r* ^ \ 
Anthropology, History, 
and American Indians: 
Essays in Honor of 
William Curtis Sturtevant 
WILLIAM L. MERRILL 
and 
IVES GODDARD 
EDITORS 
SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY ? NUMBER 44 
SERIES PUBLICATIONS OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 
Emphasis upon publication as a means of "diffusing knowledge" was expressed by the first 
Secretary of the Smithsonian. In his formal plan for the Institution, Joseph Henry outlined a 
program that included the following statement: "It is proposed to publish a series of reports, 
giving an account of the new discoveries in science, and of the changes made from year to year 
in all branches of knowledge." This theme of basic research has been adhered to through the 
years by thousands of titles issued in series publications under the Smithsonian imprint, 
commencing with Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge in 1848 and continuing with the 
following active series: 
Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology 
Smithsonian Contributions to Botany 
Smithsonian Contributions to the Earth Sciences 
Smithsonian Contributions to the Marine Sciences 
Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology 
Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology 
Smithsonian Folktife Studies 
Smithsonian Studies in Air and Space 
Smithsonian Studies in History and Technology 
In these series, the Institution publishes small papers and full-scale monographs that report 
the research and collections of its various museums and bureaux or of professional colleagues 
in the world of science and scholarship. The publications are distributed by mailing lists to 
libraries, universities, and similar institutions throughout the world. 
Papers or monographs submitted for series publication are received by the Smithsonian 
Institution Press, subject to its own review for format and style, only through departments of the 
various Smithsonian museums or bureaux, where the manuscripts are given substantive review. 
Press requirements for manuscript and art preparation are outlined on the inside back cover. 
Lawrence M. Small 
Secretary 
Smithsonian Institution 
S M I T H S O N I A N C O N T R I B U T I O N S TO A N T H R O P O L O G Y ? N U M B E R 4 4 
Anthropology, History, 
and American Indians: 
Essays in Honor of 
William Curtis Sturtevant 
William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard 
EDITORS 
Smithsonian Institution Press 
Washington, D.C. 
2002 
A B S T R A C T 
Merrill, William L., and Ives Goddard, editors. Anthropology, History, and American Indi?
ans: Essays in Honor of William Curtis Sturtevant. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropol?
ogy, number 44, 357 pages, frontispiece, 86 figures, 13 tables, 2002.?This collection of 31 
essays and one bibliographic compilation is presented as a festschrift for William Curtis Sturte?
vant. Since 1956 a research anthropologist, and, since 1965, a museum curator, at the Smith?
sonian Institution in Washington, D.C, Sturtevant is one of the world's leading scholars of the 
cultures, languages, and histories of the indigenous peoples of the New World. Over the course 
of his career, he has also served as general editor of the Handbook of North American Indians, 
president of four of anthropology's major professional organizations, university professor, con?
sultant, and public lecturer. He has contributed in myriad ways to the development of contem?
porary anthropology and to the research endeavors of scores of anthropologists and scholars in 
many other disciplines. 
The volume is organized into six sections. The first begins with recollections of Sturtevant's 
childhood and early adulthood by his younger sister, Harriet Sturtevant Shapiro, followed by 
an overview of his professional career and a compilation of his writings from 1952 through 
2001. The second section offers a range of perspectives on the history of anthropological and 
historical research on themes related to Native Americans, and the third examines the transfor?
mations that have occurred in their lives and circumstances from the time of European contact 
to today. The fourth section considers the relationship of anthropological collections and repos?
itories to the development of the field and the shifting significance of museums, archives, and 
universities as the settings where anthropological research has traditionally been conducted. 
The fifth section presents the results of a series of research projects focused on museum and 
archival collections, and the sixth explores the complex interconnections between the cultural 
and natural worlds. 
The essays provide an indication of the variety of topics and approaches represented in 
North Americanist studies at the turn of the twenty-first century. Together they address issues 
central to current scholarly debate: the political implications of cross-cultural research; the 
transcending of traditional disciplinary boundaries; the impact of colonialist and post-colonial?
ist projects on native peoples and their responses to these projects; the relevance of anthropo?
logical repositories and collections to research; and the linkages among material and 
nonmaterial dimensions of human existence. Reflecting the scope of Sturtevant's own 
research, they stand as testimony to his intellectual breadth and to the extent of his influence 
on contemporary scholarship. 
OFFICIAL PUBLICATION DATE is handstamped in a limited number of initial copies and is 
recorded in the Institution's annual report, Annals of the Smithsonian Institution. 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
Anthropology, history, and American Indians: essays in honor of William Curtis 
Sturtevant / William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard. 
p. cm. ? (Smithsonian contributions to anthropology ; no. 44) 
Includes bibliographic references. 
1. Anthropology?History. 2. Anthropologists?History. 3. Indians?History. 4. 
Ethnological museums and collections?History. 5. Sturtevant, William C. I. Sturtevant, 
William C. II. Merrill, William L. III. Goddard, Ives, 1941-IV. Series. 
GN27 .A672 2002 
301'.09?dc21 2001042020 
? The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American 
National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48?1984. 
Contents 
Page 
Preface viii 
I. William Curtis Sturtevant 1 
Sibling Review 
Harriet Sturtevant Shapiro 3 
William Curtis Sturtevant, Anthropologist 
William L. Merrill 11 
The Writings of William C. Sturtevant 
Compiled by William L. Merrill 37 
II. Anthropologists, Historians, and American Indians 45 
Sleepwalking Through the History of Anthropology: Anthropologists on Home 
Ground 
Laura Nader 47 
Charlatan, Scientist, or Poet? Frank Hamilton Cushing's Search for a Language of 
Experiential Knowledge 
Curtis M. Hinsley 55 
George A. Dorsey and the Development of Plains Indian Anthropology 
Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks 59 
American Indian Migrations: A Neglected Dimension of Paleodemography 
Dean R. Snow 75 
From Ethnohistory to Anthropological History 
Shepard Krech III 85 
Editing a Cambridge History in a Postmodern Context 
Bruce G. Trigger 95 
A Historian Among the Anthropologists 
Wilcomb E. Washburn 105 
III. Worlds Transformed 111 
"A Very Great Harvest of Souls": Timucua Indians and the Impact of European 
Colonization 
Jerald T. Milanich 113 
The Interstices of Literacy: Books and Writings and Their Use in Native American 
Southern New England 
Kathleen J. Bragdon 121 
From Manifest Destiny to the Melting Pot: The Life and Times of Charlotte Mitchell, 
Wampanoag 
William S. Simmons 131 
Indian Imagery and the Development of Tourism in the Southwest 
JoAllyn Archambault 139 
Hawaiian Art: From Sacred Symbol to Tourist Icon to Ethnic Identity Marker 
Adrienne L. Kaeppler 147 
The Neets'aii Gwich'in in the Twentieth Century 
Jack Campisi 161 
in 
iv SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
IV. Anthropology Evolving 171 
Classifying North American Indian Languages before 1850 
Elisabeth Tooker 173 
Origins of Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution and Beyond 
William W. Fitzhugh 179 
Collections as Currency 
Jane MacLaren Walsh 201 
The Creation of Anthropological Archives: A California Case Study 
Ira Jacknis 211 
Starring the Anthropologists in the American Men of Science 
David J. Meltzer 221 
V. Collections in Anthropological Research 239 
At the Cutting Edge: Patchwork and the Process of Artistic Innovation 
Sally Price 241 
European Motifs in Protohistoric Iroquois Art 
Edmund Carpenter 255 
Quilled Knife Cases from Northeastern North America 
Christian F. Feest 263 
Pabookowaih Unmasked 
William N. Fenton and Donald B. Smith 279 
The Linguistic Writings of Alfred Kiyana on Fox (Meskwaki) 
Ives Goddard 285 
The Munich Chukchi Collection 
Jean-Loup Rousselot 295 
VI. Nature in Culture 303 
Totemism Reconsidered 
Raymond D. Fogelson and Robert A. Brightman 305 
Coyote, Acorns, Salmon, and Quartz: Verse Analysis of a Karok Myth 
DellHymes 315 
The Distribution and Habits of the Ringed Seal and Central Eskimo Settlement Patterns 
David Damas 325 
Species Transformations in Northern Mexico: Explorations in Raramuri Zoology 
William L. Merrill 333 
Quenching Homologous Thirsts 
Sidney W. Mintz 349 
FIGURES 
Frontispiece x 
Sibling Review, Harriet Sturtevant Shapiro 
Figure 1.?Passport photograph of the Sturtevant family, 1932 4 
Figure 2.?Harriet, Bill, and Fritz Sturtevant in Newcastle, England, 1933 5 
Figure 3.?Fritz, Harriet, and Bill Sturtevant in Pasadena, California, ca. 1936 6 
Figure 4.?Bill Sturtevant photographed in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, ca. 1938. . . 6 
Figure 5.?Bill Sturtevant in his room in Pasadena, California, 1945 7 
Figure 6.?Bill Sturtevant at his desk, Pasadena, California, 1945 8 
Figure 7.?The Sturtevant family at lunch in Pasadena, California, 1945 8 
Figure 8.?Bill Sturtevant in the Navy, 1945 10 
NUMBER 44 
William Curtis Sturtevant, Anthropologist, William L. Merrill 
Figure 1.?Mrs. Charley Cypress demonstrating grating of coontie (Zamia) roots, 
Big Cypress Reservation, 1957 15 
Figure 2.?William Sturtevant with Solon Jones, New York, 1957 15 
Figure 3.?Josie Billie and William Sturtevant, Big Cypress Reservation, 1959 16 
Figure 4.?William Sturtevant in his Bureau of American Ethnology office, 1965 . . . 20 
Figure 5.?The staffs of the Bureau of American Ethnology and the River Basin 
Survey, 1965 23 
Figure 6.?William Sturtevant collecting botanical specimens, Kashmir, 1968 26 
Figure 7.?William Sturtevant in the Department of Anthropology, 1980 28 
Figure 8.?William Sturtevant with Claude Levi-Strauss, Paris, 1981 29 
Figure 9.?William Sturtevant in the offices of the Handbook of North American 
Indians, 1985 31 
George A. Dorsey and the Development of Plains Indian Anthropology, Raymond J. 
DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks 
Figure 1.?Ayer Hall, Field Columbian Museum, 1894 61 
Figure 2.?Cleaver Warden, Washington, D.C, 1895 63 
Figure 3.?Richard Davis, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, 1904 65 
Figure 4.?George A. Dorsey, William Jones, and James R. Murie, 1907 68 
American Indian Migrations: A Neglected Dimension of Paleodemography, Dean R. 
Snow 
Figure 1.?Distribution of home territories of eastern North American societies . . . . 79 
Figure 2.?Distribution of home territories of Northern Iroquoian societies 80 
"A Very Great Harvest of Souls": Timucua Indians and the Impact of European 
Colonization, Jerald T. Milanich 
Figure 1.?The region of the Timucua 114 
Figure 2.?Timucuan chiefdoms in the sixteenth century 115 
The Interstices of Literacy: Books and Writings and Their Use in Native American 
Southern New England, Kathleen J. Bragdon 
Figure 1.?An artist's rendering of pictographs on Dighton Rock 122 
Figure 2.?Conveyance, Martha's Vineyard, 1706 125 
Figure 3.?Verso of New Testament title page, Massachusett Bible, Nantucket 126 
Hawaiian Art: From Sacred Symbol to Tourist Icon to Ethnic Identity Marker, 
Adrienne L. Kaeppler 
Figure 1.?Feathered cloak of Kalani'opu'u 149 
Figure 2.?Feathered cloak with circle design 149 
Figure 3.?Pahu drum with crescent design 150 
Figure 4.?Feathered cape with crescent design 151 
Figure 5.?Replicas of feathered cloaks worn by the Royal Court during Aloha 
Week, Hawaiian Village, Ala Moana Park, ca. 1947 152 
Figure 6.?Funeral of Prince Albert Kuniakea in front of Tolani Palace, 1903 152 
Figure 7.?Hawaii Visitors Bureau sign, 1990 153 
Figure 8.?Kodak Hula Show, ca. 1961 154 
Figure 9.?Menu cover based on a mural painting by Eugene Savage 155 
Figure 10.?Menu cover by Frank Mcintosh 155 
Figure 11.?Performance by the Zuttermeister Hula Studio, Merrie Monarch Fes?
tival, 1990 156 
vi SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Figure 12.?Postcard of a pageant presented at the Mid-Pacific Carnival, ca. 1910 . . . 157 
Figure 13.?Three generations of Hawaiian dancers, Washington, D.C, 1984 158 
The Neets'aii Gwich'in in the Twentieth Century, Jack Campisi 
Figure 1.?Neets'aii Gwich'in territory 162 
Origins of Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution and Beyond, William 
W. Fitzhugh 
Figure 1.?Spencer F. Baird 181 
Figure 2.?Robert Kennicott 187 
Figure 3.?Extract from Kennicott's field ledger 188 
Figure 4.?Caribou hide tunic 189 
Figure 5.?Flag of the Western Union "Scientific Corps" 190 
Figure 6.?"Kegiktowruk in the Fall" 191 
Figure 7.?Edward W. Nelson on one of his trips up the Yukon River, ca. 1880 . . . . 192 
Figure 8.?"Native village [Gambell] on SW. Point of St Lawrence Is. Copied from 
sketch by J[ohn] Muir, Summer 1881" 193 
Figure 9.?Ingaliks from Lower Yukon, 1880 193 
Figure 10.?Norton Sound kayak hunting photographed by Edward W. Nelson and 
hunting visor collected from this hunter 194 
At the Cutting Edge: Patchwork and the Process of Artistic Innovation, Sally Price 
Figure 1.?Flow chart constructed by Donna Kathleen Abbas and William C. 
Sturtevant, 1969 242 
Figure 2.?A Dutch explorer with his Saramaka guides, 1908 244 
Figure 3.?Detail of cloth collected in the 1890s 245 
Figure 4.?Saramaka cape, sewn between 1900 and 1910 246 
Figure 5.?Bits-and-pieces cape, sewn between 1920 and 1940 247 
Figure 6.?Saramaka cape, probably sewn in the 1960s or early 1970s 248 
Figure 7.?Cape with cross-stitch embroidery, sewn between 1960 and 1965 249 
Figure 8.?Cape and breechcloth with cross-stitch embroidery, sewn in the 1970s.. . 250 
Figure 9.?Top of two-piece calabash container 251 
Figure 10.?Saramaka calabash bowl, 1970s 251 
European Motifs in Protohistoric Iroquois Art, Edmund Carpenter 
Figure 1.?Two antler figurines 256 
Figure 2.?Mezzotint Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, King of the Maquas (Mohawks), 
London, 1710 257 
Figure 3.?Effigy comb of antler 258 
Figure 4.?Petroglyph at Esopus Landing, New York 259 
Figure 5.?Effigy comb of antler, horse, and rider 259 
Figure 6.?European white clay pipe 259 
Figure 7.?Cast-iron handle with pewter shaft 260 
Quilled Knife Cases from Northeastern North America, Christian F. Feest 
Figure 1.?"An Indian dress'd for war with a scalp," 1759 265 
Figure 2.?Chief Oshkosh wearing a double knife case 267 
Figure 3.?"Bad Hail, Chief of the Sioux nation Minnesota Territory October 
1852" 268 
NUMBER 44 vii 
Figure 4.?Knife case with decoration of woven and applique quillwork and 
moosehair 270 
Figure 5.?Knife case with porcupine quill embroidery on birch-bark reinforce?
ment 270 
Figure 6.?Knife case with two-lane quill-wrapped panel and "zipper" edging in 
white glass beads 270 
Figure 7.?Knife and knife case with applique quillwork 272 
Figure 8.?Single knife case with applique quillwork 272 
Figure 9.?Single knife case with asymmetrical applique quillwork 273 
Figure 10.?Belt-worn knife case with moosehair embroidery and porcupine quill 
applique 273 
Pabookowaih Unmasked, William N. Fenton and Donald B. Smith 
Figure 1.?Full-face, profile, and back views of the mask at Blantyre, Scotland 
280-281 
Figure 2.?Two comparable Munsee (Delaware) masks 282 
Figure 3.?Pabookowaih of Rev. Peter Jones, after the original 283 
The Munich Chukchi Collection, Jean-Loup Rousselot 
Figure 1.?Two reindeer toys 297 
Figure 2.?Fire board 298 
Figure 3.?Fish lure with rod to attract fish 299 
Figure 4.?Leather pouch to carry human urine 299 
Figure 5.?Needle case with thimble holder 299 
Figure 6.?A cook at work at a Chukchi camp 300 
The Distribution and Habits of the Ringed Seal and Central Eskimo Settlement 
Patterns, David Damas 
Figure 1.?Central Eskimo utilization of the ringed seal 326 
Preface 
Of all its major figures, North Americanist anthropology today is perhaps most closely 
identified with William Curtis Sturtevant. The last North Americanist hired by the Smith?
sonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology?long the center of North American 
Indian studies in the world?Sturtevant has provided continuity and leadership in a field 
that has undergone radical changes in the decades since he began contributing to it. 
Through his research and writings, his editorship of the Handbook of North American In?
dians, and his participation in professional societies and conferences, he has been a guid?
ing force in the development of North Americanist anthropology, both in the United States 
and abroad. Few North Americanists have failed to have at least passing contact with him, 
and most can recount occasions on which his willingness to share his knowledge and in?
sights has been of enormous benefit to them and their research. His lifelong fascination 
with and respect for the native peoples of the Americas, his unwavering commitment to 
North American Indian studies and to anthropology in general, and the quality of his work 
have inspired several generations of North Americanists and have set the standard against 
which they have measured their own careers. 
This volume is intended to recognize William Sturtevant's contributions to North Amer?
icanist research and to the field of anthropology as a whole. The authors of these essays? 
representing at least five generations of Americanist scholars?have all been influenced in 
one fashion or another by Sturtevant, and most are linked to him in multiple ways, as 
former professors or students, as collaborators on research projects, as Smithsonian col?
leagues, or as interlocutors at professional conferences. All are leading scholars in their 
own right who have made, and continue to make, substantive contributions to scholarship. 
The essays prepared for this volume necessarily reflect only certain aspects of their con?
tributors' work, but together they suggest the range of topics that have been of concern to 
Americanists over the past half century and the different approaches that have been adopt?
ed to explore them. The essays also reveal the breadth of Sturtevant's interests and the im?
pact he has had on the field. 
We have grouped the essays into six general sections. The first section provides an over?
view of Sturtevant's development as a scholar and an assessment of his contribution to an?
thropology and other disciplines. The second treats the history of anthropological and his?
torical research among North American Indians, with particular emphasis on the political 
factors that have affected this research and the presentation of its results. The consequenc?
es of European colonialism and the responses of native people to the profound changes 
that have taken place in their worlds over the past five centuries is the subject of the third 
section. The fourth section deals with the development of anthropological research collec?
tions and repositories and the evolving roles that they and the scholars associated with 
them have played in the anthropological endeavor. The value of these collections to an?
thropology and the challenges facing collections-based research is demonstrated in the 
fifth section. The final section explores the complex linkages between cultural and natural 
worlds as exemplified through case studies from various parts of North America as well as 
Europe. 
This particular organization should not obscure the fact that the essays presented in one 
section of the volume often are linked to the themes of others. Also, the essays contribute 
to the development of a number of additional topics not explicitly recognized in this organ?
ization. These include the history of anthropology in general and its relationship to other 
disciplines, particularly history and the natural sciences; American Indian linguistics and 
literacy; the connections between material and nonmaterial dimensions of culture; ethno-
vin 
NUMBER 44 ix 
science and cognitive anthropology; world systems; and the anthropology of food?all top?
ics that Sturtevant has addressed in his own work. 
We would like to express our appreciation to the scholars whose essays appear herein 
for their collaboration in making this volume a reality and to the administration and staff 
of the National Museum of Natural History and its Department of Anthropology for their 
support of this project. We are particularly grateful to Joyce Sommers and Kim Waters for 
their assistance in logistical matters, to Victor Krantz for preparing prints from the Sturte?
vant family album, to Marcia Bakry for producing the map that accompanies David Dam-
as's essay, and to the readers of an earlier version of this manuscript for their insightful 
comments. 
This volume is very much a festscrift in the original German sense of "celebratory writ?
ing." We offer these essays to William Sturtevant to celebrate his work and to honor him 
for his accomplishments. We hope that he will find them entertaining and will recognize in 
them the admiration and affection that we have for him. 
William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard 
wp-
up* 
i 
w 
; 
l a 
?
:
'mM 
m 
-?Mtt|r 1 
? 
A. 
*^Hr^  
FRONTISPIECE.?William Curtis Sturtevant. Photograph taken on 22 November 1997 in Washington, D.C, at the 
annual breakfast of former presidents of the American Anthropological Association. Photograph by Chester Sim?
pson (page 7734, frame no. 31). 
I. William Curtis Sturtevant 

Sibling Review 
Harriet Sturtevant Shapiro 
When the editors asked me to write an article about Bill's 
childhood, my first reaction was that if they wanted an article 
on "Growing Up With A Great Man In The Family," I could do 
one, but the subject would be Father, not Bill. On further con?
sideration, it seems that this is not a bad way to start. Because 
the family was so centered on Father, and all his children have 
taken him as a role model for how to be an adult, it is necessary 
to understand Father in order to understand any of his children. 
Father, Alfred Henry Sturtevant II, was the youngest of six 
children by a substantial margin. He was born in Jacksonville, 
Illinois, where his grandfather, Julian Sturtevant, was one of 
the founders and an early president of Illinois College, a small 
Congregational church school that still exists. Julian was 
clearly a great man in that community and apparently was quite 
autocratic. Julian's youngest son, Alfred Henry Sturtevant I, 
taught mathematics at the college, but when Father was seven 
(in 1898), Alfred moved with his family (except the eldest, 
Edgar, who was away at college by then) to Kushla, Alabama, 
where he farmed and recovered turpentine. The family led an 
isolated, rural existence. Until he reached high school, Father 
attended a one-room school taught by his father's maiden sis?
ter, who lived with his family. Father never considered himself 
a Southerner. He remembered vividly that he fought the Civil 
War throughout his school years. 
When Father graduated from high school, his brother Edgar, 
who by that time was teaching linguistics at Barnard College, 
suggested that Father could live with Edgar and his family 
while Edgar paid Father's tuition at Columbia University. This 
offer surprised Father, who did not expect to go to college. 
Edgar eventually became a professor at Yale and was an au?
thority on the Hittite language. Although he was some 16 years 
older than Father, he was a great favorite with us children be?
cause he told wonderful tall tales of his supposed adventures. 
Father continued the tradition started by Edgar when Hope Tis-
dale, the daughter of another Sturtevant sibling, reached col?
lege age. He paid for her tuition, and she lived with him and his 
new wife in their New York apartment while she got her under?
graduate degree at Barnard. Cousin Hope became a distin?
guished population statistician, and she in turn financed the 
college education of one of her own nieces. 
Harriet Sturtevant Shapiro, 108 Primrose Street, Chevy Chase, Mary?
land 20815-3325, USA. 
At the time that Thomas Hunt Morgan was laying the foun?
dation for modern genetics, Father was in the only beginning 
biology class taught by Morgan at Columbia. Father was inter?
ested in the pedigrees of horses, and he realized that the records 
of their genealogies and coat colors provided a useful opportu?
nity to test the fundamental patterns of inheritance being inves?
tigated by Morgan. Father's paper working out that relationship 
was published while he was still a college sophomore; more 
important, it won him a place with Morgan's research group: a 
desk in the "fly room" where the early work on the genetics of 
Drosophila (the fruit fly) was done. For many years thereafter, 
the nucleus of the fly-room group consisted of Morgan, Calvin 
B. Bridges, and Father, with a shifting contingent of graduate 
students and visiting scientists. 
Father remained at Columbia, aside from brief service in the 
Medical Corps in World War I, until 1928, when Morgan took 
the group to Pasadena, California, to start the Biology Division 
at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Morgan re?
ceived the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1933 for the research on 
genetics done by the fly-room group. In recognition of the con?
tributions of his colleagues, Morgan divided the prize money 
equally among his, Father's, and Bridges's children for their 
education. It is a source of pride to me, and, I think, my sib?
lings, that our college and graduate educations were financed 
substantially by Nobel Prize money. 
Mother, Phoebe Reed Sturtevant, was, like Father, one of six 
children, one of whom died in early adolescence. Mother grew 
up in New Jersey and graduated from Mt. Holyoke College, 
where she majored in art. A few years after graduation, she was 
hired to illustrate the papers and books prepared by the fly-
room group. Mother was very visually oriented, and although 
she left her fly-room job after she married Father in 1922 and 
did not thereafter continue with her drawing, she remained ac?
tively involved in various crafts throughout her life. While her 
children were young, this involvement was largely expressed in 
her attention to interior decoration, in knitting, and in sewing 
for herself and me. She also attended carpentry class at night 
and made a wonderful large table and a set of cubby holes that 
were used together as a desk in the living room. Many years 
later, she went back to carpentry class and built a very success?
ful dump truck for her grandchildren. She also wove; Father 
proudly wore a jacket made from wool she had woven. 
Mother was unusual in the number and age range of her 
friends. She often befriended the wives of Father's graduate stu-
SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
dents, several of whom regularly used our washing machine be?
cause none was available in their quarters. Her circle of friends 
also included many of her fellow members of the League of 
Women Voters and many Caltech faculty wives. For one of the 
latter who was especially devoted to her poodle, Mother spun 
wool from the poodle's hair and knit it into a coat for the dog. 
I think as far as we children were concerned, Mother's beset?
ting fault was her lateness. Dinner was not started until every?
one was really hungry, and she could never get anywhere on 
time. Her children usually were the last to arrive at parties or 
other events and almost invariably were the last to be picked up. 
Bill was born on 16 July 1926, at Mother's family home in 
Morristown, New Jersey. Many years later, when Bill wanted 
to know the hour of his birth for the preparation of a Burmese 
horoscope, Father was able to provide that information by con?
sulting the notes he had taken on an ant war he was observing 
while waiting for the birth. I was bora in 1928 and was named 
Harriet Morse after Father's mother. The rest of Morgan's lab?
oratory group moved to Pasadena while the family stayed be?
hind to await my birth because Father felt I had a right to be 
born in the East; I made the trip to California in a basket. A 
family story is that Bill, on waking in the morning as the train 
traveled through the Midwest, inquired "whobody cut down all 
them trees?" 
A younger brother, Alfred Henry Sturtevant III, is the only 
one of the three of us to have been born in California, in 1931. 
For three generations, our family has named its youngest sons 
Alfred Henry Sturtevant, but I don't think there was any con?
scious family tradition to that effect. In any event, Henry, 
whom we called "Fritz" until he insisted on "Henry" shortly 
FIGURE 1 .?Passport photograph of the Sturtevant family before leaving for England, 1932. 
NUMBER 44 
before World War II, is the only one of us not to have named 
his last child Alfred. 
I have always thought that the fact that there were three of us, 
with me being both the middle child and the only girl, meant 
that the inevitable childhood alliances followed no set pattern: 
There were instead three natural alliances: the boys, the two 
younger siblings, or the two older ones. Henry, however, re?
members it differently: he thinks that the usual alliance was Bill 
and I against him. I would have said that, if any alliance domi?
nated, Henry and I tended to gang up to try (unsuccessfully) to 
unseat Bill's natural position of authority as the eldest. In any 
event, the more or less constant intersibling squabbles were 
trivial compared to our basic compatibility and affection for 
each other. There was no real feeling of rivalry among us. I 
think we were then, as we certainly are now, unusually close. 
The family spent a year in England, in 1932 to 1933, while 
Father taught at various universities as a visiting professor of 
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I remember 
almost nothing of this time, and Bill has no connected memory 
of it. It was here, however, that he learned to print, rather than 
to use cursive, a habit he still retains. Other than that period, 
our childhood was spent in Pasadena, California, with summers 
at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. 
There was a very clear division of responsibilities between 
Mother and Father: Mother was responsible for child raising 
and running the household. Nevertheless, the household re?
volved around Father, not because he was in any way auto?
cratic, but simply because that was the way Mother wanted it. 
There was never any doubt that Father's wishes were the rule, 
and his convenience was paramount. This principle worked be?
cause Father never abused it. He considered Mother his full 
partner in all respects, and he had a fundamental regard for indi?
vidual rights that extended to his children. Father once told me 
that "don't do unto others as you would not have them do unto 
you" was a better general standard of conduct than the usual 
positive formulation, because it is less likely that what you 
want, others also want, than it is that what you don't want, oth?
ers don't want either. The motto he wrote in my autograph book 
was "try all things, and hold fast that which is good." This was 
advice to a 10- or 12-year-old daughter, which reflects in part 
the more innocent pre-war age but which also was entirely con?
sistent with his confidence in the fundamental good sense of his 
children. At the time, I was more surprised by his use of a bibli?
cal quotation than by the sentiment. Father never talked down 
to us and was regularly available for serious conversation, one-
on-one, while he burned the trash in the back yard in the morn?
ing or while he washed the dinner dishes, as a child dried them, 
or during the three meals a day that the family ate together. 
The house was full of talk, although introspection was not 
encouraged, nor was the overt expression of emotions. Mother 
and Father talked about his work and Mother's activities in the 
League of Women Voters. Both were enthusiastic gardeners, 
so they also discussed their plans for the garden and Father's 
efforts in hybridizing irises, applying genetic principles to de-
FlGURE 2.?Harriet, Bill, and Fritz Sturtevant in Newcastle, England, 1933. 
SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 3.?Fritz, Harriet, and Bill Sturtevant in their yard in Pasadena, Califor?
nia, ca. 1936. 
velop specific flower colors and forms. National and interna?
tional affairs were another, less cheerful, topic. Father visited 
Germany while we were in England in 1933, and he was ap?
palled at the conditions there. From that time on, he was very 
pessimistic about the state of the world, and he was convinced 
that war was coming and that the United States would have to 
be involved. Perhaps for this reason, during most of our child?
hood Father was a rather somber figure. 
Despite Mother's wide range of personal friends, family so?
cial life was mostly with other members of the Caltech Biology 
Department and with visiting professors. Many of these came 
from overseas, sometimes for rather extended stays. They and 
their children gave us some appreciation of the styles of other 
countries. 
There was no religion. Father was a committed atheist who 
believed religion was responsible for many of the world's ills, 
and Mother was largely uninterested in the subject. Education 
FIGURE 4.-
1938. 
-Bill Sturtevant photographed in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, ca. 
was a very high priority, for its own sake, not as a means of ad?
vancement. In fact, ambition was not a value. We were told 
that happiness lay in deciding what we enjoyed doing, learning 
to do it well enough to earn a living at it, and being satisfied 
with the living we earned. We all went to a private school, 
Polytechnic Elementary, because Mother and Father lacked 
confidence in the education we would get in the public schools. 
They were correct in expecting that we would get a solid aca?
demic foundation at Poly; the unintended effect was to make us 
feel somewhat marginalized, although probably we would have 
felt the same way in public schools, too. We were quite differ?
ent from the rest of the students?we were Democrats, atheists, 
much less well-off, and nonathletic?but I don't think any of 
us interpreted those differences as inferiority, just the reverse. 
Our parents expected the best of us academically, and they 
were pleased, but not surprised or at all demonstrative, when 
they got it. Similarly, it was simply assumed that we would 
read a lot. Although we were regularly taken to the library until 
we were old enough to go on our own, nobody ever got particu?
lar credit for reading. Indeed, if Mother found us reading dur?
ing the day, she was very likely to find a chore for us to do, or 
NUMBER 44 
at least to send us outside to play. We soon learned that day?
time reading was most safely performed in the seclusion of 
one's room. Even after supper, reading in the living room was 
likely to be interrupted by talk. Reading was, in short, a plea?
sure to be cherished, not an activity that won praise. 
In general, it was very bad form to boast about your children, 
and praise was to be used with caution, for fear that they would 
develop "swelled heads." On the other hand, we never had any 
doubt that each one of us was in fact a cherished and important 
member of the family; considerable effort was devoted to en?
couraging our individual interests. Henry was mechanical, and 
from an early age he was the one the family turned to for fixing 
whatever broke down. He has undergraduate and advanced de?
grees from Caltech and went on to design spectrophotometers 
and equally complex machines to analyze blood. I was the girl 
in the family, so I sewed, cooked, and knitted. Although I was 
encouraged in (and enjoyed, as I still do) stereotypical feminine 
roles, and it was expected that I would (with luck) be a devoted 
wife and mother, it was always assumed that I was fully as 
competent intellectually as my brothers, and I was held to the 
same standards. I completed my undergraduate degree at 
Wellesley College and then law school at Columbia, where I 
was editor-in-chief of the law review. After graduating, I was 
hired by the Atomic Energy Commission and later moved to 
the United States Department of Justice, becoming the first 
woman lawyer in the Office of the Solicitor General, the group 
responsible for representing the federal government in the Su?
preme Court. Like that of my brothers, my professional work 
has been intellectually stimulating, and I have taken great plea?
sure both in my legal career and in my family. 
I don't remember any similar concern for encouraging Bill's 
particular bent; that was quite unnecessary. Bill was a collector 
from an early age. His collection was on bookcase shelves 
along one side of his room; the lower shelf held old National 
Geographic magazines. Although there must have been Ameri?
can Indian items in the collection, I cannot remember any spe?
cific such items. It did contain some ground glass from the mir?
ror for the 200-inch telescope being made across the street at 
Caltech (though Bill would never tell us how he got it), some 
fossils and geological specimens collected from the trash re?
ceptacles at the Caltech Geology Department, and a horned 
toad and a bat that Bill had preserved. His taxidermy also ex?
tended to the preparation for my doll house of several mouse-
skin rugs, of which I was inordinately proud. He must have 
made these when he was about 12 to 14. They were whole-skin 
rugs, wonderfully soft and (at least the later models) flexible, 
and no one else had anything like them. Bill also collected (at 
about age 10) enough Ralston cereal box tops to get a pair of 
heavy leather cowboy (Tom Mix) chaps that were the envy of 
his younger siblings. He had the usual stamp collection, as well 
as a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings concerning the En?
glish royal family, which covered the death of George V and 
the coronation and abdication of Edward VIII. 
For as long as I can remember, Bill has been interested in 
American Indians. More than the rest of us, Bill inherited 
Mother's artistic abilities, and he painted several murals reflect?
ing this interest for his room. On the wall over his bed, he 
FIGURE 5.?Bill Sturtevant in his room in Pasadena, California, 1945. Above the headboard is his copy of a copy 
by Covarrubias of a design on a Haida house front. 
SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 6.?Bill Sturtevant at his desk beside his rendition of the Aztec day signs, Pasadena, California, 1945. 
FIGURE 7.?The Sturtevant family at lunch in Pasadena, California, 1945. 
painted a large reproduction of a Northwest Indian bear design, 
and his closet door was covered with colorful Aztec calendar 
symbols (Henry remembers the legend as "The 20 day signs of 
the Aztec Calendar," with their names around the edges. 
The layout of our rooms also provided an early lesson in the 
exercise of, and limitations on, territoriality. Although we each 
had our own room, we all three shared a bathroom that was lo?
cated between Bill's room and mine, with access from those 
two rooms but not from the hall. This meant not only that Fritz 
was entitled to go through my room to get to it (the most direct 
route, though I felt some resentment that the easement was not 
through Bill's room), but also that if the door was left locked 
on one side, the child whose access was blocked was entitled to 
go through the other's room. The trick was to do this as noisily 
NUMBER 44 
and disruptively as possible, while not lingering so long or de?
viating so far from a direct route as to justify complaint by the 
invaded party. 
Besides our parents, the other most important adult family 
member in our lives was Mother's mother, Granny, our only 
surviving grandparent. Granny spent several winters with us in 
California, escaping the New Jersey weather. She was a some?
what formidable character, in part because, like many grand?
parents, she didn't really think her grandchildren were being 
properly brought up; she never hesitated to criticize our man?
ners and general deportment. She was a voracious reader and a 
great source of information and stories. She would even occa?
sionally let us listen to her radio, a contraption that was other?
wise banned from the house until just before the war. Granny 
and Father got along very well. They respected and admired 
each other, and they shared interests in genealogy and Demo?
cratic politics. 
Bill was named after Granny's father, was her eldest grand?
child, and was born in her house; he was clearly a favorite. She 
was the source of most of his early American Indian artifacts. 
Granny, like Mother, had a very good eye for artistic quality 
and sometimes purchased American Indian pieces when they 
were available. In addition, Granny's brother, Lloyd Curtis, was 
a naval officer who, during a tour to Alaska in 1881-1882, ac?
quired a number of items from Alaska Natives on the advice of 
his friend Lt. George Emmons, an amateur anthropologist and 
himself a collector of Alaskan Indian artifacts. Many of the 
items Uncle Lloyd acquired found their way to Granny and then 
to Bill, in light of his interest and special place in Granny's af?
fections. When Uncle Lloyd died, while Bill was in college, his 
widow gave several more American Indian items to Bill. 
Father's family too was a source of artifacts, most notably 
two ceremonial adzes from the South Pacific that came into Fa?
ther's family through the seafaring brothers of Father's grand?
mother. The provenance of the adzes is established by letters 
that those brothers wrote to their family in Connecticut and 
later Illinois. One brother settled in Honolulu around 1835; 
copies of his letters home until he died in 1850 are in the Ha?
waiian National Archives (Bill has the originals). For all of our 
childhood, the adzes, as well as an Alaskan Indian basket from 
Uncle Lloyd and a tapa cloth (probably purchased by Mother), 
decorated the living room in Woods Hole. 
Bill's friends were always somewhat mysterious to me. I 
couldn't even reproduce their assembling call, which was made 
by blowing air, flute fashion, across an opening in one's 
cupped hands; Henry did master it. With the son, also named 
Linus, of the chemist Linus Pauling, Bill explored the storm 
drains under Caltech (unbeknownst, surely, to Mother and Fa?
ther). They also built a tree house in the vacant lot across the 
street, which was, of course, off limits to the younger Sturte?
vant and Pauling siblings by order of the builders. Later, when 
Bill was in high school, there were regular meetings of his mah 
jongg club. The group's interest in the game derived, I believe, 
from the Chinese member of the group of friends. The game 
pieces and the box (which Bill still has) were entrancing?the 
pieces are carved ivory on bamboo backs, and the box is an el?
egant brass-bound, highly polished wooden construct?but the 
game itself was totally mysterious. I don't remember wanting 
to learn how to play, and the opportunity was certainly never 
offered. That was just something that Bill did. 
We spent our summers in Woods Hole, on Cape Cod, while 
Father worked at the Marine Biological Laboratory. The house 
in Woods Hole that our parents built in 1927 now belongs to 
the three of us; Bill's grandson Alex is the fourth generation to 
have a strong sentimental attachment to it. Our family traveled 
to and from Woods Hole by car after we children were old 
enough to make the trip that way (and outgrew reduced train 
fares). Due to Mother's congenital lateness, we never started 
the trip before the end of the day scheduled for departure; this 
did not seem to bother Father. The aim was to travel three hun?
dred miles a day, allowing frequent stops at likely looking 
places so Father could collect flies using a modified butterfly 
net made by Mother. The trips took about ten days' travel time. 
They were not direct, but involved stops to visit Father's col?
leagues at other institutions, as well as his family in Alabama 
and Mother's in New Jersey. Father planned the route, trying to 
take a different one each time and ultimately to visit each of the 
then forty-eight states. 
The trips were rather arduous, with the five of us in close 
quarters in an unairconditioned car. I particularly remember the 
smell of Father's pipe in the closed car before breakfast. Never?
theless, the trips did provide a chance to have the undivided at?
tention of our parents, who would join us in playing games (Fa?
ther was unbeatable at "I Packed My Grandmother's Trunk") 
and collecting Burma Shave jingles (My brothers' favorite, be?
cause it got a rise out of me, was "Ladies jump from fire es?
capes to get away from hairy apes," "Harriet" being a ready 
substitute for "hairy apes"). Mother, who had a small repertoire 
of college and folk songs, would sing with us; she rarely sang 
anywhere else. We also had rituals for the trip, such as the 
method for the hourly change of drivers: the whole family piled 
out and ran once around the car before taking new places. 
These places were rigidly rotated: the non-driving parent al?
ways sat in the middle in the back, to reduce squabbling. When 
that did not suffice, the offending child (usually, as I remember 
it, Bill) was put out to walk for a while before being picked up 
further down the road. Although that discipline backfired once 
when Bill found a whole dollar by the roadside, it may help ex?
plain his current aversion to walking. The walking strategy was 
dropped after my best friend, Jane Lancefield, and I were put 
out to walk on a day trip to Martha's Vineyard, and hid when 
the car drove past. We didn't realize why that particular trick 
so upset our parents until we ourselves had children. 
