American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION This paper stems from two concerns with a long history in Americanist anthropology, one the study of how individuals shape the intellectual life of their community, the other the study of myth "as history." They come together in the particular definition of "mythology" adopted for this paper, namely "all the texts that one narrator tells; his entire corpus of texts." We will discuss a corpus of 24 texts collected from the Yavapai Jim Stacey by E. W. Gifford in 1930 (Gifford, 1933: 349-401). We will be primarily interested in how a narrative unit extending beyond the individual myth text, called the "cycle" by Gifford, articulates the whole of Stacey's myth corpus and puts it into temporal order. It appears that the whole mythology was too large ever to be told at one time (Gifford, 1933:347). so the cyclic units were factors more in Stacey's reflections on the past than in any single recitation strictly for Yavapais that he is known to have given. When this paper is read through its Appendix, it will be seen how Stacey adjusted nine myths, covering better than two thirds of the total pages of the mythology, to the system of cycles. The demonstration need not stop at that point, but that mu ch will cover the key myths in the cycles and will s how how Stacey 's versions of those myths differ from the versions of other Yavapai narrators.

INTRODUCTION Who can control the savage in his fury! Then he is like the tiger who ha s drank Of human blood - nought else can satisfy (N. Deering, Carabasset, 1830). Savages, beasts, Amerindians, Indians; these are some of the appellations by which the aboriginal inhabitants of what has been designated the New World have come to be known. By right of conquest, Europeans have empirically determined the nomenclature pertaining to the land they claim to have discovered, and two of the main characters in this drama, Yespucci and Columbus, have had a direct influence on the naming of the new-found land and its human dwellers. However, words and names are more than just symbols. They are also expressions of attitude. And the Europeans came to America with pre-conceived notions of the nature of the people they were about to encounter. Naturally, the experience of what they actually saw qualified these notions, but did they see more than they wanted to or could see? After all, their frame of reference did not include many of the things they were exposed to in the ''New Land." They were consequently forced to incorporate the American experience into their own conceptual universe in an attempt to come to existential terms with it. Being alien to the Europeans' experience, the objects exhibited by America had to be named in order to be controlled. And the names had to be of European extraction to satisfy this goal. Furthermore, since the Europeans came to conquer, the conceptual domination had to include an inherent moral justification for the physical domination. While there can be no doubt about the fact that the newcomers were extremely influenced by what they saw, it appears equally as obvious that this influence was reflected only very little in the conceptual treatment of the experience. Or in other words, the Europeans, who voyaged across the Atlantic, have refused to acknowledge their huge debt to America, though it is there for everyone to see.

It has long been taken for granted, in these United States, that one of the privileges accorded newly elected presidents and their party leaders is the selection of those who will carry out the work of the incoming administration. Although the high price of dropping competent incumbents is impossible to calculate, the most costly decision for Native Americans must have been William McKinley's 1898 appointment of Estelle Reel to replace William N. Hailmann as Superintendent of Indian Schools. It ended a four year period during which almost all of today's innovations were successfully introduced, and it dealt such a crushing blow to Hailmann that he was never again an effective leader. At the time of his appointment as Superintendent of Indian Schools, William N. Hailmann was one of America's outstanding educational leaders. His career had been one of steady progress, from his arrival as a sixteen-year-old Swiss immigrant in 1852 through the successful adm inis tration of several German-American academies and public school districts. He held top offices in professional organizations and was well-known as a writer, editor, and lecturer. The influential Froebeli an movement of this country during the late 18005 was largely due to the leadership he and his wife, Eudora, had exerted. From 1883 until his appointment by President Cleveland in 1894, he was superintendent of public schools in LaPorte, Indiana, where he had broken with traditional methods of instruction and discipline by developing what he called the "New Education." Based on the philosophy of Friedrich Froebel, a German whose ideas had been adopted primarily for young children, Hailmann was exponent for a system that stressed student self-government, activity learning from kindergarten through high school, the importance of family life and of community involvement in the schools. The system depended upon superior teachers who were facilitators, able to challenge children to advance intellectually, socially, physically, and aesthetically in a supportive environment.

American Indian Legal Status: A Review of Recent Interpretations Walter L. Williams David H. Getches, Daniel M. Rosenfelt, and Charles F. Wilkinson. Cases and Materials on Federal Indian Law. St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1979. 660 pp. $18.95. Russell Lawrence Barsh and James Youngblood Henderson. The Road: Indian Tribes and Political Liberty. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. 301 pp. $14.95. While the literature of Indian-white relations is immense, Americans seem more interested in the dramatic conflicts of the frontier era than in what has happened to native people after the frontier period ended . This is particularly so regarding Indian legal status in the United States despite the crucial importance of questions of tribal sovereignty and treaty rights. The complexity of Indian-related treaties, statutes, administrative policies, and court decisions by it self has deterred scholarly analysis. Codification of United States Indian Law (ordered by Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier) was completed in 1942. The Handbook of Federal Indian Law, by Felix Cohen, became the bible of the field, relied upon by lawyer and judge alike. A new revision of the handbook will soon be published, under the general editorship of Rennard Strickland, to update Cohen and incorporate the mass of new material which has made United States Indian law practically a separate field unto itself.