20 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BuU. 188 



community (see "Eole," below) or to do informant work openly, it 

 provided me only with such vague and often incorrect information 

 about families and relationships as I could gather from silent observa- 

 tion. The school census, however, more than made up the deficit; it 

 furnished me with information which it would have taken me weeks 

 to accumulate through my own endeavors. Relationships between 

 separate households and especially residence groups have been further 

 clarified by the 1936 Official Navaho enumeration, a very battered 

 copy of which has somehow found its way into the hands of the 

 Shonto trader. These two documents, the school census of 1955 and 

 the tribal census of 1936, provided the f omidation upon which has been 

 built the mass of information on social organization presented in pp. 

 5^65. The map compiled by the teachers in connection with their cen- 

 sus is also the basis for map 3 herein. 



Admission records at Tuba City Hospital, to which I was given 

 free access, furnished me with invaluable data on the nature and 

 frequency of Navaho use of the hospital. Because of the incomplete- 

 ness of the data, however, they did not permit me to make valid statis- 

 tical compilations. Also of value were the Navaho income figures 

 compiled at Window Rock and furnished to me through the courtesy 

 of the assistant to the general superintendent. 



I have, of course, made extensive use of the published literature for 

 such historical and comparative material as I could find. Two little- 

 known works deserve special mention in the former regard : Richard 

 Van Valkenburgh's "A Short History of the Navajo People" (co- 

 authored by Jolm C. McPhee, 1938) and his "Dine Bikeyah" (1941). 

 Both of these contain a mass of local historical data carefully com- 

 piled from a wide variety of Government archives (cf. Kluckhohn 

 and Spencer, 1940, p. 70) and not found to my knowledge in any 

 other source. 



Prior to my own investigations, Shonto had not been the scene of 

 any etlinological studies (although local antiquities have received 

 widespread attention from archeologists) . The neighboring and 

 closely similar community of Navajo Mountain, however, was investi- 

 gated in 1938 by Malcolm Carr Collier. Unfortunately, this material 

 has never been published. It is summarized briefly in Leighton and 

 IQuckhohn's (1948, pp. 139-145) "Cliildren of the People" under the 

 caption "The People of Navajo Mountain: Harmony in the Back- 

 woods" and as such remains the only published material on any com- 

 mmiity close to or comparable with Shonto. Ethnologists, who 

 usually show a marked preference for the "backwoods," have for some 

 reason avoided them in the Navaho country. 



