At the end of the nineteenth centum a rising interest in Native American customs and an increasing desire to understand Native American culture prompted ethnologists to begin recording the life stories of Native Americans. Ethnologists had a distinct reason for wanting to hear the stories：they were after linguistic or anthropological data that would supplement their own field observations, and they believed that the personal stories, even of a single individual, could increase their understanding of the cultures that they had been observing from without.
看不懂最後一句: they believed that the personal stories, even of a single individual, could increase their understanding of the cultures that they had been observing from without.
