There are many ways that a people can learn about their past, their histories. In modern European-based cultures, knowledge of the past is most frequently based on written documents. For American Indians, however, using written documents to understand their past means viewing their heritage through European eyes; it means that Indian peoples had no history before the European invasion. However, American Indians, like other people throughout the world, have always known and understood their histories through oral traditions: the stories and ceremonies about their heritage.
European-educated scholars are often skeptical and dismissive of the reliability of oral traditions and ceremonies as vehicles for understanding the past. In her book Voices of a Thousand People: The Makah Cultural & Research Center, Patricia Erickson writes:
“Oral history was once considered little more than a methodology for mining a storehouse of facts in someone’s memory. It was largely discredited as an unreliable tool for reconstructing the past of groups of people without their own written history. Today, however, oral history is considered an invaluable way to include a history of classes and ethnicities of people that would otherwise be excluded. Furthermore, oral history today is valued for the way it reveals the dynamic structure of memory and perception.”
American Indian people today know that their tribes have histories which have been recorded not in books, but in their oral tradition. Writing in 1817, Christian missionary John Heckewelder, in his book History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States, says:
“We know that all Indians have the custom of transmitting to posterity, by a regular chain of tradition, the remarkable events which have taken place with them at any time, even often events of a trivial nature, of which I could mention a number.”
Writing about the tribes on the Mid-Columbia River, Phillip Cash Cash, in his chapter in As Days Go By: Our History, Our Land, and Our People—The Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla, says:
“Our oral traditions are organized bodies of discourse whose primary purpose is to provide a set of generalized statements on the meaning of reality.”
The important thing to recognize is that the oral traditions provide generalizations about the past. Oral traditions are often categorized as myth, meaning that they are not true, but Phillip Cash Cash points out that
“…in fact, they represent a connection to the past that is imminently real for native people in every sense.”
Phillip Cash Cash also writes:
“For many indigenous cultures, mythic origins ground the generalized experience of ancient peoples across space and time.”
One of the problems that we encounter in using oral traditions as a way of understanding the past is that there are many scholars who feel that oral tradition is not really history. Historian James Axtell, in his book Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America, writes:
“…a source with which traditionally bookish historians are distinctly uneasy is the recollection of native peoples who pass down through the generations of oral accounts of ‘events’ long in the past.”
Choctaw historian Donna Akers, in an article in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, points out that:
“Some mainstream scholars distrust oral sources, so often the information available from these records is omitted from the historical record.”
In a similar vein, Klara Kelley and Harris Francis, in an article in the New Mexico Historical Review, write:
“The idea that indigenous oral tradition contains history threatens the privileged status of nonindigenous versions of history and therefore is hotly contested in current discussions about public policy that affects indigenous peoples.”
The tradition of oral history is, however, far more rigorous than the academic study of history at some American and Canadian universities. Oral tradition requires that the person telling the histories learn them exactly and be able to recite them in the same way each time and in the same way as those who told the histories before. According to anthropologist Fred Eggan, in his chapter in Zuni and the Courts: A Struggle for Sovereign Land Rights:
“To my way of thinking, there’s no fundamental distinction between history written down and history spoken. Each can be wrong or right.”
In an article in Montana The Magazine of Western History, Andrew Fisher puts it this way:
“Present-day literates generally assume that written records have more value as evidence than spoken words, especially in the courtroom. Members of oral cultures, by contrast, often believe quite the opposite.”
According to archaeologist Charles Redman, in his book People of the Tonto Rim: Archaeological Discovery in Prehistoric Arizona:
“Oral histories are especially valuable for our study of the past in places where there has been a long continuity of settlement.”
Writing about the Mandan, Tracy Potter, in her book Sheheke Mandan Indian Diplomat: The Story of White Coyote, Thomas Jefferson, and Lewis and Clark, reports:
“Oral tradition is a valuable historical resource—the first method of passing history through the generations—but its transmission in Mandan culture involved a strictly measured sequence of storytelling, involving years of training.”
Stories were traditionally told only to people who had earned the right to learn the story. In addition, stories had to be learned in their proper sequence. According to Tracy Potter:
“It was a wonderfully complex and democratic system of maintaining a history, a process imbuing history with importance simply by the serious and paced method of teaching.”
