;
she got so angry with her husband she pulled her clitoris out and put it on her head (see?).

The crow was the eagle's wife. She did not take care of his child. She demanded the right to
dance in the sweat house. But the old man does not even look at her; he just calmly, proudly ffies
his circles (see ?).

Such narrative education may have sufficed for the "normal" girl. F, as we have
seen, shares the male's horror of the female and wishes to share his prerogatives. In
establishing power over the body's apertures, she becomes a sexless companion of
men; equals the best of them in wealth, and surpasses them in magic power. In the
context of Yurok configurations we first notice that procreation and cure are the
only nonpathological arrangements in which a double vector occurs, that is, where
substances go into and come out of one and the same aperture (F's vomiting is a
pathological version which she learns to "control"). The woman is the source of
procreation, of evil, and of cure. We shall see later that at the beginning of time the
Klamath itself flowed up on one side, down on the other. Then the creator made the
river flow down only, the salmon climb up only-and we remember F's horror of
the whale that entered, turned around, and left the estuary of the Klamath: salmon,
as salmon, only goes one way.

The general Yurok attitude toward the human body and nakedness reflects the
one toward the woman's inside. Only the menstruating woman and the young girl
between her first menstruation and her first child keep their bodies out of the sight
of bathers; otherwise, everyone swims where and how he pleases. Men emerging
from the sweat house to jump into the river may hold their hands over their genitals
or they may not; this does not depend on who is crossing their way.8 The surface
of the body is pure and purifiable; but its deep inside is likely to be incurably con-
taminated and contaminating.

CENTRIFUGAL CREATION AND CENTRIPETAL LAW

1

R is a one-man historical society of his tribe. His ability to convey the quality of
his culture in English words is outstanding; it would be interesting to explore his
life history for the sources of such a gift. However, I know little about him. The
gestures of his hands were strikingly different from anything I have seen among
whites or Indians. As he sat before his little frame hut with the river mouth and
the vast ocean before him, he seemed to conduct an orchestra of directions which
slowly crossed and circumscribed the disk which is the Yurok world. To whatever
periphery these directions set out, there to dissipate, they were gathered back to the

3 To the "phallic" Sioux this would be unthinkable. The only occasion on which he would exhibit
his genitals even to a man would be to his enemy, just before battle, in order to infuriate him [3].

269

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

course of the river and down the valley to its estuary. His head and his eyes in calm
concentration kept turning toward the Pacific Ocean, but his hands (with no move-
ment of the fingers) would make alive the particular system of Yurok directions in
which there is no west nor east, north nor south, but only an "upstream," "down-
stream," "toward the river," "away from the river," "around behind," "behind in
rear"-the last two connotating a movement up the river, away from the river,
and an elliptic return to it. One was reminded of the way the Yurok say the sky
was made:

Wesonamegetol ... took a rope and laid it down in an enormous circle, leaving one end loose at
a certain place among the hills. Traveling off ... and coming around from the south to the same
spot again, he joined the two ends of the rope together. Then for days he journeyed back and
forth over the hills, filling in and knotting the strands across each other. When the sky net was
complete the hero took hold of it in two places and "threw it up" [13].

Kroeber summarizes the Yurok geographic concepts as follows:

The Yurok, and with them their neighbors, know no cardinal directions, but think in terms of
the flow of water. Thus pul is the radical meaning downstream; pets, upstream; hiko, across the
stream; won, up hill, that is, away from the stream on one's own side; wohpe, across the ocean,
and so on. Such terms are also combined with one another. If a Yurok says "east" he regards this
as an English word for upstream, or whatever may be the run of the water where he is. The name
Yurok itself-which in its origin is anything but an ethnic designation-means "downstream"
in the adjacent Karok language. The degree to which native speech is affected by this manner of
thought is remarkable. A house has its door not at its "western" but its "downstream" corner. A
man is told to pick up a thing that lies "upstream" from him, not on his "left." The basis of this
reckoning is so intensely local, like everything Yurok, that it may become ambiguous or contra-
dictory in the usage of our broader outlook. A Yurok coming from O'men to Rekwoi has two
"upstreams" before him: south along the coast, and south-southeast, though with many turns,
along the Klamath. When he arrives at Weitspus, the Trinity stretches ahead in the same direction
in the same system of valley and ridges; but being a tributary, its direction is "up a side stream,"
and the direction "upstream" along the Klamath suddenly turns north, or a little east of north,
for many miles. Beyond their Karok neighbors the Yurok seem to have a sense that the stream
comes from the east. At least they point in that direction when they refer to the end of the world
at the head of the Klamath [8].

I asked R to tell me how the world was made. The Yurok are great storytellers
and a peculiar historical sense is strongly developed among them. "Every story
should have a foundation," R says, meaning a foundation in historical fact; "ex-
plain where something began and came from and if you do not know the foundation,
do not try to teach." Every magic formula of theirs is an account of the historical
event occurring when the formula was first used, and even today the Yurok indicate
that, to them, to tell history means to do something real to the present. When I
asked a Yurok who loved to tell obscene stories about Irishmen to tell me a few
genuine obscene Yurok jokes, he became abruptly serious and said almost anxiously
that nobody would dare to "make up" stories about sex among the Yurok; he would
only tell the old stories giving the historical foundation of how sex came to be. For
the make-believe story might be understood as concerning a living Yurok, which
either would make it a lie or might mean "to swear" at the particular Yurok-"to
swear" connoting a verbal offense against another person. This, incidentally, is
taught early: children are forbidden to talk about sex as long as their parents are
alive because to do this means to "swear" at the parents. Another time, when col-
lecting the moral fables that represent a large part of Yurok education (see Part II),
I noticed that there were stories concerning the panther, the eagle, the buzzard,
the rabbit, the eel, etc., but none about salmon. I asked for a fable about this animal
and immediately was given the same kind of negative answer: about salmon, "the
food itself," no stories can be "made up"; only the old stories can be repeated which

270

Erikson: Observations on the Yuwrok

give the historical foundation of its origin, and by their mere repetition they rep-
resent a kind of prayer, an assurance that values are durable and immovable.

R became very serious when he began to relate the story of the creation of the
world (recorded in the following section); it was almost as if he were reciting a
ritual formula. However, while the Yurok have to present stories and formulas
concerning vital issues with a historical attitude, they are by no means obliged even
to pretend to historical truth throughout; in some respects every narrator has an
exclusive right and even th,e duty to give his story a personal flavor. R's story of
the creation follows.

2

Wohpekumeu was in search of another land. In the old one across the ocean his wife was dead. He
walked on water right in here where now the river is [demonstration of tapping steps]. Every-
thing was dark. He walked up to the place Kenek. He stood there. He cried and sang: "I want a
land here. I want a land here."

In the Yurok beginning there was not "the word," but tears and a nostalgic song.
Land appeared on both sides of where he stood. In the middle the river went up on one side,
down the other.

We note that the original vector system in the river represented the double vector.
The later concepts of the river correspond to the facts only in regard to its one-way
flow out of the mouth, but keep its origin upriver unexplained; lakes, or another
part of the ocean, are vaguely assumed to provide the water. Similarly the "later"
concepts of the body take into account the anatomical fact of genital conception,
while the earlier "wise women" conceived through the mouth and had no vagina;
but "the facts" arouse irrational horror of their intrabodily location, with the cre-
ation of which, as we shall see presently, sin came into the world just as it did with
the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge in Paradise.

He cried again. "I'm terribly lonely. I must have somebody to talk to. I want somebody to talk
to." He wiped his tears like this.

Here, R wiped his eyes in a slow, ritualistic way, indicating that this method of
wiping off tears was as important as the fact of crying.

When he looked again, there was a waterspout coming up from the solid ground, slowly coming
up to the height of his breast. He cried again. When he looked again the water was up to his brow.
It was developed slowly into a woman. Head, breasts, arms, navel. The rest was water.

It is the shedding of the creator's tears which causes a waterspout to grow: in the
beginning, there were the fluids. When the spout has reached human height, the
solidification of the woman takes place in the opposite direction. However, in both
directions there is a point of hesitation: the creator has to cry twice to make the
water "grow" above a certain imaginary barrier on the level of his chest. Corre-
spondingly, the solidification of the woman hesitates after she is formed down to
the navel; above which, vaguely, is the area of sorcery, that is, the lethal pinching of
the nutritional canal.

The creator cried again: "I want a whole woman, I want a whole woman." The girl became solid,
hips and vagina and all.

Then the widower cried for his son. He came and the widower gave son and woman into marriage.

Here the grave question arises, why the nostalgic widower abruptly becomes altru-
istic once a whole woman stands before him, for whom he has cried so untiringly.

Then he created grass, flowers. The son said, "We need food, too." So the creator made elks,
rabbits, deer, grouse. Son wanted fish too. Father cries, goes down to the ocean and steps out to

271

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

the mouth where salt and fresh water meet. He takes a fish out and puts it into the fresh water.
That is where salmon, eels, sturgeon, steelhead, sea lion, seal, etc., came from.

He omitted the whale; this is the reason for F's worries over the young whale's
playing about in the river mouth.

As is the custom of creators, Wohpekumeu said to his son:

"If I give you fish, you must work." Then the creator went upstream again, found his son fishing.
Then he planted people and other rivers.

But then he became girl-crazy. He had only to look at a woman and she was in a family way.
The girls were hiding from him.

What had become the matter with the creator? First, he could not enjoy the woman
he had created; now, could he not4gtop creating, or was this sudden craze a dis-
placement of his love for the daughter whom he had renounced so easily?

He tried tricks: made an elk come out of the woods and jump into the river, so the girls might
get curious.

But people got wise. They kept houses closed, girls inside. So he planned a war dance. Pulled
out some pubic hair, put it on his hand, and blew it into the air. The hair became boys. He took
them up to the timberland and made them dance. While he watched them, a girl came out of a
house, saw the old man, and ran back before he could look at her. He never tried to go into houses.

We notice that he is inhibited in regard to "intrusion," as he was when the woman
he had created stood in front of him.

He then asked all the boys to come into his arms and made birds out of them. They are now
"the pubic-hair birds."

When he came back to Kenek, he wanted his son's wife. He told his son the grandson needed
a pet, and made him go up a tree for a chicken hawk. As the son was climbing, Wohpekumeu made a
wind blow off all the branches and left him in the treetop. The son descended by making a rope out
of Indian chewing gum, made from the inside of certain herbs.

Beginning with the creator's "tricks," we see that the story reveals elements of
excess and warns of the dangers of periphery. The "creator" wants to lure the girls
out of the house and up to the timberland. In order to impress them he makes fast-
flying birds out of the boys. He sends his son up a tree. It is after such centrifugal
acts that he seduces his daughter-in-law.

When the son came back, he met his son blind, shooting birds. The birds would fall right into
his hands so that he would not have to search; dentalium, too, was flying into his hands. The boy
had surprised the grandfather as he was approaching his mother. Already sexually excited, the
old man had blinded the boy with semen.

Here is the first suggestion of the gifts which, later on, when centripetal laws are
established, will flow from the peripheries of the world right into the crying
Yurok's outstretched hands.

The son held his cane in all directions: from every direction it bent back except when he held
it straight up. In that direction he threw his son, to the land of children and deer.

It is as if this bending back of the cane were making retroactive the tendency of
centrifugality manifested by the old man's seductive antics. It showed the "natural"
centripetal forces in the Yurok world.

The old man, repenting, swore never to have a woman again and to go home across the ocean.
On his way down the coast he met many women, beautiful, naked, lying with legs apart. "No
more," he would say. But finally he found one at Little River, shining like the sun; she had a good
form. He lies down between her legs, starts to copulate. She closes her thighs tight and says:
"Close your eyes and don't open them till I tell you. You will feel warm and very cold; you will
feel a very hot wind and a very cold wind blowing, but don't open your eyes." She brought him
back to his old country. She was the Skate woman. A skatefish looks like woman's inside.

272

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

When he was gone, the "wise people" tried to make the world better by law but could not help
being like the old man.

They had a big flood. Now they live in the mountains [along the dangerous peripheries].

Finally, the son said to the people: "The wise people's and my father's laws spoiled it all.
Now it's up to you: Keep cleon."

In Yurok mythology the creator is contrasted to another, a cleaner, "god," who
only smoked but never ate, who spent all his time with men and never desired a
'woman, and who finally did the great historical deed of banning women from the
sweat house.

This puritanical, compulsive image emphasizes by contrast the strange con-
tradictions in the creator himself, who represents what we would call a hysterical
character: he is nostalgic but sly; powerful but partly inhibited; godlike but un-
reliable. Egotistical where women are concerned, he is surprisingly unselfish and
generous in regard to food: for although tricked away from the world by the Skate
woman, he is said to have "liberated the salmon for the world," thus causing the
annual gift from across the ocean of the salmon supply.

