How I Came to Study Algonquian Indians
I was born in Biddeford, Maine, in 1942. The earliest sources of my later interests include the stories my father's sister used to tell about one of her uncles, or perhaps it was her mother's uncle, who was a captive adopted into some Indian band as a youth. He grew up as one of them, but remembered that he had a White family. One winter, he only pretended to drink at some party. Once the others were too drunk to follow, he skated down some frozen river to a White settlement. His family was found, and he lived the rest of his life among them.
There was little more to the story. He was remembered as having become quiet and shy, and having had an encyclopedic knowledge of wild plants and their medicinal uses. His lore was handed down by the women in the family, till they lost interest in it with the advent of modern medicine.
My mother's father ran a second hand store. Whenever I visited it as a kid, he would give me some old clock that no longer worked. "Take it apart," he would say, "and see if you can fix it. It's no good at all the way it is." I would never fail to take it apart, and marvel at all the little wheels, and try to figure out what made it work. In the end, I would always decide that the spring was too weak, and nothing could be done about it.
My mother taught me to read a few words, and I suppose I learned a few more in school. But I really learned to read by reading a book, a copy of Robin Hood I was given. I used to go to my aunts' place, where it was very quiet, and sit in a rocking chair and read. By the end of the book I was hooked, so my mother took me to the MacArthur library and got me a card.
My favorite library book was about a canoe party in the Northwest Territory, tricked into a current that swept them over a falls to their expected deaths by their guides, some criminals intent on robbing a gold mine. However, three of them were good swimmers and swept ashore downriver: two kids who were the mine owners sons gone along for the adventure, and an old canoeman who had learned his woodland skills from the Indians. With only a knife and the clothes on their backs, they had to hide from the killers and survive a 700 mile journey back to civilization.
With all the reading I did, I compensated for a mediocre schooling, and was accepted by Amherst College (Amherst, MA). No student has ever been treated better, and I only regret that I'll never have a fortune to endow them with. I was a Spanish major, and besides financing my education for the 3 years I was with them, they even lent me money so I could spend a summer in Colombia and a junior year in Peru to perfect my Spanish.
In Colombia I first stayed with other students. I got a working knowledge of Spanish, partly by listening to soap operas on the radio, and then set out to explore the country. When I had seen enough of the cities, I took a bus across the eastern Andes to the interior, the llanos or grasslands, on the edges of the jungles that cover the central part of the South American continent. There police stations gave way to army posts, and the streets looked like a movie set of the Wild West.
When I reached the Ariari river, I was in the jungle. I left organized civilization behind, traveling with colonists in their motorized canoes, sleeping in their thatched huts. My next ride was with an Indian, who worked for a rice merchant. Some rice had gotten rained upon, and had to be moved to where it could be dried pronto. We stopped at the owner's house at sunset, but after feeding us his wife sent us on: "That rice has to be moved tonight!" she said.
Normally, two men work a canoe. One at the stern runs the motor and steers, the other at the prow scans the river for the channel and points it out to the driver with a long pole. With the same pole, he shoves away snags, which warns the driver to lift the outboard motor propeller out of the water, so as not to ruin the blades if we hit the snag anyway. The Indian was traveling alone, and managing to do both jobs, with the skill of a man born on the river.
But then the sun set, and he couldn't see where he was going. he cut the motor to a crawl, scanned the river with a flashlight, and then hit a snag anyway. So I picked up the pole, and asked him for the flashlight. "You can pilot canoe?" he asked. "No," says I, "but I will anyhow." I was thinking of the schools of "caribe," which the Brazilians call "piranha," that strip the flesh off your bones in a minute when they come in for the kill, and of what an old rubber worker had told me earlier. "Oh, I don't worry about caribe," he said. "They leave you alone unless you're bleeding. There's other stuff down there that's much worse." A jungle river is no place to be at night. I concentrated on my job, and the two hours it took to reach the hacienda went by like two minutes.
While the peons loaded two canoes, the women gave us hot coffee. I was almost to tired to stand. And then we were off again. There were others to pilot now, men who knew the river. I laid down on the sacks of wet rice. It seemed like only a minute later when they shook me awake. I was soaked to the bone, and cold. "How did you manage to sleep, Gringo?" they asked. "Thirty years in the jungle, and I've never seen a night like that one! What rain and thunder and lightning! We lost the other boat!"
We sat around the kitchen drinking coffee for a while, then fatigue overcame worry. That boat wouldn't be showing up that night. My hammock and clothes were aboard it, so I ended up sleeping on the cement floor, on some rice sacks, wrapped in my raincoat. In the morning, the other boat did find its way home.
In the morning the hacienda owner asked me my plans. I showed him the map, torn out of an old geography book, with names of what looked like villages all the way down the Ariari to the Orinoco. He looked amazed. "I've been down the river to the Great Rapids," he said. "There are just two haciendas like mine, no villages! And beyond the Rapids, just wild Indians who don't know what money is. You have to carry trade goods for barter."
Three days later, I caught a ride back up river with a man who was taking his heavily sedated wife to the hospital. Apparantly she had a brain tumor that produced unremitting headaches, and a doctor had prescribed narcotics over the radio. One night we heard grim news: the boat just ahead of us had been too heavily laden. It had swamped at some rapids, and the men had been eaten by the caribe. No matter that we were in no danger, with no heavy load aboard. It was still a depressing thought.
I probably met 20 or 30 people on the Ariari, and it was hard to pass a house without being invited in for coffee. So I felt that if I hadn't met everyone, at least everyone on the river was known to some of the people I met. These people formed a society, who governed themselves by customary law, based on their need to cooperate to survive. When one of them took me into his canoe, I became a guest of them all. I was always treated with impeccable courtesy and consideration.
