The paradox of research

On the one hand I am loving doing the research for my life's work, the book on Native American representations in pop culture. It was fascinating reading the works of the Deloria family. It was intriguing deconstructing the AIM movement from the inside and watching a leader of the militant Wounded Knee takeover become voice talent on Pocahontas, a movie often criticized for its portrayal of Native Americans. I have read a lot of books, watched a lot of Westerns, and taken a lot of notes, spent a lot of time pondering, deconstructing, and reconstructing.

I have something like 16 notebooks filled with handwritten notes from books I have read. I have one notebook that is nothing but a bibliography. Page after page after page of books I have read, websites I have accessed, movies I have watched, television shows I have watched, and even the liner notes from Paul Revere and the Raiders classic Cherokee Nation.

And I am nowhere near finished compiling even the notes on the books I have read. Just 77 pages into the Jenkins book I have added over a half dozen pages of notes in yet another notebook. When I go to form some coherent thoughts out of them it is going to be a long, difficult process to synthesize the various thoughts into a coherent, logical sequence.

But perhaps the most illuminating part of all this has been...the more I research the more things I find that need it. A look at Philip Delorias' Indians in Unexpected Places leads to a need to study early 20th century baseball reporting. A look at Standing Bear is a Person requires deeper looks at reporting in the 19th century. Looking at newspapers leads to needing to look into the phenomenon of speaking tours. Checking out the life of Will Rogers means lots of research into early cinema, a process made infinitely more difficult by the fact that most of the films I need to examine have no known extant prints. It is like looking at a ghost to get a view of what a great-great grandfather looked like...or rather, how those who saw him perceived him.

My notes are filled with asterisks next to names, places, events...such as the need to look into the Oscar ceremony where Marlon Brando had a proxy accept his trophy and speak on fishing rights in Washington and Oregon. Nowhere in my original prospectus was there any awareness of needing to examine fishing rights treaties. The project keeps expanding.

Just today I got a look at how Camp Fire originated with using Native American traditions to instruct young girls in behavior. The circle is expanding.

Perhaps the most thought provoking thing in the whole matter is this; if such a (relatively) simple concept as showing how "white America" went from fear and hatred of Native Americans to co-opting their most sacred ceremonies has so many unexpected and interrelated, moving parts in it...how much different would the world be if we considered other aspects just as carefully; welfare, immigration, war, presidential selections, and so forth. I have a sneaking suspicion a lot of people would make some pretty serious changes in their positions. Sadly, I suspect that expecting that is a lot like being a plumber who cannot get away from his job day or night; he is always installing parts, tubes to carry water from one location to another. In other words...it is just a pipe dream.