3

The story of the creator's expulsion suggests two trends of thought: (1) its meaning
in the totality of Yurok culture, and (2) its relation to similar "creator" stories
elsewhere. To the Yurok the creator image suggests dangers: centrifugal drivenness,
homelessness, lack of restraining values, promiscuity, excess of individual power,
etc. We may assume that these dangers had a part in the establishment of the "cen-
tripetal" rules of "clean" Yurok behavior, rules which under the deadly influence
of time have developed into an intricate phobic system described in detail in
Kroeber's chapter "The Yurok." We can only touch here on some major particulars
in which mankind is "cleaner" than were those who created and preceded it.

1) A general restriction of geographic radius makes the peripheries of the world
vague and inaccessible by deliberate self-inhibition: The well-bred Yurok does not
"stray" in the directions from which the son's stick turned away, that is, the country
upriver, or behind the river, or beyond the ocean. Wherever such tendency is no-
ticed, bad breeding is assumed (in Yurok terms: one of the grandmothers of such
an individual probably was not paid for in full). The horror of unrestricted radius
is still expressed today, for example, in the Yurok's contempt for "gypsies"; they
anxiously call children into the houses, lock the doors, and hide property when
gypsies appear, much as if the gypsies were "wise people"; at least to the children
it must seem so.

2) An extreme localization of spatial and historical meaning is another manifes-
tation of the centripetal tendency of Yurok ethos. It is one of the strangest experi-
ences when walking or driving along with an old Yurok suddenly to see him point
to an old house pit barely visible and full of debris, and hear him say with the deepest
pride, "This is where I come from," like a European nobleman pointing to the castle
of his ancestors; or, better, like a son introducing his aged mother. The Yurok
goes very far in denying any prominence to a place which has not become a named
"locus" by being given a historical foundation. The gigantic redwoods all around
him seem not mentioned in his myths; a height of several thousand feet does not
assure a mountain a name. It is mainly along the creeks or the trails that rocks, pits,
groups of trees, holes in the ground, etc., are named and give meaning to their
neighborhood. The majority of house names denote the position of the house in the
village or in relation to the river. What the old Yurok meant in saying he belonged
to the pit was that, being born there, he participated in the name which the pit

273

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

would keep as long as it was visible, and often'much longer. Such place names are
considered almost timeless, and in describing the history of the place the Yurok will
calmly enter the realm of mythology without changing what he considers his "his-
torical attitude."

3) The substantiation and monetarization of values is, in turn, akin to the trend
of extreme localization; for money is value which can be grasped and handled. We
remember F's request to increase the pay for information when a more sacred level
of Yurok existence entered her report. "Every profession and privilege and every-
injury and offense can be exactly valued in terms of property.... There is no dis-
tinction between material and non-material ownership, right, or damage, nor be-
tween property rights in persons and in things" [8]. One has to see Kroeber's work
for such outstanding examples as: the exactly fixed prices to be paid for a woman
(and to be paid back, should she choose to leave her husband, according as she had
borne him one child or two or three) ; or the much discussed compensation for the
utterance of the name of a deceased person; or of an injury suffered on another
man's property; or the price to be paid by a village to the "mourners of the year"
before any major dance could be held.

4) Virtues of acquisition and retention of possessions are necessary for such a
system. On the one hand, the Yurok thought of, talked about, and prayed for money
constantly; on the other, "life was evidently so regulated that there was little
opportunity for anyone to improve his wealth and station in society materially" [1].
The highest communal occasions, such as the dances, were characterized by a display
of wealth.

5) The avoidance of political power is an anarchy obviously based on the idea that
where every value is substantiated and where everybody is out to maintain his
possessions, motives and rights cannot be misconstrued and no interference of a
"state" is necessary. "Such familiar terms as tribe, village, community, chief, gov-
ernment, clan can be used with reference to the Yurok only after extreme care in
previous definition-in their current senses they are wholly inapplicable. The Yurok
procedure is simplicity itself. Each side to an issue presses and resists vigorously,
exacts all it can, yields when it has to, continues the controversy when continuance
promises to be profitable or settlement is clearly suicidal, and usually ends in com-
promising more or less.... Justice is not always done; but what people can say
otherwise of its practices ?" [1].

It is hard for a white man to comprehend that Yurok lack of organization is not
an organizational deficiency or lack of societal development, but organized phobic
avoidance based on a certain mistrust of "free-floating" human motives. We expect
such centripetal laws of behavior, localized and substantiated in all details, to create
a kind of individual who may easily look unheroic, jealous of place, possessions,
and prestige, bickering about values, stingy in his contributions to the community,
anarchistic in his political leanings, mistrustful of his neighbor and phobic-com-
pulsive in his avoidances. To these traits we shall return when we come to the
description of Yurok childhood and of the way Yurok training strove to create the
right cultural character for the life they tried to live. However, one has to see the
Yurok among themselves-adults dancing through a night after the mourners have
been paid off and the old treasures have been produced for exhibition by the
dancers; or Yurok children at play-in order to visualize the pervading harmony
and decency that can ensue from the cultural elaboration of mechanisms which we,
as members of a different culture or of a psychiatric subculture, are used to meet
only in pathological isolation in "queer" or "malicious" individuals.

274

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

4

The avoided peripheries of the Yurok world are at the same time the main concern
of magic: their common denominator is "biological multiplication." The Yurok
have no history of where they came from as a people; they have only a vague con-
ception of a lake from which the waters of the Klamath flow; of a place "across the
ocean" where salmon originates; of another one where the money's "home" is, as
the sky is the home of deer. These peripheral wombs are joined by the human womb,
which (with partial displacement to the house of origin) is treated with ambivalence
and surrounded with avoidances and purifications. "Clean living" is orderly living
on and with a system of mutually exclusive unobstructed and uncontaminated
channels in which life flows; even that which is accumulated, namely, dentalium
shells, is lined on strings and carried in oblong purses with a slit along their
length. Similarly, the sweat house, as pointed out, is "morphologically" a tube, not
a sack or a womb. But all these tubes are guarded by taboos and rituals which pre-
vent possible cross-contamination: at certain places, signified by rocks, along the
river, women have to leave a boat and can reenter it only after having walked
around the rock; neither ocean nor river like it if one eats on a boat; money does
not tolerate sexual intercourse in one and the same house; deer will stay away from
where its blood may be subjected to the contact with water; salmon will avoid the
man who is either full of food or has been in contact with the woman's inside, etc.
While, then, the whole world is a closed space, its inner freedom depends on its fluid
ways. Geographically, the greatest danger to the Yurok world would be a blocking
of the river in such a way that salmon could not ascend, fry not descend.

5

By now, it has probably occurred to the informed reader that by using Yurok
cosmogony a case could be made for Freud's historical reconstruction of the murder
of the primal father who claimed all the women in the horde, of the erection by his
sons of laws which would prevent any of them from repeating the primal role, and
of the feelings of guilt left in man's unconscious as a residue of that historical event
which expresses itself alternately in irrational rebellion and in irrational expia-
tion [7].

Many variations of this lost theme point to its existence somewhere in space and
time. Its radical historical localization by Freud is thoroughly convincing only to
a few; others cannot be con-vinced by a mere demonstration of more variations. Here
again one might profitably emphasize a level of analysis which lies between de-
scription and interpretation, namely, the level of configurational analysis, which
would allow the establishment of differences between the divers variations of the
primal-father theme, and, maybe, their specific dynamic place within their cultures
of origin.

About the affectual tone of the story, as expressed in the creator's nostalgia and
his use of tears, I shall speak later. Its ethical relation to the characteristics of basic
Yurok laws has just been briefly discussed. In regard to the spatial characteristics
of the story I can, I am afraid, only offer another "just-so" story; but, maybe, several
such stories will blend into a real one.

Let us assume that the Yurok came from somewhere else; with no chance or wish
to turn back, they found their way blocked by the Pacific. They settled along the
river, and, noticing the periodical salmon run, became fishermen-in technique
and in magic.

The human mind is likely to feel guilty and, if necessary, to construct a guilt

275

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

when it finds itself faced with sudden environmental limitation; adapting, it learns
to see a virtue in the necessity imposed by the limitation; but it continues to look
into the future for potential recurrences or intensifications of the trauma of limi-
tation, anticipating punishment for not being virtuous enough. In this sense, to
the restricted Yurok, centrifugality; may have become a vice in the past, centripe-
tality a virtue; and the ocean's disfavor, anticipated punishment for centrifugal
"mental sins" which Yurok ethics tries to avoid.

In the psychoanalysis of individuals we meet these mechanisms in examples like
the following: a patient who had one arm paralyzed by poliomyelitis in early child-
hood began in adolescence to thank God that He had saved him from the potential
badness of at least one arm. However, he developed a severe agoraphobia; he feared
for the unimpaired arm, while the space around him normally reached and defended
by the stricken arm "felt like danger." Only after the patient had remembered the
bad things which the arm had been doing or wanted to do when the paralysis struck
did his phobic symptoms improve. The arm, of course, was paralyzed; but the pa-
tient's constriction of space feeling, and thus an important cause of his agoraphobia,
was relieved when in consequence of the removal of his psychological paralysis the
stricken arm plus the space surrounding it again felt like "belonging" to the body.
The point is that mishap increases guilt feeling (except in "moral masochists" so
satiated with vague guilt that actual mishap is a relief).

In analogy, I think it possible that the Yurok's history which placed him where
he is and made centrifugality impossible is one source of his centripetal conscience.
In the story of the creator, then, if history at all, I would be inclined to see a blend
of two or more historical traumata, or rather the fear of their recurrence (fears-as
conditioning factors in collective ideas-being more easily passed on from genera-
tion to generation than are memories). These fears concern the danger of the return
of centrifugal impulses both in the tribe as a whole and in every individual trained
to be centripetal: the widower, free and creative, becomes the primary antagonist
of the society of centripetal sons; but his banishment implies the constant danger
that the river will refuse food to a population blocked by non-Yurok and by the
ocean.

The personification of all this danger in the creator must be a synthetic product
of the culture; for if we do not want to assume that it represents an actual historical
memory of one powerful man, then it can only be either a condensation of many
-primal fathers characteristic for one stage of prehistory or a projection, renewed
by each generation and individual, of a father-son relation always again experi-
enced as identical in its essentials. I shall have more to say about this image when
we come to discuss Yurok childhood; although, in this paper, I shall not be able
to state a clear decision concerning the father-, mother-, and child-images of which
the personality of the creator is a queer composite: he feeds like a loving mother,
is an irresponsible father, and cries like a child.

We have stated our belief that the ego, under certain circumstances, tries to
understand and master geographic space by projecting nearest environment,
namely body feelings, onto it. Similarly, we may add now, it may be trying to
structuralize history by projecting onto it typical experiences of childhood; and
as the synthesis of the inner and the outer spatial environment results in one world
system of magic causation, so the integration of history and childhood leads to one
functionally interrelated time environment: with powerful and overbearing cre-
ators in the background; with thoughts and acts in the present which rebel against
the creators but at the same time atone for rebellion and implore protection and
provision; and with an outlook toward the future which wants to maintain this

276

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

balance and prevent a recurrence of the past and its ontogenetic and phylogenetic
dangers. The keynote of this synthesis, is, of course, human helplessness.

Let us now consider the possibility that the biology of the salmon as a gift and
a message from the creator had its say also in this unification.

THE SALMON RUN AND THE FISH DAM

1

The annual erection in early autumn of a weir, called a "fish dam," across the
Klamath at Kepel was not only "one of the greater rituals of native northwest Cali-
fornia, perhaps the greatest," but was also "the largest mechanical enterprise under-
taken by the Yurok or, for that matter, by any northwest California Indians, and
the most communal attempt" [12].

The approximate schedule of this yearly affair was as follows. The "dam chief,"
or "doctor of the world," after some initial ceremonies at the mouth of the river,
travels upstream to Sa'a. Under elaborate ceremonials he calls a "medicine" (a song
supposed to cure the world) down-river while all human beings hide in their houses.
The coming event being announced, preparations proceed all over the Yurok terri-
tory. About the twenty-third day, the dam building begins, and it is completed in
ten days. The dam consists of a "wide fence of poles and stakes driven into the bed
of the stream, strengthened and shored up with structural devices against the
force of the current, and so carefully fabricated that salmon could not get through.
At regular intervals along the course of this weir, openings were left leading into
small enclosures which the Indians speak of as traps, corrals, or pens.... In their
effort to get upstream, the salmon filled the Indian pens as fast as the fishermen
could empty them. The fish were split and dried, and very large quantities were
in this way preserved" [3]. For ten days salmon is taken. Then elaborate dances
follow. The dam's destruction is left to the rain floods of early winter.