The Ariari was a closed society, quite separate from the civilized part of Colombia. Here there were no written laws, no police, no fire department, no bureaucracy, no schools. In theory, of course, they were a part of Colombia. But in practice, they made all their own decisions. It was astounding to me how well this functioned.
Political philosophers usually claim that people must surrender some of their freedom to a government in order to be secure. Without the power of the state to enforce law, they say, there can only be the constant war of all against all. But in Colombia, it was precisely where there were the most police, the most government, that there were constant killings and depredations. In the jungle, beyond the last army outposts, is the only place in Colombia I ever felt truly secure.
It may have occurred to some that I'm supposed to be writing my biography here, and that I've wondered off my topic. But the purpose of biography, or at least author biography, is to understand the forces that have shaped the author's thinking, in addition to the data studied. When I reconstruct Proto Algonquian society and its regional groups, and I find no evidence that they had chiefs, much less governments, I have a model in my head of how people behave in such a society, and this is because of the evenings I spent around fires on the Ariari, drinking coffee and listening to people talk.
There is a whole intellectual tradition in the state societies originating in Europe, in which the lives of the so called Primitive people are imagined. There are different variants of this tradition: the Noble Savage variant, and the Man in a State of Nature variant. Both were produced by the imaginations of learned men who had lived their entire lives in complex state societies, and didn't know what they were talking about. They ended up describing their own hopes and fears.
I went on to study some anthropology at Amherst, and later at Cornell, in addition to my linguistic research. All of the theory was most helpful, indeed it was essential before I could understand the linguistic data that tells the story of the Proto Algonquians and their descendants.
But always, I made it a point to collect my linguistic data in Native communities, where I had extensive contact with Native people in their own milieu. I did fieldwork in an Ancash Quechua village in late 1967 and early 1968. Between 1974-78, I did fieldwork on Micmac, mainly in the home of Chief Peter Perro and his wife Sophie, of the Bayfield Road reserve, near where I now live. In early 1980, I did fieldwork on Yurok in the home of Florence Shawnessy, overlooking the Klamath river in Requoi.
All of this contact with persons of cultures different from my own was very beneficial in freeing my imagination from the straightjacket of my own inherited culture. Without this freeing up of the imagination, the only thing one ever sees is a mirror, perhaps with some distortions in it. In that mirror, the culture bound see only imperfect reflections of their own culture, and sometimes of its hopes and its fears.
Learning something of the languages I studied in a natural setting was also beneficial, because in a natural setting one learns the true meanings of words. In a bilingual dictionary or word list, on the other hand, one only learns to equate foreign words with words in one's own language that come close in meaning, at least part of the time. Some crucial aspects of the meaning are often missed entirely. In published works of linguistic anthropology, I often get the feeling that the author is not analyzing the foreign language at all, but just English translations of foreign words. This of course can only tell us about the author's own language and culture, not the one supposedly being studied.
Besides my participant observation of Native cultures, I experienced an entirely different cultural shift. In 1982-83, I was a nursing student at the Halifax Infirmary. This too let me experience an intellectual culture radically different from the one I had experienced in the Ivory Tower. One had to understand one's patients, to be sure, but not just to show off how clever one was. The Halifax Infirmary was a "tertiary care" facility, which means it was the last stop for many seriously ill patients transferred from elsewhere. Understanding was not just any intellectual game here, it was playing chess with Death.
Medicine has an element of trial and error, as no practitioner is ever clever enough to always correctly diagnose the more difficult cases on the first try. Moreover, when in doubt a good physician routinely requests a "consult" from another. But most importantly of all, no competent physician ever makes a guess and then tries to convince himself and others that his guess is infallible, and that no other alternative should be considered. If any were that vain, he would fill graveyards with his misdiagnosed patients.
Medical culture provided me with a standard of ethics, something never taught in departments of linguistics or anthropology, at least not in those days. In the Ivory Tower from which I had come, men routinely chose the problems they would work on, and the methods they would use, in such a way as to make themselves appear infallible. When someone was proven wrong, he commonly argued till he was blue in the face, rather than admit it.
The physician has no such luxury. Sometimes a patient can be sent on to a specialist, but in the Halifax Infirmary this tactic had reached the end of the line. Whether one liked it or not, the patient had to be diagnosed and treated. If the case was complicated, too bad. If there was no "good" treatment, too bad. You did your best. If it didn't work, you watched your patient die.
During my days at the Halifax Infirmary, I saw a degree of intellectual honesty I had never before seen, and a willingness to tackle whatever problem seemed important, without regard to the likelihood of success, and to correct one's errors as soon as one discovered them. These are the standards I took back to linguistics and anthropology. From that time on, I have tried to solve the problems that seemed important to me, and accepted the risk that sometimes I would be wrong, and need to correct the mistake and carry on.
These are some of the main events in my life that have made my scholarship what it is. In recent years, I have somewhat withdrawn from academic activities, though I still write some papers and review some books. Until my mother died, I spent most summers at her place in Maine, and did quite a lot of climbing in the White mountains, and kayaking on the Saco river.
At present, I live in a trailer near a Micmac Indian Reserve, on a hill, on 2 acres of land I bought when I was doing fieldwork on Micmac for my doctoral dissertation. This is my research retreat, where I work on anthropological and linguistic questions that seem significant to me. There are worse ways to spend one's life.
Paul Proulx, June 3, 2004

Posted on Sunday 04 of September, 2005 [23:45:22 UTC]