NABOKOV, Peter (Francis) 1940-

(Peter Towne)

PERSONAL: Born October 11, 1940, in Auburn, NY; son of Nicolas (a writer and composer) and Constance (Holladay) Nabokov. Education: Attended St. Johns College; Columbia University, B.A. (English), 1965; Goddard College, M.A. (ethnic studies and language arts), 1972; University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D. (anthropology), 1988.

ADDRESSES: Office—World Arts and Cultures, 200Q Kinross Bldg., 267-2037, 11000 Kinross Ave., Box 951608, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1608.

CAREER: Worked on Navaho, Sioux, and Crow reservations in Montana, 1962, and later sailed with the Merchant Marine; New Mexican, Santa Fe, NM, staff reporter, 1967-68; Monterey Peninsula College, Monterey, CA, coordinator of college preparatory program for veterans, 1970, instructor in American Indian studies, 1970-73, 1977-78; Human Resources Research Organization, Carmel, CA, research associate, 1972-75; University of California, Berkeley, instructor, 1979-82, 1984-85, 1989; Native American Educational Services College, Chicago, IL, co-instructor, 1987; University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, lecturer, 1987-89; California State University, Hayward, lecturer, 1989; University of Wisconsin, Madison, assistant professor of anthropology, 1991-96; University of California, Los Angeles, professor of world arts and cultures, 1997—, department chair, 2002-03. Research associate, Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1962-85, and Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, 1978-82. Visiting lecturer at Center for the Study of Indian History, Haskell Indian Junior College, University of California, Santa Barbara, College of the Virgin Islands, Colorado College, University of North Dakota, University of Montana, and University of Colorado, Boulder. Recorded "Land As a Symbol" (sound recording), National Public Radio, 1979.

MEMBER: Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

AWARDS, HONORS: Albuquerque Press Club awards, two first prizes, and New Mexico Press Association, first prize in editorial writing, all 1967; American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults citation, Library School Journal Best Book citation, and Carter G. Woodson Book Award from National Council for the Social Studies, all 1978, all for Native American Testimony: An Anthology of Indian and White Relations, Volume I: First Encounter to Dispossession; Newberry Library predoctoral fellowship, D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, 1986-87; Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award for Nonfiction: Arts and Letters, 1990, and American Institute of Architects Institute Honor Award, 1991, both with coauthor Robert Easton, both for Native American Architecture; Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture research fellowship in India, 1990-91; Ford Foundation Ethnic Studies Course Development Award, University of Wisconson, 1995; American Institute of Indian Studies senior research fellowship, 1997; UCLA Council on Research Award, 1997, 1999.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior, Crowell (New York, NY), 1967.

Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 1969, revised edition, Ramparts (Berkeley, CA), 1971.

(Under pseudonym Peter Towne) George Washington Carver, Crowell (New York, NY), 1975.

(Editor) Native American Testimony: An Anthology of Indian and White Relations, Crowell (New York, NY), Volume I: First Encounter to Dispossession, 1978, Volume II: Reservation to Resurgence, 1988, new expanded edition published as Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, Viking (New York, NY), 1991.

Adobe, Pueblo and Hispanic Folk Traditions of the Southwest, Smithsonian Institute (Washington, DC), 1981.

Indian Running, Capra Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1981, published as Indian Running: Native American History and Tradition, Ancient City Press, 1987.

Architecture of Acoma Pueblo: The 1934 Historic American Buildings Survey Project, Ancient City Press (Santa Fe, NM), 1986.

(With Wayne Olts) Peoples of the Earthlodge (film), North Dakota Council for the Humanities and Public Issues, 1987.

(With Robert Easton) Dwellings at the Source: Architecture of the American Indian, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1989.

Sacred Geography: Reflections and Sources on Environment/Religion, Harper (New York, NY), 1989.

Bibliography of the Crow, Scarecrow Press (Lanham, MD), 1989.

(With Robert Easton) Native American Architecture, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1989.

(With Lawrence Loendorf) American Indians and Yellowstone National Park: A Documentary Overview, National Park Service (Yellowstone National Park, WY), 2002.