Woods Hole itself was pure delight. This was primarily be?
cause the Lancefields also summered in Woods Hole. Rebecca 
Lancefield was a noted bacteriologist; her husband, Donald, 
was a former colleague of Father's at Columbia. They were 
longstanding and very close friends of Mother and Father, so 
10 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
their daughter Jane and I were destined to be best friends. 
When we came to Woods Hole, our family essentially ex?
panded to include the Lancefields. Becca and Donald became 
second parents, and for a few months I had the sister I always 
wanted. All four of us were in and out of both houses con?
stantly. We swam every day at least once, and went barefoot all 
summer, so that the soles of our feet became almost like 
hooves, and by the end of the summer our shoes were covered 
with green mold and felt incredibly cramped. For many years 
we took classes in the mornings at the science school associ?
ated with the Marine Biological Laboratory. These classes in?
volved such things as field trips for collecting specimens, dis?
sections of marine creatures, and studies of the varied flora and 
fauna of Cape Cod. When we were teenagers, the two families 
jointly owned one of the first fiberglass sailboats, an untippable 
center-board we called the Glass Cat, in which we took day 
trips down the Elizabeth Islands off Woods Hole. 
Bill's collecting tendencies evidenced themselves in Woods 
Hole at an early age by his Tootsie Toy layout, which consisted 
of his collection of metal Tootsie Toy cars (the forerunners of 
Matchbox cars, slightly larger) in a town he constructed. Per?
haps this was also an early manifestation of his mapmaking ten?
dencies. Somewhat later, he collected a complete deer skeleton 
from the islands and carefully labeled each bone in ink with his 
characteristically neat printing. Many years later, it was fun to 
watch Bill, his elder son, and his grandson spend a rainy after?
noon reconstructing the skeleton on the living room floor. 
In his early teens, Bill made a fortune (perhaps as much as 
$15) one summer by making and selling house signs consisting 
of the owner's name spelled out in twigs, meticulously split, 
cut, and nailed onto a board. He also spent a whole summer la?
boriously harvesting cattails and constructing a reed boat in im?
itation of the Peruvian Indian ones, only to have it sink inglori-
ously when it was finally launched. Henry, the engineer (who 
has worked in Peru), says that it did not in fact sink, "It just 
floated really low; you got wet sitting in it. Cattails don't have 
the same low density as the reeds around Lake Titicaca." Bill 
nevertheless still believes that his failure was due to his inabil?
ity to duplicate the design of the Peruvian boats. Despite this 
early disappointment, Bill and Henry later successfully built a 
more conventional boat as a small tender for the Glass Cat. 
That boat, although it also rode low in the water, served to 
carry us relatively undampened to and from the Cat's mooring 
until a real rowboat was scavenged from the islands after a hur?
ricane. The built boat was called "the Whale," because of the 
American Indian design Bill painted on its front. 
After Bill's freshman year at the University of California at 
Berkeley, he went to summer school in Mexico. He wanted to 
visit Yucatan after the summer-school term ended, but Mother 
and Father told him not to, and they refused to send him money 
FIGURE 8.?Bill Sturtevant in the Navy, 1945. 
for that trip. Bill cashed in his return plane ticket, budgeted the 
resultant funds carefully, and made the trip anyway. He re?
turned to Los Angeles by bus with just enough money for one 
phone call home to Pasadena to ask to be picked up. He was 
drafted into the Navy soon thereafter. 
Although I think we all assumed we would live forever and 
be happy and successful adults, we surely didn't expect to 
reach 75 or to be eminent. Henry reports that when his eldest 
child was in college at the University of California at San Di?
ego, she was asked whether she was related to "the Dr. Sturte?
vant." Mother was not at all amused when it turned out the ref?
erence was to Bill, not Father. Henry and I are sure that Father 
would have been amused, and pleased. We are certainly our?
selves pleased and perhaps amused, but not surprised, at Bill's 
eminence. We offer him our affectionate congratulations. 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.?I gratefully acknowledge substantial 
contributions to this article by my brother A. Henry Sturtevant; 
his wife, Anne F. Sturtevant; Bill's daughter, Kinthi Sturtevant; 
and Jane Lancefield Hersey. 
William Curtis Sturtevant, Anthropologist 
William L. Merrill 
William C. Sturtevant is widely regarded as one of the leading 
North Americanist ethnologists of the second half of the twen?
tieth century. He has dedicated his career, spanning half a cen?
tury, to extensive research on the cultures and histories of the 
indigenous peoples of the entire North American continent as 
well as those of much of the rest of the Western Hemisphere. 
The breadth of his interests and knowledge distinguish him 
from most other North Americanists of his and subsequent gen?
erations, who have tended to focus their research on specific 
societies or regions of North America. 
Sturtevant's first publication was a review of a popular book 
on the Seminole Indians of Florida (Sturtevant, 1952). In the 
decades since, he has produced over 200 scholarly publications 
on New World anthropology and on other themes as well, most 
notably the history and philosophy of anthropology as a disci?
pline and the importance of museums and material culture to 
the anthropological enterprise. At the same time, he has de?
voted considerable time and energy to the activities of several 
of anthropology's major professional organizations and has cu-
rated one of the largest museum collections of North American 
Indian materials in the world. 
Sturtevant's entry into anthropology coincided with World 
War II, a watershed event in the history of anthropology in the 
United States. Before the war, most American ethnologists 
conducted their research among North American Indians, with 
Franz Boas and his students dominating the field. After the 
war, the focus of American ethnology became more global, and 
the percentage of ethnologists working in North America de?
clined dramatically. Despite his interest in world ethnology, 
Sturtevant chose to concentrate his research on North Ameri?
can ethnology and to build upon the extensive knowledge 
about American Indians accumulated by his North Americanist 
predecessors. 
This decision is but one of several instances in which Sturte?
vant has gone against the grain of trends in anthropology. He 
adopted a comparativist approach in his research during an era 
of growing particularism. He promoted a historical perspective 
in anthropology when the dominant theoretical approaches 
were largely ahistorical, and he advocated research on material 
William L. Merrill, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of 
Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560-
0112, USA. 
culture and museum collections when such research was decid?
edly out of fashion. He also explored basic issues related to Eu?
ropean images of non-European people and their worlds long 
before anthropologists considered these issues to be interesting 
or recognized the value of the images themselves to anthropo?
logical research. 
He has not taken these positions simply to be contrary but 
because they follow logically from his vision of what anthro?
pology should be and from the insights he has gained from the 
pursuit of his own particular research interests. His views on 
these matters have often placed his work "out of sync" with the 
shifting trends of anthropology, but more often than not this 
work has anticipated, in some cases by decades, the directions 
that subsequent anthropological theory and research have 
taken. 
Berkeley and the United States Navy, 1944-1949 
Sturtevant began his formal education in anthropology in the 
spring of 1944, when he entered the University of California at 
Berkeley (Cal) as a second-semester freshman. His interest in 
anthropology, however, extends back to his grammar-school 
days. He remembers first hearing of anthropology while he was 
a third grader at Polytechnic Elementary in Pasadena, Califor?
nia. One afternoon, after a class on American Indians, he asked 
his father what kind of people study Indians, and his father re?
plied, "Anthropologists." Sturtevant decided then that he 
would make anthropology his career. 
In the preceding essay, Sturtevant's sister, Harriet Sturtevant 
Shapiro, provides an engaging portrait of their family and their 
childhood years together (Shapiro, 2002). Here I will add only 
that Sturtevant completed his secondary education at McKinley 
Junior High School and Pasadena Junior College (now Pasa?
dena City College), the latter offering both high school and the 
first two years of college. Because he had taken extra credits, 
he was eligible for graduation from high school by the end of 
his junior year, but he did not realize the fact until the fall se?
mester of his senior year. He took several college-level courses 
that semester at Pasadena Junior College, and in the spring se?
mester of 1944, he began classes at Cal. 
Sturtevant chose Cal over other universities because it was 
relatively close to home, and its anthropology department was 
among the best in the country. During his first semester there, 
he concentrated on studying foreign languages, which had long 
11 
12 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
held a fascination for him, taking courses in Chinese and in 
Spanish.' To gain some firsthand experience in a foreign cul?
ture and to continue his education in anthropology, he traveled 
in the summer of 1944 to Mexico City, where he attended sum?
mer school at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. 
There he took courses on Mexican archaeology and South 
American ethnology taught by Robert Barlow and George En-
gerrand, explored Mexico City, and visited archaeological sites 
nearby and in the Yucatan. He also turned 18 and registered for 
the draft at the United States Embassy in Mexico City. 
A bout with hepatitis prevented Sturtevant from returning to 
Cal in the fall and delayed his being drafted until March of 
1945, when he entered the United States Navy. After boot 
camp in San Diego, he was assigned to the hospital corps and 
was stationed at the Naval Air Station in Calexico, California, 
where he was given the task of treating sailors for venereal dis?
eases they had contracted during visits across the Mexican bor?
der. He was at Calexico when the war ended, and shortly after?
ward he was transferred to Guam. There he spent most of his 
time on night duty, sitting idle in an ambulance on the edge of 
an airstrip. To break the tedium, he prepared a map of Guam. 
He also made a small surface collection at an archaeological 
site at Tumon Bay, which he later donated to the Peabody Mu?
seum of Natural History at Yale, and joined a discharged Navy 
officer who was a botanist in collecting plants on different parts 
of the island. This botanical work gave him the opportunity to 
visit briefly with native Guamanians, whose settlements were 
otherwise off-limits. 
Sturtevant's military service ended on 30 September 1946, at 
San Pedro, California, where he received an honorable dis?
charge with the rank of pharmacist's mate third class.2 He im?
mediately resumed his studies at Cal. Alfred Kroeber, the dean 
of American anthropology of the era and for decades the domi?
nant figure in the Department of Anthropology at Cal, retired 
in 1946, before Sturtevant's return. Kroeber began spending 
the academic year at other major anthropology departments in 
the United States, and although he returned to Berkeley in the 
summers, he gave no classes. Sturtevant took courses offered 
by the department's senior anthropologists, including Robert 
Lowie and E.W Gifford, but his closest contacts were with the 
younger anthropologists, primarily Robert Heizer, John Rowe, 
and David Mandelbaum. 
Heizer and Rowe provided Sturtevant with his first formal 
introduction to American Indian studies and convinced him of 
the fundamental connection between ethnology and archaeol?
ogy. Along with Mandelbaum, Rowe was also an important in?
fluence in the area of anthropological theory. Sturtevant recalls 
as especially useful and challenging Rowe's reading course on 
the history of anthropology. Rowe would give each student a 
topic, expecting a report a week later, which he would then 
read and comment on to the class. One week he assigned to 
Sturtevant Herbert Spencer's magnum opus, the five-volume 
Principles of Sociology! Sturtevant was impressed by the 
breadth of Rowe's knowledge, his dedication to his research, 
and his respect and high expectations for his students. Rowe 
served as Sturtevant's undergraduate advisor and guided him in 
the preparation of a research paper on the origins and history of 
Chinook jargon. 
In part because of the influence of his uncle Edgar Sturte?
vant, a renowned linguist, and in part because of his keen inter?
est in the subject, Sturtevant also enrolled in several linguistics 
courses. At the time, linguistics was not being offered in the 
Department of Anthropology, so he took courses with profes?
sors in other departments: phonetics and phonemics from Mur?
ray Emeneau in the classics department, and advanced linguis?
tics from Mary Haas, a linguist in the Department of Oriental 
Languages. Haas was especially important in encouraging 
Sturtevant to develop a competency in linguistics and, later, af?
ter he began research among the Seminoles, in providing him 
with guidance in his analysis of Muskogean linguistic materi?
als, one of her areas of specialization. 
During his undergraduate years at Cal, Sturtevant gained his 
first experience in anthropological fieldwork. He interviewed 
Japanese-American students who had been interned in reloca?
tion camps during the war, and he attended the University of 
New Mexico's 1947 summer field school in Chaco Canyon, 
New Mexico, where he learned the basics of archaeological 
fieldwork and visited briefly among the Navajos and Rio 
Grande Pueblos. In June of 1949, he spent one weekend with 
Clement Meighan, Francis Riddell, and Tullio Tentori among 
the Eastern Pomos in northern California (Meighan and Rid?
dell, 1972). He also joined fellow student William King on a 
short archaeological surface survey of the California coast 
from San Diego south well into Baja California. Apart from 
King, Sturtevant's closest friends among the undergraduate an?
thropology majors at Berkeley were Henry Nicholson and 
Donald Lathrop. 
Sturtevant was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa during his jun?
ior year, and in the fall of his senior year, he began considering 
where to apply for graduate school. Apart from the University 
of California, which encouraged its undergraduates to pursue 
their graduate educations elsewhere, the leading anthropology 
graduate departments at the time were at the University of Chi?
cago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, Pennsylvania, University 
of California at Los Angeles, and Yale. John Rowe regarded 
Yale as the best of these and recommended that he apply there. 
Sturtevant was impressed by the quality of the faculty at Yale 
and by Yale's reputation as a center for innovative theoretical 
work in anthropology, especially in the area of culture and per?
sonality studies. He was particularly attracted by the prospect 
of studying with Ralph Linton, whose work on acculturation 
and, more recently, culture and personality theory, combined 
with his writings on anthropology in general, had established 
him as one of the most important anthropologists of the day. He 
decided to apply only to Yale, a decision reinforced by the fact 
that his uncle Edgar was a member of the linguistics depart?
ment there. 
NUMBER 44 13 
The University of California gave Sturtevant academic credit 
for training that he had received in the Navy Hospital Corps. 
Combined with credits he had earned at Pasadena Junior Col?
lege, he was able to graduate early, receiving a bachelor's de?
gree with highest honors in anthropology in January 1949. He 
stayed in Berkeley to audit several courses during the spring 
semester of 1949. The following summer, he studied French 
and German in preparation for examinations in reading com?
prehension in these languages that he would be required to take 
upon entering Yale in the fall. By remaining in Berkeley, he 
passed up an opportunity to attend summer school at the Uni?
versity of Oslo. He regretted his decision after taking the exam?
inations, because they turned out to be less challenging than he 
had expected. 
Yale, 1949-1956 
Yale, like most other departments of anthropology in the 
United States, promoted a comprehensive approach to the 
study of humanity, which required an understanding of what 
have become identified as the four principal subfields of the 
discipline: ethnology, archaeology, linguistics, and physical an?
thropology. Sturtevant's undergraduate and graduate training in 
this approach established the vision of anthropology that he has 
maintained throughout his career. He clearly expressed his 
view of the connections among the four subfields in his 1969 
article "Does Anthropology Need Museums?" After acknowl?
edging that each of the subdisciplines has its special interests 
and perspectives as well as linkages to separate, nonanthropo-
logical disciplines, he commented: 
But anthropology remains a single subject, with sub-divisions. Some observers 
believe that it will not (and sometimes that it should not) remain so, that in?
creasing specialization will lead to fragmentation. But this specialization often 
overlaps sub-field boundaries, so that the discipline may well become a net?
work rather than a rigid set of four pigeonholes. I believe that the sub-fields 
will (and should) continue to offer more to each other than to outside disci?
plines. (Sturtevant, 1969a:630-631)3 
A number of major figures or rising stars in anthropology 
were on the faculty at Yale while Sturtevant was a graduate stu?
dent there, and he took courses from most of them: social struc?
ture, cultural processes, and culture and personality from Lin?
ton; cultural dynamics from George Peter Murdock; New World 
and Asian ethnology from Cornelius Osgood, Wendell Bennett, 
and Sidney Mintz; archaeology from Irving Rouse; and linguis?
tics from Floyd Lounsbury. He also participated in a seminar di?
rected by George Kubler on the analysis of Mixtec codices and 
took several linguistics courses from Bernard Bloch. 
His professors provided him with a solid foundation in an?
thropological theory and method as well as a good background 
in more specific areas, like structuralist linguistics and New 
World ethnology and archaeology, which he put to good use in 
his subsequent research. However, once he had firsthand expe?
rience with the theoretical approaches in vogue or development 
at Yale at the time, such as culture and personality theory pro?
moted by Linton and others and Murdock's cross-cultural sta?
tistical studies, he was not convinced of their value. Also, like 
many other students and professional anthropologists, he found 
Linton a difficult person to deal with (Sturtevant, 1980a). He 
served as Linton's teaching assistant in courses on social or?
ganization and introduction to anthropology, but he was not ea?
ger to complete his dissertation under Linton's guidance. Floyd 
Lounsbury, who completed his doctorate at Yale and joined the 
faculty the same year that Sturtevant arrived, became his doc?
toral advisor. 
As is typical in graduate school, Sturtevant found that he 
learned as much about anthropology from other graduate stu?
dents as from his professors. His cohort included Stefan Borhe-
gyi, Harold Conklin, Philip Dark, William Davenport, Charles 
Frake, Peter Goethals, William Mangin, John Musgrave, 
Leopold Pospisil, Donald Robertson, Douglas Schwartz, Anne-
marie Shimony, Councill Taylor, Johannes Wilbert, and 
Stephen Williams. In long conversations in Yale's Hall of 
Graduate Studies, he and his fellow graduate students devel?
oped their ideas about anthropology, exchanged opinions about 
the work of their professors and other anthropologists, and de?
fined the goals and plans for their own research.4 
Sturtevant's perspectives on anthropology were strongly in?
fluenced by his fieldwork among the Seminole, which he began 
in the summer of 1950, at the conclusion of his first year of 
graduate studies. Although many of his friends were planning 
research outside the United States, Sturtevant's long-term com?
mitment to North American ethnology never wavered; how?
ever, he had not yet decided on the region of North America 
where he would focus his research. Rouse, a specialist on Car?
ibbean archaeology who had also published on Florida archae?
ology, suggested he consider the Seminoles of south Florida. By 
the end of his first fieldwork season, Sturtevant was convinced 
that the dearth of ethnographic information about these Semi?
noles and their status as one of the least acculturated of all 
North American Indian societies justified ethnographic research 
among them and offered the possibility of making an important 
contribution to North American ethnology. 
In 1950 the Florida Seminoles lived in a number of small 
communities in and around the Everglades. The members of 
these communities were the descendants of the minority of 
Seminoles who had successfully avoided deportation to Indian 
Territory by the United States government during the nine?
teenth century. These and the Seminoles who were deported 
derived primarily from distinct groups of Muskogean-speaking 
Indians who had migrated or had been displaced progressively 
southward from their homes in southern Georgia and Alabama 
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reflecting the 
diverse origins of their ancestors, the Florida Seminoles spoke 
two related but mutually unintelligible languages: Mikasuki (a 
dialect of Hitchiti) and a dialect of Muskogee (Creek) now 
sometimes called Creek Seminole (Sturtevant, 1971a). 
The limited ethnographic research on the Seminoles that had 
been completed before 1950 focused primarily on the Musko-
14 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
gee-speaking Seminoles, so Sturtevant decided to concentrate 
on the Mikasukis in his own work. In the summer of 1950 and 
again in the summer of 1951, he traveled from New Haven, 
Connecticut, to south Florida, his field expenses covered by 
Yale's Caribbean Anthropological Program, directed by Os?
good, which in turn was supported by funds from the Wenner-
Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He had con?
cluded that the best approach to beginning ethnographic field-
work among the Mikasukis and to establishing rapport with 
them would be to study the language. Accordingly, he devoted 
most of his time during these two summers to collecting and 
analyzing Mikasuki words, phrases, and texts, focusing more 
on phonology than on morphology or syntax.5 The superinten?
dent of the Dania (now Hollywood) Reservation recommended 
that he hire Joseph Jumper to work with him. At the time, 
Jumper was a high school student on the Dania Reservation; 
when he graduated, he became one of the first Seminoles to ob?
tain a high school degree. Jumper proved to be of invaluable 
assistance in the project, and by the end of the second summer, 
they had worked out the phonemics of Mikasuki. 
Through this research, Sturtevant established a basic under?
standing of the Mikasuki language, which allowed him to 
record Mikasuki terms accurately, analyze their etymologies, 
and evaluate the translations of Jumper and other interpreters 
upon whom he relied in his interviews with non-English-speak?
ing Seminoles. He also gained some familiarity with the 
Muskogee language as well as a Mikasuki nickname, roughly 
translatable as "Language Asker." He soon discovered, how?
ever, that his growing competency in the Seminole languages 
did not provide the entree to Mikasuki society that he had 
hoped for. Most Mikasukis were suspicious of outsiders, and 
they were reluctant to interact with him on more than the most 
superficial level. 
It was thus good fortune that, near the end of the summer of 
1950, he met Josie Billie, a Mikasuki doctor and medicine man 
about whom Sturtevant (1954b:4) wrote in his doctoral disser?
tation, "no greater expert on Seminole culture is now alive" (cf. 
Sturtevant, 1960c). In the 1940s, Billie, along with about one-
third of the Florida Seminole population, had converted to the 
Southern Baptist religion, but he continued to practice tradi?
tional Seminole medicine. He was different from most other 
Mikasukis, including his fellow Christian converts, in being 
more open to outsiders and more willing to discuss details of 
Seminole culture with them. Sturtevant chatted briefly with 
Billie on the Dania Reservation in 1950 and, in the summer of 
1951, visited him at his home on the Big Cypress Reservation. 
When he returned to Florida the following year to complete his 
doctoral research, he moved into an abandoned trailer on Big 
Cypress and began working intensively with him. 
During the summer of 1950, he met another person who was 
to have a significant impact on his Seminole research and his 
perspective on the anthropological endeavor as a whole: John 
Goggin, a major figure in Florida anthropology. In his obituary 
of Goggin, who died of cancer in 1963, Sturtevant described 
their relationship: 
He was very much interested in all aspects of Seminole ethnography. My own 
friendship with him began when he visited me during my first fieldwork as a 
graduate student in 1950 and 1951, decided that I was serious about Seminole 
ethnography, and thereafter at every opportunity encouraged and helped me, 
sharing his knowledge of Seminole history and culture (including his own field 
notes, photographs, specimens, and large newspaper clipping file), extending 
his hospitality to me, and introducing and sponsoring me among his many 
friends in Florida. (Sturtevant, 1964b:389) 
Goggin's interests and expertise extended across much of 
North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America and encom?
passed most of the subfields of anthropology. Although prima?
rily an archaeologist, he was firmly committed, in Sturtevant's 
words, "to a unified approach to anthropological materials, par?
ticularly the interconnections of archeology, ethnology, history, 
and natural history" (Sturtevant, 1964b:389). Goggin's view of 
anthropology reinforced Sturtevant's own conviction of the 
value of the comprehensive approach in which he had been 
trained. Goggin also impressed upon Sturtevant the importance 
of material culture to anthropological research and inspired 
him to explore museums, archives, and the extremely varied 
published literature for information to complement his ethno?
graphic field data. 
In the fall of 1951, Sturtevant attended the annual Confer?
ence on Iroquois Research at Red House, New York, in the 
company of Harold Conklin, who had developed an interest in 
the Iroquois while a high school student in New York. Sturte?
vant and Conklin had met while both were anthropology under?
graduates at Berkeley, but they did not become good friends 
until Conklin entered graduate school at Yale in the fall of 
1950, a year after Sturtevant. At the conference, William Fen-
ton introduced them to some local Seneca people who invited 
them to attend the Seneca Midwinter ceremonies to be held the 
following January and February on the Allegany Seneca Reser?
vation, near Salamanca in western New York State. In the inter?
vening months, they decided that the purpose of their visit 
would be to study Seneca musical instruments, one of the few 
categories of traditional Iroquois material culture still in exist?
ence, but one that had been little studied. 
They spent 11 days at Allegany, during which time they 
worked out the Seneca classification of musical instruments, 
recorded detailed information on their construction and use, 
and acquired examples of several of the musical instruments 
for the Yale Peabody Museum, which sponsored the project. 
Sturtevant was pleased that the Senecas, unlike the Seminoles, 
treated him as an individual rather than as just another white 
outsider and that they welcomed his questions about their cul?
ture and history. This visit marked the beginning of his now de?
cades-long research among the Iroquois. 
They reported the results of their research in a coauthored ar?
ticle (Conklin and Sturtevant, 1953). In its careful recording of 
Seneca terms, close attention to Seneca perspectives, and thor?
ough coverage of the relevant literature, this article exemplifies 
the high standards of scholarship that characterize all of their 
NUMBER 44 15 
FIGURE 1.?Mrs. Charley Cypress demonstrating grating of coontie (Zamia) roots at her camp, Big Cypress 
Reservation, Florida, 1 February 1957. Junior Billie (left), interpreting; William Sturtevant (right), taking notes 
(posed). Photograph by John M. Goggin. Courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian 
Institution (neg. no. 44,464-a). 
FIGURE 2.?William Sturtevant with Solon Jones, Cattaraugus Reservation, New York, 29 June 1957 (posed). 
Photograph by Theda Maw Sturtevant. 
16 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 3.?Josie Billie and William Sturtevant, Big 
Cypress Reservation, 28 March 1959. Photograph by 
Harold C. Conklin. 
subsequent research and writing and foreshadows their devel?
opment, in collaboration with several others, of the approach to 
ethnography commonly known as ethnoscience. 
In May 1952 Sturtevant resumed his fieldwork among the 
Florida Seminoles. Two months later, he left for his family's 
summer home in Woods Hole, Massachussetts, where, on 26 
July, his twenty-sixth birthday, he and Theda Maw were mar?
ried. Maw, from Burma, was a graduate student in history at 
Yale when they met in 1950; they became engaged in the 
spring of 1952. Following the wedding, they returned together 
to Florida, where Sturtevant continued his field research. 
Sturtevant focused this research on Seminole ethnography 
rather than on linguistics, attempting to gather as much infor?
mation on as many different aspects of Seminole culture as 
possible. He also collected some physical anthropological data 
on such things as Seminole blood-type frequencies, handed?
ness, color blindness, and dentition, and he made a small col?
lection of ethnographic materials for the Yale Peabody Mu?
seum to supplement those deposited earlier by Goggin and 
others. His original plan had been to produce a general ethnog?
raphy of the Seminole, but he decided to focus on Seminole 
medicine because this was the area of Seminole culture about 
which Billie was most interested and knowledgable. A few 
other Mikasuki people shared bits of information with him, but 
only Billie was willing to discuss Seminole culture in any de?
tail. Although he was aware of the methodological problems of 
relying so heavily on a single informant, and he recognized that 
Billie was somewhat marginal to traditional Mikasuki society, 
he had no other options. 
Sturtevant worked regularly with Billie through the fall and 
winter of 1952 and into early 1953. Their discussions focused 
on Seminole medicine, worldview, and religion, but they also 
covered Seminole history, inter-ethnic relations, material cul?
ture, economy, kinship, and social organization. Together they 
collected hundreds of plants, for which Billie provided Mika?
suki and often Muskogee names as well as detailed information 
on their use. Sturtevant was also able to make wire and later 
tape recordings of 18 medicinal spells and songs, a central but 
previously undocumented component of Seminole medical 
practice, which Billie and other Mikasuki doctors recited or 
sang for him. Also of great importance was the information he 
gathered on Seminole medicine bundles, the significance of 
which was poorly understood at the time. In investigating these 
bundles, he built upon the research of Louis Capron, a longtime 
resident of south Florida who over the years had established 
amicable relations with several Muskogee Seminoles. He had 
access to the galley proofs of Capron's (1953) study entitled 
"The Medicine Bundles of the Florida Seminole and the Green 
Corn Dance," and he used Capron's findings to elicit informa?
tion from Billie about Mikasuki bundles and their place in 
Seminole culture. 
NUMBER 44 17 
In late February 1953, the Sturtevants left Big Cypress to re?
turn to New Haven, and Sturtevant devoted the next 18 months 
to analyzing his notes and recordings, reviewing the relevant 
literature, and writing his dissertation.6 He submitted the dis?
sertation in September 1954, and it was approved before 
Christmas; he was officially awarded the Ph.D. at the end of 
the spring semester of 1955. 
As is often the case with doctoral dissertations, the title he 
gave his dissertation?"The Mikasuki Seminole: Medical Be?
liefs and Practices"?is misleadingly specific. In it, he exam?
ined not only these beliefs and practices but the many other ar?
eas of Mikasuki culture linked to them, and he produced one of 
the more detailed, systematic ethnobotanical studies available 
for any American Indian society. He also compared his find?
ings among the Seminole with data from Indian societies 
across the Southeast and in other regions of North America and 
considered some more general theoretical issues, such as the 
validity of broad, cross-cultural typologies of diseases and psy?
chological explanations of the efficacy of curing practices. The 
result is the most thorough ethnography of the Mikasuki ever 
written and is a significant contribution to a comparative eth?
nology of North America. By discussing in detail the difficul?
ties he encountered in his research among the Mikasuki and the 
limitations of his data, he also provided an important portrayal 
of the complexities of anthropological fieldwork and a model 
of anthropological candor. 
Sturtevant incorporated into his doctoral dissertation only 
about one-third of his field data and an even smaller proportion 
of the extensive materials on Florida Indian ethnography and 
history that he had gathered from other sources. While he was 
writing his dissertation, he drew on this additional information 
to produce three articles. In one of these, he provided a detailed 
comparison of his data on Seminole medicine bundles and 
busks with data collected by Capron (Sturtevant, 1954a). In the 
other two, he focused on Florida Indian history, evaluating in 
the process the reliability of native oral history and emphasiz?
ing the importance of taking into account Indian perspectives 
on their own history (Sturtevant, 1953, 1955a). He also pre?
pared a paper that reviewed the ethnohistorical and ethno?
graphic evidence for cultural connections between the Indians 
of south Florida and of the Antilles, which he presented in De?
cember 1954 at the annual meetings of the American Anthro?
pological Association. This paper was a companion piece to a 
presentation by Rouse and supported Rouse's view, based on 
archaeological evidence, that the influence of Caribbean cul?
tures on those of Florida had been negligible. 
By 1954 Sturtevant's research, publications, and participa?
tion in professional meetings had marked his transition from 
graduate student to professional anthropologist. This status 
was further confirmed in March 1954, when he submitted a 
statement to the United States Congress opposing a so-called 
withdrawal bill, which would have terminated federal supervi?
sion of the Florida Seminoles (Sturtevant, 1954c). Nearly all 
the Florida Seminoles also opposed the bill, and Congress did 
not pursue its passage. In the same year, he was hired by Yale 
University as an instructor in the Department of Anthropology 
and as an assistant curator of anthropology in the Yale Pea?
body Museum. 
The Bureau of American Ethnology, 1956-1965 
In 1956, when Yale did not renew his contract, Sturtevant be?
gan looking for a permanent position elsewhere. He received 
two offers. One was from Brown University, to establish a de?
partment of anthropology and to direct the newly created 
Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. The other was from the 
Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology 
(BAE), to serve as an ethnologist in the position vacated by 
Philip Drucker, who left the BAE and anthropology in 1955 to 
become a rancher in Mexico (Stirling, 1957:5; Lantis, 1991). 
William Fenton, who had left the BAE a few years earlier to 
take a job at the National Research Council, strongly encour?
aged Matthew Stirling to consider Sturtevant for the position. 
Stirling had directed the BAE for three decades, but despite his 
own energetic research program, he had failed to prevent the 
unit's steady decline. By 1956 its permanent research staff 
consisted only of Stirling and two other archaeologists, Frank 
Roberts and Henry Collins. Despite these problems, the BAE 
position was in many ways a "dream" job. Sturtevant found it 
more attractive than the position at Brown because it offered 
greater freedom and time for research and because it housed an 
incomparable library and archives of photographs and manu?
scripts on North American Indian subjects. Also, together with 
the staff and collections of the Anthropology Department of 
the United States National Museum, part of the Smithsonian 
Institution, it continued to be a major center of North Ameri?
can Indian studies. 
The offer from Brown was the first of several from universi?
ties?including the University of Arizona and the Berkeley and 
San Diego campuses of the University of California?that 
Sturtevant received, and declined, over the next decade. In ret?
rospect, he feels that his decision to remain at the Smithsonian 
throughout his career was the correct one, but in a conversation 
of June 1996, he expressed to me some regrets: 
I still think that one keeps up better and tends to be broader if one is teaching, 
for one is then forced to keep up with changes in the field. And I sometimes 
thought that if 1 had been teaching I would have sent people to do fieldwork in 
the Southeast and maybe there would have been more ethnographic fieldwork 
done in the Southeast than there has been. 
Sturtevant officially joined the staff of the BAE on 29 March 
1956 (Stirling, 1957:22), but he did not actually begin working 
in Washington, D.C, until the following summer. His principal 
responsibility, like that of the other members of the research 
staff of the BAE, was research and writing. The BAE had no 
material culture collections, so its staff had no curatorial duties, 
but they were expected to respond to the numerous requests for 
information on American Indians received every year from 
various organizations and especially those from the general 
public, a function that the BAE had fulfilled throughout its ex-
18 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
istence (Hinsley, 1981). To respond efficiently to these re?
quests, the staff of the BAE had prepared over the years a series 
of bibliographies and information leaflets, to which Sturtevant 
was expected to contribute. Between 1956 and 1962 he com?
piled bibliographies on diverse topics: the Seminole and other 
Indians of eastern North America, the Cherokee language, 
maps related to American Indians, the contemporary situation 
of Indians in the United States, American Indian songs and 
dances, basketry, wars and warfare, clothing, medicine and 
health, and languages and language families. He also prepared 
a leaflet entitled "Anthropology as a Career" (Sturtevant, 
1957). Regarded at the time as the best portrayal of the disci?
pline for nonspecialists, the leaflet was distributed widely and 
was included in a major collection of readings in anthropology 
(Fried, 1959, 1:6-14,2:581-587). 
Producing these materials broadened his already extensive 
knowledge of North American Indian ethnology, linguistics, 
and history. He further expanded this knowledge through read?
ing, research in museum and archival collections, field re?
search, and short visits to Indian communities in various parts 
of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In July 1957 he 
traveled to Rock Hill, South Carolina, to collect linguistic data 
from Sam Blue, the last member of the Catawba tribe to have 
maintained some competency in the Catawba language. While 
there, he made a small collection of Catawba pottery for the 
United States National Museum. In 1957 and 1958 he spent 
seven weeks continuing his research among the New York 
Seneca, and in 1959 he returned for a few months to Florida to 
follow up on his previous fieldwork, focusing especially on 
Seminole ethnobotany. He also collected ethnographic materi?
als, especially objects made for the tourist market, which he 
deposited in the United States National Museum. In July and 
August of the following year, he visited 17 European museums 
to examine early ethnographic examples and possible Euro?
pean prototypes of eastern North American Indian material 
culture, research that complemented his growing familiarity 
with museum collections in the United States. In the summers 
of 1961 and 1962, he conducted five weeks of basic ethno?
graphic fieldwork among the Seneca-Cayuga in Oklahoma and 
paid a short visit to the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, Can?
ada, during October of the latter year to attend a ceremony and 
to do a bit a fieldwork among the Seneca and Cayuga there. He 
also continued to participate regularly in conferences on Iro?
quois history and culture and, in 1964, joined Stanley Dia?
mond and Fenton in preparing a memorandum to the Subcom?
mittee on Indian Affairs of the United States House of 
Representatives, protesting the construction of the Kinzua 
Dam, which later flooded a large part of the Allegany Reserva?
tion and forced the relocation of many Seneca people living 
there (Diamond, et al., 1964). 
Sturtevant combined this active research program with a 
number of writing projects. In fact, his nearly nine years at the 
BAE proved to be one of the most productive periods of his ca?
reer. He continued writing up the results of his Seminole re?
search and prepared several articles on Seminole history, my?
thology, ritual, and material culture (Sturtevant, 1955a, 1956a, 
1956b, 1956c, 1962a, 1963b, 1967f) as well as a biographical 
essay on Billie, which appeared in a collection of 20 portraits 
of anthropological informants (Sturtevant, 1960c). He also of?
fered a detailed assessment of the state of ethnological research 
in Florida (Sturtevant, 1958a) and, with Goggin, analyzed di?
verse archaeological and historical data to reconstruct the cul?
ture and society of the Calusa, one of the principal Indian soci?
eties in southern Florida at the time of Spanish contact, and one 
of the few stratified, nonagricultural societies in all of North 
America (Goggin and Sturtevant, 1964). He applied his grow?
ing knowledge of Caribbean history and ethnology to analyze 
the precontact agricultural system of the Taino Indians of the 
Greater Antilles and to expand his unpublished 1954 paper on 
the lack of influence of Antillean cultures on the cultures of the 
Indians of the southeastern United States (Sturtevant, 1960d, 
1961b). 
The expanded study appeared in 1960, in a collection of es?
says on the Caribbean compiled by Sidney Mintz and dedicated 
to Cornelius Osgood, Sturtevant's former professor at Yale 
(Sturtevant, 1960d). In it Sturtevant pointed out that ethnologi?
cal traits taken as evidence of a direct connection between the 
Antilles and the Southeast often were widely distributed in the 
circum-Caribbean and adjacent regions, and that in some cases, 
their presence in the Antilles was assumed rather than actually 
documented in the historical and ethnographic record. More?
over, the relatively shallow time depth of this record precluded 
arriving at any definitive conclusions about the direction of in?
fluence among neighboring societies, which could be deter?
mined only within a broader chronological framework, typi?
cally derived from archaeological research. In the case at hand, 
the available archaeological data indicated that the only South?
eastern Indians who interacted with Antillean societies were 
those located in south Florida, and that the influence between 
them had flowed primarily from Florida to the Antilles rather 
than the reverse. This essay thus offered a systematic critique 
of the use of culture-trait distributions based on data gleaned 
from historical and ethnological sources alone to reconstruct 
New World culture history and was an important contribution 
to the methodology of cultural historical research in general. 
Completing this research project also reinforced Sturtevant's 
view, which he shared with Goggin and many other anthropol?
ogists at the time, that archaeology and ethnology are best re?
garded not as totally separate subfields of anthropology but 
rather as complementary endeavors within cultural anthropol?
ogy (Sturtevant, 1964b:389). 
His writing during this period was not restricted to Florida 
and the Caribbean. His growing reputation as a North Ameri?
canist resulted in invitations to prepare entries on the Haida, 
Huron, and Ales Hrdlicka for the Encyclopedia Hebraica and 
on the Creek, the Five Civilized Tribes, and the Seminole for 
the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Sturtevant, 1960a, 1960b, 
1961a, 1963a, 1964a, 1964d). He also produced a detailed 
NUMBER 44 19 
overview of Spanish-Indian relations in the Southeast (Sturte?
vant, 1962b) and wrote brief articles on Carolina Indians in the 
early historic period, on American Indian linguistics, and on 
field methods (Sturtevant, 1958b, 1959, 1960e, 1965b). In 
1959 David Quinn invited him, on the recommendation of Wil-
comb Washburn, to analyze the ethnographic content of the 
John White watercolors of coastal North Carolina Indians, 
which Sturtevant (1976:443-444) later characterized as "per?
haps the most interesting and important sixteenth-century illus?
trations of Indians from both an ethnographic and artistic point 
of view." His work on these watercolors and on early illustra?
tions of Northeastern Indians, published between 1964 and 
1967, marked the beginning of what would become a central 
focus of his research in the following decades (Sturtevant, 
1964c, 1965a, 1967a). 
It was also during this period that he wrote "Studies in Eth?
noscience," the article that has proven to be his most controver?
sial to date (Sturtevant, 1964e). He presented the original ver?
sion of this article at a conference on "Transcultural Studies in 
Cognition," sponsored by the Social Science Research Council 
and held in Merida, Mexico, in the spring of 1963. Although 
Sturtevant had not applied a strict ethnoscientific approach in 
his own research, he was an appropriate choice to provide an 
overview of ethnoscience. Many of the ideas that formed the 
basis of this approach had emerged out of conversations among 
Conklin, Frake, Lounsbury, and Sturtevant while they were to?
gether at Yale in the 1950s, and Conklin and Frake had pre?
sented their views of ethnoscience in a lecture series that Stur?
tevant co-organized for the Anthropological Society of 
Washington in 1960 to 1961 (Conklin, 1962; Frake, 1962). Yet 
it was somewhat happenstance that Sturtevant wrote the article. 
He believes that Conklin?one of the earliest practitioners of 
ethnoscience and the person who, in Sturtevant's opinion, was 
most instrumental in the development of its methodology? 
would have been invited to prepare the presentation for the 
conference had he not been conducting fieldwork in the Philip?
pines at the time. 
