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Reviews
Viola Martinez, California Paiute: Living in Two Worlds
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By Diana Myers Bahr
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University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2003. Illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 211 pages. $29.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Alanna Kathleen Brown
Montana State University–Bozeman
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| Viola martinez, california paiute is an engaging work, first because Martinez's life is so interesting and second because the writer, Diana Meyers Bahr, is consciously working on the evolution of an autobiography/biography format that is biculturally sensitive. The key to both the format and Martinez's life lies in the subtitle, Living in Two Worlds. Let us begin with Bahr's choices to contextualize and forefront Viola Martinez's voice. As a project associate for the Oral History Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, Bahr is aware that oral representations carry less weight than the written record in Euro-American culture. She is also aware that the written record can solidify the flimsy and the careless, and that both oral and written forms of communication have inherent flaws and essential worth. |
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Bahr chooses to forefront Martinez's voice and perceptions while drawing extensively on historical records and photography, her own as well as others', to adhere a life to a place and time. She also includes a "literature review," an addendum that discusses fourteen collaborations on twentieth-century Native women's lives, summarizing key elements of those women's stories while discussing the approaches of other editors to illustrate the difficulties of doing bicultural work. For Bahr, what matters most is communicating the vitality and understanding of the key figure. She also insists on the need to differentiate the collaborator from the subject in the presentation of the material. Such work brings at least two perspectives to a life, and more if other interviewees are included. To read Viola Martinez is to see the cutting edge of an evolving form as works in cultural studies, American pluralism, and feminist theory, affects the presentation of multiethnic life reflections. |
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The primary reason to read this text is the fascinating life of Viola Martinez herself. Martinez does carefully note that "these are not just my childhood memories but also recollections of what people have told me" (p. 4). Those with tribal consciousness always speak to represent their communities. While they will point out tragic paradoxes, they tell their stories on behalf of those who constantly face the threat of erasure by Euro-American culture. Born in 1917, the tenth child of a mother who died in the infamous 1918 influenza epidemic, Martinez was raised by her mother's sister in traditional ways but also in extreme poverty. |
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Her uncles decided to send Martinez, at age ten, to the Sherman Institute Federal Indian Boarding School in Riverside, California. Chapter 3 is filled with anecdotes about being punished for speaking her language and shamed for being Indian, training as a domestic servant, and being indoctrinated into Christianity. The real horror in her story is the theft of Indian children either physically, as when tourists just took away her beautiful sister, Alice, or psychologically, as when Martinez discovered that "she no longer quite fit in Owens Valley, nor did she fit comfortably in Riverside. She was on the margin of each society, partly in and partly out" (p. 67). |
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Martinez's response was to master English, to be one of the first three Indian girls to request entrance into Riverside Polytechnic High School, to go on to junior college, and ultimately to achieve a teaching credential from Santa Barbara State College in 1939, an amazing life trajectory for an Indian of that time. Fifty years later, as Bahr points out, only sixty out of one hundred Indian students complete high school, and only three out of one hundred Indians achieve a college degree. |
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Martinez's adult life has been just as surprising. In 1940, allotments opened up for Paiutes in Owens Valley, and Martinez returned with her sister and went into social service work because "the people don't want an Indian teaching white students" (p. 87). In the face of ongoing racism, Martinez became an office manager for the Indian Field Service Agency, managed a housing project for the Department of Labor with white workers under her supervision, and became a counselor at the Japanese Internment Camp at Manzanar. Martinez's comments on the similarities between the BIA-run Indian schools and the Japanese interment camps of World War II as well as Bahr's informative historical commentary insightfully expose the interlinking of race policies in America. |
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After raising her children, Martinez did become a teacher in 1968. She was an innovator in culturally pluralistic teaching methods, and became a driving force within the American Indian Education Commission and the Native American Ministry of Southern California for the Presbyterian Church. Her life story closes with a car journey back to Owens Valley — to the people she has known, the places important to her, and discoveries in local museums of images of a mother she never knew, family members, and the world she lived from 1917 to 1927 as a Paiute child. Viola Martinez is an extraordinary woman, and this autobiography/biography is well worth reading. |
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