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Abalone Tales by Les Field (6 pages)
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Page: of 6
He
at silence Native voices. Eliciting and elaborating Native standards of
craftsmanship, beauty, proportionality, symmetry, and utility (among
other qualitative measures), as Lila O’Neale (1932) first demonstrated
among Native groups in Northern California, has transformed anthropological approaches to and understanding of non-Western aesthetics.
Mari Lyn Salvador (1997) and Carol Hendrickson (1995) provide excellent recent examples of ethnoaesthetic work among the Kuna of Panama
and Kakchikel communities in Guatemala, respectively, that resulted
from collaborative research projects between anthropologists and Native artists. Ainu intellectuals and leaders contributed their own texts
to the final volume edited by William Fitzhugh and Chisato Dubreuil
(1999). Yet for all the strengths and insights of ethnoaesthetic work, the
pot I am stirring here is not entirely composed of aesthetic ingredients,
_and it is important to deploy an eclectic approach. From the materialist
angle, Marxist approaches to material culture often hinge on the concept
of “the fetishism of commodities.” This concept has generally been used
in a reductionist, even dismissive, manner that does not help to illuminate Native concepts about sacred objects. By contrast, Jean-Paul
Sartre’s notion of “interanimation” explains that when individuals and
their social groups focus emotional and symbolic energy on material
objects, the objects may in turn come to be seen not only as repositories
of that energy but also as capable of reflecting that energy back upon and
to human beings. Sherry Ortner (1979: 96, 98) calls such objects “summarizing symbols” in that they are clustered, condensed, and saturated
with affective meaning and “synthesize or ‘collapse’ complex experience,
and relate the respondent to the grounds of the system of the whole.”
The elegance of such approaches notwithstanding, Keith Basso’s work
with sacred places has called for anthropologists and others “to come to
grips with the indigenous forms” through which sacred objects or places
are understood and experienced and the “shared symbolic vehicles” that
shape Native understanding of objects and places and “facilitate {their]
communication” (Basso 1996: 109). Basso appears doubtful that anthropologists have had much success in that endeavor heretofore. Likewise,
Victor Turner (1982: 18) has expressed a pessimism about non-Natives’
attempts to analyze Native concepts of place and object, observing that
sacred objects can be “impenetrable to total rational understanding,” no
matter how appealing ideas such as “interanimation” and “summarizing
38 Artifact, Narrative, Genocide
symbols” may be for academic minds. Nevertheless, anthropological
and other scholarly fascination with Native concepts of object and place
has not diminished. In that light it is impossible to overestimate the
allure for non-Native scholars of newer approaches, which appear to
determine once and for all that Native symbolic systems can be understood as naturalizations of social constructions. The disjuncture between Native and non-Native scholarly worldviews has been eloquently
summarized by the Lakota scholar Craig Howe (personal communication 2003), who asks: In the absence of human beings, would sacred
objects (or places) have power? Howe argues that the non-Native response would inevitably be “no.” He adds that the Native response, by
contrast, would be “potentially.”
In the case of Native Californian regalia, the people with whom I have
worked very much insist that the objects called “regalia” do much more
than reflect and voice the intentions and emotions of their human animators. Regalia are themselves beings for California Indian people, and
what is more, they are sentient beings with agency and destinies linked
to yet distinct from the humans with whom they cohabitate. The interviews with Bradley Marshall and Merv George Sr. in chapter 5 offer
authoritative, as well as eloquent, representations of Native views on this
subject. As a result of specific interactions, . gained some insight into
this issue; these experiences derive from ongoing conversations with
Florence Silva, the person on whom chapter 3 focuses, about two abalone necklaces. .
The first necklace belonged to John Boston, Florence Silva's grandfather, and is described and depicted in Cora Du Bois’s The 1870 Ghost
Dance (1939; see figure 7). This icon assumed a central role in the
Dreamer religion (Bole Maru) rituals Boston practiced, particularly the
Abalone Dance, and its fate has been of some concern to many people. I
have heard from several individuals from other Pomo rancherias that
Boston’s necklace was buried with him, which Florence denies. Nevertheless, all concerned agree that the power of this necklace, its very
being, was intricately interwoven with John Boston himself. Once he
died, no one else could touch, much less use the power of, his necklace,
and its role in the Dreamer religion ended. This was the case for all
regalia used by the followers of the Dreamer religion. An individual item
of regalia belonged to only one person—the person who dreamed that
Muwekma Ohlone Cultural Patrimony 39