life history also complements the ethnographic account by adding to the descriptive an affective or experiential dimension. We know, for example, from early ethnographic accounts of Haida culture the form and function of the girl’s puberty ritual and the structure of Haida marriage, and from more recent ethnohistoric studies we know the changes wrought in Haida culture following contact. But these sources do not really address the question of meaning: What was the puberty seclusion really like? What did it mean to the individual to have his or her marriage arranged at an early age? How did individuals respond to various cultural changes? The life history is uniquely suited to addressing this kind of question.
The life history is also an appropriate medium for the study of acculturation. In many cultures the lives of natives span periods of critical and rapid culture change; the life history affords a personalized, longitudinal view of these changes.
Kluckhohn (1945), in a now classic article on the use of personal documents in anthropology, adds that life histories can be avenues to understanding status and role, individual variation within cultural patterns of behavior, personality structure, deviance, and idiosyncratic variation.
Native Americans have been by far the most popular subject material for life histories. Interest in the lives of American Indians began in the nineteenth century as famous and notorious Indian leaders commanded the attention of the public and sparked the writing of romantic and sentimental biographies. Langness (1965), for example, lists thirty-six American Indian life histories published between 1825 and 1900. A more recent and comprehensive accounting of Native American life histories (Brumble 1981), which brings the list up to the 1980s, contains over five hundred entries. Were one to include the numerous non-first-person accounts of Native American lives, which Brumble does not, this total would be considerably larger. The earliest anthropological life histories were also of American Indians (Kroeber 1908; Radin 1913). The recently published biographical sketches in American Indian Intellectuals (Liberty 1978) point to a still-current interest in the “great men”2 of native society, though simultaneously there has been a growing interest in recording the lives of ordinary Native Americans.
Inspired in part by Franz Boas’ early interest in the individual and his field research on the Northwest Coast, a number of life histories of Northwest Coast natives have been published over the years.3 Edward Sapir included a fictionalized life history of a Nootka trader in American Indian Life (Parsons 1922); Diamond Jenness (1955) relied upon the personal reminiscences of “Old Pierre” to compile his treatise on Katzie supernatural beliefs; and Marius Barbeau’s discussion of Haida argillite carvings (1957) included data on the artistic careers of the major Haida slate carvers. Further recognition of the importance of genealogical and life-history data to the study of native Indian art in British Columbia led the Vancouver Centennial Museum in 1977 to initiate a comprehensive collection of biographical data on British Columbia’s Indian artists.
Two Northwest Coast life-history documents span successive generations of recent Southern Kwakiutl culture history and are particularly valuable for their documentation of continuity and change in that culture. In 1940 Kwakiutl Chief Charlie Nowell dictated his life story to Clellan Ford (1941), and in the 1960s James Sewid related his personal history, with the editorial assistance of anthropologist James Spradley (1969). Aside from Barbeau’s brief biographical sketches in Haida Carvers in Argillite (1957) and the account of Chief Gəniyá (“Cunneah”) in Robinson’s Sea Otter Chiefs (1978), the only Haida life history is that of Peter Kelly of Skidegate (Morley 1967). To date, no life histories of native Northwest Coast women have been published, though as early as 1930 several short life histories of Kwakiutl women were collected by Julia Averkieva, a student of Boas (Rohner 1966:198).
In fact, for native North America as a whole there are more than three times the number of male life histories as female life histories. At least in the case of the life histories authored or collected by anthropologists, this imbalance is in large part due to the fact that male ethnographers, who until recently have greatly outnumbered female ethnographers, understandably came to know and work more closely with the male members of the cultures they studied. Then, too, as Rosaldo (1974) has noted, men live much of their lives in the public arena, as policy makers, warriors, intellectuals, and philosophers in native societies. Given such roles it is not surprising that anthropologists should have found the lives of men more visible, interesting, absorbing, and significant than the lives of women. This viewpoint has often affected even those who do write about native women’s lives. Ruth Underhill, for example, justifies Papago Maria Chona’s narrative by demonstrating her affiliation with important men: “As a woman she could take no active part in the ceremonial life. But her father was a governor and a warrior; her brother and husband were shamans; her second husband was a song leader and composer” (Underhill 1936:4). She does add, however, that a Papago woman’s life is interesting in and of itself “because in this culture, there persists strongly the fear of woman’s impurity with all its consequent social adjustments.”
I suspect that anthropologists are more influenced by their own cultural background than they would like to acknowledge. Perhaps the relative neglect of women’s lives in other cultures stems also from the fact that autobiography in the Western tradition has been primarily a male form. As Pomerleau notes:
The traditional view of women is antithetical to the crucial motive of autobiography—a desire to synthesize, to see one’s life as an organic whole, to look back for a pattern. Women’s lives are fragmented…. the process is not one of growth, of evolution; rather … earlier and more decisively than for a man, the curve of a woman’s life is seen by herself and society to be one of deterioration and degeneration. Men may mature, but women age. [1980:37]
In the same volume Jelinek summarizes, “Insignificance, indeed, expresses the predominant attitude of most [literary] critics towards women’s lives” (Jelinek 1980:4).
Only recently have anthropologists taken the view that, even in the absence of criteria such as a belief in woman’s impurity or relationships to powerful men, women’s lives are inherently worthy of consideration. If we are to understand women and their roles in cross-cultural perspective, it is axiomatic that we know the breadth and depth of their life experiences, the ordinary as well as the extraordinary. Margaret Mead has provided us with the latter type of document in her autobiography Blackberry Winter (1972), and in the wake of the women’s movement a number of anthropological monographs that focus on the lives of ordinary women have been published (e.g., Strathern 1972; Jones and Jones 1976; Weiner 1976; Dougherty 1978; Kelley 1978). Accounts of native women’s lives written for a more general audience have also appeared in recent years. In the native North American literature are an overview of the female life cycle in many different tribes (Neithammer 1977), a biography of a well-known Ojibwa woman (Vanderburgh 1977), and autobiographies written by a part-Cree woman (Willis 1973) and a métis woman (Campbell 1973).
Florence Davidson’s life history is the account of one who faithfully fulfilled the expected role of women in her society. For most of her life she has remained outside the public domain; above all else she has participated in her culture as mother and wife, and today she would undoubtedly sum up her identity in the word “Nani.” Despite the social position she has enjoyed as the daughter of high-ranking parents and the esteem that she has earned, Florence Davidson views her life as “ordinary,” in the sense of being uneventful. Once during our taping she sighed and then laughed, “If only I lied, it could be so interesting!” Aside from recounting the life experiences of an octogenarian Haida woman, her narrative presents a picture of an individual operating in a culture neither traditionally Haida nor fully Canadian, a culture undergoing tremendous change, yet intelligible and meaningful to one living in it.
The Haida had been exposed to Christianity for only about twenty years when Florence Davidson was born in 1896, and just fifteen years prior to her birth the Masset Haida had become reserve Indians. A few Haida were still living in cedar-plank houses when she was born. The female puberty seclusion was still practiced during her adolescence,
