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Raymond D. Fogelson’s “The Ethnohistory of Events and Nonevents”

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 66; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00141801-7217455

1527-5477

Sergei Kan,

Anthropological Studies and Insights

"The Ethnohistory of Events and Nonevents" was originally delivered as a presidential address by Ray Fogelson at the 1988 American Society for Ethnohistory meeting. In it he aligned himself with the French Annales school as far as its critique of a positivist, event-centered view of history is concerned, and he encouraged ethnohistorians to attend to various kinds of "nonevents" (see Kan and Turner Strong 2006: xviii).Later published in Ethnohistory (Fogelson 1989), this very important and frequently cited article offered a typology of nonevents, including nonrecognition (or nonvalorization) of what others consider eventful occurrences (as in political events), imagined events (as in prophecies or rumors), latent (unrecognized) events, erasures (as in a society's conscious adoption of a low profile, or the repression of a traumatic event),1 and mythic or "epitomizing" events (as in the Cherokee narrative of the demise of the Aní-kutáni priesthood that Ray analyzed in another article [Fogelson1984]). I would also add highly exaggerated events to this list and will illustrate this particular category in this brief essay.Fogelson also urged us to "take seriously native theories of history as embedded in cosmology, in narratives, in rituals and ceremonies, and more generally in native philosophies and worldviews." In his words, "Implicit here is the assumption that events may be recognized, defined, evaluated, and endowed with meaning differentially in different cultural traditions" (Fogelson 1989: 134–35). He also reminded ethnohistorians, that "an understanding of non-Western histories requires not only the generation of documents and an expanded conception of what constitutes documentation but also a determined effort to try to comprehend alien forms of historical consciousness and discourse" (134). Ray had been developing this concept, which, for lack of a better term, he labeled "ethno-ethnohistory," since the mid-1970s, when he first articulated it in an article on Sequoyah and Traveller Bird (Fogelson 1974; cf. Fogelson 1984, 1985).While the idea of "ethno-ethnohistory" has been applied to research in several parts of the world, it has been particularly popular among scholars studying Native North American cultural history (see, for example, Kan 1991; Miller 1998; Buckley 2006). Inspired by Fogelson, several generations of younger scholars (a number of them his students) have demonstrated that Native Americans possessed and continue to possess a highly developed sense of historical consciousness.Ray's concept of nonevents has been useful in my own research on the ethnohistory of the Tlingit community of Sitka, Alaska, which I have been researching since 1979 using published sources, archival materials, and ethnographic data (Kan 1999). Sitka has been a unique Tlingit community because of its long history of interaction with the Russians, which began in the early 1800s with the establishment of a Russian-American Company (RAC) fort in their territory. A combination of trade, interrupted by occasional skirmishes, and a limited amount of intermarriage, Christianization, and other forms of closer interaction characterized the Russian-Tlingit relations throughout the entire Russian colonial era, which ended in 1867 with the "sale" of Alaska to the United States.2With the RAC ending its operations, most of its Russian employees returned to the mother country. Those four hundred or so people who chose to stay behind were mostly persons of mixed Russian-Native descent (referred to as "Creoles" during the Russian era), who traced their indigenous lineage to the Aleut (Unangan) and Alutiiq country but who had been living in Sitka for decades and whose language and culture by 1867 had become predominantly Russian. For the next thirty years or so, this community formed the majority of Sitka's non-Tlingit population, even though only some of them managed to acquire wealth and political power in this capital of American Alaska dominated by the "Yankees" (see Kan 2013). Sharing the negative attitudes toward "mixed bloods" widespread in the United States at that time, the Yankees tended to view the majority of the Creoles, now called "Russian," with condescension and pity, making an exception only for the "respectable" male merchants and "Russian ladies" married to Euro-American newcomers.Thus, within this tri-ethnic racial hierarchy of Alaska's capital, the majority of the Creoles found themselves in the middle—that is to say, between the "Indians" and the "Whites." Consequently, those among them who cared about being respected by the local American elite made an effort to keep a distance from the local Tlingits, despite the fact that with the RAC's departure the latter became free to enter the "White" town itself, while those among them who had converted to Russian Orthodoxy could now worship with the Creoles in the St. Michael's Cathedral rather than the tiny chapel closer to the native village.3 Creole attitudes toward the Tlingit varied but on the whole tended to be ambivalent. On the one hand, when the Tlingit were being baptized, Creole men and women served as their godparents, which meant that they were now obligated to offer their godchildren some form of hospitality during major church holidays. On the other hand, for several decades after Alaska became American, the Tlingit remained an important part of the local Creoles' historical consciousness as dangerous and unpredictable enemies who could not be trusted. After all, the last violent confrontation between the Russian sentries and the local Tlingit warriors had occurred only twelve years prior to the "sale" of Alaska, while during the same period the Russians observed in horror how a slave was sacrificed during a mortuary potlatch for his master.Given these fears, it is not surprising that when the US government, whose local representatives did not share these sentiments, decided to withdraw its troops from Sitka and the rest of the Alaska Panhandle, the local Russian community became very nervous. Complaints about the local Indians' lack of respect for the Russians' property began to be voiced soon after the army's departure. As articulated by the local Orthodox priest in his report to his superiors, these complaints included the making of homebrew, drunkenness, indecent behavior on the cathedral's porch, and, worst of all, a large festivity that had been rumored to involve a planned attack on the "White" town for the purpose of capturing someone for a sacrifice. Although thefts and drinking by the local Tlingits did occur during this time, many of the poor Creoles were equally engaged in those activities; in fact, some of them were known to be the sellers of stolen property. As for the "wild festivities," which undoubtedly referred to potlatches, slave sacrifice was no longer a part of them, having been abandoned after the arrival of the Americans. Hence we are dealing here with "imagined events" that were contributing to a state of serious agitation in the Russian community.The excitement reached a tipping point in the winter of 1879, when one of the local clans, the Kiks.ádi, began voicing its grievances because it had not been compensated for the lives of six of its members who had perished while serving as fur seal hunters on board an American ship during the previous year. After some deliberations, the clan was finally paid, but the amount it received was smaller than its headman had demanded. Finally, on 6 February 1879, a dozen Kiks.ádi men, some of them intoxicated, approached the town's palisade. Ironically, they were turned away not by the White defenders but by the head of another clan, the Kaagwaantaan, who had been appointed chief of Indian police a few years earlier. The Kiks.ádi headman, however, was visiting another village at the time and thus missed the altercation. A rumor quickly spread among the Russians that he had actually gone to get reinforcements and that a major Tlingit attack was imminent. Some Russian residents hid in their homes, others tried to arm themselves. Appeals for help were sent to the closest naval installation in British Columbia, thus adding an international flavor to the incident.However, the attack never materialized. A few years later, Captain L. A. Beardslee (1882: 45–46), the first US Navy commander to be stationed in Sitka following the army's departure, characterized this incident in his report as simply a brawl between "half a dozen drunken Kiks.ádi . . . and a large force of Kaagwaantaan." Thus, the 1879 "Tlingit attack" on the non-Native population of Sitka represented a perfect example of Fogelson's nonevent or at least a highly exaggerated event, which had completely different meaning for the Tlingit and the Russian participants.4My second example comes from a Tlingit memorial potlatch (koo.éex) I attended in Sitka in 2004, which had originally been planned as a celebration of the centennial of a famous and grand 1904 koo.éex permitted by the local American officials on condition that it would be the very last one and described as such in the annals of local non-Native history.5 For the local Euro-American reformers, the "last potlatch" came to represent the "last hurrah" of the so-called "old customs" and the beginning of a new era of progress and enlightenment in the lives of even the most conservative elements of Tlingit society. Using Fogelson's terminology, we could characterize the 1904 koo.