Seeing Is Believing and Hearing Is Believing: Thoughts on Oral Tradition and the Pectol Shields

By LEE KREUTZER

The cedar interior of the spacious hogan glowed golden, lit up like a paper lantern by late-morning sunlight. Men and women seated themselves on rugs and mattresses along the edges of the room’s sandy floor, embraced by the curved walls of the wood and earthen sanctuary. The faces of these people glowed, too, happy and proud, in anticipation of the ceremony about to begin here. This would be a momentous event for them—and for all Navajos. Three sacred shields, powerful protectors of the Diné people, were about to be welcomed home after an absence of nearly 140 years.

These shields, known as both the Pectol shields and Capitol Reef shields and whose story is told in the previous article by Robert McPherson and John Fahey, were repatriated to the Navajo Nation by the National Park Service in 2003 under the terms of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA). I was the park archeologist for Capitol Reef National Park while the NAGPRA process was unfolding. As such, I evaluated all of the various claims, counter-claims, assessments, and objections submitted by tribal and non-Indian parties. I conducted documentary research, consulted with tribes, archeologists, historians, material culture experts, anthropologists, NAGPRA specialists, curators, and federal solicitors, and I made the recommendation to repatriate the shields.

During that process and since repatriation, the Capitol Reef shields have been the target of more interest and spilled ink than they ever were during the entire seventy-odd years they were on public display and available for scientific inquiry.

Much of this controversy centers on the acceptance of oral tradition as evidence in evaluating the NAGPRA repatriation requests. Oral tradition is information that one generation passes to the next by word of mouth. Such tradition can include narratives of past events, genealogies, instructional stories and myths, songs, prayers, and other kinds of knowledge that are integral to a group’s self-identity. NAGPRA lists various kinds of oral information among the lines of evidence that a federal agency must consider when evaluating a repatriation request. Critics fault NAGPRA for this, dismissing orally transmitted knowledge as storytelling, hearsay, allegory, and even purposeful lies.

The Navajo claim for the three Capitol Reef shields was well publicized and contentious, with most criticism centering on the park’s consideration of Navajo oral tradition in the evaluation process. Interestingly, arguments made by Euro-Americans were qualitatively different from those made by American Indian tribes, even though the central issue was the same: both groups opposed repatriation to the Navajos.

Non-Indians rejected oral tradition altogether and demanded documentary proof of Navajo ownership of the shields (even though the NAGPRA standard is a “preponderance of the evidence”). Some accused the Navajo medicine man of “concocting” his account, designing it carefully around the legal requirements of NAGPRA in order to gain the shields for the tribe’s new museum. These critics saw in oral tradition not only the possibility of error, but also a probability of deliberate falsehood. The only admissible, relevant, and valid kinds of evidence are documentary and scientific data, they maintained. Scientific data pertinent to this matter consisted of radiocarbon dates placing the shields’ construction at between AD 1420 and 1640, the period during which Athabaskan peoples (Navajos and Apaches) likely arrived in the American Southwest. As Robert McPherson and John Fahey recount, the opinions of archeological and material culture experts varied widely. Since the dates and archeological analyses neither proved nor ruled out a Navajo origin for the shields, opponents argued that the very absence of documentation disproved the Navajo tradition.

The Navajos, of course, did not have a written language until relatively recently, so they could not provide such documentation themselves. Any such documentation could only have been created by white men and women during the late nineteenth century. Photographic documentation of the shields in Navajo possession would not exist because they would have hidden the shields during nearly the entire era of the development of field photography. Ethnographic records relating to Navajo use of the shields would not exist because the Navajos would have lost the shields long before the first academic anthropologists began systematically studying their culture—and there is little reason to believe that medicine men would have discussed this particular matter with anthropologists, anyway. Therefore, the absence of documentary evidence does not necessarily weigh against the Navajo claim.

Other tribes opposed the Navajo repatriation request and entered their own competing claims for the shields. Unlike non-Indian critics, they did not object to consideration of oral tradition as a line of evidence, demand written or photographic records, or attack the character of the Navajo medicine man. However, some Indian groups were offended when asked to share sensitive cultural knowledge, even knowing that it could potentially support their own claims for the shields. NAGPRA put those groups at a disadvantage because, for cultural reasons, they could not talk about their religious practices or even speak the names of deceased persons who may have been associated with the shields, whereas the Navajos freely shared such information.

