16 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BuU. 188 



informants. They would not, I hope, recognize themselves under that 

 appellation. 



Outstanding among my informants has been the Navaho hired man 

 at Shonto Trading Post, with whom I was in daily contact for an 

 average of 9 hours, and with whom I shared the noon meal. The 

 nature of the Navaho trade (cf. table 36, p. 203) is such that we had 

 the store all to ourselves on numerous occasions for as much as sev- 

 eral hours, particularly during the long and severe winter storms 

 when heavy snow all but blocked the store door. We occupied such 

 periods alternately huddled over the stove or pricing, marking, and 

 stocking merchandise, as the occasion demanded. Our work was 

 nearly always accompanied by lively conversation, which consisted 

 principally of idle queries from me and lengthy replies from the 

 hired man. On most occasions he was quite as anxious to gossip 

 about the lives and loves of everyone in the community, including 

 himself, as I was to listen to it, and on quiet afternoons I had only 

 to "open the tap and let him run." 



Shonto's Navaho hired man has certainly contributed verbally 

 more to my ethnographic studies of the community (see pp. 53-94) 

 than all other Navaho informants combined. He is a man of fairly 

 high status in the community, not because of his comiection with the 

 store but because he is well-to-do in sheep and other property and be- 

 cause he is in all respects a thoroughgoing cultural conservative. He 

 has never been to school, speaks no English, wears long hair, and by his 

 own admission has been off the reservation only twice in his life. In 

 all of these respects he is, of course, a thoroughly untypical trading 

 post hired man, and his duties are necessarily confined to manual labor 

 and to making cash sales. (The ability to add and subtract and to 

 operate the cash register are his only job skills, although, like nearly 

 all Navahos, he can also read numbers.) Fortunately for his con- 

 tribution to the study, he was sufficiently aware of the limitations of 

 my "Trader Navaho" (see "Communication," pp. 212-214) as to limit 

 his own vocabulary accordingly, with the result that I never had any 

 difficulty in understanding him. 



Other important Navaho informants have been the sheepherders 

 with whom I have been associated for periods of several weeks on 

 three occasions (see "Association with Shonto Trading Post," above). 

 Here, as in the store, conditions have often been conducive to ethno- 

 graphic inquiry as well as to observation, particularly during tlie long 

 evenings in camp. Here again communication has been confined 

 largely to Trader Navaho, as the store makes a policy of hiring older 

 and more experienced — therefore less educated — Navahos as herders.^ 



^ If the character of the hired man, the sheepherders, and other Navahos occasionally 

 employed at Shonto Trading Post are considered, it becomes immediately apparent that 

 the major qualifications for employment at the store are lack of education and accultura- 