Waterman and Kroeber, in explaining the choice of the place for the fish dam,
quote the Yurok as saying that they had to find the "right" spot by trial and error.
In the accounts of two erstwhile assistants of the dam chief, this trial and error
again appears as a kind of geographic-anatomical parallelism: they both describe
how their ancestors at one and the same time found the right place for the dam in
the valley and the right condition in the body for its erection, namely, no food in
the stomach. "So they brought it up and made it here, and it was right. Now when
they work on the dam, they know when to eat: they do without breakfast" [12].
My informant M, who claims to have been the last real dam chief in 1906, states
that they found the right place for the dam by establishing how far the ocean could
be heard inland on the stormiest day: where one did not hear any more the most
powerful surf, there was the place for the fish dam. The anthropologists add the
practical interpretation that "the river here is or was rather broad and shallow,
with a gravel bottom which permitted the easy driving of stakes.... Upstream
from Kepel the river is, generally speaking, narrow and deep, even close along the
shore. There are numerous pools and eddies . . . where the salmon congregate and
are readily taken with a dip net.... Such places are much more numerous upstream
than down.... The dam was built in a locality where fishing places were few and
not much good" [12].

The description of the river conditions at Kepel coincides with that given by
biologists for places where the salmon likes to spawn [2]. It prefers, so they say,
large, clean gravel beds (which hold and protect the eggs) and swift current
(which provides a free flow of well-aerated water); so it may be that the salmon,
"tasting" this place as a possible spawning place, behaves conspicuously around

277

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

the gravel beds at Kepel, actually the last ideal spawning places in Yurok territory.
Higher up, the river as far as it still flows in Yurok territory is much narrower
and more rapid; many boulders form "pockets" which allow for the spawning of
only smaller groups of salmon. Maybe it should be taken into account that the
salmon's natural history clearly determines an optimum time and an optimum place
for an attempt to catch a winter supply of the greatest possible nutritional value.
The "normal" salmon (which has not participated in the earliest migration coming
up the river, has little nutritional value, and is taboo to the Yurok) stores up a
large supply of fat and protein before migrating into the river and before begin-
ning the migrational fast which at one and the same time marks the beginning
of the salmon's sexual development and the beginning of the end of its life. For
the first ten days of its migration the salmon still draws on this capital, and during
the second week it reaches the pink of condition, its flesh being dark red, its body
consisting of a maximum of solids and fats and a minimum of cartilage and water.
Later the fish has to draw on this capital both for its vigorous activity of swimming
and jumping upstream and for its sexual development. Consequently, its optimum
nutritional condition quickly decreases both in the individual salmon as it advances
up the river and in the entire migrating population as the season progresses. The
salmon stretches and shrivels and develops new cartilage to sustain an increasingly
grotesque form. The optimum place and time for a mass catch of winter supply
would therefore be the point where the greatest number of relatively early migrants
reach a maximum of solids content.

It is often doubted whether "mere Indians" would be able to observe facts like
these. Our contention is that they know it even when they cannot formulate cause
and effect. They know it for all practical purposes even when they express this
knowledge in magic terms which interpret what is observed outside as if it had
originated in themselves-interpretations that may not preclude observations
which to a less intuitive era have to be demonstrated by research. Provided, then,
that they did observe: what did it mean to the Yurok that the salmon they knew,
namely, the powerful salmon working its way up their river, had little or no food
in its stomach and never was observed eating; that, furthermore, its vigor and its
solids content decreased with its sexual development, and finally, that the male
salmon, becoming adolescent and senescent at the same time, develops a grotesquely
elongated snout? Since the salmon was sent from across the ocean (after having
been liberated by the "widower across the ocean"), was the message it carried a
code message saying: strong salmon-no food-little sex; weak salmon-hungry
(prolonged snout)-strong sex? It seems at least that this observation may have
participated in the Yurok's decision that in order to be as strong as his prey he
had better abstain from sex and have no breakfast before he should begin to build
on the dam, or, for that matter, begin any ordinary day's fishing.' (See Part II for
an account of the Yurok's way of interpreting nature to children.)

Waterman also asks why the Yurok leave the dam to its fate after working on it

4The more one thinks about a possible identification of the Yurok with the salmon, the more
do certain comparisons become suggestive, and one wonders how much the Yurok may have
guessed of the salmon's natural history. He certainly shares its "high degree of homing" and its
disinclination to "stray from the parent stream." Furthermore, the Yurok so far favored intercourse
in summer (when the salmon spawns) that most of their babies were born in the spring (when
the salmon eggs hatch). This Kroeber explains exclusively as a result of the fact that the money
in the house does not like intercourse and that all but the warmest summer weather forbids it in
the open. However, in the pursuit of intercourse one would expect a tribe if not influenced by
magic considerations to find other technical solutions than mere omission. Another point of
interest is the fact that between June and September the salmon migrates both ways, the old
ones heading upstream, the fry migrating toward the ocean. Here the double vector, which we found
twice in anatomy (in procreation and in cure), occurs in geography.

278

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

for ten days and then using it for ten days. "The number ten," so he partly answers
himself, is one of "the usual ritualistic numbers of the Yurok." A further and, it
seems, extremely important answer must be that the Yurok as the inhabitants of
the lower Klamath are, as it were, the wardens of their section of nature. It seems
affirmed by experiment that the migrating salmon "strays" only little except where
several small rivers combine to form a bay; the salmon's "homing instinct"' drives
it to its birthplace which it had left, almost two years earlier, not one-twentieth
of its adult size. The human beings living along the mouth and the lower part of the
river, therefore, are the economic and-to their magic minds-spiritual guardians
of a definite, self-propagating segment of nature, a closed shop which to an ap-
preciable degree can only be impaired by them (namely, if they cut the salmon off
from its spawning places upriver) but cannot be augmented by anything but magic
behavior. The dam, therefore, while serving immediate practical purposes, also
dramatizes and plays with the very idea of blocking the salmon, which means at
one and the same time impaired supply during years to come, famine, and spiritual
separation from the "creator"-if not, indeed, war; for the tribes upstream could
not tolerate such an undertaking.

Waterman apparently believes that the dam, at least periodically, really closed
up the river. However, not even for ten days could this have been done without
having an unmanageable number of salmon pile up against the dam, especially
at night when the fishing ceased. Actually, there were three gates under the surface
of the water which were opened at night. (To meet every emergency, these gates
were expressly forbidden to women.) 2

The following is the account of M, who claims to have been the last dam chief (in
1906). Whether he could have been dam chief at a time when the ecclesiastic hier-
archy of the Yurok was in full force, it is hard to say, but there seems little doubt
that he did supervise something like the erection of a dam and that informant A,
in Waterman's and Kroeber's report, was my informant's assistant in 1906. How-
ever, M's report can in no way compete with the report of his former assistant; it
is a conversational report which it seemed better not to interrupt. It is recorded
here because "no ceremony could be learned completely from one Yurok; their
narrations are too unsystematic" [12]. Also, it may be interesting to observe what
time does to such a story (Kroeber recorded his account during the summer in
which the present writer was born).

We cannot do it any more. You need sixty young men, stout men, good fellows. Nowadays
nobody can work any more.

Everybody pays chief, throws in two bits, maybe $20 in all. X [a storekeeper] promised $15
extra, he still has it.

6 E. B. Powers, of the University of Tennessee, off ers [10] the following interesting explanation
of what has been called the salmon's homing instinct. (1) Fish respond to a carbon dioxide tension
gradient. (2) There is an increase in protein metabolism in the salmon when approaching sexual
maturity. Increased protein metabolism tends toward acidosis, that is, lowering of the alkali
level of the blood. This brings about a response to a lower carbon dioxide tension of the water.
(3) There is a carbon dioxide tension gradient from the mouth of rivers outward to the extent
of their diluting influence in the ocean. This area would in turn be bounded by water having
carbon dioxide tensions higher than the carbon dioxide partial pressure of the atmosphere. (4)
The salmon finds the spawning streams by following the carbon dioxide tension gradient. The
steeper the gradient, that is, the greater the volume flow of the stream, and the nearer the ap-
proach to sexual maturity, the more vigorous the response of the salmon. When the salmon reach
the mouth of the river, they respond to the current and ascend the spawning streams.

One feels that this is a kind of explanation of a "parent-stream fixation"-which Freud visual-
ized when he said: "All our provisional ideas in psychology will some day be based on an organic
substructure. We take this probability into aecount when we substitute special forces in the mind
for special chemical substances" [6].

279

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

This is said with deep satisfaction as if no story of the good old days would be
either good or old enough without the mention of a debt feud.

From my home [near the mouth of the river] went to Sa'a. The sweat house was ready, on a
river bar my helper had the blanket ready. A little fire on the river bar between Murek and Kepel,
in the middle of the river. When the fire out we take the coals to Sa'a. Go into hole [old sweat-
house pit] and blacken my face [with naYve enjoyment of his importance]. People don't supposed
to see me; no matter how many people, all go into houses [everybody has to hide in order not to see
the chief]. On top of sweat house holler five times upriver, five times down-river. Put rock on
house. That rock goes clear up to heaven, down to dead people, out through ocean to tell all
beings. Even the dead people come. Therefore no live people on south side, dead people watch
there.

Anybody [nobody is supposed to] watch me when I go. One boy watch me. Next year boy was
dead. One man watch me. Next year man was blind. Mother was my cook [I think he meant his
wife].

Tomorrow we are going to finish fish dam ! Every time they roll one down [people rolled pickets
and bundles down from the heights of the steep hills opposite Sa'a], they dance. Everything
down, everybody ready, we finish the dam tomorrow. Now people come down from every place,
they work, but not I, just sat down on one place, can't walk. Everybody give me pickets, that's my
pickets, that high [shoulder]. I got to have two men and a boat to get my pickets from farther
upriver. I see boat coming from across the river, it lands where I sit. I jump into boat, they go
just as fast as they can go. Paddle just as fast as they can go. I got little basket in my hand,
catch little water in middle of river, then we land where my roll [picket bundle] is. I jump out,
I run around the roll, I have basket in my hand. I sprinkle that water on that roll, I pray before
I start across. I turn around, grasp the roll with one hand, not two. I drag it to the boat with
one hand; helpers, it takes four to put it into boat, me, I do it with one hand. Take roll on my
side. That's the time they bring all the rest of the rolls, takes big boat to carry one roll. We start
in to work. My roll first and from there they all the time tie it, roll it, tie it, roll it; sometimes
water helps them. Now [exeited] you hear the water making noise going through the pickets.
Now they put redwood brush clear along the bottom, they all dive.

Long ago they said, "We don't want no rattlesnakes on this side of Kepel." So they hunted
all the rattlesnakes and put them on other side of river, but one broke loose and is there yet today.

Thousands of people are waiting for them fellows [divers] to come up. They take me back
across again, waiting for that girl. About afternoon like this I hear the girl coming. Not married.
Put blankets over her, she come around and go up again. Leaving a basket there with acorns
in it, [she] turns back. I singing that song. Now everybody got a pole ready, everybody come
(Jim Marks did it). Girl runs down clear to the end of bar and jumps into river. They are all up
at Kepel flat now. I am the last one to come and four girls stand there before we come, shell dress
on, I come, them people come from fish dam. I go into center of them, and I throw that basket
up to tell them to go. Everybody throwing poles over me and three girls and everybody running
away. When that finished they had a deerskin dance that night.

What these girls eat, bones, etc., kept and put away, nobody touch it. Next day them girls
throw it into river, and them fishbones become alive, jump like trout. Next day dance all day
deerskin dance, etc. And then we start in catching fish.

For one or two months not to go far away from dam till river has washed it away. Not go near
ocean.

That's my story, I have done it myself, I'm alive yet. Me have done it. Picture you took yester-
day put it in newspaper, say he is the world's doctor, he is the man who done this.

3

Both the pride and the restrained cruelty expressed by this informant were
extraordinary indeed. He would demonstrate how he burned a little angelica root
every night, holding it in all directions and thus curing the world. Without his
doing this, the world would not fare well; and he did not tire of referring to the
fate of individuals who had not been obedient to the laws governing relationships
to him and had wasted away and died, been bitten by rattlesnakes, or gone blind.
One item among his boasts seemed most interesting: he was the only Yurok, he
would repeat over and over, who never cried. Even should his wife die, he would
simply leave the house, never look at her, and not shed one tear. A widower without
tears-one conceives here the possibility that there is a relation between the dam

280

Erikso'n: Observations on the Yuqrok

chief and the widower across the ocean, the nostalgic Wohpekumeu with the fertile
flow of tears.

One of the innumerable items in Waterman's and Kroeber's report neglected by
my informant is the following ritual (abstracted)

In the sweat house in Sa'a there is a small hole in the wall which is called a door and which is
stopped with a plug. After all preparations are completed, the dam chief takes out the plug. Then
the wind blows in at that door and says, "When I blow in there, I am calling you." Then the dam
chief begins his medicine. At this time everybody has to hide. When everybody is safely inside,
the shaman goes along all the trails "talking his medieine." I presume he imitates in this way the
search of the original individual for the necessary secrets. After this point in the ceremonie?
lo keeps himself concealed from the sight of the people [12].

