For many years anthropologists and historians have been interested in the past of American Indians. This interest, and it extends to native societies all over the world in addition to those of Indians, has been nurtured most recently under the label of ethnohistory. It appears that ethnohistory, to most people who profess to be ethnohistorians, is simply the history of nonliterate people. Even more often it turns out to be the study of the past of nonliterate groups as gleaned from the records of literate peoples with whom they have come into contact. In other words, and in the present case, it is the history of Indians based on evidence written by someone other than Indians themselves.2 Fortunately, there is more than the one-sided, ethnocentric, documentary record to enable the scholar to piece together the past of nonliterate societies. There are the data from archaeology, from ecology, from physical anthropology, from historical linguistics and lexicostatistics, from ethnography, and from testimony upon which to draw for reconstructions. No anthropologist writing a history would consider relying solely upon primary documentary sources. In many instances, indeed, other avenues of investigation are at best supplemented by the written record, by the diaries, letters, ledgers, contemporary reports, and other such paraphernalia which are sacred as the traditional materials of historical scholarship. Working with nonliterate peoples as anthropologists generally do, they are perhaps less mesmerized by the written word than their academic colleagues. What has come, rather unhappily, to be known as history is regarded by anthropologists as a kind of testimony. Jan Vansina, in his classic work, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology, suggests that there are three kinds of testimony. These are the eye-witness account, which includes reminiscences; rumor, which gives the latest information about the present and which is also therefore current events or news; and all verbal testimonies which are reported statements concerning the past.3 In speaking of oral tradition, Vansina avoids the word which is a value-laden one for historians. Oral history, then, consists of the eye-witness account and of tradition. One of the concerns of anthropologists with eye-witness accounts and with