Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,024

This is the grave of Oliver LaFarge.

Born in New York City in 1901, Oliver Hazard Perry LaFarge was a rich northeastern elite. His father was a major Beaux-Arts architect and he mostly grew up in Newport, Rhode Island, home of the richest of the rich. Kind of fits his namesake too. He went to Harvard, graduated in 1924, and then did a master’s degree there as well that he finished in 1929. But between those two, he had decided to become an anthropologist. This was the era when the East Coast elites had discovered New Mexico. We discussed the ultimate version of this recently with Mabel Dodge Luhan, but there are many examples of it. Those Indians and Mexicans, they are so authentic and untouched by our modern decadence and other claptrap nonsense.

Now, at first, LaFarge’s interest was primarily Mexico. He worked with the anthropologist Frans Blom on Olmec cultures. He then worked at Tulane University as an ethnologist for short time. But soon, with his own work, he became interested in New Mexico. He moved to Santa Fe permanently and became a white leader on indigenous rights, working with people such as John Collier on moving the United States from its openly racist and genocidal treatment of the Tribes. He was one of the leaders in the Association on American Indian Affairs. That was founded in 1922 to protect Native rights, end the repression of cultural practices, and push for the federal government to allow the Tribes to have self-determination on most of their affairs.

LaFarge became a popular writer about Native Americans in the Southwest. He and the painter John Sloan wrote Introduction to American Indian Art, published in 1931. He wrote As Long As The Grass Can Grow – Indians Today, a 1940 book with photographs from Helen Post about, well, the title explains it. He wrote an alphabet for the Navajo language. He wrote a biography of Cochise in 1953. He also wrote a book about Santa Fe in 1959.

There are a few novels in there too. The most famous seems to be 1929’s Laughing Boy, which was made into a film in 1934 and is about a Native boy caught between his own and white culture, a real enough situation for those suffering through the Indian schools. That book won the Pulitzer and made him pretty famous. 1937’s The Enemy Gods is about the Navajo being unable to adapt to white life. I have no idea if these hold up at all. Seems a bit dubious to me. Toward the end of his life, some libraries removed Laughing Boy for obscenity, but given that one of the cities that did this was Amarillo, I’m assuming the racism of west Texas crackers was at the core of it.

Although 40 years old when the U.S. entered World War II, LaFarge volunteered for the military. He was in the Air Transport Command and reached the rank of major by the end of the war. He was one of the three officers who wrote War Below Zero: The Battle for Greenland, the 1944 book explaining to the U.S. public what happened there. I’m sure for Donald Trump, this is a reason to annex the place or something, or would be if he had ever read a book in his life.

Now, LaFarge married a rich heiress in 1933. They had a son. His name was Oliver as well. But he didn’t care for that or for his father. He would move to New York and become the folk singer Peter LaFarge, who was a pretty important player in the folk revival there. He may not have liked his father, but he very much identified with Native Americans. In fact, he pretended to be one at times, which is really uncool. He wrote “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” which is one of the great American songs and made famous by Johnny Cash in 1964. He was a mess though and died in his apartment in 1965.

By this time, Oliver Sr. was gone, but their estrangement seems to have lasted through his death. He remarried after he divorced the heiress and this time to someone from one of the old Spanish descendant families. Now, in New Mexico, you have an endless line of bullshit being pushed at you by people who claim to be “pure” Spanish. This is a a claim to whiteness that developed as a late 19th century response to Americans pushing these people out of power after the conquest in 1848. It’s also a lie that is still told today, a way for people to separate themselves from “those people,” like pachucos in Española and recent Mexican migrants. Anyway, LaFarge got pretty into this. His wife was a Baca (one of the old names of the state). He wrote Behind the Mountains, a 1956 book, about this family.

Later, LaFarge became a columnist for newspapers in Santa Fe, while also a frequent book reviewer for the New York Times. In 1966, his columns were collected for The Man with the Calabash Pipe. But again, he had died by this time. He had a bad heart and it killed him in 1963. He was 61 years old.

Oliver LaFarge is buried in Santa Fe National Cemetery, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

If you would like this series to visit other anthropologists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. George MacCurdy is in Concord, Massachusetts and Fay-Cooper Cole is in Plano, Illinois. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.