I have been away from the project for some time, but I have resumed my journey through the programs of the annual meetings of the American Folklore Society. As discussed in my previous posts, my goal is to gain perspective on the relative presence and absences of work on Native North American studies topics within the AFS and by extension, among folklorists in the United States. The data for the first half of the 1990s is shown below. Participation in the meetings for this period is quite similar to that seen for the full decade of the 1980s.
Percentages (of Native North American-related) presentations for the 1980s as a whole was 2%, with a variation ranging between 1% and 4%. For the first half of the 1990s, the five year percentage was 3% with yearly ranges of 2%-5%. This small increase is primarily attributable to three factors that I identify in closing. The 1991 annual meeting in St. John’s was a joint meeting with the Folklore Studies Association of Canada and it seems clear to me that additional presentations by members of that peer-organization made the difference for that year. I do not do not see any specific factors accounting for the 3% in 1992, when AFS met in Jacksonville. As measured by presentation of papers and films, that meeting was large for a non-joint, non-bicentennial meeting. In contrast to 1992, the program for the 1993 meeting in Eugene shows that a very concerted effort was made by organizers to spotlight Native North America-related papers and topics. Seven panels (some were round-tables and thus not reflected in these counts) specifically related to Native North American issues were organized and several Native American individuals appeared on the program, particularly as guests for free-form discussion events. Finally, the 1994 meetings in Milwaukee were held jointly with the Society for Ethnomusicology and it is clear that presentations by ethnomusicologists on Native North American studies topics raised the total for this meeting in a way that was key. (The 1994 meeting was the first that I attended as a member of the AFS and I presented at that this meeting contributing to the N=18 shown below. It was at that meeting that I met my friend and collaborator Victoria Levine, although I knew her writings before then. With so many happy associations with the 1994 meeting, I am happy to pause here with it.)
I will finish the 1990s as soon as I am able.
Year
Presentations on Non-Native American Topics
Presentations on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
1990
362
6
2%
1991
301
8
3%
1992
417
13
3%
1993
383
20
5%
1994
447
18
4%
Totals
1910
65
3%
Presentations on Non-Native North American- and Native North American-Related Topics at the Annual Meetings of the American Folklore Society in the First Half of the 1990s (1990-1994)
Less than 100 papers were presented at the American Folklore Society meetings in the decade of 1900-1909. More than 3500 papers and films were presented during the decade of 1980-1989. This huge number does not include forums and other discussion events where named participants were not identified with a titled presentation. That fact means that the programs for the meetings of the 1980s are still larger than the papers + films count suggests. And it is clear that attendance, as in earlier periods, was greater that the count of members and non-members on the program. This pattern will continue in the decades to come in this survey–the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010. What this means practically is that it is now taking me a long time to slog through each program for each year of each decade remaining to survey.
This post is the next in a series examining the presence and absence of Native North American/First Nations topics and scholars within the work of the American Folklore Society across its history since 1888. Anyone finding this post who might want more context can work their way backwards through the series. A partial index to the relevant posts is available here: https://jasonbairdjackson.com/2020/11/02/organizing-the-material-so-far-native-north-american-studies-and-afs/. One post fits in between that overview and this post, a combined treatment of the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) and the annual meeting for the decade of 1900-1909. Remaining to be done are the annual meetings for the most recent period in AFS history.
The amazing growth in involvement evoked in the prelude here should encourage anyone interested in the dynamic expansion of the field of folklore studies. Having just finished reading the titles for 3563 conference papers I can testify that the expansion of the society ran alongside an expansion of topical interests being pursued by folklorists. Exploring that in depth is off topic, but the bigger disciplinary picture is there to be seen. In discussing the 1970s I described that decade as the one where AFS got big. The big 1970s were basically doubled in the bigger 1980s. The number of papers and films nearly doubled between the 1980s. With an increase in forums, I think that it is safe to estimate that the 1980s simply doubled the 1970s in meeting participation. In discussing the 1970s, I highlighted the special impact of the bicentennial (1776-1976) of the present-day United States as a key historical factor for that decade. Here in the 1980s, the big story was the centennial of the AFS celebrated in 1988 and 1989. The table shows how those were big years.
All of that is good for an AFS and folklore studies partisan. It is somewhat beside the point for my topic. For the decade, a small overall increase (N=8) in papers related to Native North American/First Nations can be seen when comparing the 1980s (N=85) to the 1970s (N=77). But the great increase in overall participation means that as a percentage of program participation, Native North American studies work falls from 4% to 2% for the decade. Study of the table shows that the variation across the decade is very small, with the percentage ranging from 1% to 4%.
Year
Presentations on Non-Native American Topics
Presentations on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
1980
302
6
2%
1981
253
10
4%
1982
298
12
4%
1983
323
8
2%
1984
294
6
2%
1985
349
9
3%
1986
383
8
2%
1987
379
11
3%
1988
437
5
1%
1989
460
10
2%
Totals
3478
85
2%
Presentations on Non-Native North American- and Native North American-Related Topics at the Annual Meetings of the American Folklore Society During the 1980s.