The present writer proposes the consideration that the original meaning of this
ritual was a dramatized repetition of the widower's visit, his centrifugal search,
and his banishment, which cures the world for one year.

Let us see what the medicine is which the widower possesses and which he "hollers
on top of the sweat house and in Sa'a, five times upriver, five times down-river"
while "people don't supposed to see him." It begins with the following words:

That is how it will be. If they do not make the dam, there will be no more people. That is what
I cry for. I think, "Alas I the people." For nearly ten days, he always tried to catch him [as he
passed], always heard him downstream beginning to cry, again [perhaps?] he passed by, again
he did not see him.

After nearly ten days, now he thought: "What shall I do about him?" On the trail he stood,
he heard him downstream beginning to cry, still he stood there [with his arms spread], in the
middle of the night he felt like wind coming to his heart, he felt him soon baby as big as, soon he
was larger, when it was nearly day he was larger, he began to twist [to escape], soon it was day,
then he spoke.

He said: "Let me walk, let me go. I am the one who at night only travels." He said, the one
who was holding him: "Why do you constantly cry?" He said: "I will tell you. I am so sorry for
that, that there will be no people because they do not make the dam. I will leave you my song, I
will tell it to you, then you must let me go" [12].

Who is it that "downstream begins to cry," who "at night only travels," who "feels
like wind coming to his heart," and with whom the dam chief "wrestles till the
break of day" until he receives the medicine? One suspects it is the crying "creator"
who returns in the salmon.

The ceremonies at Kepel are also called a world-renewal festival. If our in-
ference is correct, then the lonely "creator" in beginning to wander and to cry
again brings all the old danger back to the world; while the dam chief who arrests
him (as the dam arrests the salmon) is the "world doctor" who has cured the world
of its eternal evil and has made himself the only person powerful enough to be able
to dispense with crying.

Institutionalized crying, which can be provoked in Yurok individuals as well
as in groups at any time by the mention of a beloved dead person, can only be
explained in connection with Yurok child training, which will be discussed farther
on. A deliberate activation of infantile crying, it is, like all regressions, full of
ambivalence as if its message were: "See, I am only a child. If I had bad wishes
against you, they do not count. Therefore, since you [the dead] may be living now
near the mysterious source of earthly goods, please help me." The compensation of
the mourners before a dance, which our Western spirit tempts us to interpret as
a clever device of the mourners to capitalize on their sorrow, undoubtedly has a
different meaning if understood as a community action which tells the dead: "See,
we have not forgotten you. We do not want to dance without remembering you."
That this remembrance is expressed in money given to a particular person seems

281

2University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

simply an expression of the general Yurok trait of substantiating and monetarizing
values.

The ambivalence hidden in this crying, however, comes to relief in the invention
of a creator who comes back to this world like a guilty child, nostalgic, crying, and
full of pity for mankind-attitudes which one certainly would not expect of a god
who has been tricked away from the joys of this world. The people hide, as they
once did, when the creator was loose; for, as in the olden days, the creator may
pretend to be mourning his late wife but actually may bring promiscuity, incest,
lawlessness. The dam chief stops him, whereupon he alone may express the punish-
ing, pitiless, ungenerous attitudes which one would expect the god to display.

This world rejuvenation, this annual relief of the world from guilt and am-
bivalence, allows all the dam builders for at least a few days to "make all kinds
of play" and to request everybody not to cry. "If someone cried, they would not be
alive in a year." As Waterman and Kroeber further report, "the end of the dam
building is a period of freedom. Jokes, ridicule, and abuse run riot; sentiment
forbids offense; and, as night comes, lovers' passions are inflamed." Here, then, the
crying widower is made the victim of a mockery which is reminiscent of the satires
of ancient European spring ceremonials:

The old men say, "Well, I think someone has died here; I hear crying." Then they send a man
to where the crying is. He comes back and says, "The man lost his wife; he is a redwood, and
he wants pay before we dance again." They agree and send him obsidians. The messenger comes
back to say, "He wants one more obsidian and a woman." The old men are prepared with obsid-
ians, knowing how many will be needed. They also pick up a fair-sized rock, which they call a
woman. This is taken to the tree, which says, "Good, I'll take her." Then everything is settled;
they have been paid twice just like head men owning the dam at Turep. Then they dance again
on the flat on the hillside opposite Kepel.

The tree that lost his wife cries and says, "My wife is dead." The old men have picked out
several who stayed at the trees when the rest went uphill after sticks, and have told them how
to cry. One cries for his wife, another acts as his brother, and others as his relatives. As they cry,
they take the mucus from their noses and rub it on the head of the one who acts the widower
until it is eovered, so that it looks as if he were really in mourning [12].

The creator is said to have liberated the salmon; is he the salmon? If so, he lives
unharmed through the magic battle of Kepel, for the salmon says, "I shall not
be taken." I shall "travel as far as the river extends. I shall leave my scales on nets
and they will turn into salmon, but I myself shall go by and not be killed."

282

II. YUROK CHILDHOOD AND YUROK CHARACTER

There are several all-Yurok villages along the lower Klamath, the largest repre-
senting a late integration, in the Gold Rush days, of a number of very old villages.
Situated on a sunny clearing, it is accessible only by motorboat from the coast, or
over foggy, hazardous roads. When I undertook to spend a few weeks there in
order to collect more data and to check what I had concerning Yurok childhood
as given by the Requa "intellectuals," I met with the resistive and suspicious
temperament of the Yurok as a group. It appeared that, at the coast, I had visited
and eaten meals with deadly enemies of an influential upriver family. (The feud
dated back to the last century.) Furthermore, it seemed that this isolated com-
munity was unable to accept my declaration of scientific intention. Instead, they
suspected me of being an agent come to investigate such matters as the property
feuds brought about by the discussion of the Howard-Wheeler Act. According to
ancient maps (existing only in people's minds), Yurok territory is a jigsaw puzzle
of community land, land with common ownership, and individual family property.
Opposition against the Howard-Wheeler Act, which forbids the Indians to sell
their land except to one another, had taken the form of disputing what the single
Yurok could claim and sell, if and when the act should be repealed, and one of
my suspected secret missions apparently was that of trying under false pretenses
to delineate property rights which the officials had been unable to establish. In
addition, the impending death of a young Shaker and the visit of high Shaker
clergy from the north had precipitated religious issues. Shakerism was opposed at
the time not only by the Yurok "doctors" but also by a newly arrived missionary,
the only other white man in the community. In view of this general tension, as well
as of my inexperience, and of the short time at my disposal, I was not able to make
relevant observations on Yurok childhood as it is today. However, after having dis-
cussed their suspicions with some Indians, I found informants who clarified the
outlines of traditional Yurok childhood. On the Fourth of July, when permitted to
do my share in paying off "the mourners of the year" and to attend a Brush dance,
I had an opportunity to see many children assembled for a whole night.

THE TRADITION CONCERNING YUROK CHILDHOOD

Yurok informants, in their accounts of Yurok childhood as it once was, express
themselves tenderly, with serious amusement, and with enjoyment of the important
task of representing Yurok decency to children. It goes without saying that, like
other Indians, they lack that defeatism which dominates scientific accounts of
children as beasts to be tamed or machines to be measured and kept in order. To
them, children's needs coincide with the culture's needs; only a child disturbed by
spirits, white people, or non-Yurok Indians, could be in danger or temptation of
falling out of the safety and the comfort of cultural conformity. And, indeed, the
little I saw of the Yurok children upriver brought me to recognize even in these times
of undeniable cultural disintegration something of the picture the old Yurok have
of children: even-tempered, physically vigorous and graceful, and without any
noticeable nervous tension.6

6.Because of the summer season, I was unable to visit any schools, and I found only one white
teacher who confirmed this view; however, she in turn seemed a white woman extraordinarily free
from prejudice and inhibition and apparently accepted by the majority of the Indians. This
teacher confirmed my impression that the Yurok child, under proper treatment, has a much shorter
way to go in adaptation to white standards than does the child of other tribes.

[283]

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

Whatever physiognomic similarities we may see between the Yurok and phobics,
their attitudes toward childhood and their children should teach us that a well-
institutionalized phobic system may help a people to uphold a total picture of peace,
decency, pride, and physical fitness. Probably there are healthy cultures and defec-
tive or senile ones; but the phobic potentiality as such, if part of a cultural personal-
ity, has at least a chance of integrating the unknown, of clarifying daily goals, of
distributing attention and energy, and of preserving vitality; while an individual
phobic neurosis always disintegrates and devitalizes and, when it dominates par-
ental attitudes, estranges children from the intimacy of their immediate sur-
roundings.

Indians know, of course, that even the educated white man has always overlooked
their educational systems and has mistaken what he saw for a complete lack of
educational initiative on the part of Indian parents. The statements volunteered
by Indians, therefore, represent a selection, not always meaningful and coherent
to us, which is not only intended to convey the tribe's venerated educational ethos
and its traditional opinion of children, but which also reflects a defensive attitude
directed against the white man's supposed opinion of Indians and their children.

Eager as the clinical inquirer may be to get at certain facts which would provide
similarities, counterparts, or polarities to abstractions conceived elsewhere, he has
also learned not to interrupt too often the sequence of the first material offered to
him: for it represents the informant's attitude toward the facts, and in education,
at least, it would be hard to know exactly where fact begins and attitude ends.

2

In keeping with the ritual importance of the number ten, the Yurok insist that it
takes a firstborn child ten months to be ready for birth, subsequent children adher-
ing to the biological norm. The main concern of the Yurok mother is to secure for
the- child an easy birth and a basic inclination to wake up and live. The mother eats
little, carries much wood, and does other work which forces her to bend forward
so that the fetus will not "rest against her spine"; then, during the latter part of
her pregnancy, she rubs her abdomen in the afternoon to keep the fetus awake,
a custom which we have already mentioned as the prenatal representative of the
concern lasting to the end of the Yurok "preschool years" that sleep in the after-
noon may bewitch the child and make it a prey of the attraction of death. (It will
be remembered that F was expected to become a shaman because she slept so much.)

The main postbirth taboos for the Yurok parents are of an oral character. The
father and the mother eat no deermeat or salmon, but content themselves with
acorn soup, until the child's navel heals. The importance attached to this taboo is
evidenced by the contention that convulsions in childhood are the result of the
parents' disregard for an eating or drinking taboo. The more "phallic" Sioux In-
dians think that a child's convulsions are a result of the parents' intercourse during
pregnancy; the Yurok do not discourage such intercourse.

During birth, the mother, who is lying on her back and bracing her feet against
an assistant, must shut her mouth; this makes it easier for the child to pass the
vagina: apparently another manifestation of the "tube" configuration.

The newborn baby is steamed in the steam of wild ginger, the navel is covered
with a paste made of pounded land snail (shell and all), and the navel cord is
put into a split made in a branch of a pine tree. After a warm bath, the baby is
wrapped in a deer hide and then placed in a basket. While, already in utero, boys
are supposed to move harder, girls to be more restrained, the cradle further em-
phasizes the sex difference: the baskets for boys are wider at the shoulders, those

284

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

for girls, at the hips; near the baby girl's head a small shell dress is hung, a small
bow and arrow near the boy's. To prevent the baby from being bothered by too
much light while in this first cradle, two hazel branches are crossed over its head
and covered with deer hide.

The first postnatal period is of ten days, during which time the baby is not
breast-fed but is given a kind of nut soup from a tiny shell. As among other Indian
tribes, the colostrum is considered disadvantageous to the baby; the Yurok's period
of "ten days" is, of course, practically as vague as our term "a fortnight." To make
this period bearable, the mother softens her breasts over the steam of herbs, and
causes the milk to flow out. Once nursing begins, there seems to be no atmosphere
of restraint or worry; as for cuddling and other cutaneous contacts, however, it
must be remembered that the cradle basket, not the baby, was held in the arms.

The babyhood of the Yurok child seems characterized by a relative encourage-
ment to leave the mother's support as soon as this is possible and emotionally
bearable. The baby is nursed a maximum of one year, which is at the minimum side
of the nursing periods among American Indians in general. Usually around the
sixth or seventh month (that is, the period of teething as well as of near-creeping),
attempts are made to make the baby "forget" the mother's milk: the first solid
food, consisting of salmon or deermeat, is given a positive valence by being well
salted with seaweed. This, incidentally, remains the confection of the Yurok and
their neighbors inland, who pay a high price for it. But should a baby, on reaching
his first birthday, not have "forgotten" the mother's milk, she will go away for a
few days, or, in especially obstreperous cases, she will put wild onion on the nipples
to give them a definitely negative valence. (The unweaned baby should never
drink water, which is antagonistic to milk; if during his bath he tries to get a
sip of water, he is smilingly said to steal.) Again, from three o'clock until sun-
down the baby is kept awake so that death cannot close his eyes.

