Travels in Coyote's Country

Julian H. Steward (1902–1972) was a significant figure in the history of American anthropology for both his descriptive and his theoretical contributions. Recently Kerns provided an excellent account of his long career in teaching and research in her biography Scenes from the High Desert: Julian Steward’s Life and Theory (2003), evaluating his work in cultural ecology, social and cultural evolution, and acculturation studies as well as his fieldwork principally among Native peoples in the western United States. Journeys West is a worthy companion to the first, allowing additional insight into the man and particularly his fieldwork among Great Basin tribes between 1935 and 1936, much of which led to one of his most influential publications, Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups (1938). Based on diaries by Steward and his wife, Jane, as well as personal correspondence and a variety of other sources, Kerns follows in detail the Stewards’ trail over seven months of rigorous travel through the deserts of California, Nevada, Idaho, and Utah as they visit scattered camps of Northern, Southern, and Owens Valley Paiute, Northern and Western Shoshone, and Western and Northern Ute peoples. These groups had been primarily hunters and gatherers in precontact times, and all were now living scattered on large and small reservations, on small parcels (20 acres) of federal or private land outside towns or on ranches throughout the region. The book moves chapter by chapter and place to place, following their path chronologically. Much of the narrative of the Stewards’ journeys concerns the quest for suitable elderly persons to interview by traveling through very large and dry country (“Coyote’s country”) on mostly unimproved roads. When they did find the people they were seeking, the Stewards often camped at the Native homesteads, or in the few auto courts of the day. Kerns makes their life on the road and the rigors of this type of fieldwork come alive through quotes from the diaries as well as her own detailed observations of the same country, most of which she revisited in her attempt to relive the conditions of the Stewards’ road trips. Steward was in the field seeking elderly consultants to help him fill out the lengthy and painstakingly detailed Culture Element Distribution (CED) lists devised by his mentor and employer, A. L. Kroeber, as a way to measure cultural distance. The lists required people who knew local conditions preferably before the disruptive effects of non-Indian settlement. As Steward soon discovered, this was even then an almost impossible task. The book illustrates his frustrations with the approach as well as his occasional successes. As with many ethnographers of the day, he often had to settle for “memory ethnography”: what could be gleaned from the oldest residents about what they had heard of conditions and practices in times of their parents and grandparents. (Kerns refers to members of these older generations as “ghost informants.”) In addition, Steward was seeking evidence for one of his own theories as to the nature and origins of patrilocal bands, a link in his then-nascent theory of multilinear social evolution. With a schedule and under conditions that would have tested the mettle of any marriage, the Stewards sought consultants in remote sites throughout the region, remaining in each location for a few hours to a few days. A partial victim of the Great Depression (as were the people he was seeking), Steward was at the time without an academic position, and this was his most viable employment opportunity. Through Kerns’s lively writing style, as well as her dogged efforts (using U.S. and Bureau of Indian Affairs census records, etc.) to learn at least something about the people Steward interviewed and usually listed only by initials in his publications, readers not only “see” the subtle beauty of the country but also meet some of its Indian people in the 1930s. They are also provided with the context in which most ethnography of the day in this region was conducted. The constant quest by most ethnographers for the past led them to largely ignore conditions in the present. Kerns gives us an important glimpse of that present, including at least some details of the way Indian people were then living. She also includes historical observations as to the costs to them of then 70 years of non-Indian ranching and mining economies. The tolls to their lands in environmental damage were devastating, and these in turn had vastly changed their lifeways, something that Steward rarely noted in his publications, as Kerns points out. The Great Depression added further to the situation through loss of newer forms of subsistence supplied by the emerging labor market and cash economy. For presentday ethnographers, including those seeking to fill in the historical record, this book is an excellent reminder to not forget to describe present-day situations, no matter how painful. But Kerns also asks in the final chapter whether this type of “hit-and-run” ethnography is really fieldwork at all. It was certainly different from the type of long-term, intensive experience promoted by some of Steward’s colleagues of the day and, indeed, later practitioners—a participant-observation approach. Yet she finds that it was not all that uncommon at the time, often paired with the emphasis on memory culture. It was certainly not that uncommon in Great Basin ethnography, although Steward’s minimal stays with consultants were an example in the extreme. But what Kerns fails to emphasize enough is that the primary reason for Steward’s approach, and the journey, was the task for which he was being paid: Kroeber’s CED lists. Once a list was complete (or he tried to complete it), he was off to the next destination. Several other employees of Kroeber’s on this project had sim-