The 1987 meetings were held in Albuquerque, thus close to a number of federally-recognized Native American nations. That fact did not register in a broad way on the program, but there were a noticeable number of presenters who are not regular AFS attendees and there were a several papers dealing specifically with issues relevant to the Pueblo of Zuni. Among the presenters was Calbert Seciwa (Zuni), a Zuni scholar and the Director of the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals at Northern Arizona University at the time of his passing in 2009. He had previously served as he served as the Director of the American Indian Institute at Arizona State University from 1989 to 2007. (I am unaware of any other members of Federally recognized Native North American nations or First Nations participating in the annual meetings of the 1980s, but it would be easy for me not to catch some, particularly if they presented on topics outside Native North American/First Nations studies. I welcome information on this point.)
One final note. The overall numbers of presentations on Native North American/First Nations topics would be lower if papers in history of the field were excluded from the totals. The AFS centennial prompted historical research on the field and that led to scholars who are not themselves scholars of Native North American studies taking time to consider figures in the field whose focus was in this field. The paper most relevant to the project in these posts is a paper given by Claire Farrer at the centennial meetings in 1888. Her topic was “Reflections of Ourselves: Native American Folklore Scholarship 1888-1988.”
This is another post in a series devoted to better understanding the place of Native North American and First Nations studies within the field of folklore studies as represented in the present-day United States by the work of the American Folklore Society (AFS). In a post published here, I itemize the posts in the series so far.
From at least one perspective, 1900-1909 was a kind of high water mark for Native North American work within the American Folklore Society. In the early 20th century, the AFS had a lot of members (in my view), although its leaders constantly stressed the smallness of the membership and stressed the need to grow both members and the number of state and local chapters within which, in those days, most members engaged with the field. There was a relatively small elite of members, both literary and anthropological in orientation, that attended annual meetings and that published substantive articles in the pages of the Journal of American Folklore (JAF). During the 1900-1909 decade, two such elite members were Native North American men–William Jones (Sauk) and Frances La Flesche (Omaha).
Jones was the first Native American to earn a PhD in Anthropology and one of the first to earn this degree at all in the United States. He undertook extensive research among his own people–the Sauk and closely related Meskwaki (Fox)–but also other groups speaking related Central Algonquian languages. He published widely and during his lifetime he published two papers in the JAF. Two additional JAF papers were published posthumously. His first JAF paper is “Episodes in the Culture-Hero Muth of the Sauks and Foxes in JAF #55 (1901). His second paper, “The Algonkin Manitou” appeared in JAF #70 in 1905. He also published reviews in JAF during his lifetime. Sadly, in an episode that has been widely considered in the history of anthropology, he was killed in 1908 while conducting research as a Field Museum curator among the Ilongot people in the Philippines. An unsigned obituary, likely written by his mentor Franz Boas, appears at the end of the decade in JAF #84 (1909). Despite the racism of his day, I do not have any difficulty imagining William Jones having been the President of the American Folklore Society. Many of Boas’ former students, both male and female, came in time to fill this role. Among them Jones was particularly engaged in folk narrative research and he was widely admired. His death remains a vividly felt loss. When I position Jones as an leading member of the AFS in this decade, I include the fact that he was one of a very small number of members to actually present a paper at an annual meeting during this period. He delivered a paper titled “Customs and Rites Concerning the Dean Among the Sauks and Foxes” at the 1901 (13th) annual meeting in Chicago, one of sixteen given at that meeting.
Similarly prominent in this time as a working anthropologist and folklorist, although trained formally in law, is Francis La Flesche. Like Jones, he also undertook ethnographic field work among his own people (the Omaha) and among closely related peoples (the Osage and other peoples speaking Degihan langauges). The JAF volume for 1905 featured Jones’ Manitou paper and, in the next issue, La Flesche’s “Who was the Medicine Man?”. With his research collaborator (and soon-to-be AFS’s first female president) Alice C. Fletcher, he also presented a paper on “Military Insignia of the Omaha” at the 14th Annual Meeting of the AFS, held jointly with the American Anthropological Association and the anthropological section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, DC at the end of 2002 and the beginning days of 2003. While La Flesche did not become an AFS officer, he clearly could have as reflected in his Presidency of the Anthropological Society of Washington (1922-1923) and his 1922 election to National Academy of Sciences (a high honor then, as now).
A reoccurring theme in these posts, I will address the tiny group of prominent Native North American folklorists in a separate concluding post. Here, I just wish to underline that the 1900s (111 to 120 years ago was the apparent peak moment for such involvement in the society, as represented by the participation in both meetings and the JAF of both Jones and La Flesche during the decade. Ella Deloria (Dakota) would publish in JAF in the 1920s and Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Mohegan) would present at the meetings once in that decade, but as measured by total involvement including three full JAF articles published by La Flesche during his career and four full JAF articles published during (and after) his lifetime by Jones, they, and this decade, really stand out. I hope it is clear that I admire them and that I am frustrating that the best moment in terms of Native American scholars being near the center of the field would be in the first decade of the 20th century. As in previous posts when I touched on the question of Native American participation in the society, I welcome information on Native scholars involved in AFS that I many not be recognizing.
