Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: The Nature of the Land-Holding Group Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 7 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 14:31:16 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 05:53:18 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 05:53:18

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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302 a into many aspects of recent and early Indian life and has some feeling for the Indian “flavor,” “point of view,” or “ethos.” U:. less he has made a special effort to understand aboriginal con. ditions through use of historic documents, however, it does no: at all follow that he is an expert on the subject. While fame may come to a scientist only in his later year:, surveys have shown that one’s greatest achievement in most fields of endeavor including science are generally made by the age of thirty. My plea here is that my colleagues in anthropol. . give full credit, where credit is due, to the witnesses in these cases without regard to age, fame, or field of specialization. 5. Objectives. It should be possible to further a common understanding among those working on the litigation cases. Th. does not mean that agreement can be reached nor that it need b. reached. What is more important is a recognition and clarific.. tion of the areas of disagreement. If anthropology is to maintain a scientific standing in these cases it must recognize that it would be truly embarrassing we: persons holding identical theoretical views to interpret the san: body of evidence in opposite ways because they happened to be witnesses for opposing sides in a particular case. Sympathy fo: the Indians or the taxpayer, monetary considerations, and other factors perhaps subtly influence the witness, but I would like to think that they are insignificant, that the cynical statement made to me by one of the lawyers for a Plaintiff that “of course witnes suppressed, twisted, and misinterpreted evidence in order to w1' their cases" is not true. I would like to think that my colleague: do not hold with the allegation made by counsel for the Plaintiffs in two cases that my very credibility and honesty were in questi: The personal unpleasantness does not matter. What is crucially important is that the failure to clarify reasons for disagreement between witnesses — and in some cases to show that there is really very little disagreement — discredits Anthropology as 4 science, confuses anthropologists themselves, and must certainly # leave the Commission in great doubt as to what the truth is. Ethnohisto-, Yo( 2 NATURE OF THE LAND-HOLDING GROUP A. L. Kroeber University of California at Berkeley The proposition is herewith submitted that more often than not in native North America the land-owning and sovereign political society was not what we usually call “the tribe,” but smaller anits. I What are generally denominated tribes really are small nationalities, possessing essentially uniform speech and customs and therefore an accompanying sense of likeness and likeminded-ness, which in turn tended to prevent serious dissensions or internal conflicts. The genuinely political units were smaller units — corresponding rather to what it is customary to loosely call “bands” or-“villages.” These were de facto self-governing, and it was they that each owned a particular territory, rather than that the nationality owned the over-all territory. Ordinarily, the nationality, miscalled tribe, was only an aggregate of miniature sovereign states normally friendly to one another. Comparing small things to great ones, an Indian so-called “tribe” was therefore likely to be much in the condition of the pre-1871 Germans who undoubtedly constituted a nationality in view of their common speech, culture, and ideology, but remained divided into 26 sovereign states. The events of history in 1871 i converted this German nationality also into a German nation and ‘state — as corresponding events produced about the same time an Italian national state. = LYRE ERE TERT RS eee eto Bs St ze, FER Denti ead Pa aa af