Aging & Wisdom Quote by Edward Sapir

Sapir is quietly re-routing the traffic of authority. In one sentence, he treats Indigenous narration not as colorful garnish around “real” data, but as direct evidence - a category that, in early 20th-century anthropology and linguistics, was often reserved for what the outsider could measure, collect, or photograph. The key move is almost bureaucratic: “a second type.” He’s building an evidentiary system, and oral accounts are not a footnote; they’re in the ledger.

The phrasing also reveals the era’s tensions. “Statements” gets broken into “formal legends” and “personal information,” a pairing that collapses the West’s hard line between myth and history. Sapir isn’t claiming legends are literally accurate; he’s saying they carry chronological and relational claims (“age or relative sequence”) that can be analyzed like any other record. Subtext: the “native” speaker is not merely a subject to be interpreted but an informant capable of historical reasoning, even if their genres and cues don’t resemble archives.

Yet the sentence keeps one hand on the colonial steering wheel. “Made by the natives themselves” sounds respectful, but it also frames Indigenous people as a distinct evidentiary source to be authenticated, cross-checked, and slotted into “tribal history” as the scientist defines it. The intent is methodological: expand what counts as data. The context is salvage anthropology’s race against time, when scholars like Sapir sought to document languages and traditions under the pressure of ongoing dispossession. The line works because it is both corrective and revealing: it widens the archive while showing who still gets to name it.