A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

CONTRIBUTOR

Solving "The Indian Problem": The White Man's Burdensome Business, edited by Murray L. Wax and Robert Buchanan, New York Times (New York, NY), 1975.

Methods and Materials of Continuing Education, edited by Chester Klevens, Klevens Publishing, 1976.

Shelter II, Shelter Publications, 1978.

The American Indian and the Problem of History, edited by Calvin Martin, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1987.

Roots: America's Vernacular Heritage, edited by Dell Upton, American Heritage Press, 1987.

(Author of introduction) A Study of Pueblo Architecture in Tusayan and Cibola, Smithsonian Institute (Washington, DC), 1989.

Contributor to Our Indian Heritage, and Reader's Digest. Contributor to numerous periodicals, including Nation, Co-Evolution Quarterly, New Scholar, East West Journal, Camera Arts, American West, Parabola, Progressive, Washington Post, and New York Times Book Review.

SIDELIGHTS: In his books about Native Americans, Peter Nabokov presents a sympathetic and compelling view of their history and traditions. His Two Leggings:The Making of a Crow Warrior is "a crisp, unexaggerated re-creation of the life of a nineteenth-century Plains Indian warrior," as Meredith Brown of Saturday Review stated. A detailed biography that also examines Indian society of the time, it is "a unique record of a vanished culture," wrote Hardin E. Smith in Library Journal. Similarly, Brown assessed it "a handbook to the values and patterns of leadership in a culture that flourished less than 100 years ago."

Calling Nabokov's Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid "centrally the history of a social movement," Edgar Z. Friedenberg explained in the New York Review of Books that it chronicles "the formation and development, under [Reies Lopes] Tijerina's leadership, of the Alianzo Federal de los Pueblos Libres—the Federation of Free City States—and of the remarkable events in which the Alianzo has been involved in its organizing of so called 'Mexican-Americans' in the state of New Mexico." Friedenberg said that the book is "even more valuable as sociology than as history, because it shows so clearly how things work, and on the basis of such carefully and quite literally painfully gathered evidence, both by observation and documentation." Similarly, the value of the two-volume Native American Testimony: An Anthology of Indian and White Relations, according to N. Scott Momaday of the New York Times Book Review, is through its "keen insight into the mind and spirit of the American Indian. In these many utterances, there emerges one voice, and it is one of great poignancy and power, often one of great beauty."

A new and revised edition of the Native American Testimony volumes was released to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage to the New World. Now titled Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, the volumes feature contemporary Native American leaders speaking to Nabokov on the "continued resistance of our major institutions—the media, academia, government—to offering Indian voice and opinions," stated Nation reviewer Jerry Mander. At the same time, the author uses traditional narratives, oral histories, letters, and news clips, to reach back into history, presenting the testimonies of figures such as Sitting Bull and Tecumseh. In doing so the author achieves, said Mander, "what no one has before: the retelling of a half-millennium of history from an Indian viewpoint." There are accounts of battles between Indian nations and European settlers, "internal disputes and debates among the Indians themselves, intellectual discourses about the virtues and failings of the non-Indian ways, [and] painful accounts of deliberately misleading agreements," according to the critic.

In a review for American Indian Quarterly, Francis Jennings took exception to one aspect of Nabokov's study; specifically, how the book "stresses the relations of Indians with other people in terms of race. Peoples of European descent are whites, a term that has bad tradition behind it and is simply not literally true." For example, the critic continued, Nabokov writes of Indians as "bronze-skinned men and women" facing the coming of the "white man." But many Spanish settlers, noted Jennings, "were pigmented . . . and the earliest Indians on record varied widely in skin color from region to region." Sierra writer Kathleen Courrier, however, had more to recommend about Native American Traditions, calling it a "monumental" work that "deflates the romantic but patronizing notion that Native Americans somehow speak as one."

In Indian Running, Nabokov studies ceremonial running through an account of the six-day trek from Taos, New Mexico, to Second Mesa, Hopi, Arizona, to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of the Pueblo Indian revolt. "Nabokov has assembled an amazing array of written knowledge on Native Americans running," noted Kenneth Funston in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. And although Funston faulted its "bookishness" and Nabokov's reluctance in "poking around the present world, the living people," he also thought that "ironically, in the dust of his retiring journalism, Nabokov opens a whole system of Native American etiquette, a way of being—and a way of letting others be."