Inter-tribal relations also loomed large: several competing claimants disputed the purported Navajo presence in the area where Pectol found the artifacts, and suspected that the politically powerful Navajo Nation was using the shields to help build a territorial claim to Ute and Paiute homelands in the Capitol Reef area. Mainly, though, the other claimant tribes simply put forward their own best arguments, which I weighed against the Navajo account. These arguments tended to be non-specific not linked to a particular oral tradition that they could share with the National Park Service. The arguments centered on: 1) the group’s spiritual responsibility to a greater power to which, they believed, the shields truly belong, and/or 2) the fact that the shields when discovered were within an area they considered part of their own traditional homelands.

Three of the other claimant tribes, like the Navajos, submitted no documentation in support of their claims, instead preferring face-to-face discussions. Two other tribes, working jointly, mustered what photographic and written descriptive evidence they could in support of their claim. They did so with the assistance of non-tribal professionals, in an effort to meet what they knew were the expectations of federal personnel trying to comply with NAGPRA. Tribal experts themselves, however, preferred oral discussions of spirituality, morality, and culture to make their case.

These patterns raise some interesting questions. Why do Euro-Americans tend to dismiss oral tradition and question the memories of the traditional medicine man? Why do they perceive documents—published ethnography, history, and photographs—as the only meaningful evidence? In addition, why were the challenges mounted by other tribal peoples so qualitatively different from the challenges of Euro-Americans?

The easy answers are unsatisfactory. To point only to racism or the “politics of power” would be a superficial and politicized response to a much deeper, more important sociocultural issue. Why does one cultural group place such value on documentation—what we can see—and mistrust oral information and memory, while another values memory and oral information—what we hold within our own minds and what we can hear—and has little faith in documentation?

Study after study has demonstrated cultural differences in how people use their memories. Try this: think of your earliest memory and figure how old you were when that event or impression occurred. If you are Euro- American, chances are you were three to five years old at the time of your earliest memory.

That kind of early memory is common among members of “Western” societies, those whose cultures are rooted in Greek ways of thinking. However, the earliest memories for members of non-Western cultures tend to occur around the age of six or seven. Sociologists and cognitive psychologists believe the difference is because Western society emphasizes a focus on the individual, the self. We favor autobiographical memory practices, in keeping with our cultural emphasis on individuality, self-expression, personal identity, and autonomy. As a result, we tend to be skeptical of non-autobiographical memories: memories of events, not formalized in writing, which the people remembering did not experience.

Many non-Western cultures, including traditional Native American cultures, emphasize the group (village, tribe, extended family) over the individual. Societies that do this emphasize shared (group) identity, interpersonal connectedness, social obligation, conformity, and harmony. Members of such societies tend to create social memories of significance to the group, not the self, and those memories tend to develop later, along with social roles. Non-Western traditionalists attach tremendous significance to memories of stories and events that commemorate and strengthen group identity and cohesion. The Navajo medicine man’s memory of the shields saga, the names of the nine medicine men that tended the shields, and the prayers and rituals related to the shields are of this nature.

Clearly, cultural differences in memory are embedded in how we, as social beings, use our minds differently—how we develop, store, retrieve, understand, and communicate information. Why do those differences exist?

Many scholars have argued that Western society has been focused on the individual ever since the Greeks refined their alphabetic writing system and employed it in developing analytic, logico-scientific ways of thinking. Since that time, Western culture increasingly has separated personal knowledge and memory from social knowledge and memory. Our personal memories are relatively simple and center on ourselves. However, demands on our social memory are complex and vast, requiring access to bodies of law, mathematics, science, and technology. We cannot meet these demands with our unaided brains, so we rely on textual and other forms of documentation to store those kinds of information-dense memories. Then, when we want to retrieve that information, we use our eyes: we read, look at, or watch the physical records of our memories. We also tend to rely increasingly on external sources even for simple, short-term memories such as addresses and phone numbers. “Literate” societies often prefer this strategy of managing information. On the other hand, the biological memory capacities of individual members can meet the social needs of smaller, non-Western traditional societies. These traditional cultures employ many kinds of external visual symbols, such as costumes, masks, totems, design motifs, petroglyphs, and pictographs, as memory aids. In addition to non-alphabetic visual memory aids, traditionalists employ behavioral devices to reinforce and cue their memory: oral repetition and rote memorization, song and prayer, rhythmic music, ritual, dance, and other kinds of performance. They hear and physically experience their memories, and they store, retrieve, and communicate their knowledge in narrative form. “Oral” societies tend to prefer this information management strategy.