Sturtevant's goal in writing the article was not to provide a 
history of the development of ethnoscience but to present, ex?
plicitly and systematically, its perspectives and goals, explore 
its fundamental theoretical and methodological principles, re?
view how these principles had been applied in specific re?
search projects, and suggest areas where an ethnoscientific ap?
proach might be profitably employed in future research. He 
defined ethnoscience as a general approach to ethnography fo?
cused on discovering and describing the conceptual models 
that the members of different societies employ to organize 
their experiences and to orient their activities in the world. Al?
though he recognized that this focus continued a long tradition 
in anthropology of emphasizing the importance of under?
standing native points of view, he noted that most ethno?
graphic work failed to explore native perspectives exhaus?
tively and tended to distort them by forcing them into general 
categories, like religion or kinship, which were mistakenly as?
sumed to exist in more or less equivalent form in all human 
societies. In this regard, he commented, "It has long been evi?
dent that a major weakness in anthropology is the underdevel?
oped condition of ethnographic method. Typologies and gen?
eralizations abound, but their descriptive foundations are 
insecure" (Sturtevant, 1964e:100). 
From Sturtevant's perspective, ethnoscience offered the rig?
orous methodology that would enable ethnographers to de?
velop a more sophisticated understanding of the conceptual 
models of other societies and would allow a comparative an?
thropology to move forward on a firmer empirical footing. He 
referred to these conceptual models as "classifications," in the 
broad sense of being orderings of experience, and argued that 
the ethnoscientific approach could be adopted to explore any 
cultural domain, regardless of the degree to which it was struc?
tured by more specific classificatory principles, like taxonomic 
inclusion, or the extent to which its contents were explicitly la?
beled in the native language. At the same time, he noted that 
ethnoscientific research conducted to date had concentrated on 
taxonomic classification and that the analysis of terminological 
systems had provided the principal avenue for gaining access 
to native perspectives. 
Despite anthropology's lip service to the importance of 
learning native languages, few ethnographers gained more than 
a basic competency in the languages of the people with whom 
they worked. Ethnoscientists insisted, quite logically, that an 
understanding of native perspectives was possible only if eth?
nographers acquired a solid command of native languages. 
They also emphasized the importance of collecting information 
in the normal contexts of everyday life and of following proce?
dures that approximated local cultural approaches to gaining 
knowledge. By making these procedures explicit, they hoped 
that the results of one ethnographer's research could be 
checked in the future by others. 
The publication of "Studies in Ethnoscience" in 1964 stimu?
lated considerable interest in the approach but also generated 
sharp criticism. In a general review, Marvin Harris (1968: 
568-604) faulted ethnoscience, as well as most other ap?
proaches in anthropology, for privileging native perspectives 
over those of outside observers and for perpetuating mentalist 
perspectives at the expense of more materialist ones. Because 
of its emphasis on native terminologies and its adaptation of 
some methods and concepts originally developed in descriptive 
linguistics, he and others dismissed ethnoscience as a mis?
guided attempt to reduce culture to language and to impose lin?
guistic models on largely nonlinguistic cultural phenomena 
(Berreman, 1966; Keesing, 1972). Another common critique 
was that the results of ethnoscientific research were "trivial," or 
as Harris (1968:592) expressed it, "the net contribution to sub?
stantive theory is less than what usually results from equivalent 
labor in-puts." 
Nonetheless, the methods and perspectives of ethnoscience 
were widely embraced by anthropologists in the 1960s and 
1970s and have endured in several research specialities, such as 
20 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 4.?William Sturtevant in his Bureau of 
American Ethnology office in the Smithsonian 
Castle, Room 406, January 1965. Photograph by 
Stewart Brand. 
ethnobiology and cognitive science. The impact of the stan?
dards for ethnographic research established by its early practi?
tioners is also evident, although seldom acknowledged, in 
much of contemporary ethnography. For his part, Sturtevant 
considered most of the critiques of ethnoscience to be wrong-
headed, being based on misunderstandings of its aims and un?
derlying principles, but he never responded in print to any of 
them. By the time they appeared, he was heavily involved in 
other, mainly ethnohistorical, research projects and had already 
anticipated and addressed many of the critiques in his essay. 
For example, he had no illusions about the amount of time and 
resources required to implement the ethnoscientific approach 
in ethnography, commenting, 
Ethnoscience raises the standards of reliability, validity, and exhaustiveness in 
ethnography. One result is that the ideal goal of a complete ethnography is far?
ther removed from practical attainment. The full ethnoscientific description of 
a single culture would require many thousands of pages published after many 
years of intensive field work based on ethnographic methods more complete 
and more advanced than are now available. (Sturtevant, 1964e: 123) 
NUMBER 44 21 
Ethnographic research could proceed more rapidly only by 
lowering the standards of good ethnography or by underesti?
mating or ignoring the vast complexity of human cultures. 
Sturtevant regarded both alternatives as untenable if anthropol?
ogy's expressed commitment to understanding humanity was 
to be taken seriously. 
In 1962 Sturtevant began planning a year-long research 
project in Burma to complete an ethnoscientific analysis of 
clothing in the Pegu District northeast of Rangoon. He intended 
the project to provide a counterpoint to his research on Semi?
nole clothing as well as an opportunity to develop ethnographic 
methodology within the framework of ethnoscience. Burma 
was an appropriate place to conduct the project because it was 
one of the few countries in the world whose citizens had not 
adopted European-style clothing, but his decision to focus his 
project there was motivated primarily by his wife's desire to 
visit her family and to have their children learn about her coun?
try. She had not returned to Burma since the summer of 1955, 
when she introduced her husband and their infant daughter, 
Kinthi (born in 1954), to her family. In the interim, they had 
had two more children?Reed, bom in 1956, and Alfred, born 
in 1958?and the country had undergone a number of radical 
political changes. The army had taken over the government in 
1962 and was in the process of transforming Burma, which 
they renamed Myanmar in 1989, into a pseudosocialist state. 
In 1963 Sturtevant received a grant from the National Sci?
ence Foundation to undertake the project and secured permis?
sion from the BAE to take a one-year leave of absence. In May 
of that year, his close friend and mentor John Goggin died after 
an eight-month-long illness with cancer. Sturtevant (1964b) 
prepared an obituary, which was published in the American An?
thropologist the following year. Earlier, realizing that Goggin's 
illness was terminal, he had joined Charles Fairbanks and 
Rouse to organize a collection of Goggin's writings, also pub?
lished in 1964 (Fairbanks et al., 1964). 
On 4 October 1963, the Sturtevant family left Washington, 
D.C, arriving in Rangoon on 24 October. On the surface the 
country seemed little changed from their 1955 visit, but the 
new political climate made fieldwork impossible. Sturtevant 
was unable to get permission from the Burmese government to 
spend any significant amount of time outside the capital, and 
government officials, infused with antiforeigner sentiment, 
were suspicious of him and kept close tabs on his movements 
and on the people with whom he associated. He was tempted to 
try to work in the Pegu District without official approval, but 
he feared that the government would revoke his visa, thereby 
cutting short their visit, or that it would take reprisals against 
his wife's relatives, whose political situation was already tenu?
ous. Her father, Dr. Ba Maw, had served between 1937 and 
1939 as Burma's first premier after the British established 
Burma as a colony separate from India and had also served as 
Burma's head of state between 1943 and 1945, during the Japa?
nese occupation. Although Maw did not support the 1962 mili?
tary coup, he had not yet been identified by the government as 
an enemy. His was one of the few politically prominent fami?
lies in Burma whose members did not form part of the military 
government and had not yet been jailed. 
Despite these difficulties, Sturtevant was able to visit neigh?
borhoods in Rangoon and villages in the surrounding country?
side, examine photographs in several archives, study the Bur?
mese language, and read extensively about the country's 
history and culture. He also became quite interested in Bur?
mese drama and began attending performances, especially of 
the Indian epic Ramayana, but he felt that he lacked the requi?
site language skills and background knowledge to make these 
performances the focus of his research. In the process, he as?
sembled extensive notes on Burmese clothing and many other 
aspects of the culture, took hundreds of photographs, and made 
a large collection, 386 objects in all, of clothing and other ob?
jects for the Smithsonian. 
He also had the opportunity, in 1964, to visit Inle Lake in the 
Southern Shan States southeast of Mandalay, where he exam?
ined local approaches to artificial island agriculture. Agricul?
tural systems had been an important focus of his work in Flor?
ida and the Caribbean, and he had observed another example of 
this unusual approach to agriculture?in which earth is moved 
to water rather than the opposite?during a brief visit in 1960 to 
the "floating gardens" of Xochimilco, in the suburbs of Mexico 
City. In 1968 he collected data on a similar system in Kashmir, 
and he presented a paper on the topic that year at the Eighth In?
ternational Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sci?
ences, held in Tokyo and Kyoto (Sturtevant, 1970). This re?
search established that artificial island agriculture emerged 
independently in different parts of the world and lent support to 
the conclusion that early Spanish observations of this form of 
agriculture in the Valley of Mexico had been accurate. 
About five months after arriving in Burma, Sturtevant was 
shocked to learn that the BAE had become the focus of a reor-
ganizational plan being developed by S. Dillon Ripley, who on 
1 February 1964 assumed the duties of Secretary of the Smith?
sonian Institution. Ripley was concerned by the general state of 
anthropology at the Institution and was being drawn to the con?
clusion that merging the BAE and the Department of Anthro?
pology would make for a stronger program. The department in 
various organizational guises had formed part of the Smithson?
ian since the Institution's founding in 1846.7 Its staff was re?
sponsible for curating the Institution's anthropological collec?
tions, predominantly from North America but including 
important materials from other parts of the world. The BAE 
was created in 1879 as a separate research bureau focused on 
North America. Over the years, the two units developed a co?
operative relationship?among other things, the department cu-
rated the enormous collections amassed by the BAE's research?
ers?but in recent decades the department had been able to 
increase its research staff and budget, whereas those of the 
BAE had declined. By 1964 Stirling had retired from the BAE, 
and Roberts retired in the spring of that year. Its research staff 
22 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
then consisted only of Sturtevant, Collins, and Robert Laugh?
lin, who had been hired in 1962. 
To determine the future of anthropology at the Institution, 
Ripley consulted with anthropologists in the BAE, in the de?
partment, and outside the Smithsonian. In a series of letters 
written from Rangoon, Sturtevant provided Ripley with his 
perspective on what he believed should happen. He argued that 
the BAE should remain an independent research unit, but that it 
should be transformed into "a bureau of ethnology in the mod?
ern sense" by increasing its staff to include 10 to 15 research 
positions and expanding its focus from the Americas to the en?
tire world.8 Ripley was not unsympathetic to Sturtevant's vi?
sion, but he believed that the interests of anthropology would 
be better served by merging the BAE and the department into a 
new unit that could then serve as the foundation for a separate 
museum of anthropology. 
The Department of Anthropology, 1965-1997 
The BAE was officially abolished on 1 February 1965, and its 
staff, library, and archives were subsequently moved from the 
Smithsonian Institution building (the Castle) across the Na?
tional Mall to the Department of Anthropology's recently ex?
panded space in the National Museum of Natural History 
(NMNH). The new unit created by the merger of the BAE and 
the Department of Anthropology was named the Smithsonian 
Office of Anthropology (SOA). Its position within the organi?
zational structure of the NMNH was higher than that of the 
other departments in the museum but was lower than that for?
merly held by the BAE, which had been an independent bureau 
within the institution. 
Waldo Wedel, a senior scientist in the museum who special?
ized in Plains archaeology, was named the first chairman of the 
SOA, but he was soon replaced by Richard Woodbury, a south?
western archaeologist. A few months later, Secretary Ripley 
decided that the SOA needed additional, more dynamic leader?
ship and invited Sol Tax to become its head, apparently on the 
recommendation of Collins. Ripley believed that Tax?a pro?
fessor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and a ma?
jor figure in international anthropology at the time?would 
transform the SOA into one of the most important centers of 
anthropology in the world (Tax, 1988; Stanley, 1996). Tax was 
intrigued by the possibilities, but he did not want to resign his 
position at the University of Chicago, so Ripley asked him to 
spend a few days each month at the institution as a special ad?
visor for anthropology. Tax accepted this revised offer and be?
gan familiarizing himself with the Smithsonian's anthropology 
program and developing ideas for the future of the new unit. 
Tax was immediately concerned that the research staff of the 
SOA had failed to develop programs that went beyond their 
personal research projects. He asked them to prepare descrip?
tions of their work and to offer their perspectives on new pro?
grams that could be developed, organizing a meeting in late 
January 1966 to discuss their ideas. Among the alternatives 
considered was the proposal that a new edition of the two-vol?
ume Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, origi?
nally published by the BAE in the first decade of the twentieth 
century, would be appropriate. Everyone supported the idea, 
and a second meeting was held a short time later to decide on 
the general format of the new Handbook of North American In?
dians and to determine who would be in charge. A few of the 
curators felt that a dictionary format like that of the original 
Handbook would be best. Sturtevant proposed instead that a 
more ambitious, multivolume collection of detailed essays 
would be more useful, on the lines of the Handbook of South 
American Indians published by the BAE between 1946 and 
1959 and the Handbook of Middle American Indians then in 
preparation at Tulane University. The majority of the curators 
concurred with Sturtevant's position, and he volunteered, and 
was designated, to coordinate the project. 
Sturtevant was attracted by the prospect of becoming general 
editor of the new Handbook for several reasons. No compre?
hensive, scholarly overview of American Indians was then 
available except for the original Handbook, which was badly 
out of date. A new Handbook would make available to a broad 
audience the significant advances in knowledge about North 
American Indians that had been accomplished during the previ?
ous 60 years. He was also becoming concerned that his inclina?
tion to pursue somewhat disparate research topics and to focus 
on rather specific issues would preclude his ever producing a 
major synthesis of North American ethnology. He believed that 
organizing the new Handbook would provide him the opportu?
nity to make a major contribution to the field. 
With characteristic energy and enthusiasm, Tax began elabo?
rating his vision of a new Smithsonian anthropology, but he 
soon encountered difficulties. Because he was reluctant to 
leave Chicago for more than a few days at a time, Tax could not 
maintain contact with the Smithsonian staff at the level re?
quired to implement his plans, even after the Smithsonian hired 
his former student Samuel Stanley to keep Tax informed and to 
coordinate the programs on a daily basis. A more serious prob?
lem was the lack of support for and, in some cases, opposition 
to his plans on the part of several members of the SOA research 
staff. Some were concerned that Tax's ambitious vision ignored 
the basic responsibilities of the staff to the museum's collec?
tions and that its implementation would overwhelm the staff 
with new duties. Others resented Tax's attempts to direct the 
activities of the SOA from a distance or feared that his plans 
would have a detrimental impact on their personal research 
programs. 
By November 1967 Tax was convinced that this opposition 
would preclude moving ahead with his plans for the SOA, and 
he proposed to Secretary Ripley that the new programs that he 
and a few members of the SOA were developing should be or?
ganized within a distinct unit. An outside committee, ap?
pointed to review the status of the SOA in January 1967, con?
curred with Tax's suggestion, and on 1 July 1968?just three 
years and six months after he abolished the BAE?Secretary 
NUMBER 44 23 
FIGURE 5.?The staffs of the Bureau of American Ethnology and the River Basin Survey (RBS) at the time of the 
BAE's merger with the Department of Anthropology, on the steps of the NMNH, September 1965 (left to right): 
Front row: Matthew W. Stirling (director, retired), Jessie Shaw (administrative assistant), Carl Miller (RBS), Flo?
rence Morgan (secretary); center row: Evelyn S. Anderson (secretary), Robert L. Stephenson (RBS), Robert M. 
Laughlin (ethnologist), Karlena Glemser (secretary), Henry B. Collins (archaeologist); back row: William C. 
Sturtevant (ethnologist), Edward G. Schumacher (illustrator), Harold A. Huscher (RBS), Margaret C. Blaker 
(archivist), Rachel Penner (archival assistant). Missing: Frank H.H. Roberts, Jr. (archaeologist, retired). Courtesy 
of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution (neg. no. 1530B). 
Ripley created the Center for the Study of Man, with Tax as its 
acting director and Stanley as its program coordinator. Three 
months later, the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology was de?
moted to the status of a department. Sturtevant and other 
members of the SOA who supported Tax's plans were invited 
to join the Center along with a few other people from within 
the Institution and several leading scholars from the interna?
tional anthropological community. The Handbook of North 
American Indians project was also designated as one of the 
Center's programs. 
Before the merger of the BAE and the Department of An?
thropology, Sturtevant regularly joined members of the depart?
ment's staff for lunch and regarded many as his friends. The 
merger, however, generated conflicts, especially between him 
and Clifford Evans, a Latin Americanist archaeologist who had 
been one of its more active proponents. Sturtevant resented 
Evans's role in bringing about the demise of the BAE and his 
tendency to resort to heavy-handed and, from Sturtevant's per?
spective, underhanded tactics in departmental and institutional 
affairs. For his part, Evans considered Sturtevant's opposition 
to many of his plans to be unreasonable and was frustrated by 
his inability to neutralize this opposition or to convert Sturte?
vant into an ally. In contrast, they seldom disagreed on intellec?
tual matters, the main exception being Evans's view that New 
World culture history had been significantly affected by trans-
Pacific contacts, which Sturtevant rejected for both method?
ological and factual reasons. 
Sturtevant was not the only member of the department who 
opposed Evans, but Evans also had his allies. By 1969, two 
factions had emerged, known among the staff as "the Sturte?
vant faction" and "the Evans faction."9 In October of that year, 
Richard Cowan, director of the NMNH, asked the research 
24 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
staff to provide him with names of possible candidates for the 
chairmanship of the department. The supervisors of the four re?
search divisions of the department responded: 
We are convinced that the factions in this department are so firmly established, 
so polarized, and so pervasive, that there is no member of the staff who is suffi?
ciently neutral (or likely to remain so if appointed) to serve effectively as de?
partmental chairman....The only permanent solution to this dilemma, we be?
lieve, will come with the establishment of a Museum of Man with a new 
Director (from outside) with a strong mandate and several additional positions 
to dilute the existing factions and radically change the administrative, social, 
and personal environment which has thus far supported the factions. 
Given this situation, most staff members were surprised and 
several were appalled when Cowan appointed Evans as chair?
man, first on a one-year trial basis in 1970 and then for an addi?
tional four years, starting in 1971. His appointment escalated 
the conflicts, and the associated factionalism dominated depart?
mental affairs throughout the 1970s, lingering on even after 
Evans's death in 1980. William Fitzhugh, who succeeded 
Evans as chairman of the department in 1975, worked hard to 
improve relations within the department, as did Douglas 
Ubelaker, who succeeded Fitzhugh in 1980. Their efforts were 
facilitated by the hiring of several new curators in the late 
1970s and early 1980s to replace curators who had retired, and 
by the mid-1980s the factionalism had disappeared entirely. 
When Sturtevant was transferred from the BAE to the De?
partment of Anthropology, he assumed curatorial responsibility 
for all of the North American ethnology collections. The other 
North Americanist ethnologist in the department was John C. 
Ewers, a noted Plains specialist hired by the department in 
1946. In the 1950s, Ewers had been responsible for renovating 
the American Indian exhibition halls in the United States Na?
tional Museum, and in the 1950s and early 1960s, he had 
played a major role in creating the National Museum of History 
and Technology (now the National Museum of American His?
tory) (Ewers, 1956, 1959). In recognition of this service to the 
institution, he had been given a largely research position, with 
the title of "senior scientist." Sturtevant and the other curators 
tried to shield him from day-to-day curatorial concerns, con?
sulting with him only on issues about which he had special ex?
pertise or which they believed would be of interest to him. 
Although Sturtevant had never intended to be a museum cu?
rator, he was not averse to becoming one. He had long main?
tained an interest in material culture, had conducted consider?
able research in museums, and had taught a course and 
prepared a bibliography on the subject when he was an instruc?
tor and assistant curator at Yale (Sturtevant, 1955b). He had de?
posited ethnographic and archaeological collections from the 
United States, Mexico, and Guam at the Yale Peabody Mu?
seum. He also made large ethnographic collections for the 
Smithsonian from the Seminole and from Burma as well as 
smaller collections of Catawba pottery and Tarascan laquer-
ware, the latter collected during a brief visit to Uruapan, Mi-
choacan, Mexico, in January 1960. In the 1950s he had worked 
with Ewers in planning the Seminole case for the museum's 
North American Indian exhibition halls, and in subsequent 
years he served as a consultant on a number of large exhibi?
tions at the Smithsonian and other museums. 
In his new position, Sturtevant emerged as a major advocate 
for the view that museums had an important role to play in the 
anthropological enterprise. In two articles (Sturtevant, 1969a, 
1973) he explored, within the framework of the history of an?
thropology museums and material culture research, what this 
role should be, and he prepared a "Guide to Field Collecting of 
Ethnographic Specimens," which he hoped would "improve 
the quality and research usefulness of collections of ethno?
graphic materials" (Sturtevant, 1967d:l). Beginning in 1964, 
he was a member of the American Anthropological Associa?
tion's Committee on Anthropological Research in Museums, 
which was supported from 1965 to 1974 by the Wenner-Gren 
Foundation for Anthropological Research. On 25 February 
1970, Sturtevant and some other committee members wrote to 
Nelson Rockefeller, then governor of New York, and to the re?
gents of the University of the State of New York explaining 
why wampum belts currently housed in the New York State 
Museum in Albany should not be returned to the Onondaga 
who had requested them. Because they represented themselves 
as a committee of the American Anthropological Association 
but failed to clear their statement with the Association's execu?
tive board, in 1971 the Association severed its connection to 
the committee. The following year, the American Ethnological 
Society decided to sponsor the committee, which continued to 
enjoy the support of Wenner-Gren. In 1974 the committee 
evolved into the Council for Museum Anthropology (Freed et 
al., 1977). Sturtevant was the council's first vice president, 
serving two terms between 1974 and 1978, and was its presi?
dent from 1978 to 1981. 
Immediately after Sturtevant was officially designated as the 
editor of the new Handbook of North American Indians, in 
1966, he and Stanley began preliminary planning, developing a 
general outline of its contents, preparing lists of potential con?
tributors, analyzing the coverage of the old Handbook, and 
working out budgetary and personnel requirements for the new 
Handbook and its staff. More detailed planning of the Hand?
book, however, did not get underway until 1969. Between 1965 
and 1969 Sturtevant wrote several articles on Indian agriculture 
(Sturtevant, 1965b, 1965d, 1969b), and, with Stanley, compiled 
an overview of contemporary Indian communities in the east?
ern United States (Sturtevant and Stanley, 1968). He also pre?
pared entries for the Encyclopaedia Britannica on "mutilations 
and deformations," "tattooing," and "scalping," which summa?
rized ethnographic and historical information on these prac?
tices from around the world (Sturtevant, 1965c, 1965e, 1967e). 
The entry on tattooing provided the point of departure for a 
more extensive overview of the subject (Sturtevant, 1971c), 
and later he expanded his entry on scalping into a full-length 
essay, prepared in collaboration with James Axtell, which con?
vincingly refuted the idea that scalping had been introduced to 
the New World by Europeans (Axtell and Sturtevant, 1980). 
NUMBER 44 25 
During this period, Sturtevant produced one of his most im?
portant studies of Seminole material culture. Presented in 1966 
at the annual meeting of the American Ethnological Society 
and published the following year, this study focused on Florida 
Seminole men's clothing to trace the evolution of their clothing 
styles during the period of their greatest isolation, from the 
mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Although Stur?
tevant (1967f:160) characterized the paper as giving "the pre?
liminary results of a larger study," it is a mature work, the cul?
mination of over 15 years of field, museum, archival, and 
library research, in which he had collected information on all 
major and most minor museum collections of Seminole arti?
facts, compiled a corpus of over 1000 illustrations of the Semi?
noles from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and consulted 
extensively with Seminole people on the interpretation of these 
materials. In addition to providing a chronological typology of 
certain elements of this clothing and detailed information on 
their construction, he examined their relationship to the mate?
rial culture of both Europe and other areas of North America 
and their role as identity markers among the Seminoles and 
other North American Indians. He indicated that the Florida 
Seminoles employed a "reconstructed older-style Seminole 
costume" (Sturtevant, 1967f:173), sometimes mixed with mod?
ern-style clothing, to distinguish themselves from both non-In?
dians and other Indians alike, but that Indians in other parts of 
the United States, both Seminoles and non-Seminoles, had 
adopted some of these same items to mark a generalized, pan-
Indian identity. He also demonstrated how certain methods as?
sociated with ethnoscience?in this case, native classifications 
and componential analysis?could be profitably applied to the 
study of material culture. 
In addition to his research and writing, Sturtevant became in?
creasingly involved in the activities of several professional or?
ganizations. He had begun participating as an officer in such 
organizations in the previous decade, soon after he was hired 
by the BAE. In 1957 he began a three-year term on the board of 
governors of the Anthropological Society of Washington, and 
from 1959 to 1960 he was a member of the executive commit?
tee of the Florida Anthropological Society. In the latter year, he 
joined Thomas Gladwin of the National Institute of Mental 
Health to organize the annual lecture series of the Anthropo?
logical Society of Washington, for which they invited nine 
speakers from anthropology, linguistics, and psychology "to 
take a critical look at a variety of strategies available for the 
study of human behavior in a cultural context" (Gladwin and 
Sturtevant, 1962:vii). The essays were published in a volume 
titled Anthropology and Human Behavior (Gladwin and Sturte?
vant, 1962). From 1962 until 1968 he worked as the book-re?
view editor and associate editor of the American Anthropolo?
gist, and in 1969 he began serving on the American 
Anthropological Association's Committee on Archives. His 
membership on this committee was especially appropriate, not 
only because of his commitment to consulting archival materi?
als in his own research but because he had been instrumental in 
establishing the National Anthropological Archives?created 
through the merger of the archives of the BAE and the Depart?
ment of Anthropology?as a major repository of anthropologi?
cal materials from around the world." 
He also devoted considerable time to the development of the 
American Society for Ethnohistory, serving on its executive 
committee in 1959 and as its president between 1965 and 1966. 
This society began as the Ohio Valley Historic Indian Confer?
ence, and then, around 1958, changed its name to the American 
Indian Ethnohistoric (later "Ethnohistorical") Conference. In 
1966 Sturtevant convinced the majority of the members that 
the society should have a global rather than a strictly North 
American focus and that its name should be the "American So?
ciety for Ethnohistory" rather than the "Society for American 
Ethnohistory," which many preferred. At the same time, he ex?
plored ethnohistory as an intellectual endeavor, providing in 
his essay "Anthropology, History, and Ethnohistory" (Sturte?
vant, 1967b) a definitive analysis of the relationship between 
history and anthropology and of the relevance of historical data 
and methods to anthropological research. 
In June 1967 Sturtevant briefly visited the Seminoles in Flor?
ida. The following month he and his family left Washington, 
D.C, for England where he spent a year, at Rodney Needham's 
invitation, as a Fulbright scholar and lecturer at Oxford Univer?
sity's Institute of Social Anthropology. He returned to the 
United States in September 1968, traveling first to Germany to 
attend the International Congress of Americanists, then to 
Kashmir to collect data on artificial island agriculture, and on 
to Japan to present a paper on the topic (Sturtevant, 1970). 
After settling back in Washington, he became active in the 
anti-Vietnam war effort, signing petitions, attending demon?
strations, and supporting anti-war motions at the business 
meetings of the American Anthropological Association. He 
also helped draft an advertisement, published in 1968 in the 
American Anthropologist (70:1311-1317) and signed by over 
800 members of the association, protesting an advertisement 
from the United States Navy for anthropologists to participate 
in psychological warfare in Vietnam, which had been published 
in the same journal two issues earlier. 
During this period, Sturtevant began devoting increasing 
amounts of his time to planning the new Handbook. Faced with 
the size of this task and the pressures of a number of unfulfilled 
writing commitments, he found it difficult to accomplish any?
thing. He discussed the problem with Tax, who recommended 
that he "wipe the slate clean" by cancelling all his commit?
ments except the Handbook. He followed Tax's advice and 
soon was able to move ahead on his various projects. 
By 1970 Sturtevant had established, after extensive consulta?
tion with a number of North Americanists from the United 
States, Canada, and Europe, that the Handbook would be orga?
nized into 20 volumes. Eleven of these volumes would focus 
on specific North American culture areas, whereas seven 
would explore general topics from a pan-North American per?
spective. The remaining two volumes would be devoted to an 
26 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
JKwiniJJ Mi ?<A i.. f*Li :-?ri F4&". ***:, ~j ? :? -- - - - i : W 
FIGURE 6.?William Sturtevant collecting botanical specimens on a floating agricultural island at Dal Lake, 
Kashmir, 1968. Photograph by Manmohan Durani. 
introduction and index of the entire collection. Editors and 
planning committees were selected for each volume, and an ed?
itorial staff was organized within the Center for the Study of 
Man. In November 1970 a general planning meeting for the 
Handbook was held in Chicago, and planning for each volume 
continued into 1971. 
Manuscripts began arriving at the Handbook office in De?
cember 1971, and by the end of the following year they filled 
several file cabinets. Sturtevant expected the contributions to 
be accurate and up-to-date, and he insisted that they be accom?
panied by detailed bibliographies and well-researched photo?
graphs, line drawings, and maps. He gave each manuscript a 
close reading, preparing detailed comments for authors and of?
ten filling in gaps and checking the accuracy of information 
himself. If the original authors were unable to complete their 
manuscripts, he worked with the volume editors to find alter?
nates. When a manuscript was revised, he read it again, and a 
third time when it was in galley proofs. A tremendous amount 
of work was involved, but his meticulous editing and insistence 
that the contributions conform to his high standards ensured the 
quality of the volumes. 
Despite his Handbook duties, Sturtevant continued to be ac?
tive in professional organizations, especially the American An?
thropological Association, the Council for Museum Anthropol?
ogy, the Anthropological Society of Washington, the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American 
Ethnological Society. In 1977, he became president of the 
American Ethnological Society, for which he prepared a new 
constitution and set of by-laws. In 1992 he was elected presi?
dent of the Anthropological Society of Washington. Between 
1976 and 1982 he served three terms on the board of trustees of 
the Museum of the American Indian-Heye Foundation and was 
appointed to a fourth term between 1984 and 1986. During his 
tenure, he worked with the other board members to resolve the 
serious fiscal and management crises that confronted the mu?
seum and helped to convince them to appoint Vine Deloria and 
George Abrams as trustees, the first American Indians to serve 
in the capacity.12 
He also began to increase his interaction with students. He 
served as the principal advisor to a number of Smithsonian pre-
and postdoctoral fellows and summer interns and as a member 
of several thesis committees. In 1974 he accepted an appoint?
ment as an adjunct professor in the newly created Department 
of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, a position he 
held until 1989. There he offered courses on American Indians, 
linguistics, and technology and material culture as well as on 
less traditional topics, which he labeled "graphic systems," 
"pictorial ethnohistory," and "social archaeology." He also 
joined Sidney Mintz to teach a course on the anthropology of 
food and eating. 
His involvement in these activities left him little time to de?
vote to his personal research. Nevertheless, he maintained a 
NUMBER 44 27 
prodigious level of writing and even was able to visit briefly, in 
1975 and 1977, Seminole Maroon communities in northern 
Mexico and the Bahamas. Among the impressive number of 
publications that he produced during this period are several ar?
ticles on Southeastern ethnography, history, material culture, 
and ethnobotany (Sturtevant, 1971b, 1978a, 1979a, 1979b, 
1979c, 1979d); a synthesis of early Seminole history (Sturte?
vant, 1971a); an overview of the hole-and-slot heddle in the 
New World (Sturtevant, 1977c); a chapter on the Seneca-Ca?
yuga of Oklahoma for the Northeast volume of the Handbook 
(Sturtevant, 1978b); and essays reporting the results of his ex?
tensive research on early European representations of Ameri?
can Indians (Sturtevant, 1975, 1976, 1977a, 1977b, 1978c, 
1979b, 1980b, 1981b, 1981 d, 1982). He also edited a collection 
of essays for the catalog of a Smithsonian exhibition on North?
west Coast material culture (Sturtevant, editor, 1974) and, with 
Jerald Milanich, edited a seventeenth century Franciscan con?
fessional that included some of the most detailed ethnographic 
and linguistic information available on the extinct Timucua In?
dians of northern Florida (Milanich and Sturtevant, 1973). Be?
cause of his now well-established reputation as one of the lead?
ing North Americanists in the world, he was invited to 
supervise the preparation of general ethnographic and linguis?
tic maps of North America for the National Atlas, the National 
Geographic, and the Times Atlas of World History (Sturtevant, 
1967c; Sturtevant, consultant, 1972; Sturtevant et al., 1978). 
He also served as the principal consultant and author of the 
chapter on the Indians of eastern North America for a popular 
volume on North American Indians published in 1974 by the 
National Geographic Society (Billard, 1974; Sturtevant, 1974). 
In 1976 Sturtevant's work on the Handbook began to be 
shared by Ives Goddard, hired that year as a curator by the De?
partment of Anthropology. Goddard had served as the linguis?
tic editor of the Handbook since 1970, responsible for evaluat?
ing the information on American Indian languages submitted 
by authors and for coordinating consultations with other lin?
guists on these materials. After 1976, in addition to his work 
preparing linguistic sections for the Handbook, he increasingly 
fulfilled other duties related to the general management of the 
project. 
The first volume of the Handbook?volume 8, California, 
for which Robert F. Heizer served as the volume editor?ap?
peared in 1978 and immediately received rave reviews. The 
comments of Claude Levi-Strauss are representative: 
Here is the first product of a monumental enterprise in gestation for more than 
ten years under the general direction of W. C. Sturtevant, who brings to the 
project his organizational talent, his immense erudition, and?one appreciates 
this on reading the pages where he introduces the whole project?the bold in?
ventiveness and originality that characterizes it....It is hardly necessary to add 
that the new Handbook of North American Indians promises to be what it al?
ready is for the California area: an absolutely indispensable tool that should be 
found on the shelves of all libraries, public and private alike. (Levi-Strauss, 
1979: 77-79)13 
The original production schedule for the Handbook of North 
American Indians envisioned that all 20 volumes would be 
published by 1976, in conjunction with the bicentennial cele?
bration.14 Everyone involved, however, had underestimated the 
time required to complete such a large and complex project. A 
second volume, on the Northeast, was published in 1978, fol?
lowed a year later by the first of two volumes on the South?
west. Between 1980 and 1990, volumes were published at in?
tervals of between one and three years: volume 6, Subarctic, in 
1981; the second volume (10) of the Southwest in 1983; vol?
ume 5, Arctic, in 1984; volume 11, Great Basin, in 1986; vol?
ume 4, History of Indian-White Relations, in 1989; and volume 
7, Northwest Coast, in 1990. 
Several strategies designed to increase the rate of production 
were implemented?the general supervision of the Handbook 
was taken over by the associate director of the NMNH and later 
by the chairman of the Department of Anthropology;15 manag?
ing editors were hired to direct the editorial staff; volume edi?
tors were contracted to come to Washington to supervise the 
completion of their volumes?but to little effect. In the 1990s, 
a series of fiscal, logistical, and organizational problems com?
bined to slacken the pace of production further and no volumes 
were produced until 1996, when volume 17, Languages, edited 
by Goddard, appeared. 
Despite these difficulties, Sturtevant's commitment to the 
Handbook remained firm. He continued to fulfill his duties as 
general editor, but around 1980 he began to focus more of his 
time and energy on other activities. He served as president of 
the American Anthropological Association from 1980 to 1981 
and then spent part of the spring semester of 1981 at the Uni?
versity of California at Berkeley as a Regents Lecturer. In 1982 
he began a six-year term on the board of directors of Survival 
International, which overlapped with his fourth term 
(1984-1986) on the board of trustees of the Museum of the 
American Indian-Heye Foundation. Between 1981 and 1985 he 
sponsored four Smithsonian postdoctoral fellows and served on 
two thesis committees at Johns Hopkins. In 1980 he and Theda 
Maw separated, and they divorced in 1986. He spent the aca?
demic year 1986-1987 as a Smithsonian Fellow at Oxford Uni?
versity's Worcester College, and in 1990 he married Sally 
McLendon, a linguist and anthropologist at Hunter College and 
the graduate school of the City University of New York. 
Sturtevant's curatorial duties changed somewhat in Septem?
ber of 1980 when I was hired as an associate curator of anthro?
pology and North American ethnologist to fill the position va?
cated by Ewers, who had retired in 1978. Sturtevant and I 
agreed to divide the responsibility for the North American eth?
nology collections according to our areas of expertise: he 
would curate the collections from eastern North America, the 
Arctic, Subarctic, and the Northwest Coast, while I would cu?
rate those from the Plains, Great Basin, Plateau, California, 
Southwest, and northern Mexico. Apart from standard activi?
ties like reviewing loan requests and proposing new accessions, 
two major curatorial matters dominated our attention in the 
1980s and 1990s. The first was the move of the entire ethno?
logical and archaeological collections of the Department of 
28 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 7.?William Sturtevant at work in his office in the Department of Anthropology, NMNH, September 
1980. Photograph by Sheila Hicks. 
Anthropology from the attics and hallways of the NMNH, on 
the National Mall, to a state-of-the-art storage facility in Suit-
land, Maryland, in the Washington, D.C, suburbs. This move 
was largely completed for the North American ethnology col?
lections by 1992. The second matter was responding to re?
quests from American Indian tribes for the return of objects, 
usually of religious significance, from the collections. We re?
ceived the first major repatriation request from the Pueblo of 
Zuni in 1981 and responded to several other, smaller requests 
in the following years.16 With the passage of federal repatria?
tion legislation in the 1990s, repatriation-related activities have 
taken priority over all our other curatorial duties. 
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Sturtevant continued to 
pursue his long-term research interests. He worked with Semi?
nole people in both Florida and Washington, D.C, on several 
different projects, including the creation of a new exhibit on the 
Seminoles in the permanent North American Indian halls of the 
NMNH. He also compiled two anthologies on Creek and Semi?
nole history and culture (Sturtevant, editor, 1987a, 1987b) and 
published articles on a wide range of topics, including anthro?
pological museums and archives; American Indian art, material 
culture, and political organization; and Eastern North Ameri?
can Indian ethnology, history, and linguistics (Sturtevant, 
1980c, 1981a, 1981c, 1983b, 1985, 1986a, 1986b, 1991a, 
1991c, 1994a, 1994b; Meltzer and Sturtevant, 1983; Krech and 
Sturtevant, 1992, 1995; Archambault and Sturtevant, 1996a, 
1996b). In the last category were two major studies of Iroquois 
culture, one providing a detailed overview of Seneca masking, 
the other a thorough analysis of modern Iroquois ritual as prac?
ticed in the 15 principal Iroquois communities in Ontario, Que?
bec, New York, and Oklahoma (Sturtevant, 1983a, 1984). 
In addition to these diverse projects, he devoted considerable 
time to his investigation of early European illustrations of the 
New World and its native inhabitants, the main focus of his re?
search during this period. When he began this project in the 
1950s, his primary goal had been to locate illustrations of east?
ern North American Indians produced prior to the emergence 
of photography in the mid-nineteenth century. Soon, however, 
his research encompassed the entire Western Hemiphere as 
well as other parts of the world and became a central compo-
NUMBER 44 29 
FIGURE 8.?William Sturtevant with Claude Levi-Strauss in his office at the College de France, Paris, 24 
November 1981. Photograph by Josef Koudelka. 
nent of his efforts to understand native New World cultures and 
societies in historical context. 
He considered such illustrations to be an invaluable comple?
ment to early written descriptions of New World people be?
cause they could portray certain kinds of ethnographic data not 
readily described in words. The information they contained, 
however, like that found in historical documents, could not be 
accepted uncritically. To evaluate their ethnographic reliability, 
he began comparing the ethnographic content of the illustra?
tions with information preserved in historical documents, the 
archaeological record, museum collections, and modern eth?
nographies. He soon discovered that European illustrators often 
incorporated elements into their portrayals of the New World 
that they derived from the compositions of their predecessors, 
in some cases originally depicting scenes, people, or objects 
from Africa, Asia, or other parts of the Old World. He encoun?
tered numerous examples of what he called "recurring visual 
images" (Sturtevant and Quinn, 1987:99), in which the same or 
similar image appeared in a sequence of illustrations, fre?
quently attributed to quite distant areas of the New World at 
distinct points in time. 
