Practicing Ethnohistory: Mining Archives, Hearing Testimony, Constructing Narrative / Edition 1

by Patricia Kay Galloway

Overview

Practicing Ethnohistory is a compendium of twenty-one essays on ethnohistorical historiography. The essays, preceded by a contextualizing introduction, are organized under four topical heads: textual historiography, positive analytic methods using nontextual physical evidence, ethnohistorical synthesis, and the ethical-contextual issues of ethnohistory.

Part 1 focuses on issues such as concerns over the editing of ethnohistorical materials, the limitations of direct historical analogy in archaeology, and the use of archaeological evidence to deconstruct colonialist history when real events are obscured by the bias of historical accounts. Part 2 explores relations across space and time, covering such topics as interpreting change in Choctaw settlement patterns through analysis of narrative evidence for the early French period, GIS applications to historical maps, and the reflection of sociopolitical structure in Choctaw personal names and their historical contexts. Part 3 focuses on communication between Native peoples and European colonists and includes essays on the Mobilian lingua franca in colonial Louisiana, British negotiations with the Choctaw Confederacy in 1765, and eighteenth-century French commissions to Native chiefs. The final part discusses the ethics of ethnohistorical research.

Drawing on years of ethnohistorical research in the southeastern United States, Patricia Galloway has produced an essential reader on the practice of ethnohistory.

Patricia Galloway is an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Choctaw Genesis 1500-1700 (Nebraska 1995) and the editor of The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and "Discovery" in the Southeast (Nebraska 1997).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803271159
Publisher:	Nebraska Paperback
Publication date:	11/01/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	456
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Patricia Galloway is an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Choctaw Genesis 1500–1700 (Nebraska 1995) and the editor of The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and “Discovery” in the Southeast (Nebraska 1997).

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Practicing Ethnohistory

Mining Archives, Hearing Testimony, Constructing Narrative

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By Patricia Galloway

University of Nebraska Press

Copyright © 2006 University of Nebraska Press
All right reserved.

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Chapter One

Introduction

How Deep Is (Ethno-)History? Archives, Written History, Oral Tradition

In the Beginning Was Mississippi Provincial Archives: French Dominion

In 1979 I came to Mississippi to revive a ghost: I was hired to edit and take through production the final two volumes of Mississippi Provincial Archives: French Dominion (MPA:FD), a collection of translated French documents pertaining to the eighteenth-century colonization of the lands that would become Mississippi. The project had been prepared in typescript in 1932 and then set aside and eventually misplaced for forty years; the decision was made to publish it after it was rediscovered in 1974. My qualifications for this job ostensibly included an undergraduate degree in French, an MA in comparative literature specializing in the eighteenth century, plus some rigorous exposure to textual criticism and historiography as a result of a PhD in comparative literature/medieval studies that nevertheless did not seem immediately relevant at the outset. What I found, however, was that, as is axiomatic of the multifarious qualifications of archivists in carrying out their jobs, this task of historical documentary editing and the path it started me on would call on everythingI had learned to that point and would require the expansion of my theoretical and subject-area knowledge and of several areas of practice as well. In addition, the project itself was situated in the intellectual history of archival practice, historiography, ethnography, and ethnohistory, and the state of research in all of these fields would frame it and provide a starting point for all the ethnohistorical work that would flow from it. In a very substantive sense the essays here, covering some twenty years of my work in ethnohistory, track my intellectual autobiography; hence, in this introduction I will attempt to make that frame visible.

I knew next to nothing about the history of the French colony of Louisiana or of those of its inhabitants who lived in what would become the state of Mining Archives, Hearing Testimony, Constructing Narrative Mississippi. I was also unaware that the MPA:FD project itself represented the continuation of an early-twentieth-century evort by Dunbar Rowland and the board members of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) designed to prove the depth and duration of early European involvement in the state's history and to make available to the public a selection of documents portraying Mississippi's French colonial history. But I apparently seemed intelligent enough to be up to the job of editing for publication two volumes of French documents that had already been translated and documented with scholarly comment. It didn't hurt that my great-grandfather had served on the founding board of trustees of the MDAH and had known Dunbar Rowland well. There was a poetic closure in the return to Mississippi of a "daughter of the regiment."

The original estimate was that, working with an excellent typist with a vast experience in preparing materials for publication, the task would take me six months. That estimate would not have been correct even had the task as defined not been problematic, but it soon became clear that there was nothing simple about the project. First and axiomatically to me, the very texts from which the original translator had had to work were inadequate simply as a consequence of the time in which he worked. The department had acquired twenty-six volumes of handwritten copies of French colonial documents about the region, dating from the 1680s to 1763, from the French Archives nationales on the basis of a protocol devised by Dunbar Rowland, the director of the department, when he visited the French archives in 1904. Although at that time the freelance copyists who made a living at the Archives nationales doing this work were very good at their jobs, were familiar with the material, and wrote in very clear scribal hands, they were subject to the same problems that medieval copyists had experienced. That at least was something I was qualified to detect, and it soon became obvious to me when I began comparing the handwritten copies with microfilm copies of the original documents, which had been obtained in 1970 as part of a consortium evort that included the Library of Congress. So initially it was clear that the underlying French text versions would have to be checked very carefully.