After only twenty days the grandmother begins to massage the baby's leg
muscles; the Yurok cradle basket leaves the feet free. Furthermore, there is an
especial premium on the baby's early having strong legs and being eager to creep,
for it is in the period between his birth and his first energetic creeping that the
parents are forbidden sexual intercourse. To remind them, the baby has a buck-
skin bracelet around one ankle; this, it seems, symbolizes his "tie" to the mother.
(This interpretation would give some meaning to the very strong taboo, to be
mentioned later, that children should never tie each other together.) The Yurok
child's first postnatal "crisis," then, consists of a relationship in time of weaning,
teething, encouraged creeping, and the mother's returning to old sex ways and
new childbirths.

Bowel training is introduced as soon as a child can walk. To "do business"
(which expression, incidentally, at least in the Yurok pidgin English, is also used
by the man for his part in sexual intercourse), the child is led out of the house,
not by the parents but by older children.

Because of the psychoanalytic habit (to be discussed later) of referring to the
love of possessions as "anal," especially if avarice is associated with compulsiveness,
obstinacy, and retentiveness, I carefully inquired into a possible emphasis on the
time, place, or way of defecation or into possible difficulties encountered in this
part of child training. However, I only met with a rather blank expression, or
even slight astonishment that anybody should see in these matters a problem per
se; that a disturbed child may also show disturbances in this sphere was not
denied. The only fable which concerned itself with evacuation emphasizes in its
moral the need for cautious intake rather than any concern over the bowels; and,

285

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

incidentally, illustrates blatantly the "tube" configuration in Yurok imagination:

The bear was always hungry. He was married to the blue jay. One day they made a fire and
the bear sent the blue jay to get some food. She brought back only one acorn. "Is that all?" the
bear said. The blue jay got angry and threw the acorn in the fire. It popped all over the place
and there was acorn all over the ground. The bear swallowed it all down and got awfully sick.
Some birds tried to sing for him but it did not help. Nothing helped. Finally the hummingbird
said, "Lie down and open your mouth," and then the hummingbird zipped right through him.
That's why the bear has such a big anus and can't hold his feces.

3

The Yurok make the distinction between a non-sense age and a sense age, which
latter marks, in its meaning, if not in its timing, our "school age"-a differenti-
ation, as psychoanalysis has shown, which rests not only on the child's language
and locomotor development but also on the development of conscience and the
readiness, with the beginning of the "latency," to utilize sublimations. Whether
a Yurok child belongs in one or the other stage is ascertained by the question re-
peatedly put to him, "Can you tell me what I told you yesterday?" If the child
can remember with some regularity what he has been told, he is said to have sense,
which means that the child can now be held liable for his mistakes, at least in the
sense that his father can be sued for the child's offenses against Yurok laws.
Verbal education can begin.

The first group of prohibitions and laws of conduct transmitted to the child
as soon as this stage is reached concern the intake of food. He is told: "Eat slowly;
don't grab food; never take food without asking for it; don't eat between meals;
never eat a meal twice," and so on.

During meals a strict order of placement is maintained. Between the parents
a space is always left for a potential guest. The girls sit near the mother, the
boys near the father. The father teaches the boys and the mother the girls how
Sto eat. They are told to take a little food with their spoon, to put it into their
mouth slowly, to put the spoon back into the eating basket, and to chew slowly and
thoroughly, meanwhile thinking always of becoming rich. Then the food is to be
swallowed and the child may again reach, without haste, for the spoon. Nobody
is supposed to talk during the meal, so that everybody can concentrate on thoughts
of wealth. While there is still food in one's basket or in one's mouth, one does not
ask for more. If a child eats too fast, the father or the mother silently takes his
basket away from him and the child is supposed to rise silently and leave the
house. Otherwise, the child is not allowed to leave ahead of any guest. Girls
especially have to be patient; they remain sitting until first the guest, then the
boys, then the father have left the room, and until, subsequently, the mother has
cleaned the men's baskets with mussel shells, rinsed them with cold water, and
has swept (toward the fire) the floor over which the males had walked.

In this compulsive way an attitude toward wealth is conditioned (in connec-
tion with the oral zone but not at the oral stage) which later on allows the Yurok
to think of wealth at any time in an almost 'hallucinatory way. When sitting or
walking alone, he will always try to think of money or salmon, and he can make
himself see money hanging from trees, even eating leaves or swimming in the
river. In this way also an attitude is conditioned which encourages the Yurok to
subordinate drive as such to the pursuit of wealth so that later on it will be.not
only his appetite for food which he learns to restrain for the sake of amassing
wealth, but also his sexual desires. As a matter of fact, he may sit in the sweat
house and at the same time attempt to see in the river a dentalium shell as large as
a salmon and try not to think of women.

286

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

There seems to be no end to the emphasis given to restraint in eating. When
the young Yurok visits friends and is offered food, he speaks much and acts as
if he did not see the food until he has been urged so much that not to eat would
be an affront. As an adult, he will begin his day's work without breakfast and
have his first meal only after the major work is done.

To "teach" younger children, the Yurok do not tire of pointing out faces and
figures in rocks and imagining them to be former human beings who have become
stone at a dramatic and instructive moment. Thus, one of the commonest threats
to the Yurok child concerns a rock near Kenek which is said once to have been a
child. That child did not mind his parents; whereupon the owl took hold of it and
carried it up to that rock, where it can be seen sitting and crying: "I wish the rock
would lean over across the river" (like a bridge on which the child could cross the
river and return home).

As we saw in one example (the form of bear feces), certain physiognomic char-
acteristics of the animal environment are used in "teaching fables" to make the
culture's values immediately convincing to the imaginative senses of the young
child; the keynote of these fables is the ugliness of lack in restraint and conform-
ity. They represent a major part of the Yurok's elementary education, which is
immediately followed by an induction into the techniques of adult everyday tasks.
The following are examples of such Yurok fables:

1. The buzzard at one time eould not wait for his food. He tried to eat the soup before it was
cool enough. One day he was so hungry he put his whole head into the soup and scalded the top
part of his head. Now he does not touch warm food any more. He waits, high up there, until
everything gets so old it stinks.

2. Once a party of animals was waiting for the day when all the beautiful furs and feathers
were going to be distributed. The evening before, they all went to sleep. The coyote stuck sticks
in his eyes to make sure he wouldn't sleep and thus would be the first one in the morning to
select a beautiful tail. He made fun of the sleepy animals and especially pointed to an ugly
tail, saying, "I pity the one who will get that tail." But towards morning he fell asleep anyway and
when he awoke only that tail was left.

3. The eel and the sucker were great gamblers one time. They bet everything they had, includ-
ing their houses and wives. Finally the eel offered all his bones and the sucker won them. That's
why he has so many, the eel none.

4. Wild dove was a gambler, too. One day when he was gambling, sad news was brought
to him: his grandmother had died. He was just about to "deal" [shuffle the sticks] when he
received the news. He said, "I will deal once more." He said, "I will remember my grandmother
when the sun gets hot in summer." To this day he still sits high up on a tree in summer, mourn-
ing for his grandmother.

5. Cottontail wanted to be an elk [to have horns as large as an elk's; and got them]. "All right,"
the animals said "start running and let's see how much noise you can make" [crashing through the
brush]. He left. But nobody heard anything [:he could not budge because his antlers had caught
in the branches].

6. The crow wanted to be the prettiest bird in the world, pretty as a woodpecker. The animals
said to him, "We are going to blindfold you and you fly away and when you come to a high tree
wait there." The crow flew and flew and when he finally opened his eyes he was sitting on a smoke
hole all black. Now he lives on excrement.

7. The panther, the wolf, and the eagle represent the male ego ideal; they are said "always to
sleep in the sweat house," that is, to act like great hunters and ascetic heroes. The wolf's song is:
"I will eat the bones, too. I will eat the bones, too, whenever I kill the deer." They eat every bit of
a slain animal or tell others (first their mates or cubs) where the rest is. For while one should
show restraint in eating, one should not waste any food; Yurok children have to finish what is in
their eating baskets. Corresponding to this male ideal the deer is the image of femininity, sacrifice,
and quiet insistence-the very opposite to the obtrusive and ill-tempered blue jay and the ugly-
sounding crow: the Yurok suffragettes.

8. The panther had two wives, the blue jay and the deer. He always slept in the sweat house
and the deer sent her daughter to him to bring him acorn soup. It was very, very nice soup, but, every
time, the blue jay took the soup away and ate it. One day the panther felt sorry for his daughter

287

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

and took the soup himself. It was the best he had ever tasted and from that day on he always ate
it himself. The blue jay got jealous, sneaked over to the deer, and tried to find out how she made
that soup. She saw the deer take a rock, hit her front leg with it, and let some marrow bone run
into the soup. The jealous blue jay thought she could do likewise, but when she hit her leg only
slime came out. (You can still see the knot on the blue jay's leg.) When the panther ate the blue
jay's soup it tasted so bad that he paid no more attention to the blue jay. The blue jay got terribly
jealous and jumped around all the time. One day the panther said, "What is the matter with you?"
The blue jay got terribly angry, pulled her clitoris out, and put it on her head. See?

9. At one time the crow was the eagle's wife. They had a baby, but the crow scalded it and
killed it. When the eagle came home, he asked, "Where is the baby?" "At his grandmother's," the
crow answered. So the eagle went there, but he could not find the baby. "Where did my young
one go?" he asked, and they sent him to an uncle. Finally, he went home and found the dead young
one in a basket. He almost killed the crow, but then he silently flew away and decided never to
speak to her again. Now he circles high up while the crow sits and thinks to herself, "The old man
is still the same. The old man is still the same." At one time she tried to get the eagle back by
insisting that women should be allowed to dance too, and have the right to sing, but he just paid
no attention to her.

10. [To a girl.] The mouse, Negenich, was once a very pretty girl, but boys never fell in love
with her because she stole. She had a sister; her name was Frog. Nobody could make her steal. She
married, raised a family, minded her own business. But Negenich did not want to mind, so she
left the country, swam, traveled one day and one night to a beach. The Indians there spoke a
different language. She told them about the Brush dance. They understood that language; she
danced the Fire Brush dance. While dancing she took a mat, put it under her arm, and jumped under
a rock. So the people said she had to go back. She lives as a mouse now here.

In this last story (10) we see the hunger for possessions, which leads to stealing,
paired with the centrifugal wish to "leave the country," which is properly punished.

One wonders whether these ingenious and witty fables for children are of later
or even foreign origin, or whether they are different from myths and formulae
because they are intended for children. At any rate, they are told today with an
entirely different affective tone than are the myths; namely, with true pleasure in
confabulation. As mentioned before, this tone changes only when one asks for
stories about salmon. Then the magic-phobic attitude seems to interfere even today.
It will be remembered that on the score of the main emphasis of these fables, the
salmon could not be ridiculed, for in the river he abstains altogether from food.
And the first concern of Yurok education is to limit the lawless, individualistic,
and too direct expression of avaricious intake. The wish for food and for posses-
sions is strictly destined to remain within the channels of Yurok law and to remain
in Yurok conscience as an obedient expression of an ethos, not of individual
avarice.

4

Second in emphasis is the prohibition of swearing, that is, the verbal offense con-
sisting of the use of the words "dead people," or "dead man's son," or "dead man's
child"; or even of the question put to a stranger where his father or his mother is,
because they may be dead; or of a reference to somebody's mourning necklace.
Swearing is multiplied by an accompanying gesture of turning the palms of the
hands, held outspread thumb to thumb, toward another person (ten): this is the
way the dead swear. For oral swearing, nettles are put on the child's lips; for the
"dead man's" gesture, they are put on his hands. "Just a few nettles," the Yurok
explain smilingly, "and he won't do it again." One can assume that the Yurok child
early becomes aware of the fact that certain utterances result in a hushed silence
or sharp rebuke.

Sex talk, too, comes under the heading of swearing because it may imply an
intention to joke about the parents' sex life (an interpretation with which Freud
would agree). Again, the informants refer to sex talk when one asks about habits
or practices: they do not believe, or pretend not to believe, that children go further;

288

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

or, maybe, they pay as little attention to it as possible. At any rate, brothers and
sisters are not separated or restricted by any taboos such as are customary on
the Plains. As long as the boys are not busy helping in the sweat house, boys and
girls play together; as already mentioned, they also swim together naked, as do
adults. Any urge to cover a part of the body as shameful exclusively concerns
the female genital, especially the virginal one after the menarchy.

5

Yurok children love to play wife purchase and to build miniature brush houses.
Underneath the roof they hang sprouts of salmonberry representing drying
salmon. The leaves of the firecracker flowers make good purses, their flowers,
money. The girls make dolls out of blue mud and put them into little cradle
baskets; but they must not put two dolls together in one cradle-a prohibition
probably originating in the Yurok's dislike for twins, who they think may have
committed incest in utero. (To warn them, children are told that once long ago
some people put two dolls in a basket and the ocean flooded the world.) The girls
play cooking and feeding the dolls, using wild celery as food.