To sort out the "genealogical" linkages among these illustra?
tions and to establish the corpus of illustrations and other infor?
mation available to artists when they produced their works, he 
reconstructed the chronology of European illustrations and 
written accounts of the New World and the history of their dif?
fusion within Europe. To the same end, he investigated the his?
tory of New World people and artifacts in Europe, whose pres?
ence would have afforded artists the opportunity to produce 
illustrations from life without actually traveling to the New 
World. He also examined the intended audiences of the illustra?
tions, prevailing conventions of composition and aesthetics, and 
European stereotypes of the New World, not only to determine 
the impact of such factors on the accuracy of the illustrations 
but to explore the social and cultural contexts within which they 
were produced. From early in his research, he had realized that 
these illustrations frequently revealed as much about the societ?
ies and cultures of the artists as they did those of their subjects. 
By the 1990s he had devoted nearly four decades to this 
work and had located and analyzed several thousand relevant 
drawings, paintings, and sculptures. In addition to developing 
the methodology required to undertake this kind of research, 
he filled a number of gaps and corrected many mistakes in the 
historical ethnography of the New World. The results of his 
work have had substantial impact not only on historical an?
thropology and New World ethnology but on European and 
American history, American studies, and art history. His de?
tailed overview of the "First Visual Images of Native Amer?
ica" (Sturtevant, 1976; see also Sturtevant, 1991b), has been 
particularly important; its significance to the development of a 
new focus of anthropological inquiry is comparable to that of 
his earlier essays on ethnoscience and ethnohistory. Another 
30 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
notable contribution is his careful analysis of the history of the 
transformation of the vertical feather headdress from an article 
of limited distribution in the New World at the time of Euro?
pean contact into the preeminent symbol of American Indians 
for Europeans and Indians alike (Sturtevant, 1988, 1990, 
1992). In the course of this and other illustrations-based re?
search, he has provided crucial insights into the evolution of 
European conceptions of the non-European world, the impact 
of these conceptions on non-Europeans' images of them?
selves, and the more encompassing processes of interactions 
between Europeans and American Indians. 
Conclusion 
The development of Sturtevant's research and writing over the 
course of his career has followed a pattern that most scholars, 
reflecting on their own research careers, will find familiar. His 
undergraduate and graduate training channeled an early, gen?
eral interest in anthropology and American Indians into a con?
centration on more specific areas, which became the focus of 
his initial research. This research served as the point of depar?
ture for a series of projects on related themes as his work on 
one topic led him to investigate others. The direction of Sturte?
vant's research also shifted as he began exploring other, often 
quite different topics and responded to invitations from col?
leagues to participate in their own projects, and its progress 
was periodically delayed as he fulfilled growing obligations to 
his institution and profession. 
What sets Sturtevant's research apart is its broad topical and 
geographical coverage, ranging from ethnobotany and material 
culture to art and the history of anthropology and encompass?
ing much of the Western Hemisphere as well as other parts of 
the world. His knowledge of a number of languages?mainly 
French, Spanish, and German, but also some Latin, Portuguese, 
Dutch, Italian, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Burmese, Mikasuki, 
and Creek?and the collegial relationships he has established 
with scholars from other parts of the world, especially Europe 
and Latin America, have given him access to information and 
perspectives not available to most American anthropologists. 
Because of the breadth of his interests, he has contributed to 
the advancement of scholarship on a number of different top?
ics, with the majority of his work ultimately linked to the de?
velopment of knowledge within two general areas: the histori?
cal ethnology of the New World and the definition and practice 
of anthropology as a scholarly endeavor. 
As a result of his fieldwork, Sturtevant has established the 
ethnographic foundation upon which all subsequent research 
on the Seminole will be based, and he has also provided impor?
tant insights into neglected aspects of Iroquois culture. Con?
vinced of the need to understand the results of his contempo?
rary ethnographic research within a broad cultural and 
historical framework, he has contributed significantly to the de?
velopment of a comparative ethnology and history of the Indi?
ans of eastern North America and the Caribbean and extended 
the ethnographic record for these and other regions of the New 
World back to the time of the arrival of Europeans. This work 
and his extensive interaction with the scholarly community 
have stimulated much important new research on American In?
dians. As general editor of the Handbook of North American 
Indians, he has also been instrumental in the creation of what 
many regard as the most important general overview of North 
American Indian culture and history ever produced. 
Sturtevant has developed his ethnological and historical re?
search in tandem with his work on defining the aims and scope 
of anthropology and his exploration of how the practice and re?
sults of anthropological research can be enhanced. He has elab?
orated a vision of anthropology as a discipline devoted to un?
derstanding humanity in all its dimensions and diversity, in 
which both the unique interests of each of the subdisciplines 
and their interdependence are recognized. He has also situated 
anthropology within the framework of scholarship in general, 
examining the features that distinguish anthropology from 
other scholarly disciplines as well as its linkages to them. 
Sturtevant has focused much of his research at the interface 
between anthropology and other disciplines, mainly history, art 
history, and the natural sciences. Through this work, he has 
demonstrated the value of a multidisciplinary approach in 
which data drawn from sources traditionally associated with 
many different disciplines are brought to bear on particular re?
search problems. In the process, he has worked out the method?
ology required to employ these materials in anthropological re?
search and has played an important role in the development of 
several disciplinary-bridging specialities within anthropology, 
like ethnohistory and ethnobotany. He has also argued for de?
cades that material culture and museum collections should be 
incorporated into the mainstream of anthropological research, 
but only recently have anthropologists and scholars in many 
other disciplines come to share his perspective. 
Sturtevant's views of the discipline of anthropology have 
clearly influenced the approach he has adopted to his ethnolog?
ical research. Throughout his career, he has regarded ethnolog?
ical research as a collaborative undertaking in which scholars 
build upon the work of others to contribute, according to their 
distinct interests and inclinations, to the accumulation and re?
finement of knowledge. In "Anthropology as a Career" (Stur?
tevant, 1957), he described this research as involving three 
kinds of activities: recording and presenting information about 
particular societies and cultures (ethnography); comparing 
these ethnographic descriptions to isolate general processes 
and cross-cultural patterns of cultural diversity and similarity 
(comparative ethnology); and explaining these processes and 
patterns (cultural theory). In this view, the development of cul?
tural theory obviously relies on the results of comparative eth?
nology and ethnography, but the three activities are interde?
pendent dimensions of a single intellectual process rather than 
separate, isolated steps. 
Sturtevant has presented his theoretical perspectives in both 
focused theoretical studies and in the reports of the results of his 
ethnographic and comparative ethnological research. Through 
NUMBER 44 31 
FIGURE 9.?William Sturtevant in the offices of the Handbook of North American Indians with the final page 
proofs and binding mock-up for the Arctic volume, 1985. The two posters are from Nationalmuseet, Copen?
hagen: left, four Greenlanders, painted in Bergen in 1654 by an anonymous artist; right, a "Tapuya man" from 
Brazil, painted in 1643 by Albert Eckhout. Photograph by Kim Nielsen. Courtesy of the National Anthropologi?
cal Archives, Smithsonian Institution (neg. no. 85-3235-8). 
this work, he has contributed to a more profound understanding 
of the general structure of cultural systems, long-term cultural 
and social processes, the complexities of inter-cultural and in?
ter-ethnic relations, the transformation of non-Western art and 
material culture into commodities, and cross-cultural concep?
tions of art and aesthetics. He has also devoted considerable at?
tention to examining the nature of ethnography and to develop?
ing the procedures required to improve its quality. 
Sturtevant's extensive publication record is presented in the 
following paper (Merrill, 2002), but these works only partially 
reflect the extent of his research. Because he holds himself to 
such high standards of scholarship, he has been reluctant to 
publish research that he feels is incomplete. Folders and card 
files of data organized into numerous ongoing projects fill his 
office and overflow into the hallway outside. 
In 1996 I asked him about these pending research projects. A 
few weeks later he gave me a list, "compiled from memory 
alone," of 64 projects related to a wide range of topics: the his?
tory of anthropology; museum collections; material culture; Eu?
ropean explorations and representations of the New World; 
American Indian art produced within the European art tradition; 
the historical ethnography, comparative ethnology, ethnohis?
tory, ethnobotany, and linguistics of the New World, especially 
eastern North America; Tupinamba chiefdoms; Burmese dress; 
and tattooing around the world. He titled the list "projects for 
the future" and noted, "These are topics for which I have data, 
in various amounts, as well as ideas about how to write them up 
(usually after further investigation). Obviously I am unlikely to 
follow through on most of them, but my files should be helpful 
for others in the future." At the end of the list, he added nine 
topics on which he has fieldnotes but no plans for publication. 
Sturtevant's contribution to anthropology clearly has not 
been restricted to his research and publications. He has served 
the discipline in a variety of capacities, including terms as the 
president of four of its major professional organizations and as 
a consultant to a number of universities, museums, and grant-
32 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
ing agencies. He has been one of the field's leading advocates 
for museum anthropology and for standards of museum prac?
tice now followed around the world. He has devoted consider?
able energy to making anthropology accessible to a wide audi?
ence and to supporting American Indians in their efforts to gain 
federal recognition and to defend their rights, especially to land 
and religious freedom. He has also been a enthusiastic collabo?
rator in the projects of his colleagues and an inspiration and 
guide to many students and young scholars in their own anthro?
pological pursuits. 
Visitors to Sturtevant's office, located on an interior corridor 
in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, are 
inevitably struck by the sheer amount of material it contains. 
Stacks of papers and books, once characterized in a reprimand 
from the Smithsonian's safety office as "trash on the floor," 
line the narrow passages through the office and cover his desk 
and an adjacent table. Hundreds of books and journals run 
along two walls for the entire length of the office, organized by 
subject on shelves that rise from floor to ceiling. File cabinets 
line another wall and fill the center of the office, joined by in?
dex-card files filled with the 3 x 5 inch slips on which he jots 
down new ideas and records bibliographic information rele?
vant to the myriad topics that are of interest to him. But more 
impressive than the office itself is his willingness to stop what 
he is doing to discuss whatever is on his visitor's mind. In my 
experience, surely shared by many others, I have never found 
him too busy to exchange ideas, and I have never encountered 
a topic that failed to interest him or about which he had no 
knowledge. 
To recognize his contributions to scholarship and to his pro?
fession, on 14 November 1996 Brown University awarded 
Sturtevant an honorary doctorate in humane letters. During the 
presentation ceremony, Vartan Gregorian, president of Brown, 
read the following citation: 
For over forty years a distinguished anthropologist, your career has been 
marked by a long-standing concern for fusing the anthropological and the his?
torical analysis of culture, and for the preservation of the material record of hu?
mankind. 
Through extended ethnographic fieldwork among the Seminole, Burmese, 
Seneca, and other indigenous people of North and Middle America and Asia, 
combined with intensive research in historical archives on several continents, 
you have been a pioneer in the development of ethnohistory and a contempo?
rary historical anthropology. By example you have led the way not only to a re?
sponsible historiography in which languages and histories of indigenous people 
are constituted, but to scrutiny of the relationship between museums and the 
public. 
As a general anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, you have helped 
bring American Indians into public consciousness, and in congressional testi?
mony you have left a record on behalf of native rights. 
As general editor of the multi-volume landmark series, the Handbook of 
North American Indians, curator of North American ethnology at the Smith?
sonian Institution, author or editor of more than 200 works, and in your many 
leadership positions, you have been a major stimulus for research on the native 
people of North America. 
We honor you today for these lasting achievements. 
Notes 
I am grateful to William Sturtevant and Robert Laughlin for sharing with me 
their files on the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, De?
partment of Anthropology, and Center for the Study of Man and to Stewart 
Brand, Harold Conklin, and Sheila Hicks for permitting me to use photographs 
from their personal collections. Robert Sayers kindly allowed me to consult 
tape recordings of interviews that he conducted with Sturtevant in 1996, and 
Paul Theerman provided crucial information on the history of the Smithsonian. 
In preparing the final version of this essay, I have benefitted greatly from the 
insightful commentaries of Harold Conklin, Ives Goddard, Sally McLendon, 
Harriett Shapiro, and William Sturtevant. 
1. Sturtevant studied French in elementary school and studied Latin, Greek, 
Russian, and Chinese in high school. In his junior and senior years at Berkeley, 
he also took courses in German. 
2. Sturtevant's military service entitled him to the financial aid provided by 
the Gl Bill, which he used, together with the funds from the Nobel Prize award 
mentioned by Shapiro (2002), to pay for his education at both the University of 
California and Yale. 
3. Apart from emphasizing the necessary interconnections among the diverse 
specialities and perspectives that make up anthropology, Sturtevant has long 
believed that anthropology is an intellectual endeavor that should transcend 
cultural and national boundaries. In this regard, he found particularly appealing 
the remark of his friend John Murra (1976:4), who, in describing his attitude 
toward anthropology, commented, "I pretend it is my only ethnic, religious, 
and ideologic affiliation." 
4. Another of Sturtevant's graduate-student friends, Donald Simmons, was a 
dedicated bibliophile. He introduced Sturtevant to the world of book collecting, 
in which he has maintained an avid interest ever since. 
5. Sturtevant's linguistics professor at Yale, Bernard Bloch, taught his stu?
dents that they should approach a new language by focusing first on phonology 
and then on morphology before moving on to syntax and other aspects of the 
language. Although such a stepwise approach makes some sense for linguistic 
analysis, it is not the best way to conduct fieldwork in linguistics. Sturtevant 
feels that he did not master spoken Mikasuki largely because he followed this 
approach, and Floyd Lounsbury once told him that he blamed Bloch's overly 
theoretical approach for diverting Sturtevant from a career in linguistics. 
6. While preparing his doctoral dissertation, Sturtevant was employed by the 
Tri-Institutional Pacific Program at Yale. This program was created by George 
Peter Murdock to undertake comparative linguistic studies of Malayo-Polyne-
sian languages. Sturtevant and George Grace focused on compiling vocabulary 
lists from these languages derived from published sources. Grace later did 
fieldwork and published the results of the project (e.g., Grace, 1955, 1961). 
7. For a history of anthropology at the Smithsonian, from the founding of the 
Institution in 1846 until 1910, see Hinsley, 1981. For information on events re?
lated to this history that occurred between 1950 and 1985, I have relied on the 
annual reports of the Smithsonian Institution (after 1965, titled Smithsonian 
Year) as well as on unpublished documents currently in the files of Sturtevant 
and Robert Laughlin and on conversations with Sturtevant and other members 
of the Department of Anthropology. 
8. Sturtevant to S. Dillon Ripley, 30 Jun 1964, Rangoon, copy in Sturtevant's 
possession. 
9. In a 1969 memorandum to the director of the NMNH, Sturtevant indicated 
that he was "uncomfortable" being identified as the leader of the anti-Evans 
faction in the department. Memorandum, William C. Sturtevant to Richard 
Cowan, 29 Dec 1969, copy in Sturtevant's possession. 
10. Memorandum, 14 Oct 1969, from Divisional Supervisors, Department of 
Anthropology ([Gordon] Gibson, Old World; [Robert] Laughlin, Latin Amer?
ica; [Lucille] St. Hoyme, Physical (Acting); [William] Sturtevant, North Amer?
ica) to Richard Cowan, copy in Sturtevant's possession. 
11. Sturtevant was also responsible for naming the archives. The first name 
adopted was the "National Archives of Anthropology," but he convinced Marg?
aret Blaker, head of the archives, that this name would lead to confusion with 
the National Archives and that "National Anthropological Archives" would 
thus be better. 
NUMBER 44 33 
12. The problems facing the Museum of the American Indian were resolved in 
large part by its incorporation into the Smithsonian Institution in 1990. Most of 
the events leading up to this development occurred after Sturtevant was no 
longer a member of the Heye Foundation's board of trustees. 
13. The original is as follows: "Voici done le premier resultat d'une monumen-
tale entreprise en gestation depuis plus de dix ans sous la direction generate de 
W. C. Sturtevant qui a mis au service de ce projet son talent d'organisateur, son 
immense erudition et?on s'en apercoit a lire les pages ou il presente l'ensem-
ble?l'audace inventive et l'originalite d'esprit qui le caracterisent....II est a 
peine besoin d'ajouter que le nouveau Handbook of North American Indians 
promet d'etre?qu'il est deja pour l'aire californienne?un instrument de tra?
vail absolument indispensable qui devra figurer dans les rayons de toute biblio-
theque publique ou privee" (Levi-Strauss, 1979:77-79). 
14. Until 1988, the majority of funding for the Handbook came from federal 
appropriations originally designated for the bicentennial. 
15. These changes in the administration of the Handbook were linked to some 
extent to changes in the place of the Center for the Study of Man (CSM) within 
the administrative structure of the NMNH. Sol Tax resigned his directorship of 
the CSM in 1976. In October of that year the director of the NMNH took over 
the direct administration of the CSM, which began being identified with the 
National Museum of Man, the new museum of anthropology that was being 
planned then. By that date, the CSM included, in addition to the Handbook and 
several small programs and projects, major programs in immigration studies 
and anthropological film. Soon afterward, the Handbook was established as a 
separate unit within the NMNH, and then, in the early 1980s, it was integrated 
into the Department of Anthropology, along with the program in anthropologi?
cal film (now known as the Human Studies Film Archives). About the same 
time, the program in immigration studies was abolished, and the CSM itself 
was closed in 1983. 
16. For a summary of the Zuni repatriation request, see Merrill et al., 1993, 
and Merrill and Ahlborn, 1997. 
Literature Cited 
Archambault, JoAllyn, and William C. Sturtevant 
1996a. Museums and Collectors. In Frederick E. Hoxie, editor, Encyclope?
dia of North American Indians, pages 407-410. Boston: Houghton 
Mifflin. 
1996b. 150 Years of Native American Research at the Smithsonian. Anthro-
Notes, 18(3):8-11. 
Axtell, James, and William C. Sturtevant 
1980. The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping? William and Mary 
Quarterly, series 3, 37:451?472. 
Berreman, Gerald 
1966. Anemic and Emetic Analyses in Social Anthropology. American 
Anthropologist, 68:346-354. 
Billard, Jules B., editor 
1974. The World of the American Indian. 399 pages. Washington, D.C: 
National Geographic Society. 
Capron, Louis 
1953. The Medicine Bundles of the Florida Seminole and the Green Corn 
Dance. Bulletin, Bureau of American Ethnology, 151: Anthropologi?
cal Papers, 35:155-210. 
Conklin, Harold C. 
1962. Commentary [on Charles O. Frake's The Ethnographic Study of 
Cognitive Systems]. In Thomas Gladwin and William C. Sturtevant, 
editors, Anthropology and Human Behavior, pages 86-93. Washing?
ton, D.C: The Anthropological Society of Washington. 
Conklin, Harold C , and William C. Sturtevant 
1953. Seneca Indian Singing Tools at Coldspring Longhouse: Musical In?
struments of the Modern Iroquois. Proceedings of the American 
Philosophical Society, 97:262-290. 
Diamond, Stanley, William C. Sturtevant, and William N. Fenton 
1964. Memorandum. In U.S. House of Representatives, Hearings before 
the Subcommittee on Indian Affairs of the Committee on Interior 
and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, Eighty-eighth Con?
gress, First Session, on H.R. 1794, H.R. 3343 and H.R. 7354. ...May 
18, July 15, 16, August 8, 9, 12, 19 and 20, October 31, November 1, 
December 9 and 10, 1963, Salamanca, N.Y., and Washington, D.C, 
pages 504-505. Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Of?
fice. [This memorandum also appeared, under the same title, in U.S. 
Senate, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Indian Affairs of the 
Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, United States Senate, 
Eighty-eighth Congress, Second Session, on S. 1836 and H.R. 1794. 
...March 2, 1964, pages 109-111. Washington, D.C: U.S. Gover-
ment Printing Office. It was reprinted in 1964 under the title "Mem?
orandum Submitted to Subcommittees on Indian Affairs of the 
Senate and House of Representatives," American Anthropologist, 
66(3):631-633.] 
Ewers, John C 
1956. New Ethnological Exhibits, United States National Museum, Wash?
ington, DC. Museum, 9:28-36. 
1959. A Century of American Indian Exhibits in the Smithsonian Institu?
tion. In Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian 
Institution for 1958, pages 513-525. Washington, D.C: U.S. Gov?
ernment Printing Office. 
Fairbanks, Charles H., Irving Rouse, and William C. Sturtevant, editors 
1964. Indian and Spanish: Selected Writings by John M. Goggin. 329 
pages. Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press. 
Frake, Charles O. 
1962. The Ethnographic Study of Cognitive Systems. In Thomas Gladwin 
and William C. Sturtevant, editors, Anthropology and Human Be?
havior, pages 72-85. Washington, D.C: The Anthropological Soci?
ety of Washington. 
Freed, Stanley A., Donald Collier, and William Fenton 
1977. A Brief History of the Council. Council for Museum Anthropology 
Newsletter, 1(2):11-14. 
Fried, Morton H., editor 
1959. Readings in Anthropology. 2 volumes, xi+428, ix + 598 pages. New 
York: Crowell. 
Gladwin, Thomas, and William C. Sturtevant, editors 
1962. Anthropology and Human Behavior, vii+214 pages. Washington, 
D.C: The Anthropological Society of Washington. 
Goggin, John M., and William C Sturtevant 
1964. The Calusa: A Stratified, Nonagricultural Society (with Notes on 
Sibling Marriage). In Ward H. Goodenough, editor, Explorations in 
Cultural Anthropology: Essays in Honor of George Peter Murdock, 
pages 179-219. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. 
Grace, George W. 
1955. Subgrouping of Malayo-Polynesian: A Report of Tentative Find?
ings. American Anthropologist, 57:337-339. 
1961. Austronesian Linguistics and Culture History. American Anthropol?
ogist, 63:359-368. 
Harris, Marvin 
1968. The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Cul?
ture. 806 pages. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. 
Hinsley, Curtis M., Jr. 
1981. Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Devel-
34 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
opment of American Anthropology, 1846-1910. 319 pages. Wash?
ington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Keesing, Roger M. 
1972. Paradigms Lost: The New Ethnography and the New Linguistics. 
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 28:299-332. 
Krech, Shepard, III, and William C Sturtevant 
1992. The Future Uses of the Anthropological Record. In Sydel Silverman 
and Nancy J. Parezo, editors, Preserving the Anthropological 
Record, pages 119-127. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for 
Anthropological Research. 
1995. The Uses of Ethnographic Records. In Sydel Silverman and Nancy 
J. Parezo, editors, Preserving the Anthropological Record, second 
edition, pages 85-94. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for An?
thropological Research. 
Lantis, Margaret 
1991. Drucker, Philip. In Christopher Winters, general editor, Interna?
tional Dictionary of Anthropologists, pages 161-162. New York: 
Garland Publishing. 
Levi-Strauss, Claude 
1979. Review oi Handbook of North American Indians, 8: California, ed?
ited by Robert F. Heizer, L'Homme, 19:77-79. 
Meighan, Clement W., and Francis A. Riddell 
1972. The Maru Cult of the Porno Indians: A California Ghost Dance Sur?
vival. Southwest Museum Papers, 23: x+134 pages. Highland Park, 
Los Angeles, California: Southwest Museum. 
Meltzer, David J., and William C Sturtevant 
1983. The Holly Oak Shell Game: An Historic Archaeological Fraud. In 
Robert C. Dunnell and Donald K. Grayson, editors, Lulu Linear 
Punctated: Essays in Honor of George Irving Quimby. Anthropolog?
ical Papers, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, 72: 
325-352. 
Merrill, William L. 
2002. The Writings of William C. Sturtevant. In William L. Merrill and 
Ives Goddard, editors, Anthropology, History, and American Indi?
ans: Essays in Honor of William Curtis Sturtevant. Smithsonian 
Contributions to Anthropology, 44:37?44. 
Merrill, William L., Edmund J. Ladd, and T.J. Ferguson 
1993. The Return of the Ahayu.da: Lessons for Repatriation from Zuni 
Pueblo and the Smithsonian Institution. Current Anthropology, 34: 
523-567. 
Merrill, William L., and Richard E. Ahlborn 
1997. Zuni Archangels and Ahayu:da: A Sculpted Chronicle of Power 
and Identity. In Amy Henderson and Adrienne L. Kaeppler, edi?
tors, Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smith?
sonian, pages 176-205. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution 
Press. 
Milanich, Jerald T, and William C. Sturtevant, editors 
1973 ("1972"). Francisco Pareja's 1613 Confessionario: A Documentary 
Source for Timucuan Ethnography. English translation of Confes?
sionario by Emilio F. Moran, 121 pages. Tallahassee: Division of 
Archives, History, and Records Management, Florida Department 
of State. [Date on title page is 1972; actually published in 1973.] 
Murra, John V. 
1976. American Anthropology, the Early Years. In John V. Murra, editor, 
American Anthropology: The Early Years. Proceedings of the 
American Ethnological Society, 1974, pages 3-7. St. Paul, Minne?
sota: West Publishing Co. 
Shapiro, Harriet Sturtevant 
2002. Sibling Review. In William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard, editors, 
Anthropology, History, and American Indians: Essays in Honor of 
William Curtis Sturtevant. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropol?
ogy, 44:3-10. 
Stanley, Sam 
1996. Community, Action, and Continuity: A Narrative Vita of Sol Tax. 
Current Anthropology, supplement, 37:S131?S137. 
Stirling, Matthew W. 
1957. Seventy-Third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnol?
ogy. In Seventy-Third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Eth?
nology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1955-1956, 
pages 1-23. Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office. 
Sturtevant, William C. 
1952. Review of Florida's Seminole Indians, by W.T. Neill. Florida An?
thropologist, 5(3-4):65-67. 
1953. Chakaika and the "Spanish Indians": Documentary Sources Com?
pared with Seminole Tradition. Tequesta, 13:35-73. 
1954a. The Medicine Bundles and Busks of the Florida Seminole. Florida 
Anthropologist, 7(2):31-70. 
1954b. The Mikasuki Seminole: Medical Beliefs and Practices. 538 pages. 
Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Yale University. 
1954c. Statement of William C. Sturtevant Regarding S. 2747 and H.R. 
7321. In U.S. Congress, Joint Hearing before the Subcommittees of 
the Committees on Interior and Insular Affairs, Congress of the 
United States, Eighty-third Congress, Second Session, on S. 2747 
and H.R. 7321. ...Part 8: Seminole Indians, Florida, March I and 2, 
1954, pages 1136-1137. Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Print?
ing Office. 
1955a. Notes on Modern Seminole Traditions of Osceola. Florida Histori?
cal Quarterly, 33(3^t):206-217. 
1955b. A Selected Bibliography of Material Culture. 69 pages. New Haven, 
Connecticut: Peabody Museum. 
1956a. Osceola's Coats? Florida Historical Quarterly, 34(4):315-328. 
1956b. R.H. Pratt's Report on the Seminole in 1879. Florida Anthropolo?
gist, 9(1): 1-24. 
1956c. A Seminole Personal Document. Tequesta, 16:55-75. 
1957. Anthropology as a Career. Smithsonian Information Leaflet, 100: 18 
pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
1958a. Accomplishments and Opportunities in Florida Indian Ethnology. In 
Charles H. Fairbanks, editor, Florida Anthropology, pages 15-55. 
Tallahassee: Florida Anthropological Society and Florida State Uni?
versity, Department of Anthropology. [Florida Anthropological So?
ciety Publication. 5 ("4"), and Florida State University, Department 
of Anthropology, Notes in Anthropology, 2.] 
1958b. Siouan Languages in the East. American Anthropologist, 60(4): 
738-743. 
1959. A Suggestion for Field Recordings. Ethnomusicology, 3(2):75-76. 
1960a. Hayda [Haida]. Encyclopedia Hebraica, 14:55. Jerusalem: Mas-
sadah Ltd. 
1960b. Hrdlicka, Ales. Encyclopedia Hebraica, 15:184. Jerusalem: Mas-
sadah Ltd. 
1960c. A Seminole Medicine Maker. In Joseph B. Casagrande, editor, In 
the Company of Man: Twenty Portraits by Anthropologists, pages 
505-532. New York: Harper and Brothers. 
1960d. The Significance of Ethnological Similarities Between Southeastern 
North America and the Antilles. Yale University Publications in An?
thropology, 64: 58 pages. 
1960e. A Technique for Ethnographic Note-Taking. American Anlhropolo-
g?r, 61(4):677-678. 
1961a. Huronim [Hurons]. Encyclopedia Hebraica, 13:952-953. Jerusa?
lem: Massadah Ltd. 
1961b. Taino Agriculture. In Johannes Wilbert, editor, The Evolution of 
Horticultural Systems in Native South America: Causes and Conse?
quences?A Symposium. Antropologica, supplement, 2:69-82 
[Spanish text, pages 120-125]. Caracas: Sociedad de Ciencias Naru-
rales La Salle. 
1962a. A Newly-Discovered 1838 Drawing of a Seminole Dance. Florida 
Anthropologist, 15(3):73-82. 
1962b. Spanish-Indian Relations in Southeastern North America. Ethnohis?
tory, 9(1 ):41-94. 
1963a. Creek. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 6:720. 
1963b. Seminole Myths of the Origins of Races. Ethnohistory, 10(l):80-86. 
1964a. Five Civilized Tribes. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9:396-397. 
NUMBER 44 35 
1964b. 
1964c. 
1964d. 
1964e. 
1965a. 
1965b 
1965c. 
1965d 
1965e. 
1967a 
1967b 
1967c. 
1967d. 
1967e. 
1967f. 
1969a. 
1969b. 
1970. 
1971a. 
1971b. 
1971c. 
1973. 
John Mann Goggin, 1916-1963. American Anthropologist, 66(2): 
385-394. 
John White's Contribution to Ethnology [and catalog commentaries 
on the North American Indian entries]. In Paul Hulton and David 
Beers Quinn, The American Drawings of John White, 1577-1590, 
with Drawings of European and Oriental Subjects, 1:37-43, 
85-113, 138-139, 140. London: The Trustees of the British Mu?
seum, and Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 
Seminole. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 20:313H. 
Studies in Ethnoscience. In A. Kimball Romney and Roy Goodwin 
D'Andrade, editors, Transcultural Studies in Cognition. American 
Anthropologist, special publication, 66(3)2:99-131. 
Ethnographic Details in the American Drawings of John White, 
1577-1590. Ethnohistory, 12(l):54-63. 
Historic Carolina Algonkian Cultivation of Chenopodium or Ama?
ranthus. Bulletin, Southeastern Archaeological Conference, 3: 
64-65. 
Mutilations and Deformations. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 6: 
1106-1107. 
Preliminary Annotated Bibliography on Eastern North American In?
dian Agriculture. Bulletin, Southeastern Archaeological Confer?
ence, 3:1-24. 
Tattooing. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 21:834. 
("1965"). Catalog of Early Illustrations of Northeastern Indians. 
Ethnohistory, 12(3):272-273. [Date on title page is 1965; actually 
published in 1967.] 
("1966"). Anthropology, History, and Ethnohistory. Ethnohistory, 
13(1-2):1-51. [Date on title page is 1966; actually published in 
1967.] 
Early Indian Tribes, Culture Areas, and Linguistic Stocks. In Na?
tional Atlas of the United States of America, 2 maps, unpaginated. 
Washington, D.C: Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Sur?
vey. [Reprinted, 1970, in The National Atlas of the United States of 
America, pages 130-132. Washington, D.C: United States Depart?
ment of the Interior, [U.S.] Geological Survey.] 
Guide to Field Collecting of Ethnographic Specimens. Smithsonian 
Institution Information Leaflet, 503: 41 pages. Washington, D.C: 
Smithsonian Institution. 
Scalping. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 19:1135. 
Seminole Men's Clothing. In June Helm, editor, Essays on the Ver?
bal and Visual Arts. Proceedings of the 1966 Annual Spring Meet?
ing, American Ethnological Society, pages 160-174. Seattle: 
University of Washington Press. 
Does Anthropology Need Museums? In Daniel M. Cohen and 
Roger F. Cressey, editors, Papers Presented at a Symposium on Nat?
ural History Collections, Past, Present, Future. Proceedings of the 
Biological Society of Washington, 82:619-649. 
History and Ethnography of Some West Indian Starches. In Peter J. 
Ucko and G.W. Dimbleby, editors, The Domestication and Exploita?
tion of Plants and Animals, pages 177-199. London: Gerald Duck?
worth and Co. 
Agriculture on Artificial Islands in Burma and Elsewhere. Proceed?
ings of the Eighth International Congress of Anthropological and 
Ethnological Sciences, 1968, Tokyo and Kyoto, 3:11-13. Tokyo: 
Science Council of Japan. 
Creek into Seminole. In Eleanor Burke Leacock and Nancy Oestre-
ich Lurie, editors, North American Indians in Historical Perspec?
tive, pages 92-128. New York: Random House. 
Notes on the Creek Hothouse. Southern Indian Studies, 20:3-5. 
A Short History of the Strange Custom of Tattooing. In CH. Fel-
lowes, The Tattoo Book, pages 1-10. Princeton, New Jersey: The 
Pyne Press. 
Museums as Anthropological Data Banks. In Alden Redfield, editor, 
Anthropology Beyond the University. Southern Anthropological So?
ciety Proceedings, 7:40-55. 
1975. 
1976. 
1974. Woodsmen and Villagers of the East. In Jules B. Billard, editor, 777e 
World of the American Indian, pages 101-149. Washington, D.C: 
National Geographic Society. 
Two 1761 Wigwams at Niantic, Connecticut. American Antiquity, 
40(4):437^144. 
First Visual Images of Native America. In Fredi Chiappelli, editor, 
First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, 
pages 417-454. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
1977a. The Ethnological Evaluation of the Le Moyne-De Bry Illustrations. 
In Paul Hulton, editor, The Work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, 
a Huguenot Artist in France, Florida and England, 1:69-74 [plus 
ethnological annotations in catalogue entries on pages 163-164, 
185, 204-214]. [London:] Published for the Trustees of the British 
Museum by British Museum Publications Ltd. in association with 
the Huguenot Society of London. 
1977b. Perfect Likenesses as Anthropological Evidence [and six catalog en?
tries]. In Peter C. Marzio, Perfect Likenesses: Portraits for History 
of the Indian Tribes of North America (1837-44), page 13 [and 
notes on pages 18, 20, 21, 22, 24]. Washington, D.C: National Mu?
seum of History and Technology, Smithsonian Institution. 
1977c. The Hole-and-Slot Heddle. In Irene Emery and Patricia Fiske, edi?
tors, Ethnographic Textiles of the Western Hemisphere: Irene Emery 
Roundtable on Museum Textiles, 1976 Proceedings, pages 325-355. 
Washington, D.C: The Textile Museum. 
1978a. The Last of the South Florida Aborigines. In Jerald Milanich and 
Samuel Proctor, editors, Tacachale: Essays on the Indians of Florida 
and Southeastern Georgia during the Historic Period. Florida State 
Museum, Ripley P. Bullen Monographs in Anthropology and His?
tory, 1:141-162. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida. 
1978b. Oklahoma Seneca-Cayuga. In William C. Sturtevant, general editor, 
Handbook of North American Indians, volume 15, Bruce G. Trigger, 
editor, Northeast, pages 537-543. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian 
Institution. 
1978c ("1977"). The Sources of Lafitau's American Illustrations. In Jo?
seph Francois Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared 
with Customs of Primitive Times, 2:271-303, edited and translated 
by William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore. Toronto: The Cham-
plain Society. [Date on title page is 1977; actually published in 
1978; series: Publications of the Champlain Society, 49.] 
1979a. The Cherokee Frontiers, the French Revolution, and William Au?
gustus Bowles. In Duane H. King, editor, The Cherokee Indian Na?
tion: A Troubled History, pages 61-91. Knoxville: University of 
Tennessee Press. 
1979b ("1978"). Louis-Philippe on Cherokee Architecture and Clothing in 
1797. Journal of Cherokee Studies, 3(4): 198-205. [Date on title 
page is 1978; actually published in 1979.] 
1979c. Southeastern Indian Formulas. In Elisabeth Tooker, editor, Native 
North American Spirituality of the Eastern Woodlands, pages 
282-293. New York: Paulist Press. 
1979d. Black Drink and Other Caffeine-Containing Beverages among Non-
Indians. In Charles M. Hudson, editor, Black Drink: A Native Amer?
ican Tea, pages 150-165. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 
1980a. Cannibals. [Letter to the editor.] Times Literary Supplement, no. 
4015, 7March:266. 
1980b. The First Inuit Depicition by Europeans. Etudes Inuit; Inuit Studies, 
4(I-2):47-49. 
1980c. National Dress and Citizen Dress: What Indian Delegates Wore to 
Washington. American Fabrics and Fashions, 120:14-15. 
1981a. Animals and Disease in Indian Belief. In Shepard Krech III, editor, 
Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the 
Game, pages 177-188. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 
1981b. The Ethnographical Illustrations. In Helen Wallis, editor, The Maps 
and Text of the Boke ofldrography Presented by Jean Rotz to Henry 
VIII, Now in the British Library, pages 67-72. Oxford: Printed for 
Presentation to the Members of The Roxburghe Club. 
36 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
1981c. John Ridge on Cherokee Civilization in 1826. Journal of Cherokee 
Studies, 6(2):79-91. 
198Id. Quelques representations de canots et de pirogues, a partir du XVII 
siecle. Recherches Amerindiennes au Quebec, 11(4):297-310. 
1982 ("1980"). Patagonian Giants and Baroness Hyde de Neuville's Iro?
quois Drawings. Ethnohistory, 27(4):331-348 [Date on title page is 
1980; actually published in 1982; errata published in 1982 (1981 on 
title page), in Ethnohistory, 28(1 ):99.] 
1983a. Seneca Masks. In N. Ross Crumrine and Marjorie Halpin, editors, 
The Power of Symbols: Masks and Masquerade in the Americas, 
pages 39?47, plates 4, 5. Vancouver: University of British Columbia 
Press. 
1983b. Tribe and State in the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries. In Elisa?
beth Tooker, editor, The Development of Political Organization in 
Native North America. Proceedings of the American Ethnological 
Society, 1979:3-16. Washington, D.C: American Ethnological So?
ciety. 
1984. A Structural Sketch of Iroquois Ritual. In Michael K. Foster, Jack 
Campisi, and Marianne Mithun, editors, Extending the Rafters: In?
terdisciplinary Approaches to Iroquoian Studies, pages 133-152. 
Albany: State University of New York Press. 
1985. Foreword. In John R. Swanton, Final Report of the United States De 
Soto Expedition Commission, pages v-ix. Washington, D.C: Smith?
sonian Institution Press. 
1986a. Contemporary North American Indian Crafts. In Thomas Vennum, 
Jr., editor, 1986 Festival of American Folklife, Smithsonian Institu?
tion and National Park Service [program book], pages 79-82. 
[Washington, D.C:] Smithsonian Institution. 
1986b. The Meanings of Native American Art. In Edwin L. Wade, editor, 
The Arts of the North American Indian: Native Traditions in Evolu?
tion, pages 23-44. New York: Hudson Hills Press, and Tulsa, Okla?
homa: Philbrook Art Center. 
1988. La Tupinambisation des Indiens d'Amerique du Nord. In Gilles 
Therien, editor, Les figures de l'lndien. Les Cahiers du Departe-
ment dEtudes Litteraires, 9:293-303. Universite du Quebec a Mon?
treal. 
1990. What Does the Plains Indian War Bonnet Communicate? In Dan 
Eban, editor, with Erik Cohen and Brenda Danet, Art as a Means of 
Communication in Pre-Literate Societies: The Proceedings of the 
Wright International Symposium on Primitive and Precolumbian 
Art, Jerusalem, 1985, pages 355-374. Jerusalem: The Israel Mu?
seum. 
1991a. Collecting and the Development of Anthropology. In Kirk R. 
Johnson, Leo J. Hickey, and Cynthia A. Hoover, editors, Crossroads 
of Continents: The Material Culture of Siberia and Alaska, pages 
38-40. Washington, D . C , and New Haven, Connecticut: Yale-
Smithsonian Seminar on Material Culture. 
1991b. Indian America: First Visual Impressions. In Silvio A. Bedini, edi?
tor, The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia, pages 337-345. New 
York: Simon and Schuster. 
1991c. The Southeast. In Colin F. Taylor, editorial consultant, and William 
C. Sturtevant, technical consultant, The Native Americans: The In?
digenous People of North America, pages 12-35. London: Sala?
mander Books, Ltd., and New York: Smithmark. 
