On the Occasioned and Situated Character of Members' Questions and Answers: Reflections on the Question, “Is He or She a Real Indian?”

We have taken the invitation to write this epilogue as an occasion to examine our original claims and to do so with the benefit of further ethnographic material and reflections stimulated by the recent ethnomethodological work of Garfinkel and his students. ¹ While inspecting our claims, their grounds, the ways that we or others could and would extend them, and the modes of theorizing that generated them and that generate similar claims advanced by others, we encountered a collection of theorizing practices. When these practices are brought to light, they substantially effect the proper reading of our claims as well as the claims of many others who investigate naturally occurring native talk and/or who employ it as a point of departure for analyzing the world as known to and experienced by the natives.