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Native American Author Roundtable
5.
AOTW: Tell us how you conduct research when writing about Native American customs, language, and spiritual beliefs.
David and Aimee Thurlo: David has many friends and contacts among the Navajos he grew up with on the Rez, along with those both of us have made since that time around the Southwest. We've earned the trust of these people, and they know we'd never betray that trust by identifying them or failing to respect their culture. We're very careful to verify any information we present as factual, through at least two independent sources, and edit our work so we won't give away too much of what "belongs" to the tribe. Our most gratifying work comes from personal visits to the Navajo Nation, however.
Margaret Coel: I begin with what I call my bibles, which are the studies of the Arapahos by anthropologists in the 1890s. Then I go to the reservation and check with the Arapahos to make certain that what the anthropologists wrote is correct. In The Dream Stalker, Vicky Holden's grandfather blesses her with the sacred wheel --- to give her strength and courage --- all of which I took from one of my bibles. An Arapaho friend assured me that the information was correct --- but incomplete. She then told me more about the sacred wheel blessing. I asked if I could use the information. She said, "I have to ask the elders." A couple days later she called and said the elders had given permission.
David Marion Wilkinson: I read everything I could get my hands on --- primary and academic sources, missionary accounts, diaries, and the best contemporary scholarship available. I also had some very good Cherokee friends who helped me quite a bit. You have to glance at Oblivion's Altar "Acknowledgments" to get an idea of how many people and books I relied upon to tell Ridge's story. I took my research very seriously, but there are always gaps in the historical record, mainly because these cultures were under siege by the Anglo American majority. The truth is that much was lost, so a novelist must rely upon his/her imagination, which is the scariest part of writing as an outsider about anyone's culture. I worked very hard at accuracy, but how successful I was is for others to judge.
Thomas Perry: I conduct research on any subject by reading the experts. One thing I found early in my study of the Senecas is that there is a huge supply of information about them. It begins with the Jesuit Relations, the annual reports the French missionaries sent back to Paris between 1630 and 1660. They talked to, observed and studied as many of the people of the Eastern woodlands as they could, and tried to report everything. The Iroquois were powerful and militarily important. The British and the French wrote intelligence reports, memoirs, and letters about the Senecas and the other Iroquois nations until the end of the 18th century. The era of real ethnography begins in 1850 with Lewis Henry Morgan's League of the Iroquois. It hasn't ended yet. There are hundreds of good books (most notably Anthony F. C. Wallace's Death and Rebirth of the Seneca). There are also accounts, collections of letters, etc. written by educated Senecas over the past 150 years.
W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear: Research comes in many forms. Sometimes it's a story told by an elder, often it's the excavation of an archaeological site, or it may be a paper presented at the meetings of the Society for American Archaeology or the American Association of Physical Anthropologists' conference. We attend numerous research conferences because we owe it to our readers to be as accurate as we can, and we owe it to our professional colleagues to get out the most recent information-information they have labored for years to uncover.
The hardest part of the research process involves an exhaustive canvassing of the professional literature. We read "pounds" of unpublished archaeological reports, talk with the archaeologists, visits the sites, talk with the descendants of the prehistoric peoples. Next we turn to the ethnographic sources, the dusty monographs hidden in the basements of museums, libraries, and government office buildings. This is tricky because the arrival of Europeans dramatically changed the cultures in North America, and much of the information reported by early explorers and ethnographers is biased. We have to try to see through the chaff to the core cultural ideals. Critical in this process is our reliance on the oral traditions of the people. Their stories flesh out the skeletal picture etched by the archaeological record and the written resources.
We also rely on the professional journals, such as AMERICAN ANTIQUITY and the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
Finally we have to make a prehistoric society functional; that is, we must explain what the people were doing and why. More, we have to do it in a manner that we can defend to our peers in the academic as well as the real world. We have to get the environmental data correct, including the plants, animals, and soils, which is why our bibliography is loaded with ethnobotanical, climatic, and faunal sources. It's kind of like writing a dissertation within a fictional story. We don't make this stuff up. For example, in People of the Mist the prehistoric peoples of the Chesapeake Bay really did treat their dead that way, and yes, some ants are hallucinogenic, as we describe in People of the Sea. Please don't try this, however. Some ants are also deadly poisonous.
Even with all the information described above, we still must take risks when we write a novel. When we penned People of the Wolf in 1988, the best information suggested that only peoples of "Indian" appearance had originally migrated into the Americas. Another decade of archaeological research has proven that assumption wrong. The discoveries of "Kennewick Man" in Washington, and "Luzia" in Brazil, have turned the entire study of the peopling of the Americas on its head. We now know there were at least three separate racial groups present in the Americas around 12,000 years ago. Archaeology changes with each dig, each new technological breakthrough, and each review of the data using new analytical tools.
Penina Keen Spinka: I read, researched the Internet and attended gatherings in upstate NY where the Six Nations have a festival each year. I conducted several interviews to verify as well as possible, the customs and traditions of baby naming that I read about. I asked opinions about how the tribes allowed the Eternal Flame to go out when it came to the American Revolution. Although my stories don't come that close to our current times, I found their responses fascinating and helpful.
David Matheson: Since my life has been filled with our cultural beliefs and customs I did little research in the traditional sense. However, over the course of a lifetime, decades, I talked to all the elders I could. I tried learning as much of our language as I could. I collected stories of creation. I collected stories of the events that happened before mankind was put here, how our people came to be, and how things happened in the old stories that helped form the historical basis for our cultural understandings. With that knowledge I tried to practice them in our own ceremonial ways in our own ways of prayers, use them and pass them on. In the book Red Thunder these customs and spiritual beliefs were not studied in an academic sense. They were learned in a traditional sense and portrayed as accurately as I could.
Joseph Marshall III: In a sense I've been conducting research all of my life because of the stories and information I've heard from Lakota people, especially the elders; and I have lived the life of a traditional Lakota. I am a first language Lakota speaker and I think that Native American writers who actually speak their native language are few in number.
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