Native American Architecture, a widely reviewed 1989 book, is a work that "serves many reading audiences equally well," noted William Swagerty in American Indian Quarterly. Nabokov, with architect coauthor Robert Easton, surveys the settlement landscapes of Native nations north of Mexico and the Caribbean, offering a review of traditional dwellings, community housing, and religious structures. "Additional interpretative value is found in Nabokov's correlation of village and camp designs and layouts with social structure," Swagerty said, adding that the book "has no age boundaries. It is suitable for junior readers as well as senior scholars."

"Totem poles were our history books," says a Tlingit man in Nabokov's 2002 publication, A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History. This work compares the Native American oral traditions with the European-based dependence on print as a way of recording history. For the Indians, "storytelling was everything," as Los Angeles Times critic Anthony Day noted. The book relates how white scholars have attempted over the years to understand Indian ways of thought, leading Day to say that the author "is an excellent guide to the diverse and changing trends in the various fields of anthropology as applied to American Indians. Unfortunately, for the general reader [Nabokov's] approach is heavily academic and his format does not afford room for many of the haunting and moving Indian tales and ways of seeing the world that his book refers to." To Library Journal's John Burch, however, the problem of cross-cultural communication is "brilliantly demonstrated" by Nabokov in this volume.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Anthropologist, September, 1990, review of Native American Architecture, p. 765.

American Ethnologist, May, 1994, review of Native American Architecture, p. 429.

American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Volume 4, 1997, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 217.

American Indian Quarterly, summer, 1993, Francis Jennings, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 403; spring, 1994, William Swagerty, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992,

American Quarterly, September, 1991, review of Native American Architecture, p. 502.

American Reference Books Annual, Volume 21, 1990, review of Native American Architecture, p. 412.

Bloomsbury Review, July, 1993, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 17.

Booklist, October 15, 1991, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 372; December 1, 1991, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 675.

Bookwatch, February, 1992, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 2.

Christian Science Monitor, November 21, 1991, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 10.

Commonweal, November 10, 1978.

Design Book Review, winter, 1989, review of Native American Architecture, p. 78.

Guardian Weekly, June 21, 1992, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 18.

Journal of American Folklore, April, 1990, review of Native American Architecture, p. 241.

Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 1991, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 1462.

Kliatt Young Adult Paperback Book Guide, January, 1991, review of Native American Architecture, p. 51; January, 1993, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 34.

Library Journal, June 15, 1967, Hardin E. Smith, review of Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior; November 15, 1991, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 94; March 15, 2002, John Burch, review of A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History, p. 94.

Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2002, Anthony Day, review of A Forest of Time, p. E3.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 29, 1981, Kenneth Funston, review of Indian Running.

Nation, June 1, 1970; April 6, 1992, Jerry Mander, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 461.

Natural History, July, 1989, review of Native American Architecture, p. 56.

New Leader, February 16, 1970.

New Yorker, June 1, 1992, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 84.

New York Review of Books, December 18, 1969, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, review of Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid.

New York Times, February 19, 1992, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-WhiteRelations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. C20.

New York Times Book Review, January 11, 1970, April 30, 1978, N. Scott Momaday, review of Native American Testimony: An Anthology of Indian and White Relations; First Encounter to Dispossession.

Parabola, May, 1989, review of Native American Architecture, p. 116.

Publishers Weekly, November 1, 1991, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 66.

Religious Studies Review, April, 1991, review of Native American Architecture, p. 182.

San Francisco Review of Books, number 1, 1989, review of Native American Architecture, p. 27; number 1, 1992, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 40.

Saturday Review, September 9, 1967, Meredith Brown, review of Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior.

School Library Journal, August, 1992, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 195.

Sierra, November-December, 1992, Kathleen Courrier, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 116.

Technology and Culture, April, 1990, review of Native American Architecture, p. 305.

Village Voice Literary Supplement, November, 1991, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 10.

Washington Post Book World, March 29, 1992, review of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992, p. 13.

Western Historical Quarterly, November, 1990, review of Native American Architecture, p. 501.

Yale Review, June, 1970.