White] THE PUEBLO OF SIA, NEW MEXICO 4 
here I mean an Indian of the Sia tribe who, knowing my purpose and 
objectives, gave me in private and in the strictest secrecy, ethnologic 
information. First, one makes acquaintances at Sia. Some of these 
acquaintances become friends. After a time the ethnographer 
decides, on the basis of many conversations in which there are guarded 
allusions to Indian culture, whether his Indian friend would be willing 
to assist him in his inquiries. The Indian, on his part, has been able 
to divine the interests of his white friend long before they are made 
explicit. Thus, before anything has become overt, each knows 
pretty well where the other stands. It is a matter of judgment and 
timing; a mistake could easily make any investigation impossible, for 
the misjudged Indian could warn others that an ethnographer was 
hovering about. 
It should be mentioned in this connection that whereas the pueblo, 
as a community, takes a firm stand on the question of secrecy, there 
are occasional individuals who realize full well that the culture of 
their people is rapidly disappearing and who feel that a record of it 
should be made and preserved. It is the ethnographer’s task to 
“scent out”’ such individuals among his acquaintances and friends; he 
ardently hopes that he will find one or two. Most of the Indians 
who have assisted in this study were persons of this sort. 
Every Indian who has served me as an informant in this study has 
done so of his own free will and in full knowledge of who I was and 
what my objective was; I have never represented myself to an in- 
formant as anything other than an anthropologist. Naturally, it has 
not been possible to work with an informant in the pueblo itself; we 
have always been obliged to work elsewhere. I have always pledged 
myself to the informant to preserve inviolate his identity, and he 
would not have undertaken to help me had he not felt secure in this 
pledge. I have always paid informants for their time; the Sia are 
poor people, and time is valuable. No amount of money, however, 
would induce an Indian to serve as informant unless he were willing 
to do so for nonmonetary reasons. The sums paid to informants 
were never more than ordinary wages for other kinds of work. 
The procedure of ethnographic investigation followed in this study 
has, then, been for the most part one in which ethnographer and 
informant go to some place away from the pueblo, where they can 
work in privacy. A subject is discussed at length and in detail, and 
the ethnographer records it in his notebook in the presence of the 
informant. So great is the necessity of secrecy that an individual is 
unwilling to have a member of his own family know that he is helping 
an anthropologist. There was one exception to this, however, in the 
present study: one informant brought his brother along to serve as 
interpreter for him. Discussions with informants were carried on in 
