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In an important new book, A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History (Cambridge Univ. Press), Peter Nabokov explores the complexity of American Indian approaches to the past. Nabokov, a professor of American Indian Studies and World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, has drawn on decades of his own research and recent findings in ethnohistory, anthropology, folklore, and Indian studies. The result is an impressive work of transdisciplinary scholarship exploring the complex and varied ways in which American Indian societies make sense of the past.
What are you trying to accomplish with A Forest of Time?
I'm trying to open up a subject that I feel has been neglected if not suppressed. On a most general level, A Forest of Time is about the multiple American Indian interpretations, selections, and uses of the past, depending on which community is telling the story and how it wants to make constructive use of it.
I would like academic historians to become a little more modest when they talk about histories that involve non-European peoples. But in all candor, I think that most of them will respond to these case studies and provocations by ignoring them.
Part of this attitude has to do with the fact that Indian persistence remains a lump in the Anglo-American craw. These folks did not die out, which was the wishful thinking of the "Vanishing Indian" theme around the turn of the 20th century. They persist; they continue to endure; they continue to perpetuate separate histories; and they continue to run rings around the dominant society in the most intriguing ways while insisting on their diversity.
Many non-Indians, I truly believe, sense this as a threat: it's a threat territorially, and I think it's a threat philosophically on some level. It's got to be a threat to a lot of basic tenets of modern American life, whether it be consumerism, American individualism, Christian fundamentalism, territorial integrity, or what have you. And the way Indians sometimes do this; the way they do their capitalism, which is kind of a collectivist free enterprise; the way they work at maintaining their families; the ways they overcome the consequences of forced assimilation, of territorial dispossession, of internalized racism, etc.—is rather marvelous. In my view this astonishing persistence stands as something of a counterweight to—and a moral comment on—the rest of America. And I suspect that some non-Indians can only take so much of that.
Could you explain your title?
When I was at the Newberry Library as a pre-doctoral fellow, I came across a quote from David Beaulieu, who was dissatisfied with the European model of history. He said the European approach to history may be likened to a tree with many branches; the trunk contains the common themes of Western history. Instead, Beaulieu suggested the image of a forest with many different and varied trees. Then I stumbled upon a number of quotes from different Indian peoples in which a botanical analogy was utilized to talk about diversity, whether it be diversity of myths within the tribe or diversity of notions of what temporality and the purposes of people's movements through time were all about. Originally my subtitle was American Indian Concepts of History, but that suggested that Indians had intellectual traditions that were conceptualized along the same lines as those of Europeans. So remembering how Indians would describe in a gentle and nonjudgmental form that "we do it this way, and you do it that way," I opted for American Indian Ways of History.
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