Gladys Reichard and Western Native American Culture
By Nancy Mattina
University of Oklahoma Press 2019
Even among those who might be vaguely familiar with American anthropology in its pioneer days, Gladys Reichard is not a well-known name. Nancy Mattina makes a convincing case that it should be. With graceful prose, she describes a remarkable woman in a remarkable time.
All roads in American anthropology lead back to Franz Boas, who trained the next generations in the early 20th century. Reichard remained close to Boas, even living in the same house for years, and remained faithful to his process of listening to the indigenous people they studied, without imposing theories or interpretations that conveniently supported those theories. This put her at odds with several better known names, such as Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, all of whom (according to Mattina) undermined and denigrated her work.
I live in a part of the United States where many small Native American culture survived into the 20th century on their native land (and some still do.) Boas and his first prize student Alfred Kroeber (Ursula LeGuin's father) were among the first to study these cultures and their bewilderingly various languages. So it was natural that Boas (teaching at Columbia on the East Coast) and Kroeber (University of California at Berkeley) dispatched the young Reichard to study the language of the Wiyot, a very small tribe indigenous to the town where I now live, in far northern California. When Reichard visited them in 1919 their official tribal home was Table Bluff outside of Eureka, which today it still is.
Though Reichard spent much more time with the Navajo in the 1930s and beyond, and wrote several books on Navajo arts, religion and culture over the years, her work with the Wiyot set the pattern of intensive field work and immersion in the culture. Eventually she would be the first anthropologist to live within a Native community for several years at a time, when she lived in a small and remote Navajo village. Mattina suggests how well this life suited Reichard's cowgirl personality.
There are many jokes about anthropologists that American Indians still tell, and some residual bitterness. That seems to be due to the general lack of respect by non-Native scholars and their dependence on their own theories. Haida artist Robert Davidson told me a story about scholars heatedly debating what ancient Indians used a particular tool to do, without noticing that contemporary Indians were using the very same tool. Today, Reichard's method of research is better accepted as the right one, but even in her time, her Native collaborators recognized that with her respectful approach, she was really learning something, and even revealing elements (of almost forgotten languages especially) that they found valuable.
Mattina notes that Reichard's study of the Wiyot language was "the first structuralist account of a Native American language written by a woman." Reichard's pioneering as a woman researcher, writer and teacher is another major theme in this book. The neglect of her achievements as the first head of the anthropology department at Barnard College is sad indeed. But several of her books are available, in print and online. Since reading Mattina, I've acquired and am reading one of Reichard's books on Navajo sandpainting.
Mattina is also revelatory in providing historical contexts, especially the attitudes towards indigenous cultures and specifically American Indians in any given decade. She is also good on the inevitable and wearying, but significant, academic jealousies and infighting within American anthropology. She details several examples of prejudice against Reichard--even within the profession-- because she was a woman. However in the later chapters, she seems a bit reflexive at times in attributing problems to such bias.
For readers of biographies, Mattina is also very good at describing the details and the arc of her subject's life, and evoking her personality. This is an admirable book of more than academic interest.
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