Fish Out of Water
Dr. Angela Tarango on telling the stories of others
In the summer of 2006, I was in Springfield, Missouri, doing research for my dissertation. Springfield is both home to Chinese Cashew Chicken (they claim to have invented it there) and to the headquarters of the Assemblies of God (AG). As I was working on a dissertation that focused on Native Americans in the AG, I spent a week camped out in the archives, digging through dusty files. I took breaks from the exhaustion of archival research by wandering the aisles of the Bass Pro World Grandfather store, which stocks a bonanza of hunting and fishing gear and an enormous showroom of fishing boats. Having learned to fish with my dad as a child, I was fascinated by the boats and would go to browse several times that week, slowly examining them. They helped me let go of the exhaustion of archival research.
One afternoon, the director of the archive came over to me, followed by two well-dressed men. He introduced them as prominent Native American leaders in the AG and said they wanted to speak to me. As I stood up to greet them, one of the men--Brother John Maracle, a Mohawk missionary--said to me, “We have been praying that the Holy Spirit would send us someone to tell our story. We can see now that he has sent you for that purpose.”
We have been praying that the Holy Spirit would send us someone to tell our story.
Those words would echo in my brain for years.
Those words follow me to this day.
Years later, my dissertation became a book, and its epilogue retells this encounter with the leaders. I used the story to discuss how Pentecostal believers have a tendency to characterize the mundane as miraculous. My seemingly mundane encounter with the leaders has continued to stick in my head long after the book was published, but now sits with me more as a fundamental question:
What did it mean that these Native American Pentecostals entrusted their history to be told by a non-Pentecostal, Mexican-American academic?
Although much of my scholarship has been on Native American Christianity and Native religions in general, I am a Mexican American, with roots in Los Angeles, CA and El Paso, TX. I was raised by parents who came of age during L.A.’s Chicano Movement; my work has always been informed by my mother’s activism and my father’s pragmatism. As a minoritized academic who writes about a different group of minoritized people, I knew I had to be careful--cautious, even--in my scholarship. Their histories aren’t necessarily my histories. The history of Native American believers in the AG belongs to another group of people, and I had found myself in a position to safeguard this history.
Choosing the Jesus Way: American Indian Pentecostals and the Fight for the Indigenous Principle (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) by Angela Tarango
The unique history of Native American believers in the AG had not been documented prior to my dissertation and subsequent book publication. Ignored by history, and at times by their own denomination, it was certainly not miraculous that the leaders I met understood this: Only an outsider has the freedom to criticize the denomination for its failings towards Native American believers.
But being an outsider has its drawbacks, too. Some people refused to be interviewed and, if they did speak to me, would not tell me the whole truth. Additionally, the denominational newspapers were maddeningly biased, like a minefield waiting for me to take a wrong step. I had to be careful, always careful, with how I told other people’s stories.
We have a responsibility to the people we study and write about, as highlighted by the controversy over the recent publication of the novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins.
What, then, are our responsibilities to the people we study?
Read and listen carefully
Always listen to what is said and unsaid. The sources don’t say as much as they do say. Listen to the silences, look for creative ways to understand the sources. Look for unusual sources that will give you a different perspective.
I used archival photographs as a source in order to see how Native leaders were portrayed by the AG in their documents and to get a better sense of how Native people actively represented themselves. Try your very best to read the sources through the lens of the minoritized group you are writing about.
Focus
You can’t cover it all. The history that I confronted is vast and sprawling. Pieces of the story were missing, and there were subplots so big that they deserved their own book. Once I discovered that the history of the AG mission to Alaskan Natives was deeply complicated, enough for its own monograph, I chose to exclude them in my study. Acknowledge that you can’t do everything, and try to stay focused on the more relevant parts of the history you are writing about.
Empathize
Practice radical empathy towards the people you write about.
Knowing that the descendants of the people I was writing about might one day find my book, I wrote about their ancestors’ lives with the same care I would have taken towards my own family. Think: If an outsider had come to write about your history, how would you want to be portrayed--and treated?
Treat people with respect. Respect and mutual understanding go a long way.
Stay humble and keep your sense of humor
While academic work is serious work, lives and histories are messy—and occasionally hilarious—as is the process of researching and writing.
Once, while I was visiting a Native Pentecostal church in Arizona, much of the congregation got the Holy Spirit. I felt like the odd outsider, standing there and observing, so I clapped my hands in time to the praise music and sang loudly to join the few others who were singing along. Now, I can’t sing—at all! I know this. Although I’ve played instruments my whole life and have a well-trained ear, I know I’m always off-key. And, given the noise in the church as people spoke in tongues and shouted, I thought my terrible warbling would just blend into the general din. Then I heard a woman behind me say, “Oh, that poor girl! She really can’t sing.” It took all I had to swallow my laughter.
Always keep your sense of humor about your project, and stay humble about the work you do.
The Indian Revival Center (now Indian Revival Church), once the largest Native American church in Los Angeles, ca. 1962.
Source: Assemblies of God
Scholars of Native religions and Native studies in general feel this acute sense of duty to the people we study, knowing that our scholarship involves the most misunderstood group of people in the United States. As a member of another minority group that is ethnically and geographically close to the history of native peoples, I knew in my bones that I had to try to live up to Brother Maracle’s statement.
Brother Maracle may not know that his statement would follow me throughout my professional life, even as I switched to my present scholarship in Latinx communities. Brother Maracle’s statement drove home what no graduate class or book has ever managed to do so viscerally since.
We are privileged when people give us permission to write their stories.
And we should never forget that.