Nor could I trust the translations as they stood, not because they were not competent but because they were competent with respect to the standards of their time, and standards were not the same fifty years later. The translator, Albert Godfrey Sanders, a very scholarly professor of French language and literature at Millsaps College and the father of one of my own father's lifelong friends, had aimed for a sober literal translation, but there were numerous characteristics of the subject matter and its presentation that he did not and, in the state of knowledge at the time, could not know. We forget just how little was known from original documents at the turn of the twentieth century, but that very time was the one that saw the significant work done on calendaring the French documents by Nancy M. Miller Surrey (whose calendar, never properly published, remains the best brief description of what must be nearly all the relevant documents) and the acquisition of copies of the documents for the first time by American repositories, all thanks to the organizational work of the Carnegie Institution. During that time also ethnographer John R. Swanton was in the process of laying the foundations for the ethnohistorical study of Indians of the greater Southeast, including those who appeared in the documents to be edited. In fact, in the person of Dunbar Rowland the original project interacted directly with both of these historical and ethnographic projects and participated in this first flush of work that opened up the European archives to American historical and ethnographic study.

Since that time, unfortunately, little more had been done with the French colonial history of the Southeast, at least not in the region itself. The first third of the century had indeed seen the editing and publication of a considerable body of primary source material from the period, but in a region still obsessed by the Civil War and the economic changes that followed, the major topics of discussion had been the Confederacy and the New South, not that which was very old. Several periodicals, most notably the Louisiana Historical Quarterly, had nevertheless published a mine of primary materials. There were a few excellent secondary studies, but they were a tiny handful and in general either inaccessible due to language reasons or not considered "mainstream" enough to avect the writing of Louisiana colonial history significantly. The chapter on the French colonial history of Mississippi in the two-volume set brought out with such fanfare by the MDAH in 1973 ("the first comprehensive history of Mississippi in fifty years") was written by a nonspecialist.

On the anthropological side, Swanton's work from 1932, when the typescript of the materials I was working with seemed to have been completed as it stood, to his death in 1958 had added significantly to the foundation ethnography of the southeastern Indians, although his work had also been so exhaustive that it had daunted further researchers. In addition, the emergence of an interdisciplinary practice of ethnohistory had taken place in connection with research done under the Indian Claims Act of 1946 and had crystallized in the formation of the precursor to the American Society for Ethnohistory in the 1950s; its journal Ethnohistory had existed since 1954. There was therefore a body of ethnographic work and perhaps more relevant ethnohistorical practice to draw on.

Clearly, it would be necessary to do additional work over and above copyediting the existing typescript. I would need to do some serious research, because in the light of current editorial practice and historical trends in the direction of social history it was evident that the scholarly apparatus provided in the Rowland/Sanders typescript was quite inadequate, especially in view of one extremely salient fact: most of the people who resided on the lands that would later become the state of Mississippi during the period 1699-1763 were not Europeans but Indians. I therefore set for myself the goal of expanding the biographical notes already provided, which had been confined to the leading French figures in the colony and a very few Great Red Men. I would attempt to identify everyone (Indian, African, Englishman, and Spaniard as well as Frenchman), drawing on the documents themselves and the various censuses and service records that were available either in the collection or published elsewhere. In addition I would try to elucidate references in the documents that were not explained by other documents in the published MPA:FD collection so that the reader would not be obliged to look elsewhere in order to make sense of what was on the page. The resources already mentioned could be drawn upon, and in addition I could seek out archival sources in Mississippi and the surrounding states, notably Louisiana and Alabama; in fact, I made visits to archives in both states in pursuit of original materials. Finally, I would attempt to represent more equitably the actual population of the region by seeking out and publishing additional documents pertaining to the Indian history of the period.

