Reed Magazine: August 2000 > The Hidden Gringo

Haviland and a compadre, Xun Tzukipan, who taught him how to weave the kind of straw hat that he is wearing. July 1978.

Although Haviland hasn't spent as much time in Queensland as he has in Chiapas, a political change has made his work there more important than he thought possible. In the last several years, Aboriginal people have been gaining land rights. Part of what they need to document their claims are records of relationships and territories, which is precisely what Haviland spent years recording as he learned the language. "I spent a lot of time with old people who basically didn't have anything else to do with their time, going back to places they hadn't seen since they were young, and spending long, long periods in the bush. I'd go off with a couple of 60-year-olds and camp out at a river mouth where they'd camped as little kids, and we'd spend three or four weeks there. For me, it was the best way to get immersed in their memories, which was what I was interested in." Haviland's work there, and the many volumes of social history he recorded in the 1970s, has provided especially useful evidence for Aborigines from Hopevale trying to regain control of their lands.

Haviland's most recent book, Old Man Fog and the Last Aborigines of Barrow Point (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), recounts the stories of Roger Hart, the last speaker of his language, and includes tales of Haviland's travels with Hart. The introduction, by Hopevale community member and noted Aboriginal activist and advocate Noel Pearson, relates a story that illustrates Haviland's mastery of the language. He writes about Haviland "standing with a group of men around the old curio shop . . . when a Hopevale man, newly arrived from down south, and not knowing who John was, joked to the locals `Ganaa ngayu yii wangarr bagal?' (Is it all right if I just beat this white fella up?) The joker got the fright of his life when this six-and-a-half-foot American said in perfect Guugu Yimithirr: `Nyundu nganhi baadala, ngayu warra mangaalmu!' (Just you have a go, [and see if] I have no hands!)"

One of Haviland's stories about Australia gives some insight into part of the reason he fits so seamlessly into other cultures: he has an ethnically unidentifiable face that could belong almost anywhere. Haviland tells about how a young Hopevale man who had been off at school and didn't know him asked Haviland what his language was. Not understanding what he meant, Haviland told him it was English. The young man said, no, we all speak English, what's your language? "He figured," said Haviland, "that the only reason anyone would be in this godforsaken, out-of-the-way place learning about this language was that he was some poor, dispossessed, Aboriginal half-caste guy who didn't have a language. So he meant, what's your ancestral language, the one you don't speak anymore, the reason you're up here trying to learn this language. . . . Actually I think that this strange, vaguely ambiguous foreign look that I've had all my life is probably part of what made me do anthropology in the end."

Haviland also tells of playing in Chiapas on the San Cristobal de las Casas all-star basketball team in the 1970s: "San Cristobal in those days was known for having an extremely dangerous basketball team with three tall guys-two of them gringos. One of them was called the `Gringo Blanco,' who was a missionary from Michigan. The other one was called the `Gringo Escondido,' the hidden gringo: that was me."