While the boys may play with dolls once in a while, girls are definitely forbidden
to play with the boys' toys, namely, small dugouts made of the bark of bull pines,
and bows and arrows. The boys were warned not to put toy canoes into the real
creek or the river or even near the ocean. They have to build their own body of
water somewhere inland, but must not spill or waste any good drinking water.
To scare them away from the creek they are told that a large snake is lying at
its bottom. One of their severest misdeeds is to urinate into the creek or river-
a contamination which may make salmon angry, and the child sick.

To both sexes it is forbidden to tie their wrists together or to tie themselves to
dogs. Again a story is told fixing the "cause" of this prohibition in history and
geography.

One day a bad boy went to a sweat house in the middle of the day. His two grandfathers slept
there. He tied their hair together. Then he stepped back and woke them up by shouting. Soon
afterward, many people died. This happened in Orek.

To teach older children, teachers are selected by acclamation. If enough people
say about him, "He has good sense," a man with special skills in hunting, fishing,
paddling through dangerous water, etc., is entrusted with the task of showing a
group of from five to seven children "how to live right." In contrast to medicine
men, shamans, midwives, etc., the teachers are not paid but are often invited for
meals. When old, they are fed by their former pupils. The teacher does not receive
any formula from' his kin, but repeats stories and skills which are general prop-
erty. It is interesting that again the parents are kept out of the educational process.
The only "test" which the child has to undergo is a questioning by the grandfather
in regard to the stories and skills which the child is supposed to be learning at
the time.

One informant remembered a teacher who was a slave. He was not an outcast
like a thief, but "merely" had gambled away his freedom. When the men speared
salmon, his position was behind the free men, but "he always knew when he saw
a salmon come up to catch breath where it would come up the next time," and he
speared it from his disadvantageous position; so he was made a teacher in salmon
spearing.

If a child was not well-behaved "in school" (the informants say that three out
of ten or possibly two out of six children would live through such a period of
nonconformity), the explanation was simple. The child was neither inferior, nor

289

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

sick, nor bad; but he had seen spirits of a special kind-bad ones, who had com-
mitted crimes in their time. Spirits of this type were especially small, had blue-
black skin, a long white beard, very long fingernails, "Chinese" eyes, and would
dance on their heads or on one leg. They would induce the child to make faces and
to joke and laugh at the wrong moment. The treatment was equally simple. The
teacher would say to the child, "Go to your folks and tell them I could not teach
you." The child would be back soon and conform. If not, a doctor would be called:
as we saw, a woman with control over double vector and ambivalence. She did
what earlier F was described as doing: she relieved ambivalence and guilt in the
child's environment while applying a suggestive treatment to his body.

6

There is little to say about adolescence beyond what has been said already about
the ceremonies which seem to remind the girl to keep her senses closed to any
temptations not likely to lead to fhe proud possession of ten boys and ten girls.
Sexual irregularities in adolescence are neither denied nor condemned in a too
personal way. The punishment rather concerns premarital pregnancy, which
diminishes the girl's monetary value if paternity is not established; and if it is
established, it is expensive for the boy. While adolescence is "marked" for the
girl, there are no rituals or ceremonials for the boy: his gradual induction into
the sweat house marks his fraternity with all men and institutionalizes his sus-
picion of female attraction as a potential stimulus to do something economically
unwise. His adolescence rites, as it were, are lifelong: every morning he is purified
from the contaminating contact with the sex which gave him birth.

If asked any specific questions about the symptoms which are the causes of
many of our worries and our warfare with children in homes and nurseries, the
Yurok smile and refuse to believe that any child for any length of time would
be able to stand up against friendly cultural pressure and would insist on non-
conformity where conformity is so pleasant and secures a full place in Yurok life,
which, after all, is the best of all lives.

However, there is the individual with a female ancestor who was never paid
for in full. One understands, now: the male ancestor was unable to subordinate
a sentimental or sexual attachment to the economic ethos; he was weak. His chil-
dren and children's children are apt to be weak, too; they, of course, behave
"different," which is "too bad"-an attitude as pitilessly final if not so consciously
cruel as our verdicts of "constitutional inferiority." Such environmental doubt
naturally drives the individual in question deeper and deeper into mischief; he
is avoided, and his line is apt to die out, which, in turn, "proves" that the general
attitude toward bastards is justified.

But that a child as such could be inclined to be regressive or asocial is an idea
which does not occur to a Yurok. Only children who have seen spirits may be
temporarily disoriented.

TRADITIONAL CHILDHOOD AND CULTURAL CHARACTER

The majority of items volunteered by the Yurok informants, and at the same time
those most vividly emphasized, concern the oral zone, namely, primarily the intake
of food, both at the beginning of life and at the beginning of the "sense period";
and then the release of swear words. Should we suspect that the Yurok informants
repress or suppress items concerning other zones of the body and other periods of
development, or shall we take their selection at its face value?

290

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

In order to review our suspicions and, where necessary, revise our preconcep-
tions, we shall take the data available (they are-to repeat this-data of verbal
convention, not of actual observation), and shall state what configurational re-
semblance and what causal connection we see between the first experience of the
small child and the cultural character of the adult Yurok. In doing so, we follow
a theory based on Freud's work, introduced by Abraham for character pathol-
ogy [1] and by Margaret Mead for comparative characterology [9]. Accord-
ing to this theory, individual as well as group differences in character not only
resemble, but are the conditioned results of, specific differences characteriz-
ing the various types of the inescapable traumatization of the human baby.

2

I have stated in a previous paper [3] the opinion that a combination of three
factors in training are genetically important for the Sioux child's final cultural
personality. One is very late weaning, which is often postponed to the point where
the child weans the mother or where the child after having been weaned returns
to the mother's breast when she suckles a younger brother or sister. A second
factor is the Sioux mother's strong physical reaction when the child, used to
indulgence, tries to satisfy on the mother's nipples his biting wishes. This sudden
and harsh deprivation within an experience otherwise characterized by extreme
generosity seems to create the Sioux child's first temper tantrums, which are con-
sidered normal and "are looked at with the same pride with which many white
parents listen to the voice of a yelling, red-faced baby and say, 'It will make him
strong."' We may assume that the violence and the lasting impression of these
temper tantrums are increased by the third factor, namely, the Plains cradleboard,
which does not allow the child to move his body. While the smaller child seems
to find comfort and protection in so narrow an enclosure, the child with increasing
muscle energy and with a need for a catharsis of anger may be assumed to feel rather
frustrated. It seems to me that it is this unchannelized energy of frustrated impulses
to bite and kick which is the contribution of the Sioux's child training to his cul-
tural personality; it contributes to the urge for communal temper outbursts such
as endless centrifugal "parties" setting out to hunt, kill, steal, and rape; to the Sioux
Indian's proverbial cruelty both against enemies and against himself; and it finds
its most exalted expression in the scene during the Sun dance when "little sticks
driven through the breasts of the dancers and connected by strings to the Sun Pole,
were pulled free so that the flesh was ripped open": a sacred turning against himself
of the former Sioux child's biting wishes.

The importance of the biting impulses for Sioux personality is furthermore be-
lieved to be shown by the outstanding "bad habit" of the Sioux child, which involves
the play of teeth and fingernails (or substitutes of similar texture) but, as far as
I could observe, rarely the lips and the fingers. On the basis of such material, I sug-
gested a systematic psychoanalysis of Sioux culture which should take into account
both the Sioux's sadistic and self-punishing and his oral depressive traits, his
generosity as well as his "biting" gossip, and finally his demanding dependence on
the United States government.

Such observations are based on preconceptions which might be formulated as
follows. We expect a human child to bring into life personality potentialities,
that is, a variety of potential trait configurations based on the organism and the
organization in time and space of its basic needs. These potentialities are limited
by (1) the evolutionary state of the organism and any characteristies which the
racial history may have been able to impress on it, and (2) the laws of psycho-

291

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

logical displacement which say that in a human being only a limited and de-
lineated impulse modification is tolerable (libido-economy).

Child training, under the influence of an integrated and integrating cultural
ego, systematically narrows the number of these potentialities by creating hyper-
trophies and atrophies the integration of which is the.cultural trait configuration
characterizing all members of the group. It does so by utilizing that basic polarity
of human childhood which makes child care and child training necessary, namely,
initial helplessness and prolonged dependence, on the one hand, and insatiable
desire for independence, mastery, and investigation, on the other. Concentrating
on a few areas of the child's infantile interests, child training develops and then
channelizes or suppresses them, blocking regression and encouraging sublima-
tion: thus it creates a specific ontogenetic trauma, a typical kind of expulsion
from paradise in every new member's early childhood. The areas of special educa-
tional pressure (probably themselves the result of phylogenetic traumata) remain
arsenals of strong and conflicting impulses and determine the cultural trait config-
uration as well as the nature of individual variations. (Of this total cultural trait
configuration, anthropological investigation is apt to secure only one aspect, namely,
a traditional trait configuration held together by the particular verbal logic of
the tribe in question; while psychological observation tends to describe a com-
parative trait configuration based on the search for analogies to what we have
come to formulate in regard to child training in our culture.) Strange as the
methods of child training may seem, they are one expression of a tendency toward
trait synthesis which assures co6perative efficiency and prevents irrational
anxiety in most of the members of a homogeneous culture. What we finally may
call individual trait configurations are, then, individual ways of succeeding or
failing in synthesizing personal variations and limitations with the cultural trait
configuration and with the culture's sanctioned opportunities for behavior vari-
ation: it is this, the ego against the culture, which primarily has been described
in clinical literature, with a great emphasis on the little individual's painful ad-
justment to the big, bad "environment," and with little emphasis on the pleasures
and opportunities which homogeneous environment gives to an organism eager
for love and expression, not to speak of mere survival.

If it seems fruitful to apply the concepts derived from psychopathological
observation to the phenomena of culture, it is because cultural synthesis as well as
cultural rigidity and regression use, in every constituent member, potentialities the
same as, or analogous to, those which are also elaborated in individual neurosis.
However, as will be pointed out, once this similarity is recognized and has led to
fruitful problems, the differences in the organization of these potentialities within
such different settings as a culture or a neurosis need to be reemphasized.

This seems the more important as, in establishing analogies between culture
and neurosis and causal links between child training and cultural character,
psychiatric philosophy leads to the dangerous illusion that psychiatric-anthropo-
logical master minds could perhaps not only prevent neurosis, but, by decreeing
ideal methods of child training, could help create assorted desirable cultures.
As in homunculus fantasies of old, the mothers and the imponderables they stand
for are overlooked. A successful preverbal child training reflects the homogeneity,
not the verbosity, of a culture.

3

The Yurok baby is nursed long and generously enough to acquire a basic feeling
of being loved and provided for: the memory of a paradise is a prerequisite of
cultural striving. Primary oral conditioning, then (a secondary one follows at

292

Erikson: Observations on. the Yurok

the beginning of the "sense" stage), emphasizes the crossroads between the two
oral modes, sucking and biting.

Yurok child training, in contrast to Sioux training, weans early, well before
the child is one year old, and this at a time when his teeth develop and his en-
couragement to early locomotor activity bears fruit.

This tendency to wean early, as we saw, reaches into prenatal existence, where
the fetus is discouraged from "resting against the maternal spine" and from
sleeping when the evening shadows creep over the mountains. The centrifugal
tendency of leaving maternal support is furthermore emphasized by the massag-
ing of the leg muscles, which must accelerate the child's eagerness and ability to
creep and to "stand on its own feet." The boy, especially, can join the men early;
he has periods when he plays with other children, but he is early encouraged to
carry wood for the sweat house. (If he is allowed to stay, he must only promise on
his return home to let the father tell the stories told in the sweat house and not
to interrupt or correct him.) According to our assumptions in regard to the
vicissitudes of instincts, such "expulsion," even though it may be gradual and
induced by the establishment of positive goals, should leave a residue of potential
nostalgia in the child; and indeed, as we have seen, the Yurok can call on this
nostalgic talent whenever he needs to influence the paternal powers behind the
visible world. This is accompanied by other attributes of the first oral stage: the
hunger cry, the complaint of helplessness, and the simple "hallucinatory wish
fulfillment" implied in the habit of assuming that to say with tears, "I see salmon,"
is a way of getting it. It will be remembered that even the creator made the world
out of nostalgia. "I am lonely," he said, and accelerated the high points of cos-
mogony by an ever-renewed flow of tears. Yurok songs, too, in their content as
well as in their phonetics seem to be cries of desire and longing and in this are
quite different from the martial cries of the Sioux.' The difference between Yurok
and Sioux weaning would be that the Yurok at the time of his teething loses the
nursing situation in toto, whereas the Sioux baby nurses throughout the biting
period, thus being forced to suppress an ever-stimulated biting wish without
being able to abreact his initial temper through violent movements of the limbs.
The energy of the biting stage is, it seems, in Yurok training partly absorbed by
the early-provoked muscular and locomotor interest in the environment. Its mode
reappears in the economic mastery of this environment, that is, in the snaring of
deer and the netting of fish, and in the most sublime technical and spiritual elabora-
tion of the fish dam with its two closing "jaws." This interpretation, at least, gives
additional meaning to the fact that it is necessary for the Yurok to imagine both sal-
mon and deer as immortal: according to the Yurok brand of Platonism, the "ideas"
of salmon and deer remain untouched while of their own volition they send their
edible objectivation into the human traps. "I like this house," a deer will say, "I
shall go into that man's snare." "I shall travel as far as the river extends," the salmon
says, "I shall leave my scales on nets and they will turn into salmon but I myself
shall go by and not be killed" [8] .

