Introduction and Note on Orthography

Abstract

though the idea of writing a book about the Yurok Indians goes back to my first meetings with Yurok people, in 1971. The year before, I had met Harry Kellett Roberts, then living in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco. From about 1912 until the mid-1930s, Harry had been the adoptive nephew and student of Robert Spott, a Yurok man from the village of Requa, at the mouth of the Klamath River in northwestern California. By 1973 I was spending time in the Klamath region myself, eventually coming to know a fair number of Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, and Tolowa people. It was Harry Roberts, by 1972 my own adoptive uncle and teacher, who suggested that I go back to finish college and study anthropology, so that I could “set the record straight on the Yuroks.” My casual stays on the Klamath turned into graduate anthropological field work in 1976–78, and