Humboldt County Historical Society

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Yurok Narratives
By Robert Spott and A. L. Kroeber

   In 1900, A. L. Kroeber, a young ethnologist from the University of California, Berkeley, began visiting Yuroks at Weitchpec and Requa. In meetings over the next forty years, a friendship developed between Kroeber and a remarkable young Yurok by the name of Robert Spott. Fully steeped and educated in the Yurok culture, which infused his personality and world view, Robert Spott "went to battle in France in the First World War," writes Kroeber in his preface, "and has made his living in several of the few white men's ways open to an Indian, without serious impairment of these inner affects." This book of narratives chronicling the lives of Spott's Yurok contemporaries and forebears is the result of a unique collaboration and friendship.