"The Laying Aside of a Shield": Ethnographic Power Struggles in Oliver La Farge's Indian Fiction

Abstract

Oliver La Farge's debut novel about Navajo life, Laughing Boy (1929), won the Pulitzer prize and popular acclaim.' In an article of the time that considered the future of this promising writer, one reviewer raised the issue of La Farge's professional training as an anthropologist and remarked that in scientific circles it was hoped that La Farge would not give up his first profession. The reviewer's unnamed source pointed to La Farge's extraordinary anthropological skills and claimed, "He's the only man who can talk to the Indians and get anything out of them."2 In fact, La Farge chose a literary career, but he continued talking to Indians, and through his fiction Indians also talked to America.3 This paper argues that in his autobiography and Indian fiction (1927 to 1963), La Farge reveals a self-consciousness about the process of ethnography, acknowledging the inherent but morally complex power relations between researcher and subject. By questioning the motives of White ethnographers, La Farge exposes the harm they can do to Indian cultures, but by creating Indian characters who use the ethnographer's tools, he suggests that ethnography can be a powerful force in shaping Native accommodation and resistance. At its core, La Farge's work anticipates developments in ethnography that have captured scholars' attention for several decades. Since the 1950s, anthropologists have gradually abandoned the idea of "objective" fieldwork and increasingly focused on the "subjective" nature of the scientist's research into other cultures. Concerns are now raised about the researcher's power relation to his or her subjects; there has developed an awareness that descriptions of other cultures partly reflect the researcher's own prejudices or desires; and more attention is given to the researcher's personal relationship with those being observed. No longer merely an "observer," the ethnographer becomes a "participant" and his informants "collaborators." As James Clifford notes, the question of "power" is now seen as central in ethnographic work: