JF Ptak Science Books Post 2177
At first I though that this pamphlet was going to led us into a way-of-thinking, or sensibility, about aboriginal non-technical people thinking and relating mechanical and technical ideas. I also thought it might relate in some way to the absence of the advanced Chinese civilization in the 17-19th centuries (for example) of drawing technical ideas in a standardized fashion, in perspective, which I thought was so well done in the West and which helped lead to the great scientific and industrial revolutions to come.
It relates to neither, but it does in a way tell us the story of an American Indian artist from the 1880's responding to outside influences in the Navajo world.
The paper is "A Navajo Artist and his Notions of Mechanical Drawing" by R.W. Shufeldt (1850-1934), which was published in the Annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institution for 1886 in 1889, and it tells the story of a remarkable artist who seems to have rendered great tech details from scant experience and deep memory. (Shufeldt, an Army surgeon ornithologist, and osteologist and some sort of highly questionable ethnologist, published this just before he was relseased from his Smithsonian duties for disgraceful behavior. He abandoned wives, was an Indian graverobber, and other unsavory things, even while being the curator of the U.S. Amry Medical Museum. He lost much of his vaguely-tempered appeal for what he regarded as "savage races" over the next decades, publishing The Negro, Menace to American Civilization in 1907 and America's Greatest Problem, the Negro, in 1915. This in effect sums him up, and makes hm an early American version of Alfred Rosenberg-light, or at the very possibly least, a published racist of high order.1)
The paper--coming right at the end of the Plains Wars and just a few years before the Massacre of Wounded Knee--treats it subject with great distance and superiority. The artist's name is "Choh", the son of Esta-yeshi, who was the older sister of "one of the best-known sub-chiefs of the Navajo Indians", Mariano, who lived in "crudely constructed habitations" on the hillsides near Fort Wingate. (The Fort was established near Gallup, New Mexico, in the early 1860's to help control the Navajos to its north; from 1873-1886 it was used in actions to its south in the Apache Wars. At about the time the author of this pamphlet visited the Fort Douglas MacArthur was taking his first breaths.)
Choh's face was disfigured by an incident when an infant, though as a young man of 22 or 23 in 1886 "he (was) by no means a stupid clown we would take him to be".
Shufeldt takes an interest in Choh because of his ability to render uncommon objects uncommonly well, and commends Choh's work, though not without heavy criticism and a large dose of cultural superiority--though as harsh as all of this is, the man was somewhat inspired for his time and place in regards to cultural differences.
Shufeldt grants rather peculiar compliments, which certainly have the taste and feel of looking down upon Choh from agreat height:
When Shufeldt finally gives notice of Choh's "remarkable" efforts at drawing a locomotive (and tender) from a distant memory, he uses that word more in a Victorian sense of finding something worthy to remark upon rather than we would use it today, as a consideration of wonder. It is as though the author is discovering the possibility of "advancement" for the Navajo, with Choh finding his way out of an "aboriginal rut" in which his people have found themselves for 'centuries".
There is little doubt that Choh had a great talent--particularly given his position--and that he had no materials to speak of, and that many of the things he created were coming from deep memory. Shulfedlt remarks on this a number of times, both praising and in equal dosages criticizing Choh's work--he is never however more than a sentence or two away in his praise from an enormous sense of bias, noting Choh as a "savage" with the lot of his people living more like bears than humans. Of coure there is no mention of what brought the Navajo to the Fort to begin with.
It was tempting to refer to Choh as a Navajo Outsider, though I think what he was doing was responding to what were to him Outsider influences in an environment that he had known to him and which had been known to the Navajo and which had been passed down in oral tradition for centuries. Shufeldt was the the person outside of the Navajo and Zuni cultures that he studied and remarked upon. The changes in their landscape and environment would have gone unnoticed by Shufeldt in much of the same way that he would miss most of the life and sound in the full-of-life and not-silent desert.
I've no doubt spent way too much time on this paper, but I did find it to be pretty unusual for the subject matter of Native American People and technical drawing and the time in which it was published.
Notes.
1. He explains in the introduction to The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization, that his was an objective and scientific approach, and didn't harbor any particular ill-will to the African American, in spite of his title and the rest of the book. He also did not believe in capitalizing the "n" in "Negro", which actually was not a standard practice until the 1930's.
"...my object in publishing a book on the negro race as it is now represented in this country, has been for the sole purpose of pointing out, from a purely scientific view- point, the effect that these introduced Ethiopians have had upon our progress and civilization, in the past, and what their continued presence among us means in the future. In offering to my readers what I have in the following pages I desire above all else to state that, although anthropologically speaking, the negro race of the stock here treated is not by any means a favorite ethnic group of mine among the world's peoples, either to study or to come in contact with, still I have no special prejudice against them, and in penning what is set forth in the ensuing chapters I have in no case or instance been actuated by any other motive than telling the truth..."
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