During the 1900s decade, meetings remained small and centered mostly in the Northeastern US. It was common, not just for the AFS, but for scholarly societies in general, to systematically meet in what one annual report refers to as a convocation, in which a significant number of scholarly societies are jointly hosted by a university. The AFS met in such situations multiple times in the 1900s decade. Such meetings often included an overarching welcome by the host university president, break-out meetings for the participating societies, and keynote lectures and receptions held again jointly.
It is important to recall that the AFS was founded fourteen years prior to the founding of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Prior to the founding of the AAA, the Anthropological Society of Washington (ASW) (of which La Flesche would eventually be President) and the anthropology section within the AAAS were the key anthropology organizations. AFS met regularly with the ASW and with AAAS throughout its early history and after the AAA formed, it was added to this mix of regular meeting partners. Once the AAA was in the mix, it became common for there to be an AFS focused day within a multi-day meeting. This would have probably been adaptive for the non-anthropologists who may have wished to take in the AFS portion of the meeting but perhaps not the AAA (etc.) parts. I am guessing about this. With respect to the balance between scholars of Native North American and non-Native North American topics–a distinction that in this decade does map rather closely onto the anthropology/literature distinction–Native American-focused presentations at the annual meetings across the decade were somewhat dominant, but as shown in the first table, there was much variability. The most imbalanced meeting, in 1907, was one of those held jointly with the AAA and AAAS. It was held in Chicago (an emerging hub for anthropology due to the Field Museum), a new development that may have made the meeting more difficult for the New England-centric literary folklorists and appealing to the anthropologists who were in this time increasingly fanning out across the country. The meeting in 1904, where only a small number of papers were given and where the Native studies percentage is at its lowest for the decade, was in Philadelphia during one of the joint meetings that included the still new AAA and AAAS. It is likely that AFS members appeared on the AAA’s program in this context, impacting the figures. How AFS papers are reported in the annual report varies year to year in response to different meeting configurations and other factors.
The 1900s decade is when Boas’ students (both formal and informal) begin to show up in growing numbers and assume leadership roles. Jones has been mentioned here and in previous posts. In the previous decade A. L. Kroeber was present as a student, now he is present as an established figure. He is not only a presenter at meetings and a regular JAF author, but he and colleagues begin the California chapter in this time and it becomes a force within the field. In this period, there is often a dedicated section of the journal presenting papers and notes under this California branch’s auspices. Kroeber followed Alice Fletcher as AFS President, serving in 1906. John Swanton, active starting in this decade, would serve as President in 1909. Other Boas students such as Frank Speck, Robert Lowie, and Edward Sapir–all scholars of Native American topics–entered into the life of the AFS and rose to prominence in it, eventually service as Presidents.
Presentations on Non-Native North American- and Native North American-Related Topics at the Annual Meetings of the American Folklore Society During the 1900s.
As in earlier decades, the JAF picture is distorted by my initial choice (probably a mistaken one) to code notes and articles rather than limiting attention just to full articles. In this period, the JAF often (but not always) published notes that ranged from substantive contributions with a byline to very short items (as short as a couple sentences). As I have noted elsewhere, my inclusion of notes serves to supress the percentages for Native North American topical works, because the smaller notes are weighted towards items related to Non-Native North American folklore topics. I am just guessing, but it seems likely that in the decade of the 1900s, the ratio for sunstantive Native and Non-Native North American content in the journal might have been about 50/50 rather than the decade-based 39% presented in the table below.
Year
Published Papers and Notes on Non-Native American Topics
Published Papers and Notes on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
1900
21
17
45%
1901
32
18
36%
1902
45
15
25%
1903
43
18
30%
1904
18
17
49%
1905
17
16
48%
1906
30
16
35%
1907
24
18
43%
1908
16
18
53%
1909
16
18
53%
Totals
262
171
39%
JAF Publications on Non-Native North American and Native North American-Related Topics During 1900s.
Early volumes of the JAF are available without a paywall from JSTOR, thus I end by suggesting that anyone who has made it this far read the brief obituary published for William Jones in #84. Find it here. It is unsigned but his mentor Franz Boas was the editor of JAF at the time and knew him well, suggesting to me that he is the likely author of the obituary.
The posts on the presence and absence of Native North American and First Nations studies within the work of the AFS were done in a non-sequential way. Several more chunks remain to be done, but here is a historically sequenced listing of the posts completed as of November 2, 2020.
