Indians in Overalls

by Jaime de Angulo

The best-known work by the eccentric anthropologist Jaime de Angulo, Indians in Overalls is a fascinating account of his first linguistic field tripâ in 1921â to the Achumawi tribe of northeastern California. The Pit River tribe had lived in the barren high country for thousands of years and, despite the harsh climate and difficult living conditions, they had developed an extraordinary complex language and a rich mythology.As he traveled with the tribe and learned the spoken language, he observed gambling games and shamanistic practices, and he collected some of the marvelous stories told around the fire in the winter lodges. Of all the people he worked with, he felt closest to the Achumawi, among whom he discovered “the spirit of wonder, the recognition of life as power.”

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Indigenous

108 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

Jaime de Angulo (1887–1950) was a linguist, novelist, and ethnomusicologist in the western United States. He was born in Paris of Spanish parents. He came to America in 1905 to become a cowboy, and eventually arrived in San Francisco on the eve of the great 1906 earthquake. He lived a picaresque life including stints as a cowboy, medical doctor and psychologist. He survived a suicide attempt after cutting his throat from ear to ear in Berkeley. He became a linguist who contributed to the knowledge of certain Northern California Indian languages, as well as some in Mexico.
He began his career at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1920s, shortly after his marriage to L. S. (“Nancy”) Freeland. During this period he and his wife lived among many native Californian tribes, often becoming fully integrated into their daily lives, in an attempt to study their cultures, languages and music. As a linguist he contributed to the knowledge of more than a dozen native Northern Californian and Mexican languages and music-systems. De Angulo was particularly interested in the semantics of grammatical systems of the tribes he studied, but he was also a skilled phonetician and a pioneer in the study of North American ethnomusicology, particularly in his recordings of native music. De Angulo corresponded with Franz Boas, Alfred L. Kroeber, and Edward Sapir, and received considerable support for his fieldwork from Boas’s Committee on American Native Languages.
In the end, de Angulo’s Bohemian lifestyle kept him from pursuing a normal academic career, and his involvement in Native American research effectively came to an end following the death of his son Alvar in an automobile accident in 1933 and his retreat to an isolated hilltop ranch at Big Sur. At this point his writings took a wild turn into fiction and poetry. Much of his fictional work attempted to recognize and embrace the native "coyote tales", or the trickster wisdom inherent in native storytelling. Ezra Pound called him "the American Ovid" and William Carlos Williams "one of the most outstanding writers I have ever encountered." de Angulo also went on to tutor numerous famous authors including Jack Spicer in linguistics, and Robert Duncan in North American shamanic sorcery; he appears as a character in Jack Kerouac's books.
Perceptions of de Angulo swing wildly; he is seen alternately as a gifted but irresponsible and failed amateur, to an ‘‘Old Coyote,’’ an anarchist hero and talented subversive . De Angulo shaped and diversified the scholarly picture of the native Californian landscape. He was friend and colleague to poets, composers, and scholars such as Harry Partch, Henry Miller, Robinson Jeffers, Henry Cowell, Carl Jung, D. H. Lawrence, and many others.

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you enjoy linguistics and Native American Shamanistic ritual, de Angulo's colorful California characters invite you into their world. This book is an excellent flavor of the "primitive mind" of the Native Americans of the 1920's mixed with unpretentious description and an unassuming narrator.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

De Angulo was a real character, a brilliant linguist who didn't fit in with academia. He lived with his Achumawi (NE California) friends in the 1920s and wrote this narrative years later. It gave me the clearest picture of how Indian shamanism really worked.

[Pavel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book for traveling through Northern California. Found it at the legendary City Lights Books. The whole concept is captured here:

Did you get to the top that day?
Yes, I got to the top. There ain’t nothing there.
Then what?
Then I came down.
Oh…
What do you mean, oh? I got my dinihowi (luck in gambling), didn’t I? I’m always trying to tell you things, but you are worse than a young Indian.

[Asderan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A snapshot of real life for Native Americans in remote far Northern California in the early 1900s.

This book is an entertaining read but also gives the subjects the dignity of being portrayed as real humans living real lives, with one foot in traditional customs and one in the westernized world that was rapidly consuming California.

[izad]

REF: Una guía sobre el arte de perderse de Rebecca Solnit

[James G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A welcome and gentle reminder of how much I enjoyed reading anthropological texts at NYU.

[Adam Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

read cover to cover multiple times, absolutely spell-bound by this little volume of history, "cowboys, folklore & lies" as Andrew Schelling says

[Derek Pyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book. Jaime de Angulo's most well known book, but I am afraid there isn't too much meat here. Some accounts of hanging out with Pit River Indians. Interesting mixing of cultures; a car breaks down and all these Indians going around saying it's because so-and-so put a curse on us, it's bad luck from... and these beliefs all while fixing the car, doing the mechanics. Magic and science together, perhaps in contradictory ways, but without any cognitive dissonance for the Pit River people.
Accounts of doctoring too.

[Frederic · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review from Amazon: I've taught this book several times, and read it even more often. I consider it one of the best works of anthropology with Native communities, and it captures the moment of the early-mid twentieth century for the Pit River Indians beautifully. de Angulo never received the professional attention he deserved (although there is now a good biographical work [Rolling in Ditches with Shamans] available), but he actually fits better with some current trends in writing than with his own period. It's a real pity this has been allowed to go out of print.

[Mimonni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Questo libro mi ha lasciato un po’ di amaro in bocca: perché l’uomo occidentale col suo modo materiale di vivere ha annullato queste civiltà che tanto avevano di spirituale e di simbiotico con la natura, sentendosi nel “giusto” ?

[Liz Bromley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anthropologically interesting but written with a poet's precision and a cowboy's simplicity. Short but sweet.