1992. The Sources for European Imagery of Native Americans. In Rachel 
Doggett, editor, with Monique Hulvey and Julie Ainsworth, New 
World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492-1700, 
pages 25-33. Washington, D.C: The Folger Shakespeare Library; 
distributed by the University of Washington Press, Seattle. 
1994a. The Misconnection of Guale and Yamasee with Muskogean. Inter?
national Journal of American Linguistics, 60(2):139?148. 
1994b. Museum Europa, Mongols, Peoples of the World, Ethnographic 
Treasure Rooms [in] The Danish Museum, Copenhagen. Museum 
Anthropology, 18(2):49-59. 
Sturtevant, William C , consultant 
1972. Indians of North America. National Geographic, 142(6):739A [map 
supplement]. 
Sturtevant, William C , editor 
1974. Boxes and Bowls: Decorated Containers by Nineteenth-Century 
Haida, Tlingit, Bella Bella, and Tsimshian Indian Artists. 93 pages. 
Washington, D . C : Smithsonian Institution Press for the Renwick 
Gallery of the National Collection of Fine Arts. 
1987a. A Creek Source Book. 400 pages. New York: Garland Publishing. 
1987b. A Seminole Source Book. 315 pages. New York: Garland Publishing. 
Sturtevant, William C , Warwick Bray, and Jonathan King 
1978. The Americas on the Eve of European Conquest. [Maps.] In Geof?
frey Barraclough, editor, The Times Atlas of World History, pages 
148-149. London: Times Books. 
Sturtevant, William C , and David Beers Quinn 
1987. This New Prey: Eskimos in Europe in 1567, 1576, and 1577. In 
Christian F. Feest, editor, Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary 
Collection of Essays, pages 61-140. Aachen: Edition Herodot, 
Rader Verlag. [Series: Forum (Edition Herodot), 11.] 
Sturtevant, William C , and Samuel Stanley 
1968. Indian Communities in the Eastern States. The Indian Historian, 1: 
15-19. 
Tax, Sol 
1988. Pride and Puzzlement: A Retro-introspective Record of 60 Years of 
Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 17:1-21. 
The Writings of William C. Sturtevant 
Compiled by William L. Merrill 
NOTE.?The authors of jointly prepared publications are in?
serted, in the original order of appearance, within square brack?
ets following the dates of publication. 
1952. Review oi Florida's Seminole Indians, by W.T. Neill. Florida An?
thropologist, 5(3-4):65-67. 
1953. [Harold C. Conklin and William C. Sturtevant] Seneca Indian Sing?
ing Tools at Coldspring Longhouse: Musical Instruments of the 
Modem Iroquois. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Soci?
ety, 97(3): 262-290. 
1953. Chakaika and the "Spanish Indians": Documentary Sources Com?
pared with Seminole Tradition. Tequesta, 13:35-73. 
1953. [George W. Grace and William C. Sturtevant] Linguistic Question?
naire. 13 pages. New Haven: Tri-Institutional Pacific Program. 
1954. The Medicine Bundles and Busks of the Florida Seminole. Florida 
Anthropologist, 7(2):31-70. [Reprinted, 1987, in William C. Sturte?
vant, editor, A Seminole Sourcebook, item 14, New York: Garland 
Publishing.] 
1954. Statement of William C. Sturtevant Regarding S. 2747 and H.R. 
7321. In U.S. Congress, Joint Hearing before the Subcommittees of 
the Committees on Interior and Insular Affairs, Congress of the 
United States, Eighty-third Congress, Second Session, on S. 2747 
and H.R. 7321. ...Part 8. Seminole Indians, Florida, March 1 and 2, 
1954, pages 1136-1137. Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Print?
ing Office. 
1954. The Mikasuki Seminole: Medical Beliefs and Practices. 538 pages. 
Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Yale University. [Reproduced as 
No. 67-11,355 by Bell and Howell Information and Learning, Ann 
Arbor, Michigan.] 
1954. Review oi Journey into Wilderness, by J.R. Motte; edited by J.F. 
Sunderman. Florida Historical Quarterly, 32(4):300-304. 
1954. Unsigned review of The Southern Indians: The Story of the Civilized 
Tribes before Removal, by R.S. Cotterill. United States Quarterly 
Book Review, 10(2): 173. 
1954. Unsigned review of The Iroquois Eagle Dance: An Offshoot of the 
Calumet Dance, with An Analysis of the Iroquois Eagle Dance and 
Songs, by Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, by W.N. Fenton. United 
States Quarterly Book Review, 10(2):205-206. 
1955. Notes on Modern Seminole Traditions of Osceola. Florida Histori?
cal Quarterly, 33(3-t):206-217. 
1955. A Selected Bibliography of Material Culture. 69 pages. New Haven, 
Connecticut: Peabody Museum. 
1955. The Tri-Institutional Pacific Program and Its Linguistic Aspects. 
[Abstract.] Bulletin of the Philadelphia Anthropological Society, 
8(3):5-7. 
1955. [Harold C. Conklin and William C Sturtevant] [Summary ofj After?
noon Session [on Ethnology.] In Proceedings of the Ninth Confer-
William L. Merrill, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of 
Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560-
0112, USA. 
ence on Iroquois Research, pages 9-12. Albany: New York State 
Museum and Science Service. 
1955. Unsigned review of The Piltdown Forgery, by J.S. Weiner. Yale Re?
view, 45(l):xii-xiv. 
1955. Unsigned review of The Micmac Indians of Eastern Canada, by 
W.D. Wallis and R.S. Wallis. United States Quarterly Book Review, 
11(2):230. 
1956. Billy Bowlegs, Not Marcy's Scout Bushman. Chronicles of Okla?
homa, 33(4):547-548. 
1956. Osceola's Coats? Florida Historical Quarterly, 34(4):315-328. 
1956. R.H. Pratt's Report on the Seminole in 1879. Florida Anthropolo?
gist, 9(1): 1-24. 
1956. A Seminole Personal Document. Tequesta, 16:55-75. [Reprinted, 
1987, In William C Sturtevant, editor, A Seminole Source Book, 
item 17, New York: Garland Publishing.] 
1956. Unsigned review of On the Track of Prehistoric Man, by H. Kuhn. 
Yale Review, 45(3):x-xiv. 
1956. Review oi Benjamin Hawkins?Indian Agent, by M.B. Pound. Amer?
ican Anthropologist, 58(6): 1164-1165. 
1957. [William C. Sturtevant and Margaret C. Blaker] [Proceedings of the] 
Tenth Conference on Iroquois Research, Red House, New York, Oc?
tober 26-28, 1956. 4 pages. [Albany: New York State Museum and 
Science Service.] 
1957. Selected References on the Seminole Indians. Smithsonian Informa?
tion Leaflet, 98: 3 pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
[Revised, 1961, under the title "An Annotated List of References on 
the Seminole Indians."] 
1957. Anthropology as a Career. Smithsonian Information Leaflet, 100: 18 
pages. Washington, D .C: Smithsonian Institution. [Revised and 
somewhat expanded, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1963, for reprinting by the 
Smithsonian Institution as Smithsonian Institution Publication, 
4343. Reprinted, 1959, without the bibliography, in Morton H. 
Fried, editor, Readings in Anthropology, volume 1, Physical Anthro?
pology, Linguistics, Archaeology, pages 6-14, and volume 2, Cul?
tural Anthropology, pages 581-587, New York: Crowell; second 
edition of the same work published in 1968.] 
1957. Bibliography on Indian Languages and Language Families. Smith?
sonian Information Leaflet, 133: 6 pages. Washington, D C : Smith?
sonian Institution. [Revised, 1961, by William C. Sturtevant and 
Wallace L. Chafe.] 
1957. American Indian Languages. Smithsonian Information Leaflet, 134: 
2 pages. Washington, D .C: Smithsonian Institution. [Reprinted, 
I960.] 
1957. The Cherokee Language. Smithsonian Information Leaflet, 137: 2 
pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
1958. Accomplishments and Opportunities in Florida Indian Ethnology. In 
Charles H. Fairbanks, editor, Florida Anthropology, pages 15-55. 
Tallahassee: Florida Anthropological Society and Florida State Uni?
versity, Department of Anthropology. [Florida Anthropological So?
ciety Publication, 5 ("4"), and Florida State University, Department 
of Anthropology, Notes in Anthropology, 2.] 
1958. Siouan Languages in the East. American Anthropologist, 60(4): 
738-743. 
37 
38 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
1958. Review of Sun Circles and Human Hands, by E.L. Fundaburk and 
M.D.F. Foreman. George Washington University Alumni Review, 
23(2):9. 
1958. Review of Sun Circles and Human Hands, by E.L. Fundaburk and 
M.D.F. Foreman. Science, 128(3314):23-24. 
1958. Review of The American Indian in Graduate Studies, by F.J. Docks-
tader. American Anthropologist, 60(2):383. 
1958. Review of The Seminoles, by E.C McReynolds. American Anthro?
pologist, 60(2):386. 
1958. Reviews of The American Indian as Hunter and A Brief History of 
the Indian Hunter, by J. Witthoft. American Anthropologist, 60(3): 
621. 
1958. Review of The Ethnobotany of the Island Caribs of Dominica, by 
W.H. Hodge and D. Taylor. American Anthropologist, 60(4):767. 
1958. Selected References on the Indians of Southeastern North America. 
Smithsonian Information Leaflet, 174: 16 pages. 
1958. Selected References on Present-Day Conditions among United 
States Indians. Smithsonian Information Leaflet, 175: 9 pages. 
Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. [Revised, 1961, by Wil?
liam C. Sturtevant; revised, 1969, by Samuel Stanley and William 
C. Sturtevant.] 
1958. Selected Bibliography of Maps Relating to the American Indian. 
Smithsonian Information Leaflet, 197: 4 pages. Washington, D.C: 
Smithsonian Institution. 
1959. A Suggestion for Field Recordings. Ethnomusicology, 3(2):75-76. 
1959. Authorship of the Powell Linguistic Classification. International 
Journal of American Linguistics, 25(3): 196-199. 
1959. Selected References on the Indians of North Eastern North America. 
Smithsonian Information Leaflet, 227: 17 pages. Washington, D.C: 
Smithsonian Institution. [Revised, 1966.] 
1959. Review of The Travels of William Bartram, edited by F. Harper. 
American Anthropologist, 61(3):548. 
1959. Review of The Discoveries of John Lederer, edited by D.L. Rights 
and W.P. Cumming. Ethnohistory, 6(2): 187-189. 
1959. Selected References on American Indian Basketry. Smithsonian In?
formation Leaflet, 230: 7 pages. Washington, D .C: Smithsonian 
Institution. 
1959. Selected References on North American Indian Clothing. Smithson?
ian Information Leaflet, 234: 4 pages. Washington, D.C: Smithson?
ian Institution. 
1959. Selected References on North American Indian Songs and Dances. 
Smithsonian Information Leaflet, 79 (revised): 9 pages. Washington, 
D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
1960. A Technique for Ethnographic Note-Taking. American Anthropolo?
gist, 61(4):677-678. 
1960. Hayda [Haida]. Encyclopedia Hebraica, 14:55. Jerusalem: Massadah 
Ltd. [In Hebrew.] 
1960. Hrdlicka, Ales. Encyclopedia Hebraica, 15:184. Jerusalem: Mas?
sadah Ltd. [In Hebrew.] 
1960. A Seminole Medicine Maker. In Joseph B. Casagrande, editor, In 
the Company of Man: Twenty Portraits by Anthropologists, pages 
505-532. New York: Harper and Brothers. [Reprinted, 1964, with 
same pagination, in paperback edition of volume, retitled In the 
Company of Man: Twenty Portraits of Anthropological Informants, 
New York: Harper Torchbooks.] 
1960. The Significance of Ethnological Similarities between Southeastern 
North America and the Antilles. Yale University Publications in An?
thropology, 64: 58 pages. 
1960. Review of Memoirs or a Quick Glance at My Various Travels and 
My Sojourn in the Creek Nation, by L. Milfort. American Anthropol?
ogist, 62(4):704. 
1960. Review oi Southeastern Indians: Life Portraits, by E.L. Fundaburk. 
American Anthropologist, 62(4):704. 
1960. Selected References on Indian Wars and Warfare. Smithsonian In?
formation Leaflet, 48 (revised): 18 pages. Washington, D . C : 
Smithsonian Institution. 
1961. Comment on Gertrude P. Kurath's "Effects of Environment on Cher?
okee-Iroquois Ceremonialism, Music, and Dance." In William N. 
Fenton and John Gulick, editors, Symposium on Cherokee and Iro?
quois Culture. Bulletin, Bureau of American Ethnology, 180: 
197-204. 
1961. Comment on "The Study of Social and Religious Systems in North 
American Archaeology," by William H. Sears. Current Anthropol?
ogy, 2(3):243-244. 
1961. Huronim [Hurons]. Encyclopedia Hebraica, 13:952-953. Jerusa?
lem: Massadah Ltd. [In Hebrew.] 
1961. Taino Agriculture. In Johannes Wilbert, editor, The Evolution of 
Horticultural Systems in Native South America: Causes and Conse?
quences?A Symposium. Antropologica, supplement, 2:69-82 
[Spanish text, pages 120-125]. Caracas: Sociedad de Ciencias Natu-
rales La Salle. [Reprinted, 1991, in William F. Keegan, editor, Earli?
est Hispanic/Native American Interactions in the Caribbean, pages 
241-254, New York: Garland Publishing.] 
1961. Review of The American Heritage Book of Indians. New York Her?
ald Tribune Books, 29 October:5. 
1961. Review of Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations, by 
R.C Bell. American Anthropologist, 63(6): 1396. 
1962. Spanish-Indian Relations in Southeastern North America. Ethnohis?
tory, 9(1):41?94. [Reprinted, 1991, in David Hurst Thomas, editor, 
Ethnology of the Indians of Spanish Florida, pages 307-360, New 
York: Garland Publishing.] 
1962. Grant No. 2771 (1960): North American Indian Material in Euro?
pean Museums. American Philosophical Society Yearbook, 1961: 
588-591. 
1962. [Thomas Gladwin and William C. Sturtevant, editors] Anthropology 
and Human Behavior, vii+214 pages. Washington, D.C: Anthropo?
logical Society of Washington. 
1962. A Newly-Discovered 1838 Drawing of a Seminole Dance. Florida 
Anthropologist, 15(3):73-82. 
1962. Bibliography on American Indian Medicine and Health. Smithson?
ian Information Leaflet, 99 (revised): 39 pages. Washington, D.C: 
Smithsonian Institution. 
1962. Review oi Essai d'analyse structurale appliquee a la cuisine diola, 
by L.-V Thomas. International Journal of American Linguistics, 
28(1):61. 
1962. Review of 77ie Application of Genetics to Cotton Improvement, by J. 
Hutchinson. American Anthropologist, 64(5): 1131-1132. 
1962. Review oi Some Costumes of Highland Burma at the Ethnographi?
cal Museum of Gothenberg, by H.H. Hansen. American Anthropolo?
gist, 64(5): 1088-1089. 
1962. Review oi Indian Art in America, by F.J. Dockstader. American An?
thropologist, 64(5): 1113-1114. 
1962. Review oi Apologies to the Iroquois, by E. Wilson. American An?
thropologist, 64(5): 1116-1117. 
1963. Creek. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 6:720. 
1963. Seminole Myths of the Origins of Races. Ethnohistory, 10(l):80-86. 
1963. Review oi Almost White, by B. Berry. Ethnohistory, 10(3):289-291. 
1963. Reviews of The Journal of Christopher Columbus, translated by C. 
Jane, and Natural History of the West Indies, by Gonzalo Fernandez 
de Oviedo, translated and edited by S.A. Stoudemire. Ethnohistory, 
10(2): 189-194. 
1964. [Translation, headnote, and footnotes] A Jesuit Missionary in South 
Carolina, 1569-70. In Wilcomb E. Washburn, editor, The Indian 
and the White Man, pages 167-175. Garden City, New York: Dou?
bleday and Co. 
1964. [John M. Goggin and William C Sturtevant] The Calusa: A Strati?
fied, Nonagricultural Society (with Notes on Sibling Marriage). In 
Ward H. Goodenough, editor, Explorations in Cultural Anthropol?
ogy: Essays in Honor of George Peter Murdock, pages 179-219. 
New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co. 
NUMBER 44 39 
1964. 
1964. 
1964. Studies in Ethnoscience. In A. Kimball Romney and Roy G. D'An?
drade, editors, Transcultural Studies in Cognition. American Anthro?
pologist, 66(3) part 2 (special publication):99-131. [Reprinted, 
1968, in R.A. Manners and D. Kaplan, editors, Theory in Anthropol?
ogy: A Sourcebook, pages 475-500, Chicago: Aldine. Reprinted, 
1972, in James P. Spradley, editor, Culture and Cognition: Rules, 
Maps, and Plans, pages 129-167, San Francisco: Chandler. Re?
printed in part, 1974, in J.W. Berry and P.R. Dasen, editors, Culture 
and Cognition: Readings in Cross-Cultural Psychology, pages 
39-59, London: Methuen.] 
[Charles H. Fairbanks, Irving Rouse, and William C. Sturtevant, ed?
itors] Indian and Spanish: Selected Writings by John M. Goggin. 
329 pages. Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press. 
[Stanley Diamond, William C. Sturtevant, and William N. Fenton] 
Memorandum. In U.S. House of Representatives, Hearings before 
the Subcommittee on Indian Affairs of the Committee on Interior 
and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, Eighty-eighth Con?
gress. First Session, on H.R. 1794. H.R. 3343 and H.R. 7354. 
...May 18, July 15, 16, August 8, 9. 12, 19 and 20, October 31, No?
vember 1, December 9 and 10, 1963, Salamanca, NY, and Wash?
ington, D.C, pages 504-505. Washington, D.C: U.S. Government 
Printing Office. [This memorandum also appeared, under the same 
title, in U.S. Senate, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Indian 
Affairs of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, United 
States Senate, Eighty-eighth Congress, Second Session, on S. 1836 
and H.R. 1794. ...March 2, 1964, pages 109-111. Washington, 
D.C: U.S. Goverment Printing Office. It was reprinted, 1964, un?
der the title: "Memorandum Submitted to Subcommittees on Indian 
Affairs of the Senate and House of Representatives," American An?
thropologist, 66(3):631-633.] 
1964. John Mann Goggin, 1916-1963. American Anthropologist, 66(2): 
385-394. 
1964. John White's Contribution to Ethnology [and catalog commentaries 
on the North American Indian entries]. In Paul Hulton and David 
Beers Quinn, The American Drawings of John White, 1577-1590, 
with Drawings of European and Oriental Subjects, 1:37-43, 
85-113, 138-139, 140. London: The Trustees of the British Mu?
seum, and Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 
1964. Five Civilized Tribes. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9:396-397. 
1964. Seminole. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 20:313H. 
1965. Mutilations and Deformations. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 6: 
1106-1107. 
1965. Tattooing. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 21:834. 
1965. Preliminary Annotated Bibliography on Eastern North American In?
dian Agriculture. Bulletin, Southeastern Archaeological Conference, 
3:1-24. 
1965. Historic Carolina Algonkian Cultivation of Chenopodium or Ama?
ranthus. Bulletin, Southeastern Archaeological Conference, 3: 
64-65. 
1965. Report of the Book Review Editor. American Anthropologist, 67(3): 
768-771. 
1965. Ethnographic Details in the American Drawings of John White, 
1577-1590. Ethnohistory, 12(l):54-63. 
1965. Couvade: Toward the Resurrection of Father Schmidt's Stillbirth. 
American Anthropologist, 67(5): 1287. 
1966. Ethnological Collections and Curatorial Records. Museum News, 
44(7): 16-19. 
1966. Duration of Graduate Study for the PhD. Fellow Newsletter, Ameri?
can Anthropological Association, 7(6):3-4. 
1966. [Richard H. Manville and William C. Sturtevant] Early Specimens 
of the Eastern Wolf, Canis lupus lycaon. Chesapeake Science, 7(4): 
218-220. 
1966. Selected References on the Indians of Northeastern North America. 
Smithsonian Information Leaflet, 227 (revised): 25 pages. Wash?
ington, D . C : Smithsonian Institution. [Three sections were re?
printed without authorization, 1969, under the title "Iroquois 
Tribes," in The Indian Historian, 2(2):42.] 
1967 ("1965"). Catalog of Early Illustrations of Northeastern Indians. Eth?
nohistory, 12(3):272?273. [Date on title page is 1965; actually pub?
lished in 1967.] 
1967. Early Indian Tribes, Culture Areas, and Linguistic Stocks. In Na?
tional Atlas of the United States of America, 2 maps, unpaginated. 
Washington, D.C: Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Sur?
vey. [Reprinted, 1970, in The National Atlas of the United Stales of 
America, pages 130-132, Washington, D.C: U.S. Department of the 
Interior, [U.S.] Geological Survey.] 
1967. Scalping. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 19:1135. 
1967. Seminole Men's Clothing. In June Helm, editor, Essays on the Ver?
bal and Visual Arts, pages 160-174. Seattle: University of Washing?
ton Press. [Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society 
Annual Spring Meeting, 1966. Reprinted, 1987, in William C. Stur?
tevant, editor, A Seminole Sourcebook, item 16, New York: Garland 
Publishing.] 
1967. Urgent Anthropology: 1. Smithsonian-Wenner-Gren Conference. 
Current Anthropology, 8(4):355-359, 361. 
1967. Guide to Field Collecting of Ethnographic Specimens. Smithsonian 
Information Leaflet, 503: 41 pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian 
Institution. [Second edition, revised, 1977.] 
1967. "Plains Indian Religion," review of O-kee-pa, by George Catlin, 
centennial edition, edited by J.C. Ewers. Nature, 216(5118):886. 
1967 ("1966"). Anthropology, History, and Ethnohistory. Ethnohistory, 
13(1-2): 1-51. [Date on title page is 1966; actually published in 
1967. Reprinted, 1968, in James A. Clifton, editor, Introduction to 
Cultural Anthropology: Essays in the Scope and Methods of the Sci?
ence of Man, pages 451?475, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.] 
1968. Lafitau's Hoes. American Antiquity, 33(l):93-95. 
1968. Categories, Percussion, and Physiology. Man, new series, 3(1): 
133-134. 
1968. [William C. Sturtevant and Samuel Stanley] Indian Communities in 
the Eastern States. The Indian Historian, 1(3): 15-19. 
1968. Review of Lukas Vischer (1780-1840), Kunstler, Reisender, Sam-
mler, by F. Anders, M. Pfister-Burkhalter, and CF. Feest. American 
Anthropologist, 70(6): 1220-1221. 
1968. Review of The Creek Frontier, 1540-1783, by D.H. Corkran. Man, 
new series, 3(1): 154. 
1968. Review of The Bureau of American Ethnology: A Partial History, 
by N.M. Judd. American Anthropologist, 70(4)774?775. 
1969. History and Ethnography of Some West Indian Starches. In Peter J. 
Ucko and G.W. Dimbleby, editors, The Domestication and Exploita?
tion of Plants and Animals, pages 177-199. London: Gerald Duck?
worth and Co. 
1969. Anthropological Archives. [Letter to the editor.] Newsletter of the 
American Anthropological Association, 10(3):4. 
1969. Does Anthropology Need Museums? In Daniel M. Cohen and 
Roger F. Cressey, editors, Papers Presented at a Symposium on Nat?
ural History Collections, Past, Present, Future. Proceedings of the 
Biological Society of Washington, 82:619-649. 
1970. Agriculture on Artificial Islands in Burma and Elsewhere. Proceed?
ings of the Eighth International Congress of Anthropological and 
Ethnological Sciences, 1968, Tokyo and Kyoto, 3:11-13. Tokyo: 
Science Council of Japan. [Original title, "Agriculture on Artificial 
Islands in Burma, Kashmir, and Elsewhere."] 
1971. Anthropology Today. 565 pages. Del Mar, California: CRM Books. 
[William C. Sturtevant served as one of 34 contributing consultants 
to the volume and prepared the draft for the section on pages 
346-350; no editor is listed.] 
1971. Traditional Crafts and Art of Northwest Coast Indians. In [Program 
of the] 1971 Festival of American Folklife July 1-5 [pages 18-21]. 
[Washington, D.C:] Division of Performing Arts, Smithsonian In?
stitution. 
1971. A Short History of the Strange Custom of Tattooing. In C H . Fel-
40 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
1971. 
1971. 
1971. 
1972. 
1972. 
1972. 
1972. 
1972. 
1973 ( 
1973. 
1973. 
1973. 
1973. 
1974. 
1974. 
1974. 
1974. 
1975. 
1975. 
1975. 
1975. 
1975. 
1976. 
1977. 
1977. 
1977. 
1977. 
1977. 
lowes, The Tattoo Book, pages 1-10. Princeton, New Jersey: The 
Pyne Press. 
Notes on the Creek Hothouse. Southern Indian Studies, 20:3-5. 
Creek into Seminole. In Eleanor B. Leacock and Nancy 0 . Lurie, 1975. 
editors, North American Indians in Historical Perspective, pages 
92-128. New York: Random House. [Volume reprinted, 1988, by 1976. 
Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, Illinois; chapter reprinted, 1987, 
in William C. Sturtevant, editor, A Seminole Sourcebook, item 1, 
New York: Garland Publishing.] 
Review of Before Columbus, by CH. Gordon. Smithsonian, 2(5): 
62-63. 
Smithsonian Plans New Native American Handbook. The Indian His?
torian, 4(4):5-8. [Reprinted, 1979, under the title "The New Smith?
sonian Handbook of North American Indians," Washington, D.C: 
Handbook of North American Indians, Smithsonian Institution.] 
American Indian Religions. The American Way 5(2):28-34. [Re?
printed, 1972, slightly revised, in Robert L. Iacopi, Bernard L. Fon-
tana, and Charles Jones, editors, Look to the Mountain Top, pages 
45-51, San Jose, California: Gousha Publications.] 
[Principal consultant] Indians of North America. National Geo?
graphic, 142(6):739A [map supplement]. 
Review oi Sketches of a Tour to the Lakes, by Thomas L. McKen?
ney. Smithsonian, 3(8): 108-110. 
[Wilcomb E. Washburn and William C. Sturtevant] Reviews of En?
graved America, by L. Glaser, and Prints in and of America to 1850, 
edited by J.D. Morse. American Historical Review, 77(2):479-482. 
'1972"). [Jerald T. Milanich and William C. Sturtevant, editors, 
Emilio F. Moran, translator] Francisco Pareja's 1613 Confession-
ario: A Documentary Source for Timucuan Ethnography. 121 pages. 
Tallahassee: Division of Archives, History, and Records Manage?
ment, Florida Department of State. [Date on title page is 1972; actu?
ally published in 1973.] 
[William C. Sturtevant and Samuel Stanley] Linguistics in the Smith?
sonian. In Eric P. Hamp, editor, Themes in Linguistics: The 1970s. 1977. 
Janua Linguarum, Series Minor, 172:14-18. The Hague: Mouton. 
Museums as Anthropological Data Banks. In Alden Redfield, editor, 
Anthropology Beyond the University. Southern Anthropological So- 1977. 
ciety Proceedings, 7:40-55. 
Caveat Emptor?and Editor. [Letter to the editor.] Newsletter of the 
American Anthropological Association, 14(9):2. 1977. 
Domestic Noble Savages. [Review of 10 books on North American 
Indians.] New York Times Book Review, 18 March:36-38. 
[Editor] Boxes and Bowls: Decorated Containers by Nineteenth- 1977. 
century Haida, Tlingit, Bella Bella, and Tsimshian Indian Artists. 93 
pages. Washington, D C : Smithsonian Institution Press for the Ren-
wick Gallery of the National Collection of Fine Arts. 
"Man" as an Unmarked Term. [Letter to the editor.] Newsletter of 1978 ( 
the American Anthropological Association, 15(6):20. 
Woodsmen and Villagers of the East. In Jules B. Billard, editor, The 
World of the American Indian, pages 101-149. Washington, D.C: 
National Geographic Society. [Volume reprinted, 1979 and 1989.] 
[Principal consultant for the volume as a whole and for the accompa?
nying tribal map] The World of the American Indian. Jules B. Billard, 1978. 
editor, 399 pages. Washington, D.C: National Geographic Society. 
[Volume reprinted, 1979 and 1989, with map revised each time.] 
Huns, Free-thinking Americans, and the AAA. History of Anthro- 1978. 
pology Newsletter, 2(l):4?6. 
Commentary [on papers by TePaske and Tanner]. In Samuel Proc?
tor, editor, Eighteenth-Century Florida and Its Borderlands, pages 1978. 
40-47. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida. 
Some Publications of the Last Decade on the History of Museum 1978. 
Anthropology. History of Anthropology Newsletter, 2(2): 11-13. 
Two 1761 Wigwams at Niantic, Connecticut. American Antiquity, 1978. 
40(4):437^t44. 
Cuban Miami: 1743; Rediscovered: Santa Maria de Loreto. In Joan 
E. Gill and Beth R. Read, editors, Born of the Sun: The Official 
Florida Bicentennial Commemorative Book, page 28. Hollywood, 
Florida: Florida Bicentennial Commemorative Journal, Inc. 
Review of God is Red, by Vine Deloria, Jr. Journal of Ethnic Stud?
ies, 3(1): 104-105. 
[William C. Sturtevant and Wilcomb E. Washburn] The First Amer?
icans. In Peter C. Marzio, editor, A Nation of Nations: The People 
Who Came to America as Seen through Objects and Documents Ex?
hibited at the Smithsonian Institution, pages 4 -23 . New York: 
Harper and Row. [Extracts reprinted, 1981, with added pictures and 
captions by William C. Sturtevant, under the title "The First Ameri?
cans," in American Fabrics and Fashions, 123:60-64.] 
First Visual Images of Native America. In Fredi Chiappelli, editor, 
First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, 
pages 417-454. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
Perfect Likenesses as Anthropological Evidence [and six catalog en?
tries]. In Peter C. Marzio, Perfect Likenesses: Portraits for History 
of the Indian Tribes of North America (1837-44), page 13 [and 
notes on pages 18, 20, 21, 22, 24]. Washington, D.C: National Mu?
seum of History and Technology, Smithsonian Institution. 
[Letter to the editor] Anthropology Newsletter, 18(5):2, 27. 
Testimony...before the National Commission for the Protection of 
Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. Anthro?
pology Newsletter, 18(6): 11. 
[Letter to the editor.] Anthropology Newsletter, 18(7):2. 
The Ethnological Evaluation of the Le Moyne-De Bry Illustrations. 
In Paul Hulton, editor, The Work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, 
a Huguenot Artist in France, Florida and England, 1:69-74 [plus 
ethnological annotations in catalog entries on pages 163-164, 185, 
204-214], foreword, catalog, and introductory studies by Paul Hul?
ton. [London:] Published for the Trustees of the British Museum by 
British Museum Publications Ltd. in association with the Huguenot 
Society of London. 
Review oi Pelts, Plumes and Hides: White Traders Among the Sem?
inole Indians, 1870-1930, by H.A. Kersey, Jr. American Anthropol?
ogist, 79(3)740. 
Review of The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the 
Cant of Conquest, by Francis Jennings. William and Mary Quar?
terly, 34(2)312-314. 
Culture Out of Context: Anthropologist Views Exhibition of North 
American Indian Art. Council for Museum Anthropology Newsletter, 
1(2): 18-20. 
The Hole-and-Slot Heddle. In Irene Emery and Patricia Fiske, edi?
tors, Ethnographic Textiles of the Western Hemisphere: Irene Em?
ery Roundtable on Museum Textiles, 1976 Proceedings, pages 
325-355. Washington, D.C: The Textile Museum. 
'1977"). The Sources of Lafitau's American Illustrations. In Joseph 
Francois Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with 
Customs of Primitive Times, 2:271-303, edited and translated by 
William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore. Toronto: The Cham-
plain Society. [Date on title page is 1977; actually published in 
1978. Series: Publications of the Champlain Society, 49.] 
[General editor] Handbook of North American Indians. Volume 8, 
Robert F. Heizer, editor, California, xv+800 pages. Washington, 
D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
[General editor] Handbook of North American Indians. Volume 15, 
Bruce G. Trigger, editor, Northeast, xvi+924 pages. Washington, 
D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
Foreword. In Collections Policies. Indian Notes, I2(l):2-3. New 
York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. 
English and American. [Letter to the editor.] The Observer (Lon?
don), Sunday, 23 July:6. 
[Margot Liberty and William C. Sturtevant] Appendix: Prospectus 
for a Collection of Studies on Anthropology by North American In?
dians. In Margot Liberty, editor, American Indian Intellectuals. Pro-
NUMBER 44 41 
ceedings of the American Ethnological Society, 1976:241 -248. St. 1980. 
Paul, Minnesota: West Publishing Co. 
1978. [William C. Sturtevant, Warwick Bray, and Jonathan King] The 1980. 
Americas on the Eve of European Conquest. [Maps.] In Geoffrey 
Barraclough, editor, The Times Atlas of World History, pages 1980. 
148-149. London: Times Books. 
1978. The Last of the South Florida Aborigines. In Jerald Milanich and 1981. 
Samuel Proctor, editors, Tacachale: Essays on the Indians of Florida 
and Southeastern Georgia during the Historic Period. Ripley P. 
Bullen Monographs in Anthropology and History, 1:141-162. 1981. 
Gainesville: University Presses of Florida. 
1978. Sale of Harvard Peabody Museum Collections. Council for Museum 1981. 
Anthropology Newsletter, 3(1): 16-20. 
1978. Oklahoma Seneca-Cayuga. In William C. Sturtevant, general editor, 1981. 
Handbook of North American Indians, volume 15, Bruce G. Trigger, 
editor, Northeast, pages 537-543. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian 1981. 
Institution. 
1978. Review of Drawn from Life: California Indians in Pen and Brush, 
by T. Kroeber, A.B. Elsasser, and R.F. Heizer. Journal of California 1981. 
Anthropology, 5(1): 143-144. 
1978. Review of Using Historical Sources in Anthropology and Sociology, 
by D.C. Pitt. American Anthropologist, 80(2):398. 1981. 
1979 ("1978"). Louis-Philippe on Cherokee Architecture and Clothing in 
1797. Journal of Cherokee Studies, 3(4): 198-205. [Date on title 
page is 1978; actually published in 1979.] 
1979. The Cherokee Frontiers, the French Revolution, and William Au?
gustus Bowles. In Duane H. King, editor, The Cherokee Indian Na- 1981. 
tion: A Troubled History, pages 61-91. Knoxville: University of 
Tennessee Press. 
1979. Preface. In Elisabeth Tooker, editor, Native North American Spiritu- 1981. 
ality of the Eastern Woodlands, pages xi-xvii. New York: Paulist 
Press. 1981. 
1979. Southeastern Indian Formulas. In Elisabeth Tooker, editor, Native 
North American Spirituality of the Eastern Woodlands, pages 
282-293. New York: Paulist Press. 
1979. Black Drink and Other Caffeine-Containing Beverages among Non- 1981. 
Indians. In Charles M. Hudson, editor, Black Drink: A Native Amer?
ican Tea, pages 150-165. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 1982 (' 
1979. [Contribution to] Used Magazines. CoEvolution Quarterly, 21: 
113-114. 
1979. President Sturtevant's Report, 1978-79. Council for Museum An?
thropology Newsletter, 4( 1 ):4-5. 1982. 
1979. Review oi Africans and Seminoles: From Removal to Emancipation, 
by D.F. Littlefield, Jr. American Anthropologist, 81 (4):916-917. 1982. 
1980. [James Axtell and William C. Sturtevant] The Unkindest Cut, or 
Who Invented Scalping? William and Mary Quarterly, series 3, 1982. 
37(3):451-472. [Pages 452-468 reprinted, 1981, in James Axtell, 
The European and the Indian, pages 17-35, Oxford: Oxford Univer- 1982. 
sity Press; reprinted, 1986, without the footnotes, in Roger L. 
Nichols, editor, The American Indian, Past and Present, third edi?
tion, pages 47-60, New York: Knopf] 
1980 ("1979"). [General editor] Handbook of North American Indians. Vol?
ume 9, Alfonso Ortiz, editor, Southwest, xvi+701 pages. Washing?
ton, D . C : Smithsonian Institution. [Date on title page is 1979; 1983 (' 
actually published in 1980.] 
Cannibals. [Letter to the editor.] Times Literary Supplement, no. 
4015, 7March:266. 
[Translations from the German on pages 45-50, plus passim identi- 1983. 
fications and translations of Creek and Yuchi words.] In Kristian 
Hvidt, editor, with the assistance of Joseph Ewan, George F. Jones, 
and William C Sturtevant, Von Reek's Voyage: Drawings and Jour- 1983. 
nal of Philip Georg Friedrich von Reck. Savannah, Georgia: The 
Beehive Press. 
1980. The First Inuit Depiction by Europeans. Etudes Inuit; Inuit Studies, 
4( I -2 ) :47^9 . 
1980. 
1980. 
National Dress and Citizen Dress: What Indian Delegates Wore to 
Washington. American Fabrics and Fashions, 120:14-15. 
Review of Les Peaux-rouges aujourd'hui, by J. Raspail. American 
Anthropologist, 82(4):960. 
Review of Southeastern Indians Since the Removal Era, edited by 
W.L. Williams. American Ethnolgist, 7(3):593-594. 
[General editor] Handbook of North American Indians. Volume 6, 
June Helm, editor, Subarctic, xvi + 837 pages. Washington, D .C: 
Smithsonian Institution. 
Royal Incest: A Bibliographic Note. American Ethnologist, 8(1): 
186. 
[William C. Sturtevant and Peter Macnair] Kwakiutl Indian Potlatch 
and Museum Opening. American Fabrics and Fashions, 122:80-82. 
Living with Art. In Living with Art in the Hyatt Regency Woodfield, 
pages [3-5]. New York: Doric Publishing Co. 
[Testimony on the human rights of the Yanomami, delivered 30 June 
1981 before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.] 
Anthropology Newsletter, 22(6):23. 
John Ridge on Cherokee Civilization in 1826. Journal of Cherokee 
Studies, 6(2):79?91. [Corrected reprint and page headed "Some 
Comments on John Ridge's Essay" sent to subscribers in 1982.] 
R.F. Heizer and the Handbook of North American Indians. In Will?
iam S. Simmons and Polly McW. Bickel, editors, Contributions of 
Robert F. Heizer to California Ethnohistory, pages 1-5. Berkeley: 
Archaeological Research Facility, Department of Anthropology, 
University of California. 
Animals and Disease in Indian Belief. In Shepard Krech III, editor, 
Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the 
Game, pages 177-188. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 
Quelques representations de canots et de pirogues, a partir du XVII 
siecle. Recherches Amerindiennes au Quebec, 11(4):297?310. 
The Ethnographical Illustrations. In Helen Wallis, editor, The Maps 
and Text of the Boke of Urography Presented by Jean Rotz to Henry 
VIII, Now in the British Library, pages 67-72. Oxford: Printed for 
Presentation to the Members of The Roxburghe Club. 
Review of Native Religious Traditions, by E.H. Waugh and K.D. 
Prithipaul. American Ethnologist, 8(4):818-819. 
'1980"). Patagonian Giants and Baroness Hyde de Neuville's Iro?
quois Drawings. Ethnohistory, 27(4)331-348 [Date on title page is 
1980; actually published in 1982; errata published in 1982 (1981 on 
title page), in Ethnohistory. 28(1 ):99.] 
[Sheila Hicks and William C Sturtevant] Junius Bird: An Apprecia?
tion. American Fabrics and Fashions, 126:11. 
History of Anthropology in the Handbook of North American Indi?
ans. History of Anthropology Newsletter, 9(2): 13?15. 
Review oi Indian Clothing Before Cortes, by P.R. Anawalt. Ameri?
can Fabrics and Fashions, 124?125:19. 
Reviews of Micmac Quillwork: Micmac Indian Techniques of Por?
cupine Quill Decoration, by R.H. Whitehead, and Soft Gold: The 
Fur Trade and Cultural Exchange on the Northwest Coast of 
America, historical introduction and annotation by T. Vaughan; 
ethnographic annotation by Bill Holm. American Fabrics and 
Fashions, 127:50. 
1982"). Review of "Relacion acerca de las antiguedades de los in?
dios': el primer tratado escrito en America, by Ramon Pane; trans?
lated and edited by Jose Juan Arrom. Ethnohistory, 29(3):234-235. 
[Date on title page is 1982; actually published in 1983.] 