The two most recent posts in this series considered the state of Native North American and First Nations studies within the American Folklore Society (AFS) through the lens of the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) for the 1980s and 1990s and then the 2000s and 2010s. While the meetings for those years still need attention, I here jump back to the first years of the society to consider both the annual meetings of the AFS and the JAF from the society’s founding in 1888 to 1899. To preserve the decade by decade approach taken in the series, I will tackle 1888 and 1889 first and then 1890 to 1899. In these early years, meetings were small and they were reported on directly within a comprehensive annual report of the AFS published right in the pagers of the journal, making it very easy to tackle the meetings while surveying the JAF.
Readers of these posts will have noted the two story lines–the story of presence and absence of Native North American folklore studies content within the meetings and journal on the one hand and the presence and (mostly) absence of Native North American scholars present within these two AFS domains. Before getting to the meetings and journal overall, I can note that one Native American scholar, Francis La Flesche of the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska and Iowa, appears prominently in this period, authoring major articles for the JAF in 1889 and in 1890. While a large proportion of the papers appear in JAF during this time period were also presented at the annual meetings, this is not the case for Frances La Flesche. If he attended any AFS meetings in this period, it is not evident from the annual reports. It is important to note that in this period the membership was surprisingly large and attendance at the meetings was not. There were many regional societies and La Flesche could have attended meetings of these at various points. I am unaware of other Native North American JAF authors or annual meeting presenters for these years. I welcome additional information on this point.
Because in this time period, meetings presentations often went quickly into the journal, I will present meeting data first and the JAF data. Founded in 1888, the first AFS meeting happened in 1889.
Year
Presentations on Non-Native American Topics
Presentations on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
1889
11
2
15%
Total
11
2
15%
Presentations on Non-Native North American- and Native North American-Related Topics at the Annual Meetings of the American Folklore Society During the 1880s.
Here is the meeting data for the 1890s.
Year
Presentations on Non-Native American Topics
Presentations on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
1890
12
7
37%
1891
4
11
73%
1892
7
9
56%
1893
10
1
9%
1894
11
6
35%
1895
8
11
58%
1896
9
4
31%
1897
17
4
19%
1898
7
5
42%
1899
7
5
42%
Totals
92
63
41%
Presentations on Non-Native North American- and Native North American-Related Topics at the Annual Meetings of the American Folklore Society During the 1890s.
Late in the meetings of the 1890s, we see the person whom I think is the first true folklore graduate student enter the scene. If one attends an AFS meeting today, one will encounter a lot of graduate students and many of them will be presenting on the conference program. One might wonder if students always did this. I cannot answer that question here beyond noting that in 1998 and again in 1899, we see precedent in the person of A. L. (Alfred) Kroeber. Then a doctoral student working with Franz Boas at Columbia University, Kroeber presented on Inuit tales in 1898 and on his own studies among the Arapaho in 1899. He earned his PhD at Columbia in 1901, the first granted in anthropology from that university. He would go on to publish many items in JAF over the years and that first paper would be his first published in JAF, a year later in 1899 (#44) Just eight years later, in 1906 (five years past his PhD) he would serve as AFS President.
In later years, the issue of joint meetings and the ways that they would serve different parts of the society more or less well would become an issue. For the initial years, this does not seem to have been an issue. Most meetings seemed to happen independently, but in 1891 the AFS met in Washington in partnership with the Anthropological Society of Washington and the Women’s Anthropological Society. AFS returned to Washington with similar partners in 1894. In 1893, the branch of AFS in Montreal hosted. In 1899 AFS met at Yale at the same time as a large group of scientific societies. As in other early decades of the AFS, meetings were frequently rotated between a small number of cities in the Northeast.
Reporting on the JAF in the early years is difficult because in those days regular papers were published but so were very short notes, questions, and ephemeral observations, including sometimes items noticed in the popular press. I have not carefully studied every item, leaving room for mis-codeing. For most of this period, AFS is in a pre-professional or proto-professional state, with some professionals (like Boas) holding advanced degrees and some not doing so. Some folklorists were professionals in other fields, such as medicine. There is variability that would diminish after 1900. The anthropologists/literature scholar division is present in a more nebulous form and the interests of the early 20th century are all present, with an anthropological approach underpinning the extensive amount of work on Native American topics being addressed, with missionaries and travelers reporting on other parts of the world, and literary-minded scholars and antiquarians mainly working on the traditions of other peoples within the present-day United States. The anthropological scholars did also do work on non-Native cultural traditions, as when James Mooney published on the European settlers of Western North Carolina as an adjunct to his work among the Cherokee there. The numbers below reflect the presence of all of those small items in the journal. Such small bits tended to relate to non-Native peoples more than Native ones and Native studies work tended to appear in more fully formed papers.
Year
Published Papers and Notes on Non-Native American Topics
Published Papers and Notes on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
1888
24
31
56%
1889
47
40
45%
Totals
71
71
50%
JAF Publications on Non-Native North American and Native North American-Related Topics During 1880s.
The 1890s for JAF follow.
Year
Published Papers and Notes on Non-Native American Topics
Published Papers and Notes on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
1890
50
22
31%
1891
49
22
31%
1892
54
21
28%
1893
46
18
28%
1894
42
10
19%
1895
45
11
20%
1896
32
11
26%
1897
33
11
25%
1898
32
9
22%
1899
53
9
15%
Totals
436
144
25%
JAF Publications on Non-Native North American and Native North American-Related Topics During 1890s.
