Gelya Frank
National Endowment for the Humanities
Resident Scholar 2002-2003
Repatriating a Story: The Case of U.S. v.
Whaley
Salt Lake Pete, a member of the Yaudanchi tribe
of Yokuts Indians in late 19th century California, was appointed by
a tribal council to execute a shaman who had spiritually poisoned
and killed Hunter Jim, a well-liked tribal leader. This process was
not unusual as a traditional remedy against shamans who abused their
power. In an unfortunate clash of cultures, however, Salt Lake Pete
and the three men who assisted him were accused of murder under a
newly enacted federal law, then convicted of manslaughter and imprisoned
for carrying out this task for the tribe. Months earlier, the matter
would have been outside federal jurisdiction because the conflict
was between Indians only and on Indian land.
In Repatriating a Story: The Case
of U.S. v Whaley, Gelya Frank delves into this incident to uncover
the motives among the Tule River Indians and their U.S. Indian agent
who reported the crime. Her reconstruction illuminates tribal identity
and tribal sovereignty among Native Californians during a period when
traditional institutions were actively suppressed by the federal government.
“The Yokuts and Western Mono in this case were among the tiny
percentage of California Indians who survived the most rapid disruption
and devastation experienced by any native people in North America,”
Frank observes. She has been associated for over thirty years with
the Tule River Indian tribe, many members of which are descended from
principals in this case. Frank notes, however, that not even direct
descendants of Salt Lake Pete have knowledge today of the compelling
events of the Whaley case.
Using intertextual analysis and a range of
narrative and critical approaches, Frank is piecing together the case
from federal court records, unpublished field notes of anthropologist
A. L. Kroeber and his student A. H. Gayton, census records, and published
sources about the Yokuts and Western Mono tribes. “From a native
point of view,” says Frank, “the Whaley incident involved
a challenge to chiefly authority by an out-of-control shaman. Federal
repression of traditional institutions made it also a crisis of order
and succession.”
Frank, an anthropologist who helped found
the new academic discipline of Occupational Science, considers her
work with the Tule River tribe a model for what she terms direct cultural
interventions. “Anthropologists and other scholars now have the
ability and even the duty,” she observes, “to restore past
cultural information to the communities of origin. The process of
returning an American Indian history of survivance to collective memory
is central to this story.”
Affiliation at time of fellowship: Professor, Departments
of Occupational Science & Occupational Therapy and Anthropology,
University of Southern California