[General editor] Handbook of North American Indians. Volume 10, 
Alfonso Ortiz, editor, Southwest, xvi+868 pages. Washington, D.C: 
Smithsonian Institution. 
Tribe and State in the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries. In Elisa?
beth Tooker, editor, The Development of Political Organization in 
Native North America. Proceedings of the American Ethnological 
Society, 1979:3-16. Washington, D.C: American Ethnological So?
ciety. 
42 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
1983. Seneca Masks. In N. Ross Crumrine and Marjorie Halpin, editors, 
The Power of Symbols: Masks and Masquerade in the America, 
pages 39-47. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 
1983. [David J. Meltzer and William C. Sturtevant] The Holly Oak Shell 
Game: An Historic Archaeological Fraud. In Robert C Dunnell and 
Donald K. Grayson, editors, Lulu Linear Punctated: Essays in 
Honor of George Irving Quimby. Anthropological Papers, Museum 
of Anthropology, University of Michigan, 72:325-352. 
1983. Review of My Work among the Florida Seminoles, by J.H. Glenn. 
Florida Historical Quarterly 61(3)335-336. 
1983. Review of Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustra?
tions of de Bry's Great Voyages, by B. Bucher. American Ethnolo?
gist, 10(3):609-610. 
1983. Indian-Eskimo Exhibition in Cologne: Multiple Stereotypes. Ameri?
can Indian Workshop Newsletter (Vienna), 14:1-2. 
1984. [General editor] Handbook of North American Indians. Volume 5, 
David Damas, editor, Arctic, xvi + 829 pages. Washington, D .C: 
Smithsonian Institution. 
1984. A Structural Sketch of Iroquois Ritual. In Michael K. Foster, Jack 
Campisi, and Marianne Mithun, editors, Extending the Rafters: In?
terdisciplinary Approaches to Iroquoian Studies, pages 133-152. 
Albany: State University of New York Press. 
1984. Selection from the Wellington Collection at the Met. Council for 
Museum Anthropology Newsletter, 8(l):49-50. 
1984. Review of Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Popu?
lation Dynamics in Eastern North America, by H.F. Dobyns. Ameri?
can Historical Review, 89(5): 1380-1381. 
1985. First Renderings. Wilderness, 49( 171): 17. 
1985. [William C. Sturtevant and David J. Meltzer] The Holly Oak Pen?
dant. Science, 227(4684):242, 244. 
1985. Foreword. In John R. Swanton, Final Report of the United States 
De Soto Expedition Commission, pages v-ix. Washington, D .C : 
Smithsonian Institution Press. 
1985. Views of a New World. American Heritage, 36(5):82. 
1985. America from Drake's Quarterdeck: Sixteenth-Century Drawings 
from Sir Francis Drake's Voyages Recorded Important Intelligence 
for England on Spanish America. American Heritage, 36(5):85-92. 
1986 ("1985"). Review of The Sapir-Kroeber Correspondence, edited by 
V. Golla. Ethnohistory. 32(4)398-399. [Date on title page is 1985; 
actually published in 1986.] 
1986. [General editor] Handbook of North American Indians. Volume 11, 
Warren L. d'Azevedo, editor, Great Basin, xvi + 852 pages. Wash?
ington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
1986. The Meanings of Native American Art. In Edwin L. Wade, editor, 
The Arts of the North American Indian: Native Traditions in Evolu?
tion, pages 23-44. New York: Hudson Hills Press, and Tulsa, Okla?
homa: Philbrook Art Center. 
1986. [William C. Sturtevant, editor, Annemarie Shimony and William C 
Sturtevant, translators] The Origin of the Mask Complex in the 
Eastern Woodlands of North America, by Rolf Krusche. Man in the 
Northeast, 31:1-47. 
1986. Contemporary North American Indian Crafts. In Thomas Vennum, 
Jr., editor, 1986 Festival of American Folklife, Smithsonian Institu?
tion and National Park Service [program book], pages 79-82. 
[Washington, D.C:] Smithsonian Institution. 
1987. [Editor] A Creek Source Book. 400 pages. New York: Garland Pub?
lishing. 
1987. [Editor] A Seminole Source Book. 315 pages. New York: Garland 
Publishing. 
1987. [William C. Sturtevant and David Beers Quinn] This New Prey: Es?
kimos in Europe in 1567, 1576, and 1577. In Christian F. Feest, edi?
tor, Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays, 
pages 61-140. Aachen: Edition Herodot, Rader Verlag. [Series: Fo?
rum (Edition Herodot), 11.] 
1988 Statement of William Sturtevant, Curator of Anthropology, National 
Museum of Natural History, and General Editor, Handbook of North 
American Indians, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, and 
Testimony of William C Sturtevant before the Select Committee on 
Indian Affairs, U.S. Senate, August 12, 1988. In U.S. Senate, Hear?
ing before the Select Committee on Indian Affairs, United States 
Senate, One Hundredth Congress, Second Session, on S. 2672, To 
Provide Federal Recognition of the Lumbee Tribe of North Caro?
lina, August 12, 1988, Washington, DC, pages 22-24, 85-88. Wash?
ington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office. 
1988. La Tupinambisation des Indiens d'Amerique du Nord. In Gilles 
Therien, editor, Les figures de l'lndien. Les Cahiers du Departement 
d'Etudes Litteraires, 9:293-303. Universite du Quebec a Montreal. 
1988. [James B. Griffin, David J. Meltzer, Bruce D. Smith, and William C. 
Sturtevant] A Mammoth Fraud in Science. American Antiquity, 
53(3):578-582. 
1989 ("1988"). [General editor] Handbook of North American Indians. 
Volume 4, Wilcomb E. Washburn, editor, History of Indian-White 
Relations, xiii + 838 pages. Washington, D .C : Smithsonian Institu?
tion. [Date on title page is 1988; actually published in 1989.] 
1989 ("1988"). Bowles, William Augustus. In William C. Sturtevant, gen?
eral editor, Handbook of North American Indians, volume 4, Wil?
comb E. Washburn, editor, History of Indian-White Relations, page 
624. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. [Date on title page 
is 1988; actually published in 1989.] 
1989 ("1988"). [William C. Sturtevant and John Witthoft] Speck, Frank G. 
In William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of North Ameri?
can Indians, volume 4, Wilcomb E. Washburn, editor, History of In?
dian-White Relations, pages 6 8 6 - 6 8 7 . Washington, D . C . 
Smithsonian Institution. [Date on title page is 1988; actually pub?
lished in 1989.] 
1989. Statement of William C. Sturtevant, Anthropologist, Curator of 
North American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 
DC and Testimony to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Indian 
Affairs, May 5, 1989, regarding S. 611, A Bill to Establish Adminis?
trative Procedures to Determine the Status of Certain Indian Groups. 
In U.S. Senate, Hearing before the Select Committee on Indian Af?
fairs, United States Senate. One Hundred First Congress, First Ses?
sion, on S. 611, To Establish Administrative Procedures to 
Determine the Status of Certain Indian Groups. May 5, 1989, Wash?
ington, DC, pages 82-85, 183-185. Washington, D .C : U.S. Gov?
ernment Printing Office. 
1990. [General editor] Handbook of North American Indians. Volume 7, 
Wayne Suttles, editor, Northwest Coast, xv+777 pages. Washing?
ton, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
1990. What Does the Plains Indian War Bonnet Communicate? In Dan 
Eban, editor, with Erik Cohen and Brenda Danet, Art as a Means of 
Communication in Pre-Literate Societies: The Proceedings of the 
Wright International Symposium on Primitive and Precolumbian Art, 
Jerusalem, 1985, pages 355-374. Jerusalem: The Israel Museum. 
1990. Review of The Tunica-Biloxi: Southeast [sic], by J.D. Brain. Ameri?
can Indian Culture and Research Journal, 14(4): 102-104. 
1991. Collecting and the Development of Anthropology. In Kirk R. 
Johnson, Leo J. Hickey, and Cynthia A. Hoover, editors, Crossroads 
of Continents: The Material Culture of Siberia and Alaska, pages 
38-40. Washington, D . C , and New Haven, Connecticut: Yale-
Smithsonian Seminar on Materia] Culture. 
1991. New National Museum of the American Indian Collection Policy 
Statement: A Critical Analysis. Museum Anthropology, 15(2): 
29-30. 
1991. [Colin F. Taylor, editorial consultant, and William C. Sturtevant, 
technical consultant] The Native Americans: The Indigenous People 
of North America. 256 pages. London: Salamander Books, Ltd., and 
New York: Smithmark. [Reprinted, 1996; reprinted, 1999,'by Thun-
NUMBER 44 43 
1991. 
1991. 
1991. 
1991. 
1992. 
der Bay Press, San Diego, California. Danish, French, Italian, and 
Spanish translations appeared in 1992, and a Hungarian translation 
appeared in 1993.] 
1991. The Southeast. In Colin F. Taylor, editorial consultant, and William 
C. Sturtevant, technical consultant, The Native Americans: The In?
digenous People of North America, pages 12-35. London: Sala?
mander Books, Ltd., and New York: Smithmark. [Reprinted, 1996; 
reprinted, 1999, by Thunder Bay Press, San Diego, California. Dan?
ish, French, Italian, and Spanish translations appeared in 1992, and a 
Hungarian translation appeared in 1993.] 
Comments on Part I [three papers on "Collecting in the North"]. 
Arctic Anthropology, 28(l):53-56. 
[Editorial advisor] The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia. Sylvio 
A. Bedini, editor, 2 volumes, xxii + 787 pages. New York: Simon 
and Schuster. [Reprinted, 1998, by Da Capo Press, New York, under 
the title Christopher Columbus and the Age of Exploration: An En?
cyclopedia.] 
Cannibalism. In Silvio A. Bedini, editor, The Christopher Colum?
bus Encyclopedia, pages 93-96. New York: Simon and Schuster. 
[Volume reprinted, 1998, by Da Capo Press, New York, under the 
title Christopher Columbus and the Age of Exploration: An Ency?
clopedia.} 
Indian America: First Visual Impressions. In Silvio A. Bedini, edi?
tor, The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia, pages 337-345. New 
York: Simon and Schuster. [Volume reprinted, 1998, by Da Capo 
Press, New York, under the title Christopher Columbus and the 
Age of Exploration: An Encyclopedia.} 
Testimony of William C. Sturtevant on H.R. 2335 before the Inte?
rior and Insular Affairs Committee, House of Representatives, 
September 26, 1989. In U.S. House of Representatives, Hearing 
before the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House of 
Representatives, One Hundred First Congress, First Session, on 
H.R. 2335, Lumbee Recognition Act. Hearing Held in Washington, 
DC, September 26, 1989, pages 70-72. [Transcription of verbal 
comments by William C. Sturtevant supplementing this testimony 
appear on pages 68-69.] Washington, D . C : U.S. Government 
Printing Office. 
1992. Archiving Anthropology. History of Anthropology Newsletter, 
19(1):11-12. 
1992. The Sources for European Imagery of Native Americans. In Rachel 
Doggett, editor, with Monique Hulvey and Julie Ainsworth, New 
World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492-1700, 
pages 25-33. Washington, D.C: The Folger Shakespeare Library; 
distributed by the University of Washington Press, Seattle. 
1992. [Shepard Krech III and William C. Sturtevant] The Future Uses of 
the Anthropological Record. In Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Pa?
rezo, editors, Preserving the Anthropological Record, pages 
119-127. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological 
Research. 
1992. Review oi Atlas of World Cultures: A Geographical Guide to Ethno?
graphic Literature, by D.H. Price. American Ethnologist, 19(2): 
388-389. 
1993. [Special consultant] Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies. 
Jacob E. Cooke, editor in chief, 3 volumes, xxxv+745, x+787, xi+ 
865 pages. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 
1993. The First American Discoverers of Europe. European Review of Na?
tive American Studies, 7(2):23-29. 
1994. The Misconnection of Guale and Yamasee with Muskogean. Inter?
national Journal of American Linguistics, 60(2):139-148. 
1994. Museum Europa, Mongols, Peoples of the World, Ethnographic 
Treasure Rooms [in] The Danish Museum, Copenhagen. Museum 
Anthropology, 18(2):49-59. 
1994. Asians Before Columbus? [Letter to the editor] New York Times 
Book Review, 10 July:31. 
1995. [Shepard Krech III and William C Sturtevant] The Uses of Ethno?
graphic Records. In Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Parezo, editors, 
Preserving the Anthropological Record, second edition, pages 85-94. 
New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. 
1995. Review oi Pocahontas [Walt Disney Pictures movie]. AnthroNotes, 
17(3)7-9. 
1996. [General editor] Handbook of North American Indians. Volume 17, 
Ives Goddard, editor, Languages, xiii + 957 pages. Washington, 
D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
1996. [JoAllyn Archambault and William C. Sturtevant] Museums and 
Collectors. In Frederick E. Hoxie, editor, Encyclopedia of North 
American Indians, pages 407?410. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 
1996. [JoAllyn Archambault and William C Sturtevant] 150 Years of Na?
tive American Research at the Smithsonian. AnthroNotes, 
18(3):8-11. [Reprinted, 1998, In Ruth O. Selig and Marilyn R. Lon?
don, editors, Anthropology Explored: The Best of Smithsonian An?
throNotes, pages 308-314. Washington, D . C : Smithsonian 
Institution Press.] 
1997. Wilcomb E. ("Wid") Washburn. Anthropology Newsletter, 38(4):21. 
1998 (" 1997"). Mary R. Haas and Ethnology. Anthropological Linguistics, 
39(4):590-593. [Date on title page is 1997; actually published in 
1998.] 
1998. [General editor] Handbook of North American Indians. Volume 12, 
Deward E. Walker, Jr., editor, Plateau, xvi+791 pages. Washington, 
D C : Smithsonian Institution. 
1998. Boundaries of the Culture Area. In Deward E. Walker, Jr., Introduc?
tion. In William C Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of North 
American Indians, volume 12, Deward E. Walker, Jr., editor, Pla?
teau, pages 1-3. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
1998. [William C. Sturtevant and Inge Kleivan] Two Early Photographs of 
an Inughuaq (Polar Eskimo). In J.C.H. King and Henrietta Lidchi, 
editors, Imaging the Arctic, pages 24-28. [London:] Published for 
the Trustees of the British Museum by the British Museum Press. 
1998. [Harold C. Conklin and William C. Sturtevant] Floyd Glenn 
Lounsbury. Anthropology Newsletter, 39(6):29. 
1998. Tupinamba Chiefdoms? In Elsa M. Redmond, editor, Chieftains and 
Chieftancy in the Americas, pages 138-149. Gainesville: University 
Press of Florida. 
1999. [Thomas Killion, William Sturtevant, Dennis Stanford, and David 
Hunt] The Facts about Ishi's Brain. Anthropology News, 40(6):9. 
1999. Scalping. In Ronald Gottesman, editor, Violence in America: An En?
cyclopedia, 3:94-96. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 
1999. Foreword. In Shepard Krech III and Barbara A. Hail, editors, Col?
lecting Native America, 1870-1960, pages v-vi. Washington, D.C: 
Smithsonian Institution Press. 
2000. Introduction [including annotated 1880 census and 20 old photo?
graphs with captions]. In Clay MacCauley, The Seminole Indians 
of Florida, pages ix-lii. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 
2001. Documenting the Speyer Collection. In Christian F. Feest, editor, 
Studies in American Indian Art: A Memorial Tribute to Norman 
Feder. European Review of Native American Studies, monograph 
2:162-186. Altenstadt, Germany: ERNAS; distributed by the Uni?
versity of Washington Press, Seattle. 
2001. [General editor]. Handbook of North American Indians. Volume 13, 
Raymond J. DeMallie, editor, Plains, 2 parts, xvi and xvi+1360 
pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
2001. 16th-Century Algonquian Fishermen. [Letter] Science, 294(5540): 
57. 
2001. How To Not Exhibit Ethnographic Art. American Anthropologist, 
103(3):808-809. 
In press. Early Iroquois Realist Painting and Identity Marking. In J.C.H. 
King, editor, Native Art of the North American Woodlands. London: 
British Museum Press. 
In press. History of Research on the Native Languages of the Southeast. 
44 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
In Janine Scancarelli and Heather Hardy, editors, The Native Lan- Janet C. Berlo and Paul D'Ambrosio.] 
guages of the Southeastern United States. Lincoln, Nebraska: Uni- MS. Iroquois Formal Dress in the Nineteenth Century. [Submitted for 
versity of Nebraska Press. inclusion in "Across Borders: Beadwork in Iroquois Life," edited 
MS. David and Dennis Cusick: Tuscarora Folk Artists. [Submitted for by Moira T. McCaffrey, Jolene Rickard, Trudy Nicks, and Ruth B. 
inclusion in "Native Art History and Folk Art History," edited by Phillips.] 
II. Anthropologists, Historians, 
and American Indians 

Sleepwalking Through the History of Anthropology: Anthropologists on 
Home Ground 
Laura Nader 
Because of his broad experience as ethnologist, general anthro?
pologist, curator, and editor of the Handbook of North Ameri?
can Indians, perhaps no one is in a better position to understand 
the double-edged nature of relations between anthropologists 
and Native Americans than William Sturtevant. His article on 
"Spanish-Indian Relations in Southeastern North America'' 
documented the relations of native peoples with Euro-Ameri?
cans in the different phases of exploration, coexistence, mis-
sionizing, depopulation, and diplomacy between 1513-1821 
(Sturtevant, 1962), and the history of Indian-white relations, a 
subject that includes the areas of government and law, is ad?
dressed in the Handbook (Sturtevant, 1989). In the Handbook, 
the task of the ethnologist is to provide a comprehensive under?
standing of Native American history, an understanding made all 
the more central by current Native American legal claims. Nev?
ertheless, because the focus of the ethnologist is in this case on 
Native American ethnology, there is comparatively less atten?
tion given to explicating the position of the anthropologist, in a 
wider sense, in relation to the knowledge being produced and 
the uses being made of that knowledge. 
Sturtevant directed attention to the production and use of an?
thropological knowledge in a 1983 essay on "Tribe and State in 
Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries" when he discussed the con?
cept of tribe in connection with domains that lie beyond anthro?
pology. He indicated that labeling makes Native Americans eli?
gible for federal programs (or not) and concluded: "Thus it ill 
behooves anthropologists now to suggest that tribes do not ex?
ist" (Sturtevant, 1983:13). Anthropological terms may have a 
rather ambiguous relation to the real world, and misinterpreta?
tion or misuse of social anthropological argumentation by law?
yers, judges, bureaucrats, and the sort can introduce confusion. 
Such confusion may result in adjudicating claims brought by 
unrecognized tribes who may or may not receive recognition 
and standing in court.1 
Earlier, Walter Goldschmidt (1979:2) noted the particular 
difficulties for anthropologists who find that "the problem lies 
not in the 'target population' so much as it does in the sub-cul?
tures of his employers." He continued: 
Laura Nader, Department of Anthropology, University of California, 
Berkeley, California 94720-0001, USA. 
Where the issues are large, the anthropologist is cast in the role of social critic. 
...When practical matters affect established vested interests, matters can be?
come extremely sticky...the anthropologist engaged in research that has policy 
implications may find that he is at the center of controversy; perhaps it can be 
said that he himself becomes a part of the problem. (Goldschmidt, 1979:2-3) 
Anthropologists have played many roles in their North 
American work, yet self-reflection, where it is found, is fo?
cused narrowly on the relations between the ethnographer and 
the subjects of research to the exclusion of a wider range of re?
lations, indicating the primary interest of the academic anthro?
pologist. Roles of a political or policy nature are often rele?
gated by academics to the applied anthropology literature (Van 
Willigen, 1980), or, more recently, to the growing interest in 
the ethnographic history of anthropology, or to oblivion, rather 
than to an understanding of ethnography as it is produced by 
individuals occupying multiple roles and reaching multiple au?
diences. Such multiplicity would include the roles of scholar, 
advocate (sometimes for colonizers and sometimes for the col?
onized), negotiator between parties, translator of world views, 
educator intent on overturning prejudicial views, politician and 
citizen forming policy, and witness, as when appearing before 
the judiciary in court. In other words, we are realizing that our 
ethnographic contributions must be situated amid our assump?
tions, intentions, and worldly circumstances more generally in 
order to understand the grids within which we are working? 
grids from which it is often not easy to escape without attentive 
awareness. 
In this paper, I consider the role of the anthropologist as eth?
nographer in the light of this paradox: the seeming contradic?
tions inherent in the story of what it is we actually do and the 
context in which we do it. 
The Importance of Political Context 
In a paper entitled "American Anthropologists and American 
Society," Eric Wolf (1969) argued that three major phases of 
American anthropology correspond largely to three phases in 
the development of American society. Although he granted that 
his triadic scheme was an oversimplification, he thought it 
worthwhile to generate an interest in the sociology of anthropo?
logical knowledge. His first period spanned roughly the end of 
the Civil War to the last decade of the nineteenth century; the 
47 
48 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
second ranged from the end of the nineteenth century to the on?
set of World War II; and the third included the military-indus?
trial period of the Cold War, covering a roughly forty-year pe?
riod from World War II to the present. Wolf argued that 
American anthropology reflected the historical events of the 
times. During the first period, Social Darwinist evolutionary 
theory was elaborated; in the second period, which he calls the 
Liberal reform period, anthropologists responded with theories 
that stressed human flexibility and plasticity; and in the present 
phase, the military-industrial period, anthropologists have re?
sponded with uncertainties and equivocations about power. 
Wolf was attempting to bridge the gap between the anthropolo?
gist as an academic and the anthropologist as a political being. 
Yet when anthropologists articulate such conjunction be?
tween external and internal histories, some dismiss these at?
tempts at a sociology of anthropological knowledge, claiming 
them to be unconvincing or peripheral to the development of 
anthropology (Abbink and Vermeulen, 1992). But how could 
one explain the writing of Edward Sapir's (1924) article "Cul?
ture, Genuine and Spurious" without bridging the gap between 
histories? Sapir's concept of the spurious culture is one in 
which ultimate ends are replaced by immediate ones, where hu?
man labor is reduced to an extension of a machine, a culture 
that is neither harmonious, integrated, nor spiritually satisfy?
ing?conditions that are far more likely to occur in smaller and 
preliterate societies, whereas the spurious culture is a direct 
product of industrialization. 
Others relegated the political content to a kind of postscript. 
In his essay on the institutional censorship of Franz Boas by the 
American Anthropological Association (AAA), George W. 
Stocking, Jr. (1968:307) concluded with a list of the many 
events that he did not treat in his historical attempt to contextu-
alize the event, thereby illustrating the general pervasiveness of 
the avoidance in American academic life of a recognition of 
external pressures/power on the discipline. In 1919 Boas pub?
lished a scathing letter in the Nation denouncing the use of 
"Scientists as Spies," thereby publicly exposing anthropolo?
gists who were thought to have used scientific activities in 
Mexico to further wartime espionage. In 1920 the AAA cen?
sured Boas, removed him from the Council of the Association, 
and forced his resignation from the National Research Coun?
cil?a sober warning for those who would follow.2 
The story about Boas is usually told as an anecdote, some?
thing that could not, does not, or has not happened since in a 
similar or functionally equivalent form. The history of anthro?
pology is still taught as an orderly succession of people and 
their ideas, and the broad context is missed in such a history. 
Thus, anthropology appears to proceed autonomously, even 
though we have documented the opposite for a long time now, 
especially in the History of Anthropology series begun in 1983 
by Stocking. To contextualize is to begin to understand how a 
teaching style and curriculum format evolved. 
As a student of anthropology in the 1950s, I learned the his?
tory of theory in the model of lineal genealogy: intellectually, 
Ruth Benedict, Sapir, and Margaret Mead descended from 
Boas; Meyer Fortes descended from A.R. Radcliffe-Brown; 
Edmund Leach, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Audrey Richards 
descended from Bronislaw Malinowski, via the French school.3 
The history of anthropology has been primarily what Harvard 
anthropologist Douglas Oliver once privately referred to as 
"geriatrics' rituals." The contextualized or ethnographic history 
of anthropology had yet to come, and, as I was to discover 
while recently researching the impact of the Cold War on an?
thropology, what I had learned as a student was surreal by com?
parison. In my work, the earlier history, neatly ordered, was 
soon replaced by a nonsequential history. It became a story 
without order, as in a dream (Nader, 1997). 
Apparently Leach felt the same way about these ruptures. In 
a 1984 publication of the Annual Review of Anthropology, he 
observed: 
Differences of social class played a critical role in what happened in British an?
thropology during the first forty years of this century, yet the two most recent 
monograph-scale histories of British twentieth century anthropology...distin?
guish the protagonists only according to the qualities of their research publica?
tions, the theoretical attitudes, and their direct academic influence upon one 
another... nor is the reader given any feel of the major intellectual movements 
of the period as they were generated by such contemporary Titans as Bertrand 
Russell and Sigmund Freud. Such deficiencies are serious...I am saying that 
the sociology of the environment of social anthropologists has a bearing on the 
history of social anthropology. (Leach, 1984:2-3) 
The political environment was key for British anthropolo?
gists in Africa, where they were studying peoples who were the 
products of colonial situations. Max Gluckman spoke about the 
judicial process among the Barotse?to emphasize their com?
monalties with European legal systems, specifically Roman-
Dutch law?rather than examine more directly the colonial im?
pressions of African law. His message was clear: the natives are 
not "savages." The same purpose could be found in his well-
known piece, "The Reasonable Man in Barotse Law" (Gluck?
man, 1963), an example of his political need to assert similarity. 
It took a legal historian, Martin Chanock (1985), to address the 
construction of customary law as the product of missionary and 
political colonialism, many years later. From that remove, one 
could criticize Gluckman for glaringly omitting the colonial 
policies without understanding the political context and advo?
cacy strategy that he might have been pursuing. 
Hugh MacMillan, a historian, wrote an interesting article 
about Max Gluckman and the Zulu (MacMillan, 1995). He 
pointed out that after describing the formation of the Zulu Na?
tion, Gluckman analyzed the development of the Zulu-white 
community. MacMillan noted that although Gluckman was 
later "criticized for using the word 'community' in this context, 
and accused of over-emphasizing harmonious interaction, 
Gluckman was under no illusion as to the nature of the con?
quest of the Zulu" (MacMillan, 1995:49). Gluckman's defini?
tion of the social field and his view on Zulu "tradition," accord?
ing to MacMillan (1995:51), drove Gluckman "to demonstrate 
the impossibility of segregation... also to distance South Afri?
can anthropology from segregation." In examining cultural 
NUMBER 44 49 
movements, Gluckman could see that traditionalism in nation?
alist movements was not a form of survival but of revival. He 
first published these ideas in 1940 and 1942, and they were 
later republished (Gluckman, 1958). MacMillan correctly con?
cluded that the lasting relevance of Gluckman's work is in his 
identification of two contrasting trends and the controlling pro?
cesses operative within each?one towards revival and the 
other towards absorption. Both trends have been continuous in 
the literature on Native Americans as well. 
There is, however, another side to an unreal history of an?
thropology accomplished by the depoliticizing influence of the 
scientific method. George Stocking's (1991) piece, "Macay, 
Kubary, Malinowski: Archetypes from the Dreamtime of An?
thropology," presented an interesting tidbit. He quoted from a 
letter that Malinowski had written in an appeal for graduate 
student support for Jomo Kenyatta: 
Mr. Kenyatta started his work in my Department about two years ago. At that 
time he had a definitely political bias in all his approaches. This, I think, has 
been almost completely eradicated by the constant impact of detached scientif?
ic method on his mental processes. The highly depoliticizing influence of sci?
entific anthropology has worked a "remarkable change." (Stocking, 1991:57) 
Stocking then reminded us that the neutralizing power of so?
cial anthropology failed to impress Kenyatta, who went on to 
become the leader of the independence movement and the first 
president of the Kenyan nation. It is in such observations that 
the ethnographic history of the field can develop, with serious 
attention to anecdotal material as an intrinsic and tightly inter?
woven part of anthropological developments. Indeed, the same 
possibilities are open to all of the sciences that generally per?
ceive themselves as autonomous or free from political, eco?
nomic, or cultural influences more generally (see Nader, 1996). 
On Home Ground 
Examples of American anthropologists working on Native 
American ethnography on home ground ("home" referring to 
the nation state) indicate the challenges of multiple roles and 
the separate resolutions that are reflected in the ethnographic 
work and its reception during the past century. 
THE EARLY SETTING: JAMES MOONEY AND FRANK SPECK 
It is ironic that the recounting of anthropological history 
should divorce internal politics from external events, because 
anthropological thought, particularly as it was articulated in 
North America, was born from a Jeffersonian tradition of 
heightened engagement between the scientist and the outside 
world (Mark, 1980:1, 6). Historian of science Joan Mark 
(1980:5) noted that "Jefferson was interested in the misnamed 
'Indians' as well as in the African Americans and Europeans 
who had come or been brought forcibly to the New World." To 
this end she quoted Jefferson as writing in Notes on the State of 
Virginia in 1785: "To our reproach it must be said that though 
for a century and a half we had had under our eyes the races of 
black and red men, they have never yet been viewed as sub?
jects of natural history" (Mark, 1980:5). Jefferson (1955:101) 
added: "It is to be lamented.. .that we have suffered so many of 
the Indian tribes already to extinguish, without our having pre?
viously collected and deposited in the records of literature, the 
general rudiments at least of the languages they spoke." Under 
Jefferson's leadership the Philadelphia-based American Philo?
sophical Society became an important repository for such stud?
ies, and by means of government expeditions, a large amount 
of data was collected during the pre-1840 period (Mark, 1980). 
Not all of these expeditions were driven by scientific purpose 
alone. 
Following Jefferson's lead, many of the first ethnologists and 
"proto-anthropologists" (Eddy and Partridge, 1987) were com?
pelled to action by the complexities of an expanding frontier, 
especially as they pertained to the contemporary "Indian Prob?
lem" (Murra, 1976). New and prolonged contact with the 
Other, as some now refer to the peoples we study, secured a 
place for these early scientists in government discussions about 
Indian land settlement and resettlement as well as assimilation 
issues. 
Of course, which ethnologists were to gain the ears and, ulti?
mately, the money of administrators and politicians at this time 
depended upon what these ethnologists thought about how the 
Indian population should be controlled, and subsequently, to 
which theories they subscribed. Lawyer and anthropologist 
Henry Lewis Morgan's progressive evolutionism was used to 
justify the continuous resettlement of Indians throughout the 
end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century by 
the movers and shakers of Theodore Roosevelt's time. Pro?
gressive evolutionism was also useful to the research-support?
ing institutions of the time, mainly to the Bureau of American 
Ethnology (BAE), which was placed under the already estab?
lished Smithsonian Institution. John Wesley Powell, who 
founded the BAE (as the Bureau of Ethnology) in 1879, was 
determined to use ethnologists' work to empirically and induc?
tively further Morgan's theories as they related to Indian popu?
lations and to secure the BAE as the informational arm of the 
Congress and the American people. The bureau provided the 
first permanent, government-supported research for anthropo?
logical work (Hinsley, 1979). 
Curtis Hinsley (1979) wrote about the contradictory ways in 
which Powell thought about the BAE's role and noted that in 
his recommendations to Congress, Powell was bolstered by 
new evolutionary arguments about the transition to agrarian-
ism. That Powell underestimated the complexities of the role of 
anthropologists in this regard is present in the historical record. 
The work of those BAE ethnologists who did not agree with 
Morgan's progressivist theories may have been suppressed by 
Powell, beginning a long history in which anthropologists' 
confrontations with dominant social beliefs would be avoided 
or guided into muddy waters by other anthropologists, publish?
ers, or government agencies. For example, ethnologist Charles 
Royce's studies oi Indian Land Cessions in the United States 
50 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
(Royce, 1899), completed in 1885, passionately argued, 
through the use of cultural relativity theories, for the removal 
of whites from Indian territory. Powell promised publication, 
but the work lay untouched until 1895 and finally appeared in 
1899. Some might argue the delay reflected financial problems, 
but a statement by Powell himself indicates differently: 
Despite the pitiably frequent cases of personal and temporary injustices to the 
weaker race, the general policy has been guided by a deep-grounded recogni?
tion of the principles of justice and right on the part of both peoples...the jus?
tice shown the red man is more richly tempered with mercy today than during 
any earlier decade, (quoted in Hinsley, 1979:23) 
Compare Powell's statement with a statement made by 
Royce (1887:371): "For two hundred years a contest involving 
their very existence as a people has been maintained against the 
unscrupulous rapacity of Anglo-Saxon civilization." 
Powell also appears to have been uneasy with the work of 
other ethnologists. These included Frank Hamilton Cushing, 
who called into question the ethics of condoning the living con?
ditions on Zuni reservations (Tozzer, 1935), and James 
Mooney. In the 1890s Powell provided Mooney with funds to 
conduct fieldwork among the Sioux. This BAE research, com?
bined with Mooney's own research, culminated in his extraor?
dinary work, "The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Out?
break of 1890" (Mooney, 1896). In it, Mooney detailed the 
Ghost Dance movement among many Native American tribes 
in the last decades of the nineteenth century, which culminated 
in the massacre of over 200 Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890. 
He documented the greatest aboriginal revival the country had 
ever seen, a religion that promised a return to a time without 
the white man. With empathy and compassion, Mooney, an 
early proponent of the cultural deprivation school of thought, 
made the connection between religious revivalism and the 
alienation, cultural decay, tragic conditions, and desperation of 
a people who had suffered enormous losses at the hands of the 
white invaders of their land. In his research on peyote he main?
tained that the peyote religion combined the soul of Indian cul?
ture with a modified form of Christianity, and he advocated the 
Indians' right to use peyote. Native peoples, in Mooney's view, 
had their own logic. Mooney's work marked the beginnings of 
a revitalization theory. 
Hinsley described Powell's position as that of the nonpoliti-
cal, detached, unemotional scientist and pointed out that 
"Mooney caused Powell constant headaches...for being 
present?and active" (Hinsley, 1979:23). The Smithsonian's 
response as a government agency was censorial, prompted by 
fear that Mooney's work would alienate both the Bureau of In?
dian Affairs and the Congress, with which the Smithsonian 
needed to work. Mooney's supervisors at the Smithsonian 
wished that he had avoided comparisons with European reli?
gions and had not made connections between the Ghost Dance 
and the conditions of misery of native peoples, who longed for 
a prophet to give them a means of redemption. In this introduc?
tion to the annual report, Hinsley noted, director Powell tried to 
repair the damage: 
It may be observed that caution should be exercised in comparing or contrast?
ing religious movements among civilized peoples with such fantasies as that 
described in the memoir; for while interesting and suggestive analogies may be 
found, the essential features of the movements are not homologous. (Hinsley, 
1979:24) 
Mooney's American Indians were not heathens or barbari?
ans; they were part of the human race, including the "civilized" 
human race. His work spanned the chasm of time, space, and 
mental development in a period when unilineal evolution was 
not solely a question of anthropology but of everyday political 
and religious-political practice (Moses, 1984). Later on 
Mooney was barred from further research on the reservations 
by the commissioner of Indian affairs, who did not appreciate 
the ethnologist's references to religious freedom and scientific 
truths as justification for his peyote research (Moses, 1984). 
Mooney was ethnologist, advocate, and citizen. Powell pub?
lished his work, but Mooney was regarded as a political time 
bomb. 
Many times there was real reason to teach a fictitious or par?
tial history of anthropology in order to protect the scientific 
ideal within which anthropological researches were cast. Har?
vey Feit's article on Frank Speck's 1915 publications encom?
passes such reasons in his title: "The Construction of Algon-
quian Hunting Territories: Private Property as Moral Lesson, 
Policy Advocacy, and Ethnographic Error" (Feit, 1991). Feit 
reviewed the issue of private property as it has developed be?
fore and since the work of Eleanor Leacock (1954). Leacock's 
conclusion that "there are now strong reasons to think that it 
was erroneous to claim that Algonquian territoriality ever was, 
or was becoming, a kind of private property system" (Feit, 
1991:110), invited a reexamination. 
According to Feit, Speck's case for the existence of private 
property in Algonquian territories was the product of a local 
colonial situation of land ownership issues in North America, 
which included government policies and settler claims, and so?
cial science advocacy. In his work, Speck spoke against the 
policies of United States President Theodore Roosevelt, who 
was presiding over the further dismantling of Indian lands at 
the time and who discussed, as an evolutionist, American In?
dian nomadism. The powerful evolutionists of the time spoke 
for the mainstream. When Speck shifted to an anthropological 
audience, he spoke against Henry Lewis Morgan and his brand 
of unilineal evolution, although Morgan himself, as an advo?
cate of American Indians, understood the transformation from 
communal to private property and its implication for the de?
struction of Indian ways of life. Feit recorded that Roosevelt 
and his friends depicted Indians as wanderers and beggars un?
attached to private property, a thin observation used to justify 
government policy. 
Mooney and Speck were not exactly examples of retreat 
from controversy, and their roles as citizens and anthropolo?
gists had impact on their ethnographies, albeit in different 
ways. Speck compared the conditions of the Algonquian hunt?
ing peoples to that of colonial peoples elsewhere, and he coun?
tered government policy by arguing the case for the family 
NUMBER 44 51 
hunting ground, a position at the time being argued by Indians 
themselves. In the end, Speck took his policy advocacy into 
theory. Feit (1991) illustrates the origin of such ethnology in 
political advocacy. 
CONTEMPORARY ISSUES 
Times have changed for Native Americans since the days of 
Mooney and Speck, largely due to the emergence of the Red 
Power movement in the 1960s and to new economic develop?
ments on Indian reservations over the same period, namely 
gambling and the employment of Native Americans as the 
overseers of toxic waste (see Tsosie, MSa; Ou, 1996). Times 
have also changed for American anthropologists, due to a more 
critical evaluation of the ethnographic project and the political 
realities in which the ethnography is embedded. Two young an?
thropologists have been drawn to contemporary issues in a 
somewhat revolutionary manner that reflects the changing rela?
tionships between anthropologists and Native Americans and 
between anthropologists and various systems of control. 
Michael Tsosie, an anthropologist and Native American, has 
initiated a study of Indian gambling among the Mojave of Fort 
Mojave Indian Reservation and the Colorado River Indian 
Reservation, in Arizona and California. In a recent manuscript, 
"Avi MiYou'a?Indian Gaming and the Struggle for Power 
and Control in Two Mojave Communities," Tsosie (MSa) fo?
cused his attention on the internal dynamics of the develop?
ment and operation of a casino facility in a reservation-based 
community, a subject that has generally not been attended to 
by early analyses of arguments for and against gambling on 
reservations. Tsosie linked opposition to gambling as a tribal 
economic activity to fear among the reservation political elite 
of the potential of gambling to reconfigure the existing balance 
of power. Indeed, once the casino facilities opened, multiple 
power struggles did emerge. Tsosie argued against essentializ-
ing and against the use of binary terms such as "traditional" 
and "progressive," approaches that often obscure the power 
dynamics in Native American communities, and thereby pro?
duce ethnographic error. 
Tsosie's discomfort with restrictions on Native American 
scholarship posed by anthropological concepts was also di?
rected at the spurious restrictions imposed by other Native 
Americans. The use of the traditional culture concept has be?
come an effective means of censoring discourse in both tribal 
and pan-Indian settings. In a second manuscript on traditional 
culture, Tsosie (MSb) outlined a description of the use of tradi?
tional culture to exclude competitors by essentializing identity 
to a finite trait list. He cited Peter Worsley in The Three 
Worlds: Culture and World Development: 
Cultural traits are not absolutes or simply intellectual categories....They are 
strategies or weapons in competitions over scarce social goods. What is mis?
takenly often seen as tradition?attachment to the past as a value in itself?is 
better viewed as a way of maintaining title to power, wealth and status in the 
present, or as a nostalgic spiritual contrast to present disprivilege. (Worsley, 
1984:249) 
Tsosie also cited Richard Clemmer's work on the Hopi 
(Clemmer, 1994), again corroborating Worsley's argument. 
Clemmer questioned the usual categories of traditional versus 
progressive, while noting and making use of symbolic uses of 
tradition for the purposes of legitimation. Certainly these are 
not the first observations of such usage. The application of tra?
dition and culture concepts to pan-Indian militancy stresses the 
importance of such concepts, not as intellectual tools, but as 
tools for garnering power, which is critical to drawing bound?
aries around Native Americans and establishing their claims le?
gally. By use of the temporal dimension they are able to estab?
lish authority, an authority that confounds the configuration of 
federal, state, and corporate involvement. 