éex as an "epitomizing event" in the local settler colonial narrative of Tlingit progress. The truth of the matter is that in several other Tlingit communities mortuary and memorial feasts or potlatches continued after 1904. However, they came to be conducted less openly and ostentatiously, especially in places like Sitka, where the Natives were under the constant gaze of the local colonial officials and the non-Native public (Kan 2016: 293–303). In fact, the leaders of the 1904 koo.éex, who on the eve of the festivities made a pledge to the governor of Alaska never to take part in any ceremonies of this kind from now on, would later be reprimanded by the Presbyterian Church, which they belonged to, whenever they "reverted to their heathen ways" and attended potlatches sponsored by other clans and lineages. These insults by the non-Native society were never forgotten, so that in a new era of multiculturalism and a much greater respect enjoyed by the Alaska Natives in their state, the hundredth anniversary of the "last potlatch" seemed to be a perfect opportunity to celebrate the survival of the ceremony as the core and the key symbol of the traditional Tlingit culture.In accordance with the centrality of the matrilineal group in the ideational culture of the modern-day Tlingit, the 2004 ceremony was sponsored not only by the same clan but even by the same lineage (Tlingit "house") as the 1904 one had been. Despite that, I had expected that potlatch to emphasize the political message of the survival of the most important ritual of the Tlingit people, so central to their social structure and spirituality, despite the efforts by the settler colonial society and the more Americanized members of the Native community itself to eradicate it.It turned out, however, that the message of Tlingit resistance and survival, while being present, was not the primary one. It is true that a few Native speakers did address the theme of the 1904 potlatch not really being "the last one," and that the sponsors of the ceremony managed to get Governor Frank Murkowski to issue a proclamation recognizing the two days of the potlatch (October 23–24, 2004) as "the days of Celebrating Tlingit Culture in honor of the so-called 'Last Potlatch' of 1904." His proclamation also stated that "attempts at extinguishing Native culture have failed" and that "the value of such cultures and cultural diversity is now known and accepted for the benefit of all."Much of the two-day ceremony was in fact dedicated to regular "clan business," such as ritually confirming the installation of the new head of the house, which was sponsoring the koo.éex, giving names to other members of his house and clan, honoring certain key members of the opposite moiety acting as honored guests, issuing a symbolic apology to a specific group within the opposite moiety who had been offended by one of the elders belonging to the host group, dedicating new crest objects and bringing out some old ones that had not been seen in a long time, and so on.6Thus, the 2004 koo.éex showed that I had underestimated the degree of continuity in the Tlingit historical consciousness. The ceremony showed that—despite significant changes in the Native economy, daily life, sociopolitical organization, and religion—matrilineality as well as lineage and clan identity remain central to the Tlingit worldview and that for many Tlingit people a good deal of prestige (or what they call "respect") is still derived from their participation and performance in the ceremonial system. It was these concerns that turned out to be of much greater importance for the sponsors of the 2004 potlatch than the political message of that ceremony as a centennial of the so-called "last potlatch." When it came to Tlingit ethno-ethnohistory, one hundred years of postcontact history was too short a period of time compared to centuries of histories of specific clans, within which souls, honorable names or titles, and at.óow were passed down generation after generation. Using Fogelson's terminology, one could also conclude that my own expectation of what this ritual event was supposed to look like and what it actually turned out to be about were quite different. Although I would not go as far as to say that, from the point of view of the present-day relations between the Tlingits and the majority society, the 2004 potlatch was a nonevent, it was certainly not a particularly important event. However, from the perspective of the history of the host clan and especially the host lineage, it was a highly significant one.In other words, despite my twenty-five-year-long experience of doing research on Tlingit culture and history, I was still not fully able to appreciate this "alien form of historical consciousness." It was time to do more research and reread Ray Fogelson's article on events, nonevents, and ethno-ethnohistory.