For many generations, the Native peoples of the Northwest Coast have told stories about great earthquakes, but non-Indian academics have often dismissed these stories as just stories, not reflecting any true history. Anthropologist Jon McVey Erlandson, in an article in Anthropology News, writes:
“But history is also written in the sediments of Oregon Coast estuaries, in tsunami sands discovered by geologists who questioned conventional wisdom and dared to believe what many Indian people had long known: that the ‘legends’ of coastal tribes sometimes recorded historical events.”
The Tsimshian, a Northwest Coast tribe, have oral traditions called adawx. The adawx for each Tsimshian lineage provides a record of events, explanations of territorial ownership, and descriptions of significant relationships with other groups. Anthropologist Andrew Martindale, in his chapter in Emerging from the Mist: Studies in Northwest Coast Culture History, writes:
“Since each lineage owned adawx that spoke of events and relationships in the wider society, collectively the adawx are a palimpsest of records on the history of Tsimshian life preserved from multiple perspectives.”
The Tsimshian adawx were traditionally performed at social events such as feasts. According to Andrew Martindale:
“Public performance of these stories helped to transmit them to younger generations and also helped to ensure that an accurate historiography was maintained since any falsehoods committed by the speaker could be challenged.”
In using the oral traditions of the clans of the Indians of the Northern Northwest Coast in conjunction with archaeology, Philip Drucker, in his book Archeological Survey on the Northern Northwest Coast, writes:
“So matter-of-fact and internally consistent are those of one family line with the traditions of their neighbors, that no ethnographer who has worked in the area has denied their historic value.”
In his work on the Northwest Coast Heiltsuk, anthropologist Michael Harkin, in his book The Heiltsuks: Dialogues of Culture and History on the Northwest Coast, writes:
“We must recognize that native historical accounts express fundamental truths about historical processes and therefore constitute an important expression of culture.”
In their work on the history of Santa Ana Pueblo, Santa Ana: The People, the Pueblo, and the History of Tamaya, Laura Bayer with Floyd Montoya and the Pueblo of Santa Ana write:
“Together the stories of the oral tradition record not just what the people did, but how they saw—and see—their own origins and history. The tradition records a part of the people’s past that no other source can, for it alone reveals their beliefs and values, their hopes, interests, concerns, and fears.”
In discussing the use of oral history by archaeologists, Leora Boydo Vestel, in an article in American Archaeology, notes that Indian oral tradition often presents the past in a highly metaphorical way. She goes on to report:
“In the same way archaeologists and historians find historical content embedded in the Bible, oral tradition, it’s argued, may contain historical references that elucidate how tribes evolved, lived, and, in some cases, disappeared.”
In writing about the Plains Indians in the Handbook of North American Indians, Raymond DeMallie and Douglas Parks note that the oral traditions frequently violate credibility from the European viewpoints. They write:
“Understanding the historicity of oral traditions, rather than treating them as outside history by relegating them to the category of myth, is essential for insightful interpretations of the history of interactions between Euro-Americans and Plains peoples from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first.”
Oral traditions provide not only a link to the past, a way of understanding the past, but also a link to geography. They create for the people a cognitive map of the cultural landscape. Phillip Cash Cash notes:
“Myth locales are considered sacred and potentially dangerous, because the deep time separation that exists between the former myth world and the present are collapsed at these sites.”
One of the problems of oral histories, from the viewpoint of European-trained scholars, is that they are not linear: that is, they do not provide an accurate account of how long ago something happened. For those who want to put history into a linear time frame, the oral histories do not provide the data they desire. On the other hand, there is much that they can tell us. Historian James Axtell writes:
“They may not tell us just when a particular event occurred, but they almost always convey how the native participants felt about it at the time, and often what kind of moral they drew from it.”
In a report in This Week from Indian Country Today, Ungelbah Daniel-Davila writes:
“While the European idea of literature relied on print, indigenous literature depended largely on verbalization. A common theme in Native cosmology is the acknowledgement that nothing lasts forever, thus, where a text might have an indefinite and unchanging shelf life, an oral story has the flexibility to evolve and change.”
From an American Indian viewpoint oral traditions which are passed down through stories and ceremonies are valid histories. They are organized differently than European-style written histories, but this does not make them less valid.
Indians 101
Twice each week—on Tuesdays and Thursdays—this series presents American Indian topics. More from this series:
Indians 101: Indian Languages
Indians 201: American Indian Trade Languages
Indians 201: Smoke Signals and Mirrors
Indians 201: Plains Indian Sign Language
Indians 101: The Algonquian Language Family
Indians 201: A short introduction to Indian reservations
Indians 101: A very short overview of treaties
Indians 101: A brief introduction to tribal religious traditions