Carrying forward from the previous post on the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) during the 1980s and 1990s, my focus here is the presence and absence of Native North American and First Nations scholarship (and scholars) in JAF during the 2000s and 2010s. Later posts will circle bask to look at the annual meetings of the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.
I have no special interest stories for the 2000s. The first table here presents the data for this decade. Keep in mind what I have noted previously for the post-1940s world. A significant proportion of the (now) small number of the Native North American studies items published in JAF during this period are smaller notes and not full articles. Also in this broader period, I am counting obituaries, including them in the Native North American count when the scholar remembered was wholly or mainly a scholar of Native North American matters. These factors inflate a count that here, in the 2010s, reaches a new low-water mark of 4% of JAF content. No JAF authors for the 2000s are known to me to have been enrolled citizens of federally recognized Native North American/First Nations nations. I welcome corrections if this understanding is in error.
Year
Published Papers and Notes on Non-Native American Topics
Published Papers and Notes on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
2000
22
1
4%
2001
21
0
0%
2002
22
1
4%
2003
21
1
5%
2004
28
1
3%
2005
25
1
4%
2006
20
2
9%
2007
12
1
8%
2008
19
1
5%
2009
18
0
0%
Totals
208
9
4%
JAF Publications on Non-Native North American- and Native North American-Related Topics During the 2000s.
The 2010s are presented in the next table, below. Here we see, as began to happen occasionally in the 1960s, runs of multiple years of JAF without publication of Native North American studies works occur. The most notable thing to happen in this decades, related to my topic, is the publication in 2013 of a special issue of JAF focused on Native North American studies. That is how the out of the ordinary count of four items and 22% came about. I happen to be one of those four authors. In the year in which the 500th number of the journal would be published, the editors recruited authors for a series of theme issues. In recognition of the historical importance of Native North American studies within the society and in the journal and, I think, recognizing the decline that my posts are tracking, they cultivated this special issue. I was honored to participate in it. It created a retro moment and provided a historical reminder of how things once were, but you will note that the three following years saw no cognate content, thus the four items in 2013 could have been spread out between 2013 and 2016 to produce a very typical looking table for the recent period. From 4% in the 2000s we move to 3% in the 2010s, despite the publication of a dedicated issue on Native North American folklore studies.
To the best of my current knowledge, no JAF author publishing in the 2010s is a member of a federally recognized Native North American nation. I welcome correction on this point.
Year
Published Papers and Notes on Non-Native American Topics
Published Papers and Notes on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
2010
18
0
0%
2011
22
1
4%
2012
21
0
0%
2013
14
4
22%
2014
20
0
0%
2015
23
0
0%
2016
22
0
0%
2017
22
1
4%
2018
34
0
0%
2019
28
0
0%
Totals
224
6
3%
JAF Publications on Non-Native North American- and Native North American-Related Topics During the 2010s.
Just to round out the available data, here is a final table for the first year of the 2020s, our own dreaded present moment. In the 2010s, it was more common for a year to feature no Native North American studies content than to include such content. This default setting zero pattern has occurred again this year, as shown below.
Years
Published Papers and Notes on Non-Native American Topics
Published Papers and Notes on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
2020
24
0
0%
Totals
24
0
0%
JAF Publications on Non-Native North American- and Native North American-Related Topics During 2020.
In this post I continue considering the absence and presence of Native North American and First Nations studies within the work of the American Folklore Society. Please look at earlier (and future) posts in the series to gain context for what is being examined here. In the earlier years of the society, the journal contained more content than the annual meeting and thus was the harder of the two venues to scan and assess. Over time, this dynamic reversed and by the later 20th century, AFS meetings were huge relative to the journal. With help from JSTOR, studying the journal is a relatively simple and quick task (setting aside the coding questions that I have mentioned previously). It will take more time to work through the more recent meetings. In this context, I polish off the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) through 2020 in this post and one that will follow it for the 2000s and 2010s.
The JAF data for the 1980s (6%) and 1990s (5%) is not radically different from the JAF data for the 1960s (5%) and 1970s (5%). The plateau continues. Here first is the JAF table for the 1980s. As you consider the 1950s-1990s plateau, recall that the JAF percentage for Native North American studies content in the 1920s was 31%.
Year
Published Papers and Notes on Non-Native American Topics
Published Papers and Notes on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
1980
26
2
7%
1981
23
0
0%
1982
16
0
0%
1983
18
1
5%
1984
20
3
13%
1985
17
2
11%
1986
20
0
0%
1987
28
4
13%
1988
19
1
5%
1989
20
0
0%
Totals
207
13
6%
JAF Publications on Non-Native North American- and Native North American-Related Topics at During the 1980s.
