This article uses current approaches to "voice" to explore the local meanings of ethnographic testimonial. By considering the performance of Barnie Bitsili, one of the informants for Edward Sapir's Navaho Texts, carried out at the 1929 Laboratory of Anthropology Field School in the reservation town of Crystal, New Mexico, the article continues a recent line of research documenting ways that sessions of elicitation (particularly those conducted on site) have provided opportunities for "informants" to bring new "voices" into being- voices that were understood to have some bearing on role relations outside the ethnographic interview.