Modern-day societies, of course, are neither wholly oral nor exclusively literate; rather, they are a complex blend of both, but with emphasis on one of the two strategies. The Jesuit historian, philosopher, and English professor Walter J. Ong suggests classifying these cultures along a continuum, in terms of how much their original “orality” has persisted alongside their growing literacy. Many Native American societies remain predominately oral. Linguists have identified key structural differences between speech and writing, and these generally reflect distinctions between oral-primary and literate-primary cultures, as well. Cultures that favor the spoken word value interdependency, group identity, conformity, and tradition. Their accounts of the past tend to be formulaic and non-chronological, and to commemorate events of significance to the group. Cultures that favor the written word value independent thought, competition, individualism, and selfidentity. Their accounts of the past tend to be information-dense, logical narratives that are structured by the Western concept of the linear passage of time. These distinctions are much more than simple group preferences, but reflect deep-rooted and significant differences in how cultural groups perceive and make sense of reality.

Many scholars attribute the origin of these differences to the development of alphabetical literacy, which opened up new intellectual possibilities. The new ability to write down any idea and go back to it later, study it at leisure, analyze it, critique it, and refine it led to revolutionary developments in abstract thinking. Mathematics and geometry, science, logic, philosophy, and history are some of the intellectual disciplines made possible by writing. These disciplines and processes are highly abstract, favor linear and chronological organization of thought, and emphasize observation and the sense of vision over listening and the sense of hearing.

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, even our use of language has been closely linked to sight and reason. Scientists observe a “phenomenon,” which itself is from the Greek phainomenon, “that which appears or is seen.” When we understand, we “see.” We have insights, we are enlightened, we reflect, we show, we have points of view, and we draw conclusions.

Because of its intellectual heritage, then, Western culture favors sight over sound and values documentation, particularly textual documentation, over oral information. We grant text a higher authority than speech, and we devalue biological memory as a source of knowledge and oral narrative as a means of conveying factual information. For us, seeing is believing. This, then, is why those who argued most strenuously against accepting the Navajo medicine man’s oral traditional information took the position that they did. It is why they, and I, regarded documentary evidence as necessary in deciding the case: we are culturally conditioned to seek visual evidence and put greater confidence in text than in oral information.

Many American Indian tribes, however, have different intellectual practices, and like the Navajos, emphasize face-to-face consultations, oral information, and commemorative, social memory in their claims for the shields. For them, hearing is believing.

Floyd O’Neil, Director Emeritus of the American West Center at the University of Utah, observes:

No competent oral historian would suggest that we consider oral history or oral tradition to constitute an intact, immutable, timeless truth, or that we should accept all uttered word without critical evaluation. Memories erode and evolve, influenced by emotion, suggestion, and the passage of time. When a group or person stands to gain from relaying a false “tradition,” the possibility of deception must be considered. In fact, much of the current body of literature on oral tradition, folklore, and oral history is devoted to ways of systematically measuring the reliability, validity, “compatibility,” and “reasonability” of oral accounts in order to arrive at some judgment of truth. Although the goal is laudable, it seems ironic that we are writing down oral historical and religious narrative and then employing methods derived from Greek logic to objectify, analyze, and evaluate it.