Tanselle and the Text

"Historical editing" was the rubric under which my work would fall, and it was obvious to me that even though I was preparing translations I would need to investigate the state of historical editing to see if there was anything that I needed to know beyond what I already understood as a result of my acquaintance with literary editing. To my amazement, I found that I had stepped into the field just in time to encounter a major scandal of historical editing, then being exposed by G. Thomas Tanselle. Tanselle wrote a very influential essay in which he described the common practices of the many editing projects, mostly sponsored by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), producing modern editions of the papers of Great White Men Important in Political History in which the editors chose to clean up the spelling and even the language of these admired gentlemen without concern for faithfulness to the original manuscripts or the fact that people who used the editions would be unlikely ever to consult the originals. Tanselle compared this kind of practice, for a discipline that was ostensibly concerned with accuracy and truth, to the literary editing that had been going on at the same time under the aegis of the Center for Editions of American [literary] Authors, where common practice was if anything punctilious to a fault in reproducing the texts of the original manuscripts, warts and all. Tanselle pointed out the significant work of twentieth-century literary editors in building upon the long toil of classical and biblical textual criticism and the failure of historical editors to profit from this example. Having surveyed historical editing practice in the major NHPRC projects, he concluded that "the diverence between the way American statesmen and American literary figures have recently been edited is a striking illustration of how two closely related fields can approach the basic scholarly task of establishing dependable texts in two very different ways, one of which [historical editing] seems superficial and naive in comparison to the other [literary editing]."

With a background in medieval literary history, I was certainly predisposed to be persuaded by Tanselle's argument that the literalist literary standard was far preferable to what seemed to be the Whiggish bias of the historical standard. My most recent background had included work on computer-aided medieval manuscript filiation, which was essentially invented by Dom Froger in the late 1960s to take advantage of the computer in order to establish relationships among manuscript copies with the intention of establishing authoritative texts with variants. I was well acquainted not only with the literature pertaining to this new approach (some of which I had myself created) but with the underlying theory about information transfer before the age of mechanical reproduction that informed this literature: that of codicology, or the making of manuscripts and books, and that of diplomatics, or the establishment of authenticity in manuscript sources. This neighborhood of textual criticism was especially relevant to the French colonial documents, I believed, because, first, they were in fact manuscript documents, and, second, many of the "original" documents were not originals at all but official copies made under specific circumstances and for specific purposes. Ignoring those purposes would prune significant meaning from the text.

In addition to the discipline of textual criticism per se I also drew upon long-honed practices of comparative literature. The subdivisions of that discipline that had occupied me were, first of all, the establishment of sources for written material. I had the good fortune to be trained by Werner P. Friederich, the doyen of comparative literature studies in the United States, and Papa Friederich brought intertextuality to life (avant la lettre-or at least he never used the term) by first showing his students how interlaced and interdependent all the literatures of Europe were and then requiring us to track down every last allusion and influence we could find, drawing upon information about the author's education and biography, his friends and enemies, people who might have been his friends and enemies, lists of books in his library, lists of books in his friends' libraries, and so on. Working as a scholar primarily in the period from the twelfth to eighteenth centuries, I had also fortuitously studied the gradual emergence of the genre of history in European writing as separate from fiction and was therefore aware of the degree to which this was still a matter of serious debate in the eighteenth century. Finally, having sat in on courses given by the eminent twentieth-century specialist Eugene Falk, I had read reader-response theory and imbibed the beginning of a concern with the author's intention for the work, the reader's reception of the work, and the notion of a text as something mutually constructed between author and reader; this approach had partly informed my 1974 dissertation and became an important part of my computational work with texts.

One other element was blended into this mix: in 1966, before I went off to become a comparatist, I spent the summer at Indiana University as a Summer Folklore Fellow, and I was introduced to the study of folklore and the mysteries of tracing oral traditions in the spirit of the gatherers and classifiers of encyclopedic collections of folktales and traditions who had worked under the leadership of Stith Thompson. Under the supervision of Linda Degh we all fanned out to gather folk traditions from informants in the region to add to the local collection, and I not only had the opportunity to see an entirely different side of my grandparents' lives as country people (they formed the key informants of the snowball sample I pursued) but gained a first understanding of how an official literate discourse can mask a world of tradition and practices unrepresented in the literate culture. Just gaining the attention of students at that time were the work of Marshall McLuhan on alterations in communication, the first translated writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss on oral tradition and its structural analysis, and the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the latter two of which influenced my dissertation powerfully and would continue to provide a frame for my understanding of positive evidence.

(Continues...)

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Editorial Reviews

“Galloway’s painstaking multidisciplinary research . . . provides case studies that exemplify how to extract a good deal of information out of what often appears to be simple lists of place names or of names and associated roles. . . . What archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and museum directors do has consequences for indigenous groups and for the society at large. . . . These last two chapters should be required reading for all involved in narrating the history of colonial encounters.”—Journal of Anthropological Research

Journal of Anthropological Research

“This book is an excellent text for use in graduate classes on methodology in a number of disciplines, including ethnohistory, ethnoarchaeology, and Native American studies. . . . The book is ‘a kind of ethno-ethnohistory’ that reinforces the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the Other. Scholars interested in eighteenth-century Choctaw culture will want this book as part of their libraries.”—Journal of Southern History

Journal of Southern History