Vindication

Headlined in newspapers across the country, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s grant of 1.6 million dollars to pay for the digitalization of thousands of tape-recorded oral histories of indigenous people has a special meaning for me. One of the remarkable things about Doris was that she tried to move beyond giving to the charitable organizations her friends and family supported—the Presbyterian Church, welfare issues, medical research and so forth—by coming to know something about the suffering of Native communities, ignored in the 1950’s by most mainstream philanthropists.

After her visit to the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in 1959, where she saw first-hand the miserable living conditions of the inhabitants and was adopted into the tribe with a naming ceremony—an event, complete with sweat lodge, I describe in The Silvan Swan: In Search of Doris Duke—Doris became better informed about the infamous transgressions of the U.S. Government. But that was not all; during her visit, she was “alerted to the presence of a people determined not only to survive in the harshest of circumstances, but to flourish.”

Part of the flourishing depended on preserving ritual stories, chants and prayers, usually memorized and told by the elders. Funded with Doris’ donation, professors and graduate students from eight universities began in 1966 to visit tribal communities and, after securing permissions, to record the elders’ stories.

But Doris, like many donors, left it to these universities to preserve these taped interviews and over time, without more funding, the enormous collections of nearly 6,500 tapes deteriorated and nearly disappeared; one box of tapes, I read during my research, was abandoned on a loading dock. Without additional funding, publicity and the crucial involvement of the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums, which donated three hundred thousand to the current project, these oral histories were doomed to neglect and eventual oblivion.

Their survival and spread has become even more crucial as the pandemic has wiped out the elders on many reservations, their unique oral traditions lost. The Navajos here in North-Western New Mexico have been hard hit, their communities, often without water or on-site medical clinics, have not received enough vaccine and continue to die in great numbers. At least now the survivors will be able to listen to ancient oral histories about hardship and survival.

It has been difficult, or perhaps even impossible, for my biography to penetrate or alter the old rumors about Doris Duke, exemplified by an accusatory article in Vanity Fair. I have felt saddened that her Foundation found it best to ignore my work after granting me access to her archive at Duke University. But perhaps someone on the board did read The Silver Swan and did notice my mention of the tapes abandoned on a loading dock.

The universe sometimes grants the work of a complicated and misunderstood woman of power a late vindication.

[The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke is out in paperback on March 2. For more on Doris Duke’s philanthropy, please see my video, Doris Duke’s Legacy.]

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