Historians correctly point out that a written account prepared soon after an event occurs does not mutate as it passes from generation to generation, as oral information can, or lose detail over time, as human memory does. Although our understanding of written information often evolves, the information itself remains stable. However, while stability is desirable, it is not necessarily truth. Written accounts, which after all are derived from memories, are susceptible to many of the same original weaknesses as oral accounts. Emotion, ambition, cultural expectations, and memory failure influence the most conscientiously objective writer. Many documents are written expressly to influence or even to deceive the reader. Writers compose with an audience and a goal in mind—and their ultimate goal typically is to present themselves to peers and posterity in the best possible light. Therefore, as any historian will acknowledge, documentation requires the same level of scrutiny as oral information. At issue, though, are more than just sight and sound, writing vs. talking. Cultural values, worldviews, and the styles of communications that derive from those values and views are at the heart of the matter. In my own experience with intercultural consultations, I often have puzzled over the misunderstandings and intellectual disconnects that occur even though all the participants are speaking English. Conversation stops abruptly when one party makes what the other considers a non sequitur, and those on one side of the table look blankly at those on the other side until someone ventures a response. Body language is frequently misinterpreted; behavior that is respectful or inoffensive in one culture may be disrespectful and insulting in another. Euro-Americans struggle to make sense of traditional accounts provided by tribal consultants, and consultants grow frustrated by demands for chronological order and historical detail in their accounts. Agreements and consensus quickly unravel when it becomes clear that the parties have different perceptions of the conversation, and each can end up suspecting the other of dishonesty and evasiveness. Walter Ong describes similar interactions between literate-primary instructors and oral-primary students in academic settings.

Because they are participants in both the larger American society and their traditional tribal societies, many tribal representatives recognize that important differences exist between the communication and thinking styles of those societies. In that regard they are a step ahead of most of us from the dominant culture, who go on living, communicating, and thinking in the Western tradition that we consider to be natural and universal, unaware that there are other legitimate ways to perceive, make sense of, and act in the world. However, even bicultural individuals do not understand the deep-rooted reasons for those differences.

Critics have accused NAGPRA of being flawed of placing Native American religious thought above other kinds of religious thought, and of being too generous in its treatment of tribal claims and too lax in its consideration of science and history. For many years, I was sympathetic to those complaints. After working closely with the law and numerous tribes in the shields matter and reflecting at length on those experiences, however, I have grown to appreciate the wisdom inherent in NAGPRA. Flawed it may be, but not in this respect. The drafters of the law, who insisted that oral tradition, oral history, linguistics, and folklore be considered equally with historical documentation, radiometric dating, archeology, and DNA analysis, were not being politically correct, but insightful. Those who insisted that agencies and museums consult with tribes, not just write them form letters, were not being solicitous, but fair. They recognized that cultural differences in remembering, reasoning, and communicating exist, and that those differences have real impacts on real people.

NAGPRA is intended to give Native Americans a meaningful voice in the treatment and disposition of their ancestral remains, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. The law does not give oral information priority over documentation, but requires only that it receive fair consideration. Many critics accept writings as stand-alone evidence, but regard oral tradition as a hypothesis to be tested against documentation, as mere rumor, or even as entirely irrelevant. These critics, in fact, are advocating the very thing they think they protest: elevating the practices, beliefs, and world view of one culture above those of another.

Neither writing nor speech is intrinsically superior. They are just two different, legitimate forms of communication that can inform and enrich each other.

Seeing is believing and hearing is believing. Historians and archeologists would do well to remember that.

Lee Kreutzer is an archeologist with the National Park Service’s National Historic Trails office in Salt Lake City. She was park archeologist at Capitol Reef National Park from 1993 to 2003.

1 These kinds of accusations, in addition to the fact that the shields were claimed as sacred objects, are why Navajo Nation officials repeatedly have assured the public that the shields will not be placed on exhibit.

2 See, Michelle D. Leichtman, Qi Wang, and David B. Pillemer, “Cultural Variations in Interdependence and Autobiographical Memory: Lessons from Korea, China, India, and the United States,” in Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self: Developmental and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Robyn Fivush and Catherine A. Haden (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2003), 75.

3 Ibid, 73, Katharine Nelson, “Narrative and Self, Myth and Memory: Emergence of the Cultural Self,” in Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self, 21.

4 Leichtman, Wang, and Pillemer, “Cultural Variations,” 73.

5 James Fentress and Chris Wicham, Social Memory (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1988), 8.

6 Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegolema for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).

7 For example, Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1963): 304-345; Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964); Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Eric A. Havelock, The Origins of Western Literacy (Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1976); and Merlin Donald, “Human Cognitive Evolution: What We Were, What We Are Becoming,” Social Research 60, no. 1 (1993):143-70.

Floyd O’Neil, “Values of Zuni Oral History,” in Zuni and the Courts: A Struggle for Sovereign Land Rights, Ed . . . . E. Richard Hart (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 28.

9 Ong, “Literacy and Orality in Our Times,” An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton, 2002), 465-78, originally published in ADE Bulletin, Association of Departments of English (September 1978):58.