The Yurok relation to the salmon and its metaphysical source, characterized as
it is by tearful prayer before the capture of the prey, and, after its destruction
and devouring, by the protestation that not the whole, not the life itself of the
animal, has been destroyed, represents a parallel to the Yurok baby's oral experi-
ence which taught him: as long as you had no teeth, you only had to cry and the

7 Early one fifth of July, during the last stages of a Brush dance which had lasted all night,
songs were improvised; I could obtain only two translations: a girl sang, "I think of the time
when I thought of you, but now it seems I have thrown you away"; a boy, "I think of the time
when, down in Requa, I had two bottles of whiskey."

293

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

mother came; as soon as you began to use your teeth, the mother went away and
you were taught "to forget the milk." Therefore, it seems better to pretend that
you are a toothless baby, and if you did bite, to say that you bit only the edible
representation of an immortal and invulnerable being which not only does not
mind but expressly desires your bite.

This parallelism of what we assume to be the Yurok's relation, on the one hand,
to the first ontogenetic source of food, namely, the mother, and, on the other, to
the metaphysical source of "the world's" food supply, is repeated in an anatomic-
geographic parallelism. Like every one of the "helpless" individuals populating
it along its central lane, the whole Yurok world has, as it were, its mouth open
toward the yearly present of salmon, and it is ready to close the jaws of nets and
dams as soon as the salmon is "in the bag"-whereupon the crying ceases, no
offense is taken, and sexual restraint relaxes. It is as if the fish dam represented
a play, with the greatest danger both in phylogenetic reality (the end of the salmon
supply) and in ontogenetic fantasy (the loss of parental love because of one's oral
sadism), and is therefore strictly ritualized at the beginning and enjoyed with
manic lawlessness at the end.8

The secondary oral education at the "school"-age (a period fostering develop-
ment of conscience, verbal intelligence, and sublimated curiosity) puts the finish-
ing touches on this transformation of oral desire; it uses the situation of daily
food intake to condition at one and the same time restraint in oral impulses and
a disciplined desire for prey and wealth. Interestingly enough, the fables which
are called on to reinforce the general attitude of considerate intake, and which
are about the freest form of confabulation found in Yurok culture, use a mental
potentiality which, according to another vague theory of psychoanalysis, repre-
sents the intellectual elaboration of the biting mode, namely, the apperceptive
isolation, the singling out of outstanding parts of the environment. With a sharp
eye, they grasp one characteristic of each animal (the buzzard's bald head, the
blue jay's crest, the bear's excrement) to substantiate their point, namely, the
danger of avarice and inconsiderate intake. The general Yurok habit of isolating
points and of localizing events probably uses the same mental potentiality, which
may be called the "partialistic" mode of apprehending and organizing the en-
vironment.

The training of the oral-tactual-sensory organization thus contributes to the
Yurok's cultural character two generalized modes, namely: (1) preambivalent
nostalgia directed toward the personified food sources behind reality, this nostalgia
being prevented from turning into a vague exploration of the geogra.phic peri-
phery by the "restriction of radius"; (2) sublimated, highly institutionalized
"biting off" of circumscribed objects and events out of the mass of space and the
stream of time.

The "object relation" to the mother or both parents, as built up during the oral
stages, contributes the following relations of the Yurok to the beings surrounding
him: (1) ambivalent avoidance of women and their houses, possibly with a pro-
jection of the "catching" mode into them, that is, a fear of being held and weakened;
(2) a displacement of preambivalent trust into substitute parents behind the
visible world from whence an eternal supply is flowing; (3) anarchic mistrust
of earthly parent substitutes, such as political officials.

In his daily social contact with his fellow men the Yurok's receptivity becomes
8 In the last analysis, the configuration of the salmon entering the river to deposit food
without being destroyed itself, corresponds to infantile images of both the mother's nipple and
the father's penis, the two highly cathexed organs which enter a mouth in order to deposit
life-giving fluids.

294

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

definitely more aggressive, challenging, claiming, and complaining?: comparing
it with the attitude toward metaphysical beings, one is immediately reminded
of the way in which a whining child, now so touchingly helpless in the presence
of the mother, uses an instant of her absence to turn on his sibling and to protest
that this or that object-anything will do-is his. Not that we would expect to
find this behavior more extreme among Yurok children than among our own (short
of murder, it hardly could be) ; we again have in mind a comparison between the
typical Yurok child's typical expulsion from oral paradise and the typical Yurok's
cultural character. A child, in a noncontraceptive culture, if weaned early will
early be aware of a new tie between father and mother and will soon find a
sibling baby in the place which was his. His protestation, even if suppressed, will
easily combine the "biting" characteristics of the second-oral and the retentive
ones of the anal stage; and indeed, to claim angrily the right to get what he has
not got (often in connection with the sorrow over a loss or an alleged offense),
and to hold to the last to what he has got, are the only techniques by which the
Yurok can hope to gain a little more than he could by relying on his work technique
or his ability to produce, raise, and sell worthy girls.

This channelization, this positive use of oral craving, has, as we saw, allies in
negative institutions such as oral taboos and the prohibition of swearing. The
earliest taboo is the prohibition given to the breast-feeding baby not to drink
("steal") water.

In our own culture swearing at a person has an admixture of displaced anality.
We like to use "dirty" terms for a form of defamation which often seems like an
elimination in the direction of the defamed or even identifies him with the elimi-
nated. The meaning of Yurok swearing seems different. What he loosely translates
as "swearing" is solely a verbal reference to a dead person. One wonders whether
the temptation suppressed by this prohibition is that of calling the dead dead,
powerless, gone, in other words, of eliminating them without remorse and anxiety.
* The anthropologist who has lived long enough among a people can tell us
whether or not what its informants care to enlarge upon, and what the culture
cared to formulate, is representative for categories which can be observed as at-
tracting most attention and arousing most emotion in daily and yearly life. But
there is rarely available the material which would indicate whether or not tradi-
tional traits (such as nostalgia or avarice or retentiveness) are also dominant
personal traits in typical individuals. Take the Yurok's ability to pantomime a
crying helpless being or a deeply offended mourner. Does it mean that the Yurok
anywhere within his technology is more helpless, more paralyzed by sadness, than
are members of a tribe which does not develop these "traits" ? Certainly not; his
institutionalized helplessness eo ipso is neither a trait nor a neurotic symptom.
It is an infantile attitude which the culture chose to preserve and to put at the
disposal of the individual, to be used by him and his fellow men in a limited area
of existence. Such an institutionalized attitude neither spreads beyond its defined
area nor makes impossible the development to full potency of its opposite: it is
probable that the really successful Yurok was the one who could cry most heart-
breakingly or bicker most convincingly in some situations and be full of fortitude
in others, that is, the Yurok whose ego was strong enough to synthesize orality and
"sense." In comparison, the oral types whom we may be able to discern today in our
culture and to whom (for purposes of simplicity in scientific and ethical orienta-

9In characterizing the Yurok's institutionalized claiming of recompense, Kroeber, during a
few minutes of one seminar evening, used the expressions "whining around," "fussing," "bicker-
ering," "erying out," "self-pity," "excuses a child might give," "claimants who make them-
selves nuisances," etc.

295

6 University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

tion) we would be inclined to liken what we have said about the Yurok so far, are
bewildered people who find themselves victims of an overgrown and insatiable
potentiality without the corresponding homogeneous cultural reality.

If we know the character potentialities required for the successful participation
in the official part of a certain culture, we stand only at the beginning of a persono-
logical inquiry; for each system-let us say of generosity or avarice-admits in its
own way certain additions to and deductions and exemptions from individual
avarice or generosity. The Yurok of today is little help in this matter, which can
only be studied in living primitive cultures; but our speculations insist that no con-
sistent integrated cultural emphasis can develop without a specific condition-
ing-a specific variation of the universal expulsion from paradise-in early
childhood; and that such a conditioning, in order to create people who can function
as useful members of even the strangest culture, must aim for what we vaguely
call a "strong ego," that is, a personality core both firm and flexible enough to
maintain cultural and psychological homeostasis.

4

No student of psychoanalytic literature could avoid the impression that many
of the Yurok "traits" correspond to the "anal character" as described by Freud
and Abraham [1]. Compulsiveness, suspiciousness, miserliness, etc., are said to
characterize "anal-neurotic" individuals, that is, individuals with an infantile
history of preoccupation with excretion, with a narcissistic holding on to the "treas-
ures" of the cloaca, and with a sadistic identification of other individuals with an
expelled waste product :10 a sad asocial picture.

In the psychoanalytic observation of adult patients, it has been emphasized [1]
that it is hard to reconstruct orality because in retrospect one finds it buried under
a layer of traits and fantasies developed during the anal period. The archaeological
picture used here, as so often, is too static to fit the nature of developmental facts.
If one begins with the beginning, it seems equally as difficult to discern with safety
the onset of clear anal traits in a child; for, as we increasingly find in clinical work
with small children, what has been called one of the main criteria of anality, namely,
retentivity, may be already well developed in connection with orality: and it is my
contention that the same is true for most if not all typical Yurok traits.

We may pause here to ask 'what our criteria are for calling an activity oral or
anal. The only real criterion is, of course, the zone criterion, namely, experiences
at the zone in question or strong emotions immediately associated with zonal sen-
sations and frustrations. All the other criteria seem secondary and have to be traced
back to the first one in order to be considered valid. Such secondary criteria would
be: first, the mode criterion, that is, the fact that the mode for which the zone in
question is the modal zone (as the mouth is for receptivity, the anus for retentive-
ness and elimination) is either generalized (i.e., retentive personality) or displaced
to another zone (i.e., genital retention) -and this in such a way that it can be traced
back to the original zone. This mode criterion has a companion in the countermode
criterion, that is, in the generalization or displacement of a mode counteracting
another mode (i.e., retention as countermode of elimination). A further criterion
would be the affect or attitude criterion, that is, the generalization of a typical be-
havior (experienced as affect and observable as an attitude) which has originated
in the zonal experience in question (i.e., the affect and attitude of helplessness or
nostalgic craving in connection with originally oral situations, or the affect and

10 That the prohibition of swearing may (or may not) be an oral counteraction of the death
wish, the wish "to eliminate" rivals, has been suggested.

296

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

attitude of stubbornness originally in connection with the demand to regulate
defecation).

So far as we know now, the Yurok does not seem to focus any interest, pleasurable
or phobic, on feces; and such reaction formations as regularity or compulsive
orderliness do not seem to transgress what could be expected of people with a crafts-
manship of Yurok level. Anal character in our culture often appears to be a result
of the impact on a retentive child of a certain type of maternal behavior in Western
civilization, namely, a narcissistic and phobic overconcern with matters of elimina-
tion. This attitude helps to overdevelop retentive and eliminative potentialities and
to fixate them in the anal zone; it creates the strongest social ambivalence in the
child, and it remains an isolating factor in his social and sexual development. Forms,
of "individualism" in Western culture which represent a mere insistence on the
privilege to sit in isolation on possessions can be suspected of representing just
such an inroad of anality into cultural and political life. Otherwise it seems that
cultural life and anality contradict one another.

What could be interpreted as counteranal traits among the Yurok rather con-
cern all eliminations, be they oral (vomiting), anal, urethral (urination into the
river, etc.), or genital (especially menstruation).

The affect and attitude criteria of what is called anal often seem to fit the official
Yurok personality. His "pleasure of final evacuation and exhibition of stored-up
material" is most conspicuous at dances, when, toward morning, the Yurok with a
glowing face produces his fabulous treasures of headwear ornamented with wood-
pecker scalps or of obsidians. However, the institutionalized obstinacy which al-
lowed him to accumulate these treasures seems counteracted by the highly social
experience of seeing his treasures enhance the prestige of the whole tribe. At least
ceremonially, they belong to everybody. Such ceremonial occasions put a great
burden of free hospitality on the small villages where they take place. (F, even
during one of her tearful descriptions of her novitiate, could not omit the statement
that it cost a good deal to feed all the visitors: but this increased her importance
at the time and thus her power now. As a hostess F is most gracious.)

These remarks are not to be understood as denying the possibility that in some
cultures anality is quite developed according to all the criteria which we have
enumerated, but we would expect its influence on cultural character to be differ-
ent from that of anal fixation in our culture. Yurok retentiveness seems alimentary
rather than anal; it is a tendency to accumulate creatively for the sake of making
the most of the collected values, which belong to the whole social system where it
gives communal pleasure, prestige, and permanence in turn.

