The Intersection of Karuk Storytelling and Education

meant to combat high drop-out rates amongst Indian students. He stepped fully and
publicly into the world of Indian activism with his book Genocide in Northwestern
California: When Our Worlds Cried, in which he subverts the dominant narrative of “The
California Story” by describing the conquest of northwest California in terms of the
Geneva Convention’s definition of genocide. He was applying for a tenured position at a
state university at the time. (Buckely 2002, 71) Later, he was employed at a different
state university, Humboldt State, where he founded the Native American Studies
Department in 1998. (Cahill “Tales of Subversion”)
Norton’s story typifies and exhibits many of the positive changes happening for
Indian students during a watershed moment in American Indian history. However, his
academic pursuits were only part of his life. Norton was and is a ceremonial singer and
dancer in High Dance ceremonies. The period in which he participated in Indian people’s
struggle to claim American institutions of education in an effort to make them work for
Indian students was marked by activism and religious revivalism both nationally and
locally. Some elements of traditional education continued (cf. Buckley 2002), but the
Indian generation that came of age in the 40s and 50s is colloquially known as the “lost”
or “short-hair” generation, referencing their alienation from their traditional culture,
symbolized by their wearing their hair short to try to assimilate into mainstream
American society. In 1970, however, a group of Yuroks, largely from the villages of O-
pyúweg on the coast and Mowr-rekw on the Klamath River founded the Northwest
Indian Cemetary Protection Association (NICPA) with other indigenous northwest
Californians to fight the looting of their ancestors’ graves. (Platt 128) Their movement
began to gain steam after a showdown with anthropologists from San Francisco State
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