"Native Americans and the Monitored Retrievable Storage 
Plan for Nuclear Wastes" (Ou, 1996) is a novel ethnographic 
example, different from Mooney, Speck, or even Tsosie, be?
cause the scope of the work is broader and is ethnographically 
more inclusive of the power dimensions. The ethnography in 
this instance is being used to explain the "way in which struc?
tural relationships between the federal government, Native 
American tribes, and the nuclear industry have shaped and di?
rected the nuclear waste negotiation process" (Ou, 1996:32). 
Thus, the subject of ethnographic practice includes an analysis 
of actors who were previously in the shadows, or out of the eth?
nographic picture altogether. The constrictive nature of earlier 
ethnographic work made an understanding of intense struggle 
and violence incomprehensible as part of root causes. C. Jay 
Ou's approach, on the other hand, is inclusive. 
Ou examined critically the politics of economic blackmail 
through the use of culture and political representation. The story 
is about how federal officials and native advocates actively try 
to find linguistic, ethical, moral, cultural, and political traditions 
that could be used to sell nuclear waste disposal to Native 
Americans?a case of ethnographic knowledge being turned 
back on Native Americans in the form of subtle persuasion. 
In his example of the Mescalero Apache, Ou (1996) de?
scribed a coercive and incremental process of consensus build?
ing and documented the sociolinguistic construction of tribal 
perceptions of ethics and morality. The means of control that 
Ou outlined are implicit and are closely related to the language 
use of particular speakers at specific times. In analyzing a criti?
cal dialogue held at the Cheyenne Mountain Conference Resort 
in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Ou broke down the dialogue 
process as manifested in the use of Indian spirituality, Western 
reason, history, nuclear wastes, ethics, morality and patriotism. 
He examined particular forms of power relations as expressed 
in speech acts, drawing relations between each person's institu?
tional ties and their speech acts. In his analysis of selling, limit?
ing, and maintaining control of the agenda, he outlined the 
boundaries of acceptable discourse. In several cases, dialogue 
was controlled by a facilitator and was transcribed by two court 
reporters. The underlying intention of the facilitator was to de?
lineate the idea of tribal perceptions of ethics and morality so 
as to make a fit with the interests of nuclear waste storage on 
52 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
reservations. The dialogue between critical-minded Indians and 
pro-waste apologists was kept at an abstract level, and in this 
way a general feeling of social harmony was found at the level 
of the common good. As Ou noted, "Indian identity was up for 
grabs. ...Those in positions of power benefited from it" (Ou, 
1996:75). 
The facile cultural maneuvering was a striking use of cultural 
knowledge. In the end, the facilitator portrayed the nuclear 
waste crisis in terms of a collective crisis: 
The nuclear waste issue is just a microsymbol of the challenges that we face as 
human beings living on a single living organism, the earth. To find a way to 
live together as Black Elk said, as children of a single mother and a single fa?
ther. (Ou, 1996:78) 
As Ou said, "there is a fine line between coercion and in?
formed consent?The question of economic development is 
closely linked with the MRS [Monitored Retrievable Storage] 
program, and it in turn intricately related to the notion of tribal 
sovereignty" (Ou, 1996:80). 
C. Jay Ou and Michael Tsosie are correct in calling attention 
to the political structure of the local community, because it is at 
the local level that intergroup agreements are being reached. 
The institutional elements of federal, state, and reservation pol?
itics include the nuclear waste industry, a player that has been 
on the back burner in ethnological reports in the past. In the 
case of gambling, intergroup politics has been oversimplified 
by the use of concepts such as traditional and progressive. The 
point in both of these examples is that the inclusion of all the 
players in the ethnographic work makes it unnecessary to com?
mit the ethnographic errors by which earlier ethnographies are 
now characterized, or to separate academic ethnography from 
applied or policy concerns, or to separate us from them. In 
other words, the perils of studying only up or only down 
(Nader, 1969) might be avoided by a vertical slice approach 
(Nader, 1980).4 
Discussion 
There are a number of issues in Native American anthropology 
on home ground, an anthropology that has been dealing with 
the political complexities of Native American life since Euro?
peans came to the New World. Starting with an issue close to 
the defining factors in American anthropology, it is clear that 
particular conditions in North America shaped the discipline 
here. Sidney Mintz put it simply: "A profound difference be?
tween the history of our discipline in Europe, on one hand, and 
in the Western Hemisphere on the other, inheres in the simple 
fact that our subjects of study, our 'primitive' peoples, were our 
neighbors?our ill-treated, indeed often persecuted, neighbors. 
In this instance, as in others, the anthropology we did and have 
done is conditioned by the history and social complexion of the 
society from whence we come" (Mintz, 1996:290). 
One need only glance at the papers about fieldwork by Brit?
ish anthropologists in Anthropology at Home (Jackson, 1987) 
to realize to what Mintz was referring. In the discussions of 
fieldwork in Britain, the authors are heavily concerned with the 
anthropologist and the informant, with reflexivity, with rural 
life as seen by the academic eye for readers of their work, and 
with self-knowledge and what "home" really means. Although 
some American anthropologists, especially those who work 
away from the United States and within a Eurocentric tradition, 
may share the flavor and interests of Jackson's volume, those 
working at home with Native Americans have different experi?
ences. The historical base of American anthropology was at 
home. For the British, the historical base was away from home. 
It is apparent in the brief commentary on Mooney, Speck, 
Tsosie, and Ou that the social field, as Gluckman defined it for 
South Africa, long ago went beyond looking at communities as 
if they were isolated. Writing before Boas, Mooney made con?
nections. Speck also made connections. Both knew their work 
had consequences beyond the anthropologist/informant dyad. 
Lives were at stake, land was at stake, sovereignty was at stake, 
and what's more, power was central. The younger anthropolo?
gists Michael Tsosie and C. Jay Ou understand the wider politi?
cal and economic uses (among others) made of anthropology. 
Culture traits, tradition, essentializing, pan-Indianism, nuclear 
waste?all this has consequence for turning Native American 
reservations into gambling casinos or toxic waste dumps. It 
also has consequence for anthropology. 
In conclusion, I would like to address the implications this 
essay might indicate for anthropology's ethnography. If the 
study of "them" does not include the study of "us," we are only 
encouraging, as in the case of Frank Speck, ethnographic error, 
at the same time that we are forgetting early pioneers in func?
tionalist theory, such as James Mooney, a man forgotten in fa?
vor of remembering the decades of liberal Boasian anthropol?
ogy, and another heroic f igure. What contemporary 
anthropologists have shown is that the critique of traditional 
anthropology, which was followed by a focus on the field-
worker in ethnographies, can move toward a systematic inclu?
sion of an examination of power holders. As we learn to oper?
ate the wide-angle lens that Malinowski envisioned, we begin 
to better comprehend the concerns that Sturtevant has raised in 
his own work about the consequences, and therefore the value, 
of our ethnographic work beyond academic circles. Anthropol?
ogists located outside of academia have already begun to out?
number academics (Basa, 1994). 
As the primary site of anthropological activity shifts once 
again, the time is ripe for us to have the best of many worlds, 
but the optimism inherent in having the best of all worlds needs 
to be tempered with a comment on the perils of studying up. In 
1969 I wrote that anthropologists like to like the people that 
they study. When anthropologists began to study up, their ef?
forts often replicated earlier models, that is to say earlier eth?
nographies that were truncated and detached from studying 
down or sideways. Later (Nader, 1980), I wrote about the verti?
cal slice as a method to call attention to the observations that 
anthropologists who were studying up were still conceiving of 
communities like government agencies, industrial sites, and ge-
NUMBER 44 53 
netic engineering firms, as if they were isolated island societies 
without connections to the wider world. More important per?
haps, the need for anthropologists to like the people they study 
becomes an obstacle when their informants are powerful, not 
powerless, as has been the case in Native American communi?
ties. In situations of unequal power, intellectual co-optation of 
critical insight will mar the quality of our ethnographies, much 
as it did at the turn of the nineteenth century. 
Notes 
I acknowledge with gratitude the indispensable help of Rachel Stryker in the 
preparation of this paper and the out-of-the-ordinary library support of Suzanne 
Calpestri. Errors and omissions are my responsibility. 
1. Elizabeth Colson's article, "Political Organization in Tribal Societies: A 
Cross Cultural Comparison," is one of the clearest expositions of the problem 
that Sturtevant raises about "tribal" and "tribe" and correctly concluded that 
anthropologists have and are studying "political units which take their defini?
tion and their meaning from their position within the much larger political sys?
tem of nation-state" (1986:17). 
2. David Price has recently published a sequel to Boas's piece ("Anthropolo?
gists as Spies," The Nation, 20 Nov, 2000) bringing earlier concerns up to date, 
noting that the American Anthropological Assoiation has removed explicit 
condemnation of secretive research from their code of ethics. 
3. One only need look at histories of anthropology available in the 1950s to 
realize how narrowly history was conceived. The broadening of our under?
standing was to come later, in works by historians of science and ethnographers 
who sought to conceptualize political processes like industrialism, colonialism, 
World War II, or the Cold War. Works by George Stocking, Hugh MacMillan 
and L.G. Moses are examples of the excellent contributions from history. 
4. In "Up the Anthropologist" (Nader, 1969), I argued that a more inclusive 
anthropology needed to study not only the poweless (down) but also the power?
ful (up), as well as the horizontal neworks (sideways), in order to link power 
with consequences. I later introduced "the vertical slice" to underscore the 
need to study the powerful not as isolated elites, and in this way to connect 
their structures as they extend to the less advantaged, while acknowledging that 
in some situations, we are all disadvantaged. 
Literature Cited 
Abbink, J., and Hans Vermeulen, editors 
1992. History and Culture?Essays on the Work of Eric R. Wolf. 113 
pages. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. 
Basa, Marietta L. 
1994. The Fifth Subdiscipline: Anthropological Practice and the Future of 
Anthropology. Human Organization, 53(2): 174?186. 
Boas, Franz 
1919. "Scientists as Spies." The Nation, 109(2842):797. [Letter to the edi?
tor] 
Chanock, Martin 
1985. Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in 
Malawi and Zambia, xi+286 pages. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer?
sity Press. 
Clemmer, Richard 
1994. The Hopi Traditionalist Movement. American Indian Culture and 
Research Journal, 18(3): 125-166. 
Colson, Elizabeth 
1986. Political Organization in Tribal Societies: A Cross Cultural Compar?
ison. The American Indian Quarterly, 10(1 ):5?19. 
Eddy, Elizabeth, and William L. Partridge, editors 
1987. Applied Anthropology in America. New York: Columbia University 
Press. 
Feit, Harvey A. 
1991. The Construction of Algonquian Hunting Territories: Private Prop?
erty as Moral Lesson, Policy Advocacy, and Ethnographic Error. In 
George W. Stocking, editor, Colonial Situations: Essays on the Con-
textualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, pages 109-134. Madi?
son: University of Wisconsin Press. 
Gluckman, Max 
1958. Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand. Rhodes-Living?
stone Papers, 28: 77 pages. Lusaka. 
1963. The Reasonable Man in Barotse Law. In N. Gluckman, editor, Order 
and Rebellion in Tribal Africa, pages 178-207. London: Cohen and 
West. 
Goldschmidt, Walter, editor 
1979. The Uses of Anthropology. 280 pages. Washington, D.C: American 
Anthropological Association. 
Hinsley, Curtis 
1979. Anthropology as Science and Politics: The Dilemmas of the Bureau 
of American Ethnology, 1879-1964. In Walter Goldschmidt, editor, 
The Uses of Anthropology, pages 11-27. Washington, D.C: Ameri?
can Anthropological Association. 
Jackson, Anthony 
1987. Anthropology at Home. London: Tavestock Publications. 
Jefferson, Thomas 
1955. Notes on the State of Virginia. Edited and with an introduction and 
notes by William Peden, xxv+315 pages. Chapel Hill: University of 
North Carolina Press. 
Leach, E.R. 
1984. Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social An?
thropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 13:1-23. 
Leacock, Eleanor 
1954. The Montagnais "Hunting Territory" and the Fur Trade. Memoirs, 
American Anthropological Association, 78: xi+59 pages. 
MacMillan, Hugh 
1995. Return to the Malungwana Drift?Max Gluckman, die Zulu Nation 
and the Common Society. African Affairs, 94:39-65. 
Mark, Joan 
1980. Four Anthropologists: An American Science and Its Early Years. 
209 pages. New York: Science History Publications. 
Mintz, Sidney 
1996. Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: The Caribbean Region as 
Oikoumene. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, new se?
ries, 2:289-311. 
Mooney, James 
1896. The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. In J.W. 
Powell, Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 
2:641-1136. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. 
Moses, L.G. 
1984. The Indian Man: A Biography of James Mooney. xvii+293 pages. 
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 
Murra, John, editor 
1976. American Anthropology: The Early Years, viii + 260 pages. St. Paul, 
Minnesota: West Publishing. 
54 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Nader, Laura 
1969. Up the Anthropologist?Perspectives Gained from Studying Up. In 
Dell Hymes, editor, Reinventing Anthropology, pages 285-311. New 
York: Random House. 
1980. The Vertical Slice: Hierarchies and Children. In G. Britain and R. 
Cohen, editors, Hierarchy and Society, pages 31?43. Philadelphia, 
Pennsylvania: ISHI Press. 
1996. Naked Science?Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, 
and Knowledge, xvi+318 pages. New York: Routledge. 
1997. The Phantom Factor?the Impact of the Cold War on Anthropology. 
In Noam Chomsky, editor, The Cold War and the University: To?
ward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, pages 107-146. 
New York: The New Press. 
Ou, C. Jay 
1996. Native Americans and the Monitored Retrievable Storage Plan for 
Nuclear Wastes: Late Capitalism, Negotiation, and Controlling Pro?
cesses. In Laura Nader, editor, Essays on Controlling Processes: 
Theme Issue. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, 80:32-88. 
Royce, Charles C. 
1887. The Cherokee Nation of Indians. In J.W. Powell, Fifth Annual Re?
port of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian 
Institution. 1883-84, pages 121-378. Washington, D .C: Govern?
ment Printing Office. 
1899. Indian Land Cessions in the United States. In J.W. Powell, Eigh?
teenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the 
Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1896-97, pages 521-997, 
plates 111-174. 
Sapir, Edward 
1924. Culture, Genuine and Spurious. American Journal of Sociology, 29: 
401^29 . 
Stocking, George W., Jr. 
1968. Race, Culture and Evolution; Essays in the History of Anthropology. 
xvii+380 pages. New York: The Free Press. 
1991. Maclay, Kubary, Malinowski: Archetypes from the Dreamtime of 
Anthropology. In George W. Stocking, Jr., editor, Colonial Situa?
tions: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, 
pages 9-74. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 
Stocking, George W., Jr., editor 
1983. Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork. In George 
W. Stocking, Jr., editor, History of Anthropology, volume 1: vi+242 
pages. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 
Sturtevant, William 
1962. Spanish-Indian Relations in Southeastern North America. Ethnohis?
tory, 9(l):41-94. 
1983. Tribe and State in the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries. In Elisabeth 
Tooker, editor, The Development of Political Organization in Native 
North America. Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, 
197:3-16. Washington, D.C: American Ethnological Society. 
Sturtevant, William, general editor 
1989 ("1988"). Handbook of North American Indians, volume 4, Wilcomb 
E. Washburn, editor, History of Indian-White Relations, xiii+838 
pages. Washington, D . C : Smithsonian Institution. [Date on title 
page is 1988; actually published in 1989.] 
Tozzer, Alfred M. 
1935. Frederic Ward Putnam 1839-1915. Biographical Memoirs, National 
A cademy of Sciences, 16:125-151. 
Tsosie, Michael 
MSa. Avi MiYou'a: Indian "Gaming" and the Struggle for Power and 
Control in Two Mojave Communities. [Unpublished manuscript in 
the files of the Department of Anthropology, University of Califor?
nia, Berkeley.] 
MSb. Traditional Culture: Issues of Power and Control Within North 
American Indian Communities. [Unpublished manuscript in the 
files of the Department of Anthropology, University of California, 
Berkeley.] 
Van Willigen, John 
1980. Anthropology in Use: A Bibliographic Chronology of the Develop?
ment of Applied Anthropology. - 150 pages. Pleasantville, New 
York: Redgrave Publishing. 
Wolf, E. 
1969. American Anthropologists and American Society. In Dell Hymes, 
editor, Reinventing Anthropology, pages 251-263. New York: Pan?
theon Press. 
Worsley, Peter 
1984. The Three Worlds: Culture and World Development, xiv+409 pages. 
Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. 
Charlatan, Scientist, or Poet? Frank Hamilton Cushing's Search for a 
Language of Experiential Knowledge 
Curtis M. Hinsley 
In Cushing files in SW Mus lib, a photo of Cushing, full-length, standing in 
front of Navajo blkts, arms folded, dressed as a Zuni... Presented to SW Mus 
by F W Hodge, Mar 13, 1950. On back of print, in Matilda Coxe Stevenson's 
hand (ace to Hodge note) in pencil, appears the following: "Frank Hamilton 
Cushing in his fantastic dress worn while among the Zuni Indians. This man 
was the biggest fool & charlatan I ever knew. He even put his hair up in curl 
papers every night. How could a man walk weighted down with so much tog?
gery?" 
In 1973, at my first meeting with him at his Smithsonian Insti?
tution office, Bill Sturtevant handed me the above notation, 
which he had made at the Southwest Museum, in Los Angeles, 
a few years earlier, and thereby introduced me to the problems 
of Cushing, anthropological style, and scientific reputation. I 
have been indebted to Bill ever since for his generosity with his 
materials, his insights, and, above all, his constantly question?
ing mind. This paper, about style, specifically discursive style 
in the history of anthropology, is a small payment on a large 
obligation. 
My central arguments in this paper are that Frank Cushing, 
beginning in 1879, developed a unique, poetic style of report?
ing; that this style inhibited the acceptance of his archaeologi?
cal work on the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Ex?
pedition in the late 1880s; and that this gulf in turn accounts for 
the historical perception of his archaeological work as a scien?
tific failure.1 This paper analyzes the genesis and elements of 
that style, as seen especially in Cushing's marvelous journal or 
"Itinerary" of the expedition, which was written intermittently 
between 1890 and 1892 and which now will finally be pub?
lished (Wilcox and Hinsley, in press). 
Cushing's writings from the Hemenway Expedition fall into 
three parts: first, his "Preliminary Notes" (Cushing, 1890), the 
well-known programmatic statement of the expedition, which 
he prepared for the International Congress of Americanists in 
Berlin in August, 1888, but which was not actually finished in 
time for the meetings and was ultimately published in 1890; 
second, the unpublished Itinerary, which was written a few 
years later and is discussed below; and third, an obscure but 
significant set of notes entitled "Commentary of a Zuni Famil?
iar" (Cushing, 1893), written as an appendix to Song of the An-
Curtis M. Hinsley, Department of Applied Indigenous Studies, North?
ern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona, 86011-5018, USA. 
cient People, a Hiawatha-type poem by the Boston poet Edna 
Dean Proctor. 
Taken together, these writings between 1888 and 1893 pro?
vide a continuum of Cushing's style, ranging from a serious at?
tempt to communicate with an international audience of scien?
tific peers to acquiescence in the recognition that so-called 
scientific discourse was simply inadequate to the expression of 
his ethnographic and archaeological knowledge. As Cushing 
wrote in a letter to Edward Everett Hale as early as 1882: 
The life and language, the religion of the Zunis, are intensely poetic. With no 
amount of poetry to which my words or pen may aspire, can I hope to give to 
the world as I feel it, in listening to the rituals, folklore, or even councils of this 
innocent people, their imagery and their poetry and their quaintness.... I have, 
thus, inadequately told the truth about my Zunis; yet I have told the truth so far 
as my abilities enable me to. 
Here as elsewhere Cushing used the term "poetry" quite 
loosely, but his term and his sense of the problem substantially 
overlap the two senses in which I am using "poetics" here: 
first, the structures?syntax, vocabulary, figures of speech? 
embedded in forms of communication; and second, poetry 
more specifically, namely, the concentrated language forms we 
employ, relying on tone, sound, metaphor and metonymy, to 
communicate a reality that eludes more literal and denotive ex?
pression. The problem of Cushing's "scientific poetics" was the 
challenge of creating a form of communication that both con?
veyed Cushing's interlocutive knowledge and conformed to the 
discursive practices that were increasingly, at the Smithson?
ian's Bureau of American Ethnology and elsewhere, being 
called "scientific." 
Cushing began to develop his authorial voice during his 
years with the Zunis (1879-1884), and it first emerged with 
clarity in his brilliant "Zuni Breadstuff series of 1884-1885; 
however, he carried his problems of communication into his ar?
chaeology for the Hemenway Expedition. In the paper prepared 
for the 1888 International Congress of Americanists, Cushing 
(1890:151-152) announced that he had come to believe that "a 
people carry through all succeeding environments?relatively 
unmodified?the impress or the Idea of the earliest environ?
ment which affected their culture." Therefore, the tasks of the 
anthropologist are, he suggested, "the ascertainment of...what 
Idea possessed" a people, the origin and history of the idea, and 
how it influenced or modified all other ideas and institutions of 
55 
56 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
the culture. Cushing (1890:151-152) had various terms for this 
dominant cultural idea: the "Culture-soul," the "living soul," or 
the "dominating or all-fashioning Idea" of a people. 
Whatever the name, the search for the idea within a cultural 
configuration involved two stages, the first of which Cushing 
felt he had already accomplished at Zuni pueblo: he had estab?
lished the seven-fold (septenary) nature of Zuni life and had 
isolated the search for the middle (or center) of the world as the 
organizing principle of Zuni culture. It now remained for him, 
through his archaeology for the Hemenway Expedition, to trace 
both the Zunis and their central cultural idea back through time 
and space to their origins. This was the central focus of his ex?
pedition for Mary Hemenway, the wealthy Boston patron of the 
expedition. He sought a specific historical and migratory se?
quence, paying special attention to the relationship between 
people and the physical environment through time. It is impor?
tant to emphasize, however, that Cushing argued for the tenac?
ity of deep, original ideas?his entire method depended on an 
assumption of their perseverance. Far from being repeatedly 
shaped by environment and altered by historical experience, 
the mental structures of peoples, he wrote, give the framework 
to the world as they perceive it: "A primitive people, once hav?
ing conceived an Idea, rather modify (nominally) a changed en?
vironment to suit it, than modify it to suit their changed envi?
ronment" (Cushing, 1890:191). 
Such were, to use Cushing's own terms, his "working hy?
potheses" for his first sustained archaeological work in the Salt 
River Valley, near present-day Tempe, Arizona. But what were 
his methods in this pursuit? To answer this question, consider 
two passages from Cushing's Itinerary, that strange amalgam of 
travelogue, landscape sensibility, excavation descriptions, and 
interpretive ruminations. 
The first is Cushing's account of the afternoon of 3 March 
1887. The crew had been digging at the site Cushing named 
Los Muertos for two days with rich initial finds, and Cushing 
was about to begin laying out the grounds for detailed excava?
tion. He wrote that he would ask the artist of the expedition, his 
sister-in-law Margaret Magill, to be present for on-site sketch?
ing, that he wanted to get a camera, and that he would push the 
work hard for several weeks. Abruptly, though, Cushing's nar?
rative voice shifted as he remarked on the idyllic climate and 
purple mountain rims to the south and west. He continued in 
this vein: 
The sky, save for a few white and brown clouds hastily gathering today, so soft 
a blue, yet so bright that it seemed more than tinted?alive with liquid tur?
quoise as the ocean sometimes is?alive as a face is with blood. Then the great 
valley was raggedly green with mesquite groves, or olive gray with broad 
stretches of sage-brush level as lakes, and the whole plain seemed to wave 
tremulously, yet very slowly, in the tremendous but always soft flood of light, 
as though this light were in some sort of luminous gauze, and were swayed 
from side to side by the ceaseless winds. The two Mexicans sang at their eager 
work...and the covies of quail, scudding about everywhere under the bushes 
and across bare spaces, sang also for all the world like the fowls of an Eastern 
farmyard in springtime, but with a more gladsome and constant plaint. (Cush?
ing, Itinerary, entry for 3 March, in Wilcox and Hinsley, in press)3 
Cushing's reverie was interrupted at this point, though, by a 
sudden, violent late afternoon monsoon, which ended as 
abruptly as it started, after which a rainbow appeared: 
a splendid, dazzling rainbow, double (and at one point triple), and connected, 
yet cut into sections, by radiating bars of prismatic color and light. There it 
blended, on hands and feet (so it seemed to Weta [Cushing's Zuni companion]), 
over the whole great mountain-centered valley, between us, seemingly, and the 
flying clouds, and all the rain ceased far and near. Never before, except in 
Zuniland, had I seen anything approaching this in gorgeousness and sublimi?
ty?nothing ever so spectacularly swift! (Cushing, Itinerary, entry for 3 
March, in Wilcox and Hinsley, in press) 
The rainbow seems to have stirred in Cushing images of the 
Zunis' great Man-Worm of the Skies devouring the rain clouds. 
He now pursued this new connection: 
The relation of such fleeting scenes and incidents as these to the primitive his?
tory for which we were delving after the material data is sharply illustrated in a 
discovery made long afterward by me in the Maricopa Mountains, just under 
where the sun shone so brightly that day, for there I found a triple arch crudely 
depicted... two lower segments of which were connected by radiating lines 
precisely as had been the remarkable rainbow we saw on our way. Further elab?
oration there was none, but the presence underneath this of an emblem or fig?
ure of the sea-serpent... so sharply undulated that it expressed the rapid fleeing 
away of that which, of course, in this connection it was merely designed to 
symbolize, namely, the rain-clouds and rain?clearly showed that the Ancient 
City Dwellers, like the Zunis of today, held to an identical mythical interpreta?
tion and belief regarding the God of the Rainbow and associated phenomena. 
(Cushing, Itinerary, entry for 3 March, in Wilcox and Hinsley, in press) 
Cushing's narrative then shifted back to that evening's events 
in camp, but the significance of the storm-rainbow reverie 
should not be missed. Cushing had inserted the thread of au?
thority which runs through his entire account: seemingly im?
mersed in excavations, he experienced a series of natural phe?
nomena; drawing on his Zuni knowledge-experience, he 
"ceases to wonder," that ancient Zunis understood and depicted 
the rainbow as they did; this thought in turn reminded him of a 
rainbow petroglyph discovered nearby?after the 3 March ex?
perience but before the Itinerary writing?thus providing 
proof, to Cushing, of connection between peoples' present and 
past. Through a kind of triangulation, Cushing had established 
his position of authority between past and present, between ar?
chaeology and ethnography, by reference to immediate events 
on the expedition. Through the interplay?and the play?be?
tween his imaginative sensibilities and those events Cushing 
created an ethnographic past. The thread of his authority runs, 
then", through three critical points: his field data and observa?
tions (e.g., the petroglyph); the events of the moment (rainbow/ 
clouds); and his presumed knowledge of life at Zuni pueblo 
(the myth of the God of the Rainbow). From these positions 
Cushing derived an interpretation, as he moved from earlier 
suspicion or wonder?two of his most common self-descrip?
tions?to explanation and conviction. 
Two weeks later, in the face of rumors of Apache violence, 
Cushing and two companions undertook a reconnaissance of 
the Superstition Mountains. Exploration in the face of danger is 
vintage Cushing, and the account of this two-day adventure oc?
cupies a significant segment of the Itinerary. It centers upon 
NUMBER 44 57 
one eternally long, cold night of wakefulness in the mountains. 
As Cushing watched the shadowy mountain rims while his 
companions slept, his imagination sliped its moorings. In the 
Itinerary he described the experience as follows: 
I constantly scanned, through the long hours that succeeded, all these cliffs and 
forms, expecting that at any moment others would rise up from amongst them 
and, if unseen in so doing, cheat my closest scrutiny by their mimetic motion?
less. No change in those outlines occurred, however, until their nature was fully 
revealed, and in such stately magnificence that description is belittling. Yet 
when the moon had fully risen, there even it stayed, fixed like the stars, and 
with all this wondrous change no change seemed to have been wrought save 
only in my own looking; all the world seemed as dead frozen and stony as be?
fore, I only saw more, and more than ever it seemed as if Time would never re?
turn,?never! No wonder that the Ancients of that wondrous land tell of the 
countless destructions of men, monsters and cities, whole countries and re?
gions,?changed to stone everlasting! No wonder they sought such scenes as 
this for their mystic midnight rites and sacrifices, deeming these latter as last?
ing as the mountain they were laid in! And this thought became so suggestive, 
as with the growing light my dream of a dead and timeless nature became less 
dominant, that I felt already amply rewarded for all the toil and risk of our jour?
ney by this new light on our researches, dawning in my mind. (Cushing, Itiner?
ary, entry for 15 March, in Wilcox and Hinsley, in press) 
The key term in Cushing's account of night in the Supersti?
tions is "wonder"?"No wonder... they tell.... No wonder they 
sought." And his reflections eventually, again, dissolved the 
wonder of ignorance into the certainty of new knowledge. But 
what are we to make of Cushing's poetics, of his insistent in?
sertion of himself into his narrative of exploration and discov?
ery, his reminding the reader of his own catalytic role in the 
construction of his archaeological interpretation? At the time, 
the advisors to Hemenway were not impressed. William T. 
Harris, her close confidant, wrote to Cushing repeatedly to de?
mand and exhort from him the "scientific" results of the expe?
dition?if he did not produce them, Harris threatened, Cushing 
would be discredited: people would say that his "personal 
equation" had run away with him, that he was, as Matilda 
Stevenson had called him, a charlatan and a fool, perhaps even 
a madman.4 
Now, however, we are beyond the nineteenth-century hori?
zons of Harris or Stevenson. In her recent study, Imperial Eyes: 
Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt 
(1992:58-67) explored, among other genres, the natural history 
and ethnographic accounts of European exploration, analyzing 
the various linguistic apparatuses, as she called them, of the 
scientific enterprise that both legitimated scientific authority 
and globally systematized "nature." The language of taxonomy 
and, importantly, the presence of an invisible observer?actu?
ally an absence of person, but the presence of an authorial 
voice?were central to this project. According to Pratt 
(1992:29), "the systematizing of nature... is a European project 
of a new kind, a new form of what one might call planetary 
consciousness among Europeans." Following the circumnavi?
gation and mapping of the planet, through the nineteenth cen?
tury Euro-Americans continued the systematizing process with 
verbal descriptions of the interiors of regions previously only 
exteriorly outlined. Out of the chaos of these interiors the sci?
entist/observer, invisible and objective, presumed to produce 
order. As Pratt (1992:64) explained, just as the natural historian 
produced land as landscape and territory, scanning for re?
sources and investment prospects, the ethnographer produced 
indigenous inhabitants as bodyscapes and resources: "together 
they dismantle the socioecological web that preceded them and 
install a Eurocolonial discursive order whose territorial and vi?
sual forms of authority are those of the modern state." 
A hundred years ago the desert Southwest, from New Mex?
ico to southern California, was in the process of being imagina?
tively incorporated into the United States?a dynamic that has 
gone on continuously since, an ever deepening and self-elabo?
rating pattern of tourism and market consumption. In other 
words, the Southwest was, in effect, an internal colony of the 
United States national state. The beginnings of this process lay 
with Cushing's generation, and in important ways he certainly 
participated. But he also posed a challenge, perhaps even an al?
ternative, to the scientific discourse that Pratt has identified so 
closely with "imperial eyes": Cushing melded the present peo?
ples of the region with previous populations?the Ancient 
Ones, as he fondly called them?and connected them both, 
through mythologies, agricultural practices, religious rituals, 
and many other ties, intimately to the landscape. In so doing he 
provided them with a certain legitimacy and continuity in 
southwestern time and space.5 Equally important, from the per?
spective of the history of anthropology, Cushing presented his 
archaeological knowledge as the result of an internal conversa?
tion that derived in equal parts from indigenous sources (as he 
understood them ethnographically), his own psychological and 
emotional capacities, and direct field observations. I believe 
that he eventually came to trust this internal process com?
pletely, but in so doing, and so moving, he experienced scien?
tific "failure." 
When Cushing was fired as director of the Hemenway Expe?
dition, in July 1889, he was succeeded by Jesse Walter Fewkes, 
a Harvard-trained zoologist and college classmate of Hemen-
way's only son, Augustus. Fewkes knew no Indian languages, 
and on the train out to the Southwest for the first time he was 
madly reading Cushing's (1882-1883) "Adventures in Zuni." 
Fewkes worked many summers in and around southwestern 
pueblos in the 1890s, regularly turning out short, descriptive 
pieces that were as dry as the land around him. But where 
Cushing failed, Fewkes succeeded magnificently with his sci?
entific points, his factual bits and pieces. The "mania for facts" 
that David Shi (1995:66-78) has pinpointed as the bedrock of 
post-Civil War American culture did not, of course, banish so 
much as it obfuscated subjectivities of all sorts?class, gender, 
region, race, and other. But the requirements of professional 
status in fledgling field sciences, such as archaeology, simply 
did not permit latitude for the internal conversations to which 
Cushing so freely confessed. He flirted with failure, and, in his 
own lifetime, he found it. 
58 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Notes 
1. For background and discussion of Cushing's career on the Hemenway Ex?
pedition, see Hinsley and Wilcox (1996). 
2. Cushing to Hale, 16 Apr 1882, Zuni Pueblo, Edward E. Hale Papers, New 
York State Historical Society, Albany, New York. 
3. Several years after the Hemenway Expedition had disbanded, Cushing and 
his secretary Frederick Webb Hodge prepared a typescript entitled "Field Notes 
and Journal of Explorations and Discoveries in Arizona and New Mexico dur?
ing the Years 1887-88." Cushing generally referred to this account as the Itiner?
ary, a practice I follow in this text. This document will be published in Wilcox 
and Hinsley, in press. 
4. Harris to Cushing, 9 Nov 1891, Hodge-Cushing Papers, Southwest Mu?
seum, Los Angeles, California. 
5. For further discussion on this point with reference to Cushing's 1882 trip 
to "The Nation of the Willows" (Havasupai), see "Authoring Authenticity" 
(Hinsley, 1990, especially pages 468-470). 
Literature Cited 
Cushing, Frank H. 
1882-1883. My Adventure in Zuni, I and II. Century Magazine, 25 (Dec 
1882):I91-207;25(Feb 1883):500-511. 
1884-1885. Zuni Breadstuff. The Millstone, 9, nos. 1-12; 10, nos. 1-4, 
6-8. 
1890. Preliminary Notes on the Origin, Working Hypothesis and Primary 
Researches of the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedi?
tion. In Congres International des Americanistes, Septieme Session, 
Berlin, 1888, pages 151-194. Berlin: W.H. Kuhl. 
1893. Commentary of a Zuni Familiar. In Edna D. Proctor, Song of the An?
cient People, pages 27^19. Preface and notes by John Fiske. Boston: 
Houghton, Mifflin and Company. 
Hinsley, Curtis M. 
1990. Authoring Authenticity. Journal of the Southwest, 32:462-478. 
Hinsley, Curtis M., and David R. Wilcox, editors 
1996. Frank Hamilton Cushing and the Hemenway Southwestern Archae?
ological Expedition, 1886-1889. Volume 1, The Southwest in the 
American Imagination, xxxix+266 pages. Tucson: University of Ar?
izona Press. 
Pratt, Mary Louise 
1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. xii+257 pages. 
London and New York: Routledge. 
Shi, David 
1995. Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 
1850-1920. x + 394 pages. New York: Oxford University Press. 
Wilcox, David R., and Curtis M. Hinsley, editors 
In press. Frank Hamilton Cushing and the Hemenway Southwestern Ar?
chaeological Expedition. Volume 2, The Lost Itinerary of Frank 
Hamilton Cushing. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 
George A. Dorsey and the Development of Plains Indian Anthropology 
Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks 
Historians of anthropology agree that Franz Boas "was the 
most important single force in shaping American anthropology 
in the first half of the twentieth century" (Stocking, 1974:1). 
Reacting against the evolutionary theorists of the nineteenth 
century and their outmoded method of classifying cultural and 
social phenomena from simple to complex, Boas is credited 
with historicizing and relativizing anthropology. Moreover, by 
developing anthropology in the context of the university, Boas 
trained most of the next generation of anthropologists who in 
turn would teach in ever-increasing numbers at colleges and 
universities throughout the country. Over time, American an?
thropology became so closely identified with Boas that a his?
torical amnesia set in: anthropologists who were not trained by 
or closely associated with Boas came to be forgotten. As a re?
sult, the important work done by anthropologists outside the 
social network of Boas and his followers was forgotten. The in?
tention of this paper is to examine the career of one such indi?
vidual, George A. Dorsey, focusing on his contributions to the 
development of Plains Indian anthropology.1 
George Amos Dorsey (1868-1931), who held the first doc?
torate in anthropology granted by Harvard University 
(Dorsey, 1894), also taught the first organized class in anthro?
pology at that university. From 1896 to 1915 he headed the 
anthropology department at the Field Columbian Museum (af?
ter 1905 the Field Museum of Natural History) in Chicago, Il?
linois, and was a major force in anthropology during the first 
decade of this century. Dorsey was one of the founders of the 
American Anthropological Association (AAA), and in 1902 
he served as its first secretary.2 He served as president of the 
American Folk-Lore Society in 1903 and as vice-president of 
Section H (Anthropology) of the American Association for 
the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1903-1904. Dorsey 
was the second member of the anthropology faculty at the 
University of Chicago, serving under Frederick Starr. After 
moving to New York City in 1921, "Doc Dorsey" became the 
most successful popularizer of anthropology of his time. De?
spite his many professional accomplishments, Dorsey is not 
well remembered in anthropology today. Nevertheless, his 
Plains Indian studies, undertaken between 1897 and 1907, 
represent the first systematic ethnographic survey of the Prai-
RaymondJ. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks, Department of Anthro?
pology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 47405-7000, USA. 
ries and High Plains, and the results of those studies, pub?
lished or unpublished, inspire admiration even today and 
serve as a cornerstone for the anthropological understanding 
of the Plains area. 
Dorsey's Early Career 
Dorsey was born in the small town of Hebron, Ohio, on 6 Feb?
ruary 1868.3 In 1888 he received the Bachelor of Arts degree at 
nearby Denison University. The next year he went to Harvard 
University, where he discovered archaeology and anthropol?
ogy, and in 1890 he received a second bachelor's degree under 
Frederick Ward Putnam. 
In 1891 Putnam accepted the challenge of heading the ar?
chaeology and ethnology department of the World's Columbian 
Exposition, held in Chicago, with the intention of founding an 
anthropological museum there at the close of the exposition. 
Hastily, he began to send collectors throughout the Americas to 
procure material for the anthropology exhibits (Dexter, 
1966:315-316). Putnam sent Dorsey to South America, where 
he oversaw excavations and purchased collections in Peru, Ec?
uador, Chile, and Bolivia (Dorsey, 1900:249). 
In 1893-1894 Dorsey completed his studies at Harvard as a 
Hemenway Fellow and wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled 
"An Archaeological Study Based on a Personal Exploration of 
over One Hundred Graves at the Necropolis of Ancon, Peru" 
(Dorsey, 1894). After he received his doctoral degree, he was 
appointed assistant in anthropology at Harvard in 1894-1895, 
and the following year he was appointed instructor in physical 
anthropology. Among his students who later achieved promi?
nence in anthropology were Roland B. Dixon, Frank Russell, 
and John R. Swanton. Swanton later reminisced that teaching 
was not Dorsey's strength: "His nature was too restless and he 
was at his best when on the move as a collector and promoter. 
His lectures were little more than a replica of the textbook 
which he recommended to us, 'Precis d'Anthropologie 
generate,' by Hovelacque and Herve [1887]" (Swanton, MS:9). 
Swanton's admitted disinterest in physical anthropology, how?
ever, may have colored his evaluation. 
