Every life history interviewee obviously edits the telling of his or her story, and consequently every life history is a partial story. But some life stories contain more conflict or seem more candid, less guarded, than others. In some cases the explanations may lie in culturally specific traditions of self-revelation and public discourse, but the reasons may be more blatantly political. In Marjorie Shostak’s (1981) popular life history of a !Kung San woman, Nisa, the interviewee speaks freely about her sexuality, her husbands, her extramarital affairs. Had members of the interviewee’s own community had access to the book’s contents, her story might have been less freely told, the author concludes.4 But Nisa’s people are not literate and do not speak English, and she knows little of the world that her story has reached. By contrast, Florence’s book is not only marketed in her own community but nonlocal purchasers come to meet her, locals read the book, and she and members of her family have given the book as presents. Her narrative conveys her public self; “the world’s Nani,” as she sometimes jokingly refers to herself, offers the world her story.
The individuality of the life history endeavor can be misleading. Florence worked with me always on an individual basis and, very much her own person, decided what to include in her story. Nonetheless, that she is also the senior member of a large, prominent, and very protective family was not lost on the final document. Family members offered retrospective views on the book in 1990, and even though they were not interviewed when I did my initial research between 1977–79, a copy of the manuscript was circulated among Florence’s children in Masset. Both directly and obliquely their comments reached me. They expressed more concern about my parts of the manuscript than about their mother’s narrative, though one comment was made about my grammatical editing (or lack thereof) of one of Florence’s statements. There was some distress at my reliance on “books” rather than people as authoritative sources on Haida ethnography, as well as concern about my choice of words in certain passages. In particular, they focused on my use of the term “ordinary” in describing their mother’s life. “Ordinary” held connotations of “common,” and Florence, of course, was anything but “common” in the Haida social hierarchy. Clarification was easy enough to make, as I did by noting that the reference was to Florence’s self-perceptions of the uneventfulness of her life. More important, this was a lesson both in the care with which appropriate words are selected in the Haida world and in the power of words to affect a person’s social standing.5 Family were equally concerned lest Florence be identified with comments about the Haida ranking system; especially bothersome was quoted material on this ranking system (p. 24) attributed to Florence. Social position is everything in Masset, but when it comes to mention of the aboriginal social system of chiefs, commoners, and slaves, people are quick to publicly assert, “but we’re all equal now.” Noting that so-and-so’s great-grandfather was a slave or perhaps even mentioning the qualities that identified those who did and did not belong to chiefly families is kitchen-table talk, but not acceptable public discourse, permissible for the ethnographer’s edification, but not for attribution in print to the human source. To talk about such things publicly is not “high class.” The information was left in; the reference to its source was deleted.
Despite their pre-publication concerns, the family appear generally happy with the book. It has brought Florence both some income and some positive attention from the outside world. She is, after all, now “the world’s Nani.” The book is testimony to who she is, not only through her own words but also through those of an outside speaker, the anthropologist. It is, so far, the only life history of a living Haida.6 Its uniqueness is not lost on Florence. One morning in 1983 as we lingered over tea at her kitchen table, she told me of another Haida woman and the ethnographer who attempted to do her life history; “They tried to copy us,” she sniffed. As the only one, Florence’s life history is a model of sorts. An elderly Haida woman in the summer of 1989 approached an ethnographer working for the Masset Band and asked if she would be willing to write her life history, “just like Florence Davidson’s.” The unspoken caveat was, “only better.” Of course, During My Time is also not without its detractors in the local Haida community; Florence’s long-time rivals predictably pronounced it a pack of lies the minute it was published.
Though it is not known exactly how the book is “read” in Masset (save that my parts, as one family member confessed, could be deleted without harming the integrity of Florence’s life story), that it is read and even marketed locally speaks volumes on the anthropologist/Native American community relationship.
I talked with family members about the book. Not all had read it from cover to cover despite the pre-publication scrutiny given the manuscript. There was interest in what I had to say in respect to the issue of cultural representation, but that aside, it became apparent that life histories intended for local use do not need introductions, analyses, summaries, and afterwords. Some outsiders concur that the narrative is best left to stand on its own. Complained one reviewer of the book, “During My Time threatens to overwhelm Nani’s delicate, rather shy reminiscences with an overly academic context…. Blackman is formal and scrupulous in providing ethnographic background, bracketing Nani with forewords and afterwords, footnotes and bibliographies” (Jackson 1983:56).
But how was Florence’s narrative itself perceived by her family? Everyone agreed that there were no surprises nor any glaring omissions in Nani’s story, even though in our interviews each contributed new dimensions to Florence’s story. One comment, offered by daughter Virginia Hunter, was particularly revealing regarding ownership of the story and the role of the collaborator in its creation. Racking her brain to recall the book she had read so long ago, she suddenly remembered a portion of it that struck her as strange. “I just wondered,” she questioned me, “why Mom kept talking about having her period. A woman has her period. They’re so superstitious about things like that. I couldn’t understand why she would talk about something like that in her book, because they weren’t even allowed to talk about what they went through.” I remembered well the interview Florence and I had about her seclusion at menarche and our subsequent discussion of menstrual customs, a subject she would not consider broaching until the male linguist residing with her at the time had vacated the house for the day. That important life-cycle material was included in the manuscript at my urging (see chapter 7), yet obviously it was seen neither as normal Haida discourse nor as Florence’s discourse on her life.
In every life history, the final shape of the narrative, both consciously and not, is determined by the editor/author and the narrator. Asymmetries in this collaboration, however, give the advantage to the editor. The narrator, less familiar with the world of books and publishing, may defer to the editor, as Florence did sometimes in our interviews when she instructed me: “Just ask me questions.” Or as she told me during our most recent interview: “Just write it down the way you think it’s best.” The life story is also manifestly a product of the times in which it is told and written. As I confessed in the first edition, my inquiry was driven towards more traditional Haida customs that continued to be practiced by Florence and others of her time; thus my focus on her seclusion at menarche and her arranged marriage and my interest in feasting and potlatching. Given the notable Haida ceremonial efflorescence in recent years which has paralleled the political evolution of the Haida Nation, if Florence’s story were told today, it might well focus more on recent ceremonial events than it did between 1977–79.7 Similarly, my own inquiry would attend more to domains short shrifted in the original, such as the role of the church and Christianity in Florence’s life.
In the intervening years since During My Time was published, public interest in the life history has continued to intensify. In a survey taken in 1985, the Library of Congress reported that more people had read a biography in the previous six months than any other form of literature, and since the 1960s the number of biographical titles has virtually doubled each year (Oates 1986:ix). There is a universal appeal to the life history, for it is testimony that each of us has a life worth relating, a story to tell. It is an inclusive, as opposed to an exclusive, form. The life stories of the Florence Davidsons take