In this series I have been trying to track not only the presence and absence of Native North American and First Nations studies scholarship within the field of folklore studies as practiced in the United States and as represented by the work of the American Folklore Society, I have also been considering the presence and absence of Native North American and First Nations scholars within, and intersectional to, this field. As the field of Native American and Indigenous studies is presently constituted in the United States and as laws such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 and the Native Programs Act of 1974, as amended, work, Native Hawaiian people have a standing like but not the same as federally recognized Native North American nations within the present-day US. I mention these contexts because, to the best of my knowledge, ethnomusicologist and hula scholar Amy Ku’uleialoha Stillman is a Native Hawaiian person and a JAF author in this study period (issue 434, 1996). I hope that Professor Ku’uleialoha Stillman will forgive me and correct me if I have misperceived and misrepresented this delicate matter. I am thrilled that she chose to share her work with the JAF readership and I hope that she contributes to the journal again. The larger point is that Native North American, First Nations, and Native Hawaiian colleagues continued to be virtually non-existent in the work of the AFS as reflected in the JAF during the decades that have been reviewed.
The table for the 1990s follows below.
Year
Published Papers and Notes on Non-Native American Topics
Published Papers and Notes on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
1990
18
1
5%
1991
17
0
0%
1992
19
2
10%
1993
12
0
0%
1994
21
1
5%
1995
21
1
5%
1996
19
1
5%
1997
16
1
6%
1998
21
1
5%
1999
26
3
10%
Totals
190
11
5%
JAF Publications on Non-Native North American- and Native North American-Related Topics at During the 1990s.
Here is the next in my series on the presence and absence of Native North American and First Nations studies in the work of the American Folklore Society, as a representative of the field of folklore studies in the present-day United States.
In the first table here, I present (using the same format as in earlier posts) data from the annual meetings of the AFS during the 1970s. (At the end of this post, I note some methodological issues to keep in mind when considering my gathering of meeting and Journal of American Folklore (JAF) data.) I want to call attention to two meetings specifically. From a Native American studies perspective, 1974 is the noteworthy meeting. What was going on then? I do not want to give all of the credit to Dell Hymes, but this can be seen as a very Hymes-inflected meeting. He was AFS president and he gave his presidential address at this meeting, which was held in his beloved home town of Portland and in the state where his studies among Native American peoples were centered. His address took account of these matters and emphasized the study of Native American verbal art of the region. Adding to the synergy was the fact that Barre Toelken, the other senior folklorist of that era focused (in large part, but not completely) on Native North American studies, was central to the organization of this meeting.
In addition to Hymes’ lecture and his influence on the meeting, there are some other distinctive features of the 1974 gathering. It included individuals and events that were not typical of AFS gatherings. Hymes chaired a session on “The Use of Folklore in the Education of Indian Students.” Panel discussions are not included in my meeting data unless each participant was given a title-like discussion topic. That is not the case for this session (thus it is not counted in the first table below), but the event is noteworthy and needs to be surfaced. Participating in the event were Barre Toelken, Jarrold Ramsey, Larry George, Deni Leonard, Bruce Rigsby, Rayna Green, and Alfonso Ortiz. On this panel, businessman Deni Leonard is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservations of Oregon and anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz was a member of the Indigenous nation of Northern (present-day) New Mexico now known as Ohkay Owingeh. I believe the Larry George participating was a Yakama Nation artist. I mention the panel for the obvious reason that it platformed these Native (and non-Native) people to explore a significant social issue of relevance to the field and to communities.
The 1974 meeting also included a panel related to the federally recognized Nez Perce Tribe (of present-day North Central Idaho) and among those presenting Native studies oriented papers was Richard Dauenhauer, who devoted his life to work on Tlingit language revitalization, history, and literature. Not Tlingit by birth, he was married to Tlingit poet and scholar Nora Marks Dauenhauer and clearly, over his lifetime, became extraordinarily involved in Tlingit national life.
The other meeting that will stick out when scanning the table is 1976. Participation on the program for that meeting in Philadelphia was very large. I do not have a fully developed account for this, but I note that this was the bicentennial year for the US and it is generally understood within the field that that year was one of special intensity for this reason, with a huge amount of disciplinary activity. In addition to being held in a city relevant to the bicentennial theme, it was a meeting held in a folklorist-dense region in a folklorist-dense city. The meeting was held in coordination with the Society for Ethnomusicology, but the impact of that is not particularly evident from the AFS meeting program. The meeting was not particularly strong on Native American studies work, but like most meetings in the 1970s, it had a dedicated panel gathering together work in this area, with a few more papers appearing elsewhere on the program.
Films (later also videos) were a prominent part of the meetings during the 1970s and 1971 is of special relevance to this project in this aspect. In that year, two films on Navajo subjects appeared on the program. Both were by Navajo film makers. I cannot tell if they were in attendance (This source suggests that this is unlikely). The films were A Navajo Weaver by Susie Bennally and Intrepid Shadows by Alfred Chah. The context for these films is pretty well known and the connection is obvious on the program, as Sol Worth was present and listed as a discussant. These two films belong to a group of films arising from the visual anthropology project reported in the book Through Navajo Eyes and various articles by Worth and John Adair.
