During My Time - Margaret B. Blackman

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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 their places among the ghost-authored autobiographies of the Nancy Reagans and the Donald Trumps. The life story is also seen—for a price—as anyone’s route to immortality or at least to a place, however modest, in history. The February 1989 issue of the popular high-tech catalogue The Sharper Image made the following limited offer to its more up-scale customers: “Hold the story of your life in your hands in a custom-written, leather-bound biography.” Touted as a personalized treasure that would only appreciate in value with each reading, it was available for a mere $27,000. Appealing to a much wider audience, the U. S. Postal Service in 1988 offered free genealogical charts as part of a program encouraging children, through oral history interviews, to learn from their grandparents their family history. Works such as William Zimmerman’s How to Tape Instant Oral Biographies and the Foxfire series also make the point that the life history is not confined to the rarefied realm of the academy but is a form of endeavor open to all.

      The life history is enjoying a renewed popularity in Anthropology as well. The sharing of ethnographic authority, the growing recognition of multivocality, heterogeneity, and cultural diversity within cultures once oversimplified as homogeneous have bestowed increased credibility and value on personal experience and individual narratives. No longer justified primarily in terms of what they reveal about culture or how they amplify other ethnographic data, life histories are increasingly being read and understood as texts that reveal the multiple ways in which people conceptualize, integrate, and present their lives to others.

      More difficult to calculate is the personal value of the life history. For both the subject and the interviewer, the life history endeavor holds a gift. For the narrator, it offers an unparalleled opportunity for life review to an attentive audience; for the interviewer, it offers the receipt of a well-told story with all its insights, reflections, and shared experience. As one anthropologist confessed, the life history endeavor is “a constant meditation on life.”8 For Florence

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