Faculty
Andrew Wiget
Professor
Director of New Mexico Heritage Center
Email:
awiget@nmsu.edu
Office Address:
New Mexico State University
Department of English
P.O. Box 30001, MSC 3E
Las Cruces, NM 88003
Phone:
(575) 646-3011
Fax:
(575) 646-7725
"The lands around my dwelling
Are more beautiful
From the day
When it is given me to see
Faces I have never seen before.
All is more beautiful,
All is more beautiful,
And life is thankfulness.
These guests of mine
Make my house grand."
Takomaq, an Iglulik Eskimo woman spontaneously created this song to greet the Danish ethnographer Knud Rasmussen, who visited her deep in winter and contributed tea to her table, adding to the meal she prepared for him.
A Folklorist's Journey
People in living communities are not only the folklorist's resource, they are friends. The courage and creativity of their lives is their lasting gift to us. The experience of entering into a dialogue of respect and understanding with another culture is the principal source of my growth, and sharing it the main motivation for my teaching. My resources and my friends are the indigenous peoples of North America and Eurasia and the traditional communities of the Southwest. My work has been about describing, interpreting and helping to conserve the traditions of these peoples. At the same time, I try to foster an informed understanding of the rich, complex field of meaning-making generated by their imaginations. I try to teach my students that all human behavior, however different from their own experiences, is always meaningful and often intensely beautiful, the product of complex interactions between cultural and individual energies.
My interest in the cultural heritage of Native America began to take shape in my first years in graduate school with a philological interest in the literary character of Native American oral texts. As I learned more of indigenous aesthetics and understood the dynamics of oral literature as performance, it became clear to me that I must move from the study of recorded texts to the study of living performances and do substantive fieldwork.
New Mexico provided me the opportunity to put my knowledge and skills as a professional folklorist at the service of traditional cultures in general and Indian communities in particular. Working with living traditions and understanding how expressive forms emerge from the complex social, historical and environmental forces that shape culture called me into an even deeper, interdisciplinary engagement with these communities. Documentation was clearly an inadequate response for me as a responsible scholar. Like others, I began to evaluate how my skills and knowledge could benefit traditional communities by helping them to preserve traditions in situ, and my work evolved into yet another dimension.
In 1986 I founded the New Mexico Heritage Center here in order to focus these cultural conservation efforts, applying scholarly research to the development of public programming in the service to impacted communities. Over more than a decade, the Heritage Center has made a substantial difference among Anglo, Hispanic, African-American and American Indian communities throughout the region with grant-funded documentation, exhibit, and festival projects totaling more than $400,000. To develop only the Native American example, I have worked with the Pueblo of Zuni as an expert witness in one of their claims cases, as a consultant to the development of their tribal museum, and in producing Zuni-language cultural programming for the tribally-owned radio station. In 1996, I concluded a project to conserve more than 400 hours of audio recordings documenting an entire generation of Zuni storytellers, now deceased, so that the tribe now has useful access to this material. I have also worked with the Ramah Navajo and, to a lesser degree with individuals at Mescalero, in documenting various aspects of traditional culture. I have also given a workshop documenting oral traditions for the intertribal Keepers of the Treasures organization. As co-curator of the New Mexico Program for the Smithsonian's annual Folklife Festival in 1992, I was principally responsible for insuring that Indian cultures in the state were adequately and accurately representing in the public programming in a manner that was responsive to the needs of Indian people. That program in Washington, DC, was attended by over 1.2 million people, and later I independently reproduced it in the state with contracts from the state legislature City of Las Cruces.
...And Siberia. An interdisciplinary comparativist at heart, with my first trip to Russia in 1990, I began a research program on the common folkloric inheritance of indigenous Siberians and Native Americans, building on the knowledge of the ancient historical relationship between these two populations. At the same time, as a person with practical experience in cultural conservation programs and law, it was apparent to me, especially after my first Siberian fieldwork in 1992, that the experiences of Native Americans would be of enormous benefit to the indigenous peoples of Russia. I have been working closely with Russian government officials, the World Bank and local Siberian native leaders to bring contemporary American methods of cultural impact assessment, absolutely unknown in Russia, to bear upon the situation of native peoples in Siberia. The MacArthur Foundation has supported this with three, two-year grants: the first, completed in 1995, provided the first survey of sacred places of any Siberian indigenous tribe; in the second, which completed in 1998, I coordinated a Russian-American team to produce the first traditional land-use atlas for any indigenous Siberian people. MacArthur is also supported a program we designed to bring Native Siberian leaders to North America to begin a face-to-face dialogue with Indian leaders in the U.S. and Canada. I also serve as co-convener and Western delegation organizer for an annual international working seminar on the problems of the indigenous peoples of the north, which we founded with the Russian government in 1995, and which recently completed its second annual meeting with very useful results. Currently, with support again from the MacArthur Foundation, we are working to gain protected area status for native lands in Siberia as a vehicle to provide for the first time both communal land tenure and local self-government for indigenous people, which, if established in law and given international status, would provide a Russian indigenous people with control of land and local self-government (similar to American Indian reservations) for the first time in the history of Russia.
Principal Research and Teaching Interests
Folklore (Myth, Legends, Oral History; Rituals, Folk Art and Architecture), especially the folklore of indigenous peoples (Native Americans and native Siberians) and folklore of the Southwest; cultural conservation; American Indian Studies; the ethnography of communication; critical theory; American literature to 1900; the Bible as Literature.
Major Publications
Books include:
Native American Literature (Twayne, 1985)
Critical Essays on Native American Literature (G.K.Hall, 1985)
Simon Ortiz (Boise State U, 1986)
The Dictionary of Native American Literature (Garland, 1995).
I am a member of the editorial board of The Heath Anthology of American Literature, and have written numerous book chapters, as well as articles in American Literary History, College English, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Studies in American Indian Literature, Latin American Indian Literatures, and Ethnohistory.
Currently I am working on a book about the Siberian Khanty (for the short term) and, as a long-term project, developing an encyclopedia of American Indian folklore.
Education
- Ph.D., University of Utah (1977)
- M.A., John Carroll University (1973)
- B.A., John Carroll University (1968)