In general, the pattern for the 1970s was for there to be one, sometimes two, omnibus panels of 4-5 talks under a heading such as American Indian Folklore (later becoming Native American Folklore). A few of the scholars participating in such panels are widely known (in addition to Toelken, I highlight Claire Farrer and Margaret Brady), but most are not or, if they are well-known, it is for other work on non-Native topics. In this period, we also see a new dynamic emerge in which broad-focus, community-based public folklorists can be seen working across a diverse communities in their home regions and, along the way, making connections and gaining understandings of Native American traditional and expressive culture in a way that is not superficial but that is also not the same being solely focused. A clear example of this during the 1970s is James Griffith’s growing connection to Arizona Native communities. (ex: 1976).
Year
Presentations on Non-Native American Topics
Presentations on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
1970
95
9
9%
1971
91
6
6%
1972
128
7
5%
1973
124
6
5%
1974
131
17
11%
1975
195
6
3%
1976
319
9
3%
1977
190
4
2%
1978
194
6
3%
1979
294
7
2%
Total
1761
77
4%
Presentations on Non-Native North American- and Native North American-Related Topics at the Annual Meetings of the American Folklore Society During the 1970s.
The pages of the JAF contain one special story alongside more evidence of the general trend. In Toelken’s first issue as editor (#343 for 1974), he published a paper titled “Coyote Tales: A Paiute Commentary” by Judy Trejo. Ms Trejo was then a student at the College of Idaho and she would go on to become noted for her recordings of, and her performances of, Paiute ancestral music and for service as a teacher among her people. I recommend her article to you. By way of context, Toelken wrote:
This paper inaugurates a new policy of encouraging the bearers of tradition to add their own critical comments to the ongoing study of folklore. Especially to the members of those ethnic minority groups who have been scrutinized and dissected exoterically do we extend a standing invitation to provide our profession with their perspectives.
An LA Times obituary for Ms. Trejo reports that she was enrolled in the Walker River Paiute Tribe but it may be that she was enrolled at the Summit Lake Paiute Tribe. The near complete and very regrettable absence of Native American people from the twentieth century work of the society and field make episodes such as this one particularly instructive. Toelken’s intervention at the level of the journal should be studied more and considered in light of present work aimed at diversifying both the society and the journal, a theme to which I hope to return at the end of this series.
At 5% for the 1970s, the rough count for the decade roughly matches that for the 1960s. For the time being then, the decline for the journal has plateaued while, for the meetings, the larger population of attendees (and thus the size of the active field) seems to have contributed to a modest increase (2% to 4%) in presentations related to Native North American studies. The table for the JAF follows.
Year
Published Papers and Notes on Non-Native American Topics
Published Papers and Notes on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
1970
48
1
2%
1971
39
3
7%
1972
36
1
3%
1973
47
0
0%
1974
36
1
3%
1975
35
3
8%
1976
24
2
8%
1977
24
3
11%
1978
25
2
7%
1979
27
2
7%
Total
341
18
5%
JAF Publications on Non-Native North American- and Native North American-Related Topics During the 1970s.
Caveats–Keep in mind that the scratch paper counting that I am doing is imperfect–more imperfect than it would be in a formal inquiry based on a rigorous approach to coding. I am doing this fast and questions can arise that I not attending to except in on the fly deciding. The whole effort would need to be redone on the basis of experience to reduce this aspect. Here are a couple of examples to stand as a warning. During the 1970s, the AFS annual meetings programs gained abstracts. These can help clarify the nature of an ambiguous title or to determine if a scholar known for work in Native American studies was, in a particular instance, actually speaking about this topic. An example of ambiguity can be found in 1970, where Roger Welch spoke at the annual meeting about Omaha foodways. Given his career, this could equally have been a discussion of the foodways found in the city of Omaha or among the people of the federally recognized Omaha Tribe of Nebraska and Iowa. I counted this talk in the “Native Studies” column, but deeper research could prove this to have been the wrong choice. It is an example. Were I to start over again, I would categorically exclude obituaries from consideration, but I decided early on to include them in the Native studies column if the scholar being remembered was fully or primarily focused in Native North American/First Nations studies. My thinking then was that a person working in this field would likely be as interested to read such an item as one by the scholar being remembered. Obituaries by scholars not working in Native Studies or working in it only marginally (as with minor work by European tales scholars on Native American borrowings of European tales) were included in the non-Native group. Colleagues following behind me would surely take a somewhat different approach and get somewhat different numbers. I think that the trends would remain the same.
Here again is a post from my series considering the presence and absence of Native North American and First Nations studies work within the intellectual life of the field of folklore studies as represented in the United States by the American Folklore Society (AFS). This account of the 1960s focuses on work published in the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) in that decade. It is a companion to the fourth post in the series (on Native American and First Nations studies at the AFS annual meetings of the 1960s) and it extends the preceding post on JAF in the 1950s. The decade being considered here, as noted in the third post, began with the birth of the AFS Fellows in 1960.