5

The main body zone emphasized in Yurok child training is the oral-nutritional one;
the modes stressed are reception and retention. Yurok child training and the
Yurok's identification of world and body focus on the alimentary zone, in the
sense of "the tubular food-carrying passage extending from the mouth to the anus,"
with a positive educational emphasis on the mouth. The rest of the body is subordi-
nated to the concern with this zone; in particular, areas and modes of elimination
are avoided.

The groundwork for the genital attitudes desired in Yurok culture is laid-in the
child's earlier conditioning which teaches him to subordinate drive to economic
considerations; within the established limits of these considerations sex as such is
viewed with leniency and some humor. Masturbation, for example, is admitted, but
said to yield to a mild discouraging attitude. The Yurok do not expressly approve

297

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

of, nor are they insensitive to, the habits of self-indulgence which have so prominent
a place in the clinical complaints of parents in our culture; on the other hand, it
seems that cultures which make for a gradual exchange of social for physical satis-
faction render unnecessary-or can afford to ignore-a certain amount of autoerotic
satisfaction. What seems to drive many of our children into self-indulgence is the
accumulated frustration and repression throughout the various childhood stages;
it is especially the feeling of having lost with the mother's availability, reliability,
and firmness any possibility of deriving, through her, cultural compensations for
sacrificed infantile satisfactions, which makes autoeroticisms in our culture in-
dispensable addictions. Otherwise, every society which we know so far, demands
a certain amount of subordination of genital drive to the particular libido organiza-
tion favored and expressed by the culture.

In adolescence, when the relationship to the opposite sex becomes important, the
young Yurok can look back on a childhood of free play with other children during
which at least the body surface of the other sex had in no way remained a secret.
By the time the girl has passed the menarchy and in some ways becomes more
secretive (a mystification which must increase both her positive and negative fasci-
nation), the heterosexual relationship has already found a firm place within the
established system of property values, based as it is on the modes of considered
intake and clever retentiveness. A girl strives to be worth a husband who can pay
well, and she knows that all her own and her children's and her children's children's
happiness depends on the amount of wealth she will actually bring in; she must
retain her good name and her value-if not her virginity-until this goal is reached.
The boy, on the other hand, has to be able to wait until he has accumulated enough
wealth to buy a worth-while wife: or at least has to be restrained enough never to
be caught in heterosexual pursuits before this goal is reached. Again we see reten-
tion emphasized, both in the sense that the Yurok remains virtuous in order to retain
value and possessions and in the sense that the Yurok man must project into the
woman a tendency to "catch" him.'

Among our neurotics this retentiveness is common enough: it interferes with
psychosexual development and genital potency. But here again the comparison
between the cultural and the neurotic character ends; for, on this level too, the
strong Yurok is he who never risks, over sexual matters, his property or his luck in
hunting or fishing, but who would still be man enough to use with unimpaired sexual
potency opportunities without danger of commitment. The understanding between
the sexes in these matters goes so far (or can go so far) that one informant defined
a "nice girl" as one who always tells the boy beforehand when she is menstruating,
thus saving him ritual trouble and subsequent loss of working time.

As for the woman's sexual potency as we have come to understand it, namely, the
ability to reach a full orgasm during intercourse, nothing can be said. This writer
did not stay long enough with the Yurok to talk with any woman about this matter;
men, when asked about the woman's general sexual response, merely showed an
astonished smile. "After all," they would say after a moment's silence, "our women
were bought." Indian women, while modest and girlishly simple, certainly do not
impress one as being sexually immature or inhibited, at least so far as basic genital
satisfaction is indispensable to marital and paternal harmony; however, the female
orgasm seems not to be represented among verbalized facts and certainly has not
the connotation of a female achievement (of an almost masculine character) which
it often assumes with modern white women.

'- This fantasy of the vagina as a snare is expressed in the fate of the creator who, we remember,
when finally succumbing to the skate woman, finds his penis inclosed and himself abducted.

298

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

6

In a primitive culture, the cycle of the year as well as that of every day, the smallest
personal emotion as well as the great events of religious life, more consciously
focus on the pursuit of food than we would permit our cultural life to do ex-
pressly-which speaks for a greater admitted importance in their culture of the
laws and taboos of food intake than we would like to admit in our child training. If
people like the Yurok seem to lose their concern for their children so much earlier
than we do and, as a matter of fact, emphasize least the period which seems to be
the one appearing as most critical in our clinical experience, namely, the "Oedipus"
period, we have to remember that after a relatively longer period of closeness to
their mother Indian children rapidly become members first of the cliquelike sub-
cultures of other children and then of economy and culture itself: their reward
for imitating the gestures of those around them is merely the feeling of a partici-
pation in group life, which we underdevelop in our children because in our in-
creasingly specialized culture we create isolated places for childhood. Only he who
has seen Indian children sitting through a night of dances can understand the possi-
bility that rituals and myths by acknowledging unspeakable feelings in more than
verbal representations take care of the impulses and fears of a period of childhood
when our children still fight their lonely battles with the Oedipus provocations of
an every-family-for-itself culture. We may suspect that sex and aggression in their
widest sense, and within the basic laws of libido-economy, can be easily subordinated
to cultural reality to the extent to which its economy and its child training, its
mythological expression and its provisions for individual variations, are well syn-
chronized. This seems to be true to a high degree in American Indian cultures.

7

On the whole, it is the woman's position in the culture which remains mysterious,
and this on the basis of a strange paradox of which this last chapter should help to
make us aware. Faced with the taboos and avoidances of a people like the Yurok, one
cannot help wondering again and again what the woman thinks of the entirely
negative role which she seems to play in the formalized part of her culture. Mani-
festly, she does not seem to take these laws either too literally or too seriously in a
personal sense; she does not seem to question the fact that it is the man's job both to
create and to uphold taboos and that it is hers to encourage her children to adhere
to them; and she seems to derive a feeling of belongingness from them, as if she had
long forgotten what they really mean-if, indeed, all the avoidance does not flatter
her feeling of being dangerously attractive. Maybe she can act this way because in
turn her powerful position in everyday life is not questioned by the men, and does
not seem less convincing to them because so much of it evades verbalization and
rationalization-the only criteria we (and this, unfortunately, includes an influen-
tial type of mother in our culture) seem to accept as denoting cultural importance.
The homogeneity of a culture seems to depend to a large degree on mothers who
peacefully, and firmly, and wordlessly mediate between themselves (as the child's
original object of love and anxiety) and his later goals and gods-for many of which,
after all, the mothers are the models. But the mothers cannot do their part without
a homogeneous culture.2

12The process of civilization (of which we, the observers of primitive and transitory cultures
and of neurotics in our own, are a part) seems to aspire at a psychological homeostasis on the
level of a more universal synthesis, oriented toward an image of a supertribal and supersexual
man in a superregional world. Advocating progress and rationality rather than tradition and
belief, all-embracing universality rather than rigid exclusion, civilization endangers the remnants

299

University of California Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn.

8

In the Yurok world, homogeneity rests on an integration of ethical with economic,
geographical, and physiological concepts, for all of which the groundwork is laid
in the training of the young organism.

The relationship of the whole body to the whole world is that of a vigorous strong-
limbed physique assigned to strictly localized tasks within a circumscribed world
with forbidding horizons: centripetality as against centrifugality.

Of the zones of the body, the alimentary canal is outstanding in ethical impor-
tance; of organ modes, incorporation is emphasized.

The mouth, beyond the everyday tasks of verbal communication, utters cries and
songs of helplessness and of grief, convincingly states wishes and claims, and keeps
from releasing swear- (death-) words; as for its function as an organ of food intake,
it is trained to choose food carefully, to avoid contamination, to chew slowly, and
to subordinate oral craving to the craving for wealth. Vomiting, if uncontrolled,
evokes horror; although, if controlled for the purpose of materializing "pains," it
is considered magically beneficial.

The nutritional canal is in danger of being pinched together by sorcery which
suffocates the individual. With respect both to vomiting and to sorcery, it is the
one-way flow through the nutritional tube which is obstructed or averted.

The anus seems to be considered merely as the other end of the tube, with the
function of releasing what was not needed and should remain eliminated.

The vagina, however, representing a sacklike organ with a double vector and an
inescapable contamination of fluids (blood, urine, and semen), has to be avoided or
counteracted by purification. In contrast, the penis, also being the end of a tube, is
considered without horror, except in its contact, or directly after its contact, with
the enclosing vagina.

The configurational emphases of bodily existence thus are: the receptive opening
has to be kept uncontaminated; the tube has to be kept unconstricted; the sack has
to be avoided.

The geographic world consists primarily of a central lane dividing into two equal
parts a disk of territory which is surrounded by ocean. In front of the river mouth,
ocean and river fishes are divided; the main river fish, namely salmon, during one
period of the year can be observed making a trip upriver from which it does not
return. The middle part of the river, near the navel of the world, is obstructed by
the yearly erection of a fish dam which is accompanied by sacred ceremonies and
represents the most communal enterprise and the most advanced technical accom-
plishment of California Indian cultures. After its confluence with the Trinity
River, the Klamath enters that territory at the periphery of the world disk which
is avoided by every Yurok of good breeding: where the river comes from, where the
money comes from, how the salmon procreates are problems which the Yurok con-
siders as not belonging in his world; he assigns them to imaginary wombs beyond
the ocean.

The fate of the salmon as understood by the Yurok fits into his world outlook, for
this strong animal never eats and has no food in its nutritional system. Its sexual
development leads to loss of strength and to death. Its procreation and its source
"beyond the ocean" are mysterious. Whether the old Yurok knew that the fry which

of tribal synthesis for the sake of an unknown future standard for all. The revolutions of today
seem to represent attempts at consolidating human gains somewhere midway, with race or class
replacing tribe, and world domination or world revolution replacing universality. The fate of
democratic and rational education will depend on the degree to which rationality will make for a
new and more universal cultural homogeneity.

300

Erikson: Observations on the Yurok

descends the river is the product of the salmon which ascended it, we do not know;
at any rate, this double vector aspect of the salmon's life is ignored, the territory
where it takes place avoided.

Yurok architecture allows a dramatization of daily life, which represents both
a magic adaptation to and a magic mastery of world and salmon as he sees them.
The living house, the sacklike place of storage and of gestation, and the place of
double vectors and inescapable contaminations, forces purification on the man. In
order to achieve this, he enters the sweat house, which is morphologically a tube,
and leaves it through a narrow exit. This exit is the "obstruction" test of the Yurok
world, in that it may represent a pinching of the tube if it is too small (i.e., for fat
men), while it represents unobstructedness if the man is slim and sweaty enough
to get through, in which case he is not offensive to the river.

These configurations are a limited but, it is hoped, not unrepresentative selection
of truly "primitive" Yurok concepts. They seem to express the general idea that by
being a good warden of his nutritional system and a good warden of the river, and
by guarding strength and wealth, the Yurok is clean enough to perform the miracle
of his existence, namely, to eat his salmon and have it next year too.

REFERENCES CITED

(By bracketed numbers in the text)

1. Abraham, Karl, Psycho-Analytical Studies on Character-Formation, in Selected Papers, The

Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1927.

2. Davidson, F. A., and Shostrom, E. O., Physical and Chemical Changes in the Pink Salmon dur-

ing the Spawning Migration, U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, Investigation Report No. 33, 1936.

3. Erikson, E. Homburger, Observations on Sioux Education, The Journal of Psychology, 7, 1939.
4. Erikson, E. Homburger, Clinical Studies in Childhood Play, in Child Behavior and Develop-

ment: A Representative Course of Studies, ed. Barker, Roger, and others, McGraw-Hill, New
York, 1943.

5. Freud, Anna, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, The Hogarth Press and the Institute

of Psychoanalysis, London, 1937.

6. Freud, Sigmund, On Narcissism: An Introduction, in Collected Papers, IV, The Hogarth

Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1925.

7. Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Tabu, Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Vienna, 1920.
8. Kroeber, A. L., The Yurok, in Handbook of the Indians of California, Bureau of American

Ethnology, Bulletin 78, 1925.

9. Mead, Margaret, The Use of Primitive Material in the Study of Personality, in Character

and Personality, 3, 1934.

10. Powers, E. B., The Spawning Migration of the Salmon, Science, 92:2390, 1940.

11. Waelder, Robert, The Principle of Multiple Function: Observations on Over-Determination.

The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1936.

12. Waterman, T. T., and Kroeber, A. L., The Kepel Fish Dam, University of California Publica-

tions in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 35:49-80, 1938.

13. Waterman, T. T., Yurok Geography, U.C. Publ. Am. Arch. and Ethn., 16:177-314, 1920.

[Assistance in the preparation of these materials was furnished by the personnel
of Work Projects Administration Official Project No. 65-1-08-62, Unit A 15.]

301