For JAF in the 1960s, there really is not anything new to say that has not already been said. William Fenton published his presidential address (on Haudenosaunee cosmology,) already mentioned, in 1962. There are odds and ends but the field and the journal was growing decreasingly relevant to scholars of Native North America as both cultural anthropology and folklore studies diversified in terms of interest and as folklore studies began to shift more quickly away from the anthropology/literature binary towards something more muddled and complicated. A careful scholar of Native American studies who was tracking down works of significance for their own projects would need to go and retrieve X or Y article from JAF, but I think it is safe to say that, by the 1960s, it is not essential reading for such a scholar and also that it was no longer essential reading for cultural anthropologists in general, even as key scholars in the field continued to publish significant works in its pages. In a way, these trends can be seen as generic across post-WWII scholarly activity, reflecting the dramatic growth and diversification of scholarship in Anglophone North America–more journals, more topics, more specialization…
Study of the right column in the table shows that the situation in the second half of the decade was worse than at the start and that the initial years are thus propping up the later ones. Especially when it comes to journal publication, content moves slowly through the pipeline and disciplines do not turn on dimes. Scholarly habits and loyalties change slowly, but the 1960s really mark the end of an old order and the start of a new one. I see Fenton’s presidency and address as one of the last key moments of the older era and the 1968 AFS meetings as a dramatic start to the new era. Paradoxically, Dell Hymes is the figure who both embodies a continuity from, and a transformation of, the era that functionally ends in the 1960s.
Once again, it is my sad task to report that none of the authors of the seventeen articles and notes related, I deem, to Native North American or First Nations studies in the JAF numbers of the 1960s are known to me to have been citizens of Native North American nations. Please correct me if you know me to be in error. I can say that the 1970s brings one happy story on this front. Stay tuned.
Year
Published Papers and Notes on Non-Native American Topics
Published Papers and Notes on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
1960
33
3
8%
1961
43
2
4%
1962
33
3
8%
1963
30
3
9%
1964
28
4
13%
1965
37
0
0%
1966
35
2
5%
1967
32
0
0%
1968
28
0
0%
1969
29
0
0%
Total
328
17
5%
JAF Publications on Non-Native North American- and Native North American-Related Topics at During the 1960s.
In this post, I continue the work of assessing the presence and absence of Native North American and First Nations studies in the work of the American Folklore Society. In this series of post I have also been tracking the (near) absence of Native North American and First Nations scholars in the field as represented by the society. In this post, my focus is the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) during the 1950s. In this focus, the post is a companion to the first in the series, wherein I considered the presence and absence of Native North American and First Nations work at the annual meetings of the 1950s.
The JAF in the 1950s did not call many specific stories to my attention. The total number of papers getting published increased relative to the 1940s. The number of papers on Native American topics remained roughly the same in this context, resulting in a smaller percentage.
Study of the percentages in the right column may strike readers as particularly variable. Particularly instructive is the case of 1958 and 1959. In 1959, the editors of JAF seemingly intervened in the general trend, producing a special theme issue (#284) focused on Native North American and First Nations folklore studies. From the perspective of an editor’s desk, the particularly thin situation in 1958 may have been born out of plans to produce the issue in 1959. Alternatively, 1958 may have set off an alarm relative the decline of this historic area of strength, motivating a special effort in 1959. More study would be required to figure this out. (If this special issue were subtracted from the decade, the picture overall would be even more dramatically impacted.)
Another noteworthy year is 1951. In a way, my count for 1951 is very misleading and the picture is worse than it seems, from a Native North American studies focus. I coded two items in 1951. One is a single page note in Native North American studies. The other is an obituary for a scholar and AFS leader–Frank G. Speck–who devoted his life to work in Native North American studies.
When we look at the papers that were published in JAF during the 1950s related to Native North American studies, it is important to note that such works continued then to be authored by anthropological folklorists trained in, and based in, anthropology. Related is the pattern, continuing in the 1950s, of anthropological folklorists working in other parts of the work (in an ever growing range of settings) publishing in JAF. The 1950s represents a time still preceding autonomous the rise of folkloristics in the United States, although the seeds of that transition were then being planted.
The final point that I will make, in parallel with other posts in the series, is that none of the authors appearing in the JAF in the 1950s are known to me to be citizens of Native North American/First Nations nations. If you know me to be in error on this point, please correct me.
Year
Published Papers and Notes on Non-Native American Topics
Published Papers and Notes on Native American Topics
Percentage on Native American Topics
1950
31
8
21%
1951
50
2
4%
1952
42
6
13%
1953
25
7
22%
1954
30
9
23%
1955
39
9
19%
1956
33
7
18%
1957
37
5
12%
1958
45
1
2%
1959
19
13
41%
Totals
351
67
9%
JAF Publications on Non-Native North American- and Native North American-Related Topics at During the 1950s.
Shreds and Patches 