Putnam's plan for a permanent anthropological museum in 
Chicago, to be created out of the collections brought together 
for the World's Columbian Exposition, became reality on 26 
October 1893 with a founding gift of one million dollars from 
59 
60 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Marshall Field. The Fine Arts building was selected to house 
the new museum, and, as it was emptied at the close of the ex?
position, anthropological material from other buildings was 
consolidated there. Franz Boas, Putnam's assistant throughout 
the exposition, did the actual work of supervising the anthropo?
logical exhibits. On 21 May 1894 the name was changed to the 
Field Columbian Museum; opening day was 2 June. By then, 
Putnam, facing too many political problems, had resigned, as 
had Boas (after learning that he was to be passed over as Put?
nam's successor), and William H. Holmes, of the United States 
National Museum (now the National Museum of Natural His?
tory, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C), was appointed 
curator. In 1896 Dorsey was appointed assistant curator of so?
matology (physical anthropology), doubtless on Putnam's rec?
ommendation. When Holmes resigned at the end of September 
of that year, Dorsey was appointed acting curator of anthropol?
ogy, and four months later he was promoted to curator. Stephen 
Chapman Simms, who had been associated with the museum 
from its beginning, was appointed assistant curator (Field Co?
lumbian Museum (FCM), 1894:9-15; Dorsey, 1900:252, 256; 
Dexter, 1966). 
During his last three years at Harvard, Dorsey had devoted 
himself to the study of physical anthropology. Writing from 
Cambridge, he offered his services in that field to William R. 
Harper, president of the University of Chicago, noting that he 
had taken courses in comparative osteology, comparative verte?
brate anatomy, histology, and embryology and had studied 
anatomy at the Harvard medical school (Dorsey to Harper, 6 
Apr 1896, UC-A). He was appointed a lecturer in the Univer?
sity Extension program in 1896 and again in 1897. In 1900 he 
was appointed professor of comparative anatomy at Northwest?
ern University, and in 1905 he was also appointed assistant pro?
fessor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, with a 
promotion to associate professor in 1909. 
Dorsey as Field Columbian Museum Collector 
With a background in archaeology and physical anthropology, 
Dorsey was not well prepared to meet the immediate chal?
lenges of the Field Columbian Museum. During his first year 
he was largely engaged in inventorying, cataloging, and label?
ing specimens, and then reinstalling them. North American In?
dian ethnological material represented some of the strongest 
collections: two halls were devoted to the Northwest Coast, 
two to the Eskimo, and the largest one to the collections do?
nated by Edward Ayer, which primarily represented the Plains 
and the Southwest. An 1894 photo of Ayer Hall shows what 
Dorsey was up against: the space was filled with an assortment 
of vertical, flat-topped, and slant-top cases, salvaged from the 
exposition, that amounted to open storage, with objects identi?
fied by handwritten labels (FCM, 1894:70-75; Figure 1). 
Beginning in 1897 Dorsey initiated a series of expeditions in 
North America to fill gaps in the ethnographic coverage of the 
museum. He planned to organize exhibits around specific tribes 
and to include life groups made from casts and anthropometric 
measurements of living tribal members. Life-size figures repre?
senting various cultures, a popular feature of the anthropologi?
cal exhibits at the exposition, had been on loan from the Smith?
sonian Institution and afterwards had been returned to 
Washington (Kavanagh, 1990). Dorsey now set about replacing 
them. 
On his first expedition for the museum, from May to August 
1897, Dorsey was accompanied by Edward Allen, a museum 
photographer. On 12 May they left Chicago and went first to 
the Blackfoot, Blood, Flathead, and Kutenai tribes in Montana 
and Alberta. Dorsey was particularly pleased with their success 
on the Blood Reserve, where from 20 to 25 May they collected 
136 objects, including a ceremonial pipe. Dorsey (FCM, 
1895-1900(3): 186) wrote, "with this were collected costumes, 
etc., so that it will be possible to represent one of the scenes in 
the transfer of the medicine pipe" (see also VanStone, 1992). 
They then went to the Northwest Coast, where they visited the 
Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian, to photograph and record physi?
cal anthropological data for the life groups. By August they 
were in the southwestern United States, at the Hopi pueblos in 
Arizona and at Zuni pueblo in New Mexico, where they pur?
chased ethnological material to complement Ayer's collection. 
At Hopi Dorsey met Rev. H.R. Voth, a Mennonite missionary 
who had amassed a large collection of Hopi material culture 
and who was studying Hopi ritual life. In December Dorsey re?
turned to the Hopi with F.B. Melville (a sculptor associated 
with the Field Columbian Museum's Department of Anthropol?
ogy) to secure casts to be used for constructing Hopi life 
groups. On that visit Dorsey collected pottery and other mate?
rial from Hopi ruins. Most important, he arranged to buy Voth's 
collection and succeeded in hiring Voth to catalog and install it 
in the museum (Dorsey, 1901b:219). Voth worked on the 
project in Chicago from late January 1898 through April 1900, 
during which time he installed nine altar groups that depicted 
the annual round of Hopi ceremonial life. 
The pace of such a collecting trip left no time for any kind of 
ethnological study. Dorsey, who had a great sense of urgency 
for his work, recorded only the name of the object purchased 
and the price paid; when helpful interpreters were available, he 
also recorded amateurish renditions of the native terms for the 
objects. Occasionally he jotted down comments on design sym?
bolism or some other fact about a piece, but his records are 
frustratingly telegraphic, giving the clear sense that filling the 
museum with specimens while they could still be obtained was 
uppermost on his agenda.4 
After returning from the Hopi in January 1898, Dorsey re?
mained in Chicago for most of the year to oversee the catalog?
ing and installation of both Voth's and his own material (FCM 
1895-1900(4):277). 
The next year, 1899, Dorsey undertook another far-ranging 
expedition. In the summer he began by visiting the cliff ruins at 
Walnut Canyon, Arizona. From there he went to Ukiah, Cali?
fornia, where he had arranged to meet J.W. Hudson, a collector 
NUMBER 44 61 
FIGURE 1.?Ayer Hall, Field Columbian Museum, 1894. Courtesy of the Field Museum of Natural History, 
Chicago (neg. no. 8191). 
of California Indian material. Together they visited Porno com?
munities to make collections for the Field Columbian Museum. 
Dorsey then went to Tacoma, Washington, where he met 
Melville and his assistant, who made nine casts "intended for 
ethnic groups to show the native industries of the people of 
Puget sound" (Dorsey, 1900:260). The final stop on the trip 
was Vancouver Island, where additional casts were made for a 
large Kwakiutl ceremonial group to be installed in the museum. 
In December he returned to Hopi with Voth, not to collect, but, 
significantly, to record information for finalizing the exhibits. 
While there they witnessed and documented the Winter Sol?
stice ceremony (FCM, 1895-1900(6):444; Dorsey, 1901b:220; 
Dorsey and Voth, 1901). That trip was apparently Dorsey's in?
troduction to ethnographic fieldwork and represents a signifi?
cant breakthrough in his career. 
In 1900 Dorsey s summer expedition lasted from May 
through July. He visited the Fox in Iowa; the Shoshone and 
Arapaho in Wyoming; the Bannock and Nez Perce in Idaho; 
the Paiute in Nevada; the Ute in Utah; the Umatilla and Kla?
math in Oregon; the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre at Fort 
Belknap Reservation and the Assiniboine and Sioux at Fort 
Peck Reservation, in Montana; and the Sioux at Devil's Lake 
Reservation in North Dakota (VanStone, 1996). 
The next phase of Dorsey's work at the Field Columbian 
Museum began in January 1901. In a report to F.J.V Skiff, di?
rector of the museum, he presented a collecting plan that 
would "fill in the gaps" in Ayer Hall and transform it into a 
systematic ethnographic representation of tribes from the 
"Plains," a label he used broadly to encompass five linguistic 
groupings: the Algonquian tribes, from the Naskapi in the 
62 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Northeast to the Blackfoot in the West; the Siouan tribes, from 
the Santee in Minnesota to the Assiniboine in Montana; the 
Shoshonean tribes of the Plains, Basin, and Plateau, from the 
Comanche of Oklahoma to the Bannock of Idaho; the Cad-
doan tribes; and the Kiowa. The museum had no representa?
tion whatsoever from the Caddoan tribes or the Kiowa, and 
tribal coverage in the other three language families varied 
from good to nothing. Dorsey proposed a five-year project, 
during which he would spend three months each year collect?
ing in the field, to be financed at $12,000 above the current 
departmental budget. 
In the report, Dorsey pointed out that if this plan were to be 
acted upon, haste was essential for two reasons: 
In the first place as each year passes it becomes more difficult to secure 
good ethnological material. Valuable in the hands of the Indian, representing 
olden times, it becomes more and more precious in his eyes, and owing to the 
great interest at present manifested in the Indians throughout the country, 
which carries with it a desire for Indian things, there is a constant endeavor on 
the part of tourists, traders, etc., to get hold of this material so that for this 
reason the sooner the work be done the better. In the second place, this insti?
tution is not alone in the knowledge of the fact that there still exists valuable 
material among the Plains Indians, which if it is to be obtained at all must be 
secured at once. I need not say that all material retained in the life of the Indi?
an is to a certain extent limited in amount and so it would soon become a 
question of our having to take what other institutions had left behind, or in a 
majority of categories of objects!,] getting nothing. (Dorsey to Skiff, 17 Jan 
1901) 
Justification for the project was that the current collections did 
not "represent properly and adequately" the range of tribes in 
this broadly defined region. The very next day Dorsey sent a 
similar plan to improve the Northwest Coast collections. 
For Dorsey, museums were like research libraries: coverage 
of particular subjects must be as complete as possible for the 
exhibits to be of maximum value. Ethnological exhibits were 
valuable to the extent that they represented contiguous tribes in 
comparable detail. 
Dorsey undertook a collecting trip to Oklahoma in May and 
June 1901, during which he visited the Osage, Pawnee, Wich?
ita, and Cheyenne (he had heard that a Cheyenne Sun Dance 
was to be performed, but he found it had been postponed). Also 
during this trip, Dorsey met James R. Murie, a mixed-blood 
Skiri Pawnee, and Cleaver Warden, an Arapaho, both of whom 
would become important contributors to Dorsey's enthno-
graphic work. 
In November, Dorsey revised the plan he had submitted to 
the museum director the preceding January. He now proposed 
to devote more time each year to the Plains work, which 
would allow collecting to be completed by spring 1903. He 
would also share the work with Simms (Dorsey to Skiff, 8 
Nov 1901). The accelerated time schedule and the revised list 
of tribes to be covered reflected Dorsey's increasing knowl?
edge of the area as well as the activities of collectors from 
other museums. 
Dorsey as Ethnographer 
The new year, 1902, saw Dorsey firmly entrenched in the rap?
idly professionalizing field of anthropology and enmeshed in 
an impressive array of projects. First were the projects directly 
relevant to his position in the museum: overseeing both the ac?
quisition of ethnographic material from throughout the world, 
especially North America, and the installation of exhibits. Sec?
ond were ethnographic investigations already begun, most im?
portant his collaboration with Voth on Hopi rituals. Third, and 
increasingly dominant, were his studies of what he called the 
"social organization" of the Cheyenne and Arapaho and of the 
Pawnee and other Caddoan tribes. Just as he used the term 
"Plains" very broadly, Dorsey likewise used the term "social 
organization" to refer to the entire social and religious organi?
zation of tribes, with special emphasis on ceremonies and the 
myths that underlie them. It was in 1902, Dorsey later wrote, 
that he "became profoundly interested in the social organiza?
tion of the Pawnee, Arapaho, and Cheyenne, and used such 
time as I could spare in making observations on these subjects" 
(Dorsey to Skiff, 4 Mar 1905). To continue this work, in 1903 
he took a leave of absence from the museum on limited pay. 
During that leave Dorsey was apparently supported by the 
Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway, and he now 
had the opportunity to do fieldwork and write without concern 
for collecting. In a letter to the director of the Field Columbian 
Museum, Dorsey argued for the need to undertake ethnographic 
research to support collecting activities: "We have been re?
proached for not doing our share of the work of investigation. 
.. .In the truest sense of the term, investigation is really a part of 
the work of collecting, and the two should properly go hand in 
hand; but on account of the considerable expense involved in 
pure investigation I have aimed first, to see to it that the Mu?
seum side did not suffer" (Dorsey to Skiff, 10 Jan 1903). 
Using his rapidly increasing knowledge of American Indian 
cultures, Dorsey wrote Indians of the Southwest (1903c), a 
popular book promoting tourism along the line of the Atchison, 
Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway from Chicago, through Kansas 
and Oklahoma, and continuing across the Southwest to Califor?
nia. Despite his foray into popularization, Dorsey's ethno?
graphic work fully met the standards of the day for profes?
sional-quality museum anthropology, which was exemplified 
in the Plains area by the work of Alfred L. Kroeber and Clark 
Wissler, both of whom were students of Boas supported by the 
rival American Museum of Natural History, in New York. 
Dorsey's enthusiasm for Plains ethnographic study may have 
been in large part fueled by the interpreters with whom he 
worked, notably Cleaver Warden (Arapaho), Richard Davis 
(Cheyenne), and James R. Murie (Pawnee). All were educated 
in boarding schools, and each was committed to aiding the ef?
forts of anthropologists to record, preserve, and perpetuate na?
tive culture. Professional influences in anthropology may have 
inspired Dorsey as well. The first part of Kroeber's monograph 
on the Arapaho, presenting introductory material on social or?
ganization and a study of decorative art, was published in 1902 
NUMBER 44 63 
(Kroeber, 1902-1907); however, much of Kroeber's material 
came from his collaboration with Warden in 1899 (among the 
Southern Arapaho in Oklahoma) and in 1900 (among the 
Northern Arapaho in Wyoming). Kroeber and Dorsey worked 
independently, each going to the Arapaho to collect specimens 
for their respective institutions, but their studies converged to 
the extent that both were guided by the interests and perspec?
tives of Warden (Figure 2). 
During the five-year period from 1902 through 1907, Dorsey 
worked feverishly on his North American ethnographic 
projects, undertaking multiple studies simultaneously and be?
ing drawn deeper and deeper into the potential for describing 
other cultures. In January 1904 Dorsey reported to the museum 
director that the task of collecting to fill in the gaps in the North 
American material was nearly completed, and he suggested 
that the next collecting activity take place in South America 
and the Pacific (Dorsey to Skiff, 6 Jan 1904). For the next three 
years Dorsey sought to wrap up his Plains studies so he could 
move on to other projects; in no sense did he intend the Ameri?
can Indian ethnological work to be a lifetime pursuit. Despite 
his plans, the Plains studies took more and more time, and fi?
nally he abandoned them, leaving many parts undone?some 
nearly completed, others barely begun. 
FIGURE 2.?Cleaver Warden, Washington, D.C, 1895. Courtesy of the 
National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution (neg. no. NAA/ 
BAE:94). Photograph by William Dinwiddie. 
THE ARAPAHO 
On 27 November 1901 Cleaver Warden wrote to Dorsey from 
Darlington, Oklahoma, announcing that the Indian agent had 
given the Arapaho permission to have their Sun Dance the next 
week. Dorsey took the train to Oklahoma, arriving on the reser?
vation on 5 December in time to observe and photograph the 
entire eight-day ceremony. After the ceremony, Dorsey re?
turned to Chicago with Warden and Hawkan, one of the Arap?
aho priests, where they "spent two weeks, going over the de?
tails of the ceremony, inquiring especially into the symbolism" 
(Dorsey, 1903a:3-4), which allowed Dorsey to expand his de?
scription of the Sun Dance. 
Dorsey was pleased with the work he had been able to ac?
complish with Warden and Hawkan in Chicago, and in January 
1902 Dorsey hired Warden on a trial basis, instructing him to 
record information on Arapaho shields and men's societies 
(Dorsey to Warden, 27 Jan 1902).5 
During the summer of 1902 Dorsey visited the Arapaho in 
Oklahoma and collected material for the museum (Dorsey to 
S.C. Simms, 14 Feb 1903). He attended the Arapaho Sun 
Dance on 21-28 August and once again photographed the cere?
mony in great detail (Dorsey, 1903a: 157). Earlier in the year 
Dorsey's inclination had been to visit the Northern Arapaho in 
Wyoming with Warden, but he was pleased enough with War?
den's work that while in Oklahoma Dorsey proposed that War?
den go to the Northern Arapaho independently (Dorsey to War?
den, 27 Jan 1902; Warden to Dorsey, 1 Sep 1902). Later that 
month or early in October, Warden came to Chicago to consult 
with Dorsey, then he headed for the Wind River Reservation, in 
Wyoming. 
From late January through June 1903 Dorsey was in the 
field; this was the year of his partial leave from the museum. 
He was in Chicago early in July but left the museum again for a 
trip to Oklahoma, California, and Alaska, returning in late Sep?
tember (Commissioner of Indian Affairs William A. Jones to 
Dorsey, 16 Sep 1903; Dorsey to Jones, 30 Sep 1903). In No?
vember he left again, stopping in Oklahoma on his way to the 
Southwest. Before the end of the month he visited the Hopi, 
and during the first week of December he was writing letters 
from Albuquerque on Fred Harvey Company stationery. 
Warden continued to work for Dorsey throughout the year. 
His notebooks record syntheses of information on specific top?
ics rather than interview transcripts, and with the exception of 
some ritual prayers, they are all in English. The date of his re?
turn from Wyoming to Oklahoma is apparently unrecorded, but 
he reported attending a dance (probably a Clubboard society 
dance, one of the Arapaho age-graded men's societies) with 
James Mooney, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, who 
photographed the event. Warden wrote, "It will take me a little 
while to straighten the report of the ceremony" (Warden to 
Dorsey, 1 Dec 1903). Warden's work for Dorsey developed 
along two lines, writing traditional stories and describing the 
ceremonies of the men's societies and the sole women's society 
(all called "lodges" by the Arapaho). Dorsey seems to have felt 
64 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
an increasing desire to be directly involved in the work. He 
wrote to Warden from Albuquerque on 3 December 1903: 
"When I hired you I said that I should probably be able to give 
you work for at least two years...I am by no means ready to 
quit work among the Arapaho, but I am anxious to take it up 
with you personally; that is, I want to camp among your people 
for some time." 
Dorsey remained in the field until the end of April 1904, 
when he returned to the museum (Dorsey to Skiff, 4 Mar 
1905). Throughout the remainder of the year he devoted a por?
tion of his time to the Field Museum's involvement in the Lou?
isiana Purchase Exposition, held in St. Louis. 
The second part of Kroeber's study of the Arapaho, "Cere?
monial Organization," was published in 1904 (Kroeber, 
1902-1907). That summer Dorsey sent a copy to Warden. 
Kroeber's data had all been recorded in 1899 and 1900, but 
Warden and Dorsey had continued to work on the same topics 
since 1902. Dorsey instructed Warden: "Write out everything 
you know and have not already sent to me What we want 
now is additional information" (Dorsey to Warden, 2 Jul 1904). 
Following instructions, Warden set about describing the soci?
eties. On 1 August he reported that he had finished his account 
of the women's Buffalo Lodge and had begun writing about the 
Thunderbird Lodge. He offered this advice: "Mr Dorsey, you 
have to get a good priest of these topics to [come to Chicago to] 
stay and work out to the bottom of the lodges." On 17 August 
Warden reported that he had finished his description of the 
Thunderbird Lodge. Although Dorsey intended to go to Wyo?
ming with Warden that fall, it proved impossible, and Warden 
again traveled independently to the Wind River Reservation, 
arriving at the Arapaho subagency in early November (Dorsey 
to Warden, 12 Oct 1904; Warden to Dorsey, 9 Nov 1904). 
Warden continued to keep Dorsey apprised of ceremonial 
events in the Arapaho communities. Warden wrote on 6 Sep?
tember 1906 to tell Dorsey that the Lime Crazy Lodge was to 
be held near Calumet, Oklahoma; it would be the first perfor?
mance of the ceremony in 19 years, and Warden requested that 
he bring for it the ritual paraphernalia in the museum collec?
tions. Dorsey complied with the request and traveled to Okla?
homa, taking with him three distinguished visiting European 
anthropologists: Eduard Seler (Mexicanist from the Museum 
fur Volkerkunde in Berlin), Paul Ehrenreich (Brazilianist from 
the Royal University of Berlin), and Alfred Cort Haddon (from 
Cambridge University, leader of the 1898-1899 Torres Straits 
Expedition, the first multidisciplinary field party in anthropol?
ogy). They failed to meet Warden, however, and left before the 
ceremony was held, visiting the Pawnee on their return to Chi?
cago. 
The next month Warden wrote to Dorsey to say that the 
dance, delayed because of opposition from missionaries, had 
taken place on 6-9 October. "The Indians were very sorry to 
see you leaving the grounds.... It was a wonderful dance." At 
the culmination of the ceremony the lodge members danced 
into a bed of glowing coals until the fire was trampled out. 
"When they had a fire walk and a circular pass over [i.e., 
around the camp], it was a grandeur scene!" (Warden to 
Dorsey, 11 Oct 1906). The Arapaho were grateful for the loan 
of the regalia, and Warden promised to write an account of the 
ceremony (Warden to Dorsey, 16 Oct 1906). He sent Dorsey a 
small notebook on 12 December, suggesting that one or two of 
the priests be brought to Chicago to fill out the account. Dorsey 
replied on 18 December that he was too busy to work on the 
Arapaho but planned to do so at a later date; however, Dorsey 
never returned to his Arapaho studies. 
Nevertheless, he continued to receive letters from Arapaho 
correspondents. Faustinus White Antelope wrote from the 
Arapaho Agency in Wyoming in June 1907 to invite Dorsey to 
the Sun Dance and to enlist his support for it. Dorsey replied 
that he would like to attend the ceremony but did not know 
whether it would be possible. He added, "I do not think you 
will have any trouble with your agent in this matter, as it is 
none of his business" (Dorsey to White Antelope, 13 Jul 1907). 
The same day Dorsey wrote a strongly worded letter to Com?
missioner of Indian Affairs Francis A. Leupp asking him to ex?
plain why the Arapaho agent was allowed to interfere in the In?
dians' religious observances: "The sun dance like other Indian 
ceremonies will die a natural death, for it has served its day, but 
it makes me indignant to find certain agents in the West at?
tempting to dictate to the Indian his religious beliefs" (Dorsey 
to Leupp, 13 Jul 1907). 
Dorsey published two volumes based on his Arapaho work. 
The first is "The Arapaho Sun Dance: The Ceremony of the 
Offerings Lodge" (Dorsey, 1903a), which includes 137 plates 
that reproduce 177 photographs of the 1901 and 1902 ceremo?
nies and 10 plates of color drawings of the altar and of body 
paints of the dancers. The description is based on a day-by-day 
account of the 1901 ceremony, with comparative notes from 
1902. Description of the ceremony is supplemented with the 
texts of prayers and relevant myths and stories related to the 
Sun Dance, all given in English translation; much of this mate?
rial was provided by Hawkan during his visit to Chicago. The 
ethnographic account, moreover, is personalized by providing 
the names of all participants in the Sun Dance and their roles. 
All information was attributed to particular individuals or to 
Dorsey's own observations, as he did not hesitate to refer to 
himself in the first person as an active observer of the cere?
mony. Dorsey was at particular pains to try to understand the 
minute details of symbolism in the altars, dancers' body paints, 
and ritual actions, frequently referring to myths for the keys to 
explain what otherwise seemed to be meaningless detail. Con?
sequently, for ethnographic detail and thorough photographic 
representation of ritual this volume set a new standard in 
American anthropology. 
The second published volume, "Traditions of the Arapaho," 
coauthored by Dorsey and Kroeber (1903), includes 146 stories 
that the two anthropologists compiled independently (but both 
working with Warden), together with abstracts of each story.6 A 
strong point of this voluminous collection is the inclusion of 
NUMBER 44 65 
numerous variant versions. The stories are arranged in three 
categories: 15 origin stories relating to sacred bundles and soci?
eties, 47 trickster tales, and 84 myths and traditions. 
Dorsey's third volume on Arapaho social organization, soci?
eties, and art was never completed, although he had commis?
sioned an extensive series of line drawings and exquisite water 
colors of museum specimens to illustrate it. The publication in 
1907 of the final part of Kroeber's (1902-1907) study of the 
Arapaho, "Religion," which was illustrated with line drawings 
of artifacts from the American Museum collections, may have 
dampened Dorsey's enthusiasm for completing the manuscript. 
Moreover, publication funds at the Field Museum had become 
harder to obtain. 
Today, Dorsey's manuscripts, together with notebooks, 
drawings, and miscellaneous material from Cleaver Warden, 
are preserved in the Field Museum's Department of Anthro?
pology archives. They serve as testimony to the two men's col?
laborative method of working and form valuable resources for 
future study. 
THE CHEYENNE 
On 6 July 1901 Dorsey received a letter from Cleaver Warden, 
informing him that the Cheyenne and Arapaho in Oklahoma 
had received permission from their Indian agent to hold Sun 
Dances. Eager to witness the ceremony, Dorsey took the train 
to Oklahoma in August. The Cheyenne Sun Dance took place 
on the Washita River near Watonga. Admitting that he was not 
acquainted with the Cheyenne, Dorsey nonetheless wrote that 
he "was given authority by a council of chiefs to witness all the 
rites of the ceremony, and I remained throughout this perfor?
mance" (Dorsey, 1903a:2, 1905d:xiii). He was permitted to 
photograph virtually every aspect of the ceremony and to ob?
serve the ritual activities day-by-day, with the exception of the 
secret preparatory rites in the Lone Tipi. 
After observing the Sun Dance, Dorsey planned to bring one 
of the Cheyenne religious leaders to Chicago to revise and ex?
pand his field notes, but that proposed collaboration never 
took place. During the summer of 1902, while Dorsey was 
working in Oklahoma, he met, or became reacquainted with, 
Richard Davis, who would become his interpreter and collabo?
rator in the rest of his Cheyenne studies (Figure 3). Dorsey 
sent $40 to Davis for expenses, together with instructions for 
writing out Cheyenne stories in English. He was particularly 
interested in obtaining everything possible relating to tribal or?
igins, the medicine arrows, and the Sun Dance: "The old men, 
and especially the blind, are generally the best story tellers. Do 
not fail to get stories from women as well as from men. Insist 
upon the stories being completed; the longer the better. When 
you get hold of a good story teller, get everything he knows 
before you go to another man. Cover the ground thoroughly 
and make your money go as far as possible" (Dorsey to Davis, 
6 Sep 1902). 
FIGURE 3.?Richard Davis, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, 1904. 
Courtesy of the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago (neg. no. 15426). 
Photograph by Edward Carpenter. 
In July 1903 Dorsey again attended the Cheyenne Sun 
Dance, this time accompanied by Field Columbian Museum 
photographer Edward Carpenter. James Mooney, who was in 
Oklahoma working on Cheyenne and Arapaho symbolism, was 
also present. Davis served as interpreter, and the Sun Dance 
priests, at Dorsey's request, "appointed one of their number, a 
well-known chief and Sun Dance priest, by the name of Ro-
man-Nose-Warrior, who should devote his time to me. This ar?
rangement proved quite satisfactory" (Dorsey, 1905d:xiv). 
Early in the morning on the day following the conclusion of 
the Sun Dance, a young man underwent an ordeal of self-morti?
fication. Two skewers were inserted into cuts in the skin of his 
back and two ropes, each tied to a fragment of a buffalo skull, 
were attached to the skewers. The man dragged the skulls 
around the inside of the camp circle for 35 to 45 minutes; then 
66 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
a Sun Dance priest removed the skewers. The incident was 
photographed both by Carpenter and by Mooney (Dorsey, 
1905d: 179-180) but was also witnessed by others. When John 
Seger, the Indian agent, accused the anthropologists of paying 
the Indian to torture himself to gratify their scientific curiosity, 
the incident became a media event. Both Dorsey and Mooney 
wrote affidavits for the Indian Office denying the charge. 
In May, Davis informed Dorsey that Roman Nose had 
pledged to sponsor a Sun Dance during the coming summer: 
"You understand the situation down here and all Indians desire 
your assistance and from all other ethnologists who desire to 
witness this gathering so they [can] perform this ceremony 
without any trouble from Seger or any other Agent" (Davis to 
Dorsey, 8 May 1905). By then, however, Dorsey had already 
completed his Cheyenne Sun Dance book and had sailed for 
Europe. After he returned, Dorsey wrote to Davis on 21 July to 
explain his failure to attend the ceremony. On 3 August Davis 
wrote to Dorsey from Pawnee, Oklahoma, to announce that 
Agent Seger had resigned and to report that, although Seger 
had opposed the Sun Dance, he had allowed the Indians to hold 
it in July. Dorsey sent copies of the Cheyenne Sun Dance book 
with his reply: "I am very anxious to investigate more thor?
oughly the various medicine rites, and especially the arrow cer?
emonies and the ceremonies of the warrior societies among the 
Cheyenne, but as I say my time will be so occupied that I am 
afraid I can not get around to it, at any rate for several months" 
(Dorsey to Davis, 5 Aug 1905). 
In June 1906 Dorsey again attended the Cheyenne Sun 
Dance; Little Chief requested that he bring the buffalo skull 
and hide from the museum for use in the ceremony (Warden to 
Dorsey, 26 Jun 1906; Dorsey to Warden, 28 Jun 1906). That he 
would attend the ceremony suggests the sincerity of Dorsey's 
commitment to continuing work with the Cheyennes; neverthe?
less, he did not return to his studies of that tribe. 
The published results of Dorsey's Cheyenne studies ap-. 
peared in a single volume, issued in two parts. "The Cheyenne, 
I: Ceremonial Organization" (Dorsey, 1905c), is organized in 
two sections: "Ceremonies," which discusses the medicine ar?
rows, chiefs, and the men's societies, and "Myths," which pre?
sents five origin stories. Most of the material came from 
Richard Davis, including the diagrams and drawings, which 
were reproduced as 17 plates (most in color) and six figures. 
Dorsey wrote in his introduction: "These notes on the organiza?
tion of the Cheyenne are given in this form because opportu?
nity for further and more extended observation does not now 
seem possible" (Dorsey, 1905c:[v]). 
"The Cheyenne, II: The Sun Dance" (Dorsey, 1905d) is illus?
trated by 51 plates and 108 figures, which reproduce 197 pho?
tographic images depicting the Sun Dance, 11 diagrams, and 13 
color plates that depict body paints and reproduce drawings by 
Davis. The text describes the 1903 ceremony, with comparative 
notes from 1901 when relevant. In contrast to the Arapaho 
study, Dorsey's account of the Cheyenne Sun Dance is based 
on the notes he took while in the field and lacks the richness of 
prayers and associated stories that might have been recorded 
had he arranged to bring a Sun Dance priest to Chicago. 
Dorsey organized the volume to parallel the Arapaho one, 
thereby facilitating comparison between them. After a discus?
sion of similarities and differences, he concluded that the cere?
monies of the two tribes were "morphologically the same," but 
he was impressed by how much more forcefully the Cheyenne 
ceremony enacted the meaning underlying its origin story as "a 
drama epitomizing creation"?not the first creation, but "a re?
newal of creation, or of rebirth" (Dorsey, 1905d: 185-186). He 
ended the study with a call for further comparative study to de?
termine the origin of the Sun Dance. 
There are no unpublished materials relating to the Cheyenne 
among Dorsey's papers in the Field Museum. 
THE CADDOAN TRIBES 
Dorsey undertook the study of all five surviving tribes of the 
Caddoan language family: the Skiri and South Band Pawnee 
(the latter comprising the Chawi, Kitkahahki, and Pitaha-
wirata), the Wichita, and the Caddo?all in Oklahoma?and 
the Arikara in North Dakota. He planned to collect mythology 
and traditions from each tribe and to document social organiza?
tion and religious ceremonies. In his studies of the Caddoan 
tribes Dorsey depended on the collaboration of James R. Mu?
rie, who carried out most of the fieldwork. 
Dorsey met Murie during a 1901 collecting trip to the Paw?
nee. Murie was then collaborating with Alice C. Fletcher on a 
study of Pawnee rituals. Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, the 
mixed-blood Omaha with whom she shared her studies as well 
as her home in Washington, D.C, had known Murie as a student 
at Hampton Institute, in Virginia. When Fletcher first visited the 
Pawnee in 1898, Murie had provided entree to tribal religious 
leaders. In 1899 and again in 1900 Murie had brought to Wash?
ington a Chawi Pawnee priest named Tahirasawica' 'He Ar?
rives In The Lead' to record on graphaphone cylinders the pipe 
adoption ritual, to which Fletcher and Murie gave the name 
"Hako," and to answer Fletcher's questions about the ceremony 
(Fletcher, 1904:14-18; Parks, 1981; Mark, 1988: 274-277). 
One can reasonably conjecture that during Dorsey's 1901 
visit, Murie described the methods he and Fletcher had used to 
record the long and complex Hako ceremony. It also seems 
likely that Dorsey found their approach well suited to his posi?
tion as museum curator. Field Columbian Museum administra?
tors frowned on fieldwork that did not enhance the collections, 
but if American Indians could be brought to the museum, one 
could accomplish much more than was possible in a few hur?
ried days in the field. Dorsey invited Murie to come to Chicago 
during the winter and work with him, but, when reporting the 
incident to Fetcher, Murie noted with apparent satisfaction, "I 
have refused Dorsey" (Murie to Fletcher, 24 Aug 1901, F-LFP). 
Dorsey was determined, however, and wrote to Murie again 
in March 1902. That letter prompted Murie to seek Fletcher's 
advice (Murie to Fletcher, 2 Apr 1902, F-LFP): "Dorsey is 
NUMBER 44 67 
coming in two or three weeks and wants to hire me for two 
years. If I hire to him I shall let you know. He wants to take the 
Indians one at a time to Chicago and get all he can out of them. 
Do you think I had or not?" Also in this letter, Murie revealed 
the intensity of his desire to see the documentary work on Paw?
nee ceremonies carried out and his realization that money was 
the key to success: "O! Miss Fletcher there is lots to learn about 
these people. If I was rich I could sit down with them and write 
down what they tell me." 
Fletcher wrote to Dorsey about his plans to hire Murie and 
pointed out that she had been working with him for the past 
four years on Skiri rituals (Fletcher to Dorsey, 16 Apr 1902). 
Replying from Wichita, Kansas, on his way to Chicago, Dorsey 
informed Fletcher that he had taken his plans too far to aban?
don them and announced that he had hired Murie, who, he said, 
had been asking him to do so for the past year. He told her that 
he would be visiting Washington soon and would discuss the 
matter with her (Dorsey to Fletcher, 4 May 1902). 
For Murie, the pragmatic issue seemed to be who had the 
best rapport with the priests and who had the money necessary 
to support the work Finally, in May, he explained to Fletcher 
his reasons for taking the job that Dorsey offered: 
Before Geo. A. Dorsey left Pawnee I had made arrangements to work for 
him. He had been into several bundle ceremonies and I leam from Indians that 
he was making headway in gaining some of their secret & sacred ceremonies. I 
had telegraphed you of my rejecting his offer, which I did?; but he made other 
offers which I rejected and made some explanations to him thinking he would 
give me up. He made an offer, and was at my house [so] often, that I could not 
refuse and if I had not [accepted], he would have got everything so we could do 
nothing. Leader is now his best friend. I did not write you sooner for he prom?
ised to see you & Doctor McK.ee [WJ McGee, Ethnologist in Charge, Bureau 
of American Ethnology] and make everything alright.... In one of the ceremo?
nies he was permitted to say something and in his talk to the Indians he spoke 
of you very highly as doing the same work he was. I was very sorry to have to 
leave the work with you and go over to Dorsey, for his work is entirely differ?
ent from yours. (Murie to Fletcher, 28 May 1902, F-LFP) 
Dorsey's face-to-face conversation with Fletcher seems to 
have resulted in a mutual agreement, and in future correspon?
dence they maintained a collegial relationship. Fletcher was 30 
years older than Dorsey, and both got their start at Harvard as 
proteges of Putnam. They agreed that she would bring to a con?
clusion the studies she had already begun. In August the Hako 
manuscript was sent to the printer (McGee to Fletcher, 11 Aug 
1902), and on 6 September, after taking a long vacation to rest, 
Fletcher wrote to Dorsey from California inquiring about the 
progress of his Pawnee work. Dorsey's reply is not extant. By 
December, he had brought Murie and a Pawnee priest to the 
Field Columbian Museum, where they began their project 
(Dorsey to Skiff, 7 Jan 1903). At the winter meeting of the 
AAAS, held in Washington, D.C, Fletcher delivered a paper 
entitled "Pawnee Star Lore" (Fletcher, 1902), and Dorsey 
spoke on "Recent Investigations among the Pawnee" (AAAS, 
1903:501). 
Dorsey now faced the problem of funding Murie's work. In 
June 1902 Dorsey learned that he, Holmes, and Boas had been 
selected as members of the advisory committee on anthropol?
ogy of the newly founded Carnegie Institution of Washington 
(Holmes et a l , 1903; Charles D. Walcott, secretary, Carnegie 
Institution of Washington, to Dorsey, 3 Jun 1902, CIW-A). 
Soon after, Dorsey inquired about applying for a grant to subsi?
dize his work with Murie. Boas opposed the request, arguing 
that the work should be supported by the Field Columbian Mu?
seum because that institution stood to benefit from any collec?
tions made, but Holmes interceded, and $2,500 was granted in 
January 1903 to support the project (Boas to Holmes, 13 Sep 
1902; Boas to Dorsey, 23 Sep 1902; Dorsey to Holmes, 12 Jan 
1903, CIW-A; Walcott to Dorsey, 27 Jan 1903, CIW-A). 
In his proposal to the Carnegie Institution, dated 12 January 
1903, Dorsey stated that the object of the grant was "to com?
plete a study of the different tribes of the Caddoan stock, spe?
cial attention being given to (1) the rituals of the Pawnee cere?
monies and sacred bundles, and (2) the mythology and 
linguistics of all four tribes... .The field work would be done by 
Mr. James Murie, an educated Pawnee...who is connected by 
blood relationship with the leading Pawnee priests," while 
Dorsey would oversee writing up of the material. 
On 1 October 1903 Dorsey reported the results of his work 
with Murie under the grant (CIW-A; Carnegie Institution of 
Washington, 1903:xv-xvi). Murie had recorded some 70 Skiri 
myths, which, together with those Dorsey had previously ob?
tained, "form perhaps the largest body of mythology, so far col?
lected from any one tribe in America." Most of them had al?
ready been prepared for publication as a memoir of the 
American Folk-Lore Society. He noted that 35 of the stories in?
cluded songs but that he had not yet found anyone to transcribe 
the music. Murie had, moreover, recorded 40 Wichita stories 
and 80 Arikara traditions. In addition to recording myths and 
tales, Dorsey also listed an impressive number of Pawnee and 
Arikara ceremonies that he and Murie had witnessed?some?
times together, sometimes Murie alone. 
In 1904 Dorsey was awarded a second Carnegie grant for 
$2,500, which allowed him to continue to employ Murie. 
Dorsey was absent from the Field Columbian Museum until 1 
May to continue his study of Caddoan oral traditions in Okla?
homa (Dorsey to Skiff, 4 Mar 1905). In a report to the Carnegie 
Institution dated 1 October 1904, Dorsey noted that the previ?
ous fall and winter had been devoted to the study of Wichita 
mythology and that during the winter and continuing into the 
spring he had worked among the Caddo (CIW-A; Carnegie In?
stitution of Washington, 1905(3):83). Frederick R. Burton, a 
musicologist from Yonkers, New York, had come to Chicago to 
transcribe the music for the songs included in the Wichita sto?
ries; in addition, he transcribed about 200 Skiri ceremonial 
songs (see discussion in Burton, 1909:44-57). Dorsey also re?
ported that, to supplement the volume of Skiri stories just pub?
lished, he was preparing another volume of those Skiri tales 
that included songs, together with musical transcriptions 
(Dorsey, 1904d). He was also working on the collection of 
South Band Pawnee traditions. Finally, he reported that a vol-
68 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
ume of Arikara traditions, recorded by Murie, had been submit?
ted to the Carnegie Institution for publication (Dorsey, 1904c). 
Continuing the study of ceremonies, Dorsey brought to Chi?
cago for several weeks a Skiri priest who provided the rituals 
and songs of the Morning Star and Evening Star ceremonies, 
medicine men's ceremony, Four Directions bundle ceremony, 
and scalp offering. Tawakoni Jim, a Wichita ceremonial leader, 
also visited Chicago, and he began to provide information on 
rituals (Dorsey, 1904b:[iii]). In the cover letter for his report, 
Dorsey requested that he be funded at $3,000 annually for the 
next two years (1905-1906) to complete his study of Caddoan 
traditions and ceremonies. 
In April 1905 Dorsey requested that the Field Columbian 
Museum pay rail transportation for Murie to come to Chicago 
to work with him on the Carnegie Institution project; Murie 
would also help him prepare the Pawnee material for exhibit at 
no additional expense to the museum (Dorsey to Skiff, 2 Apr 
1905). Murie was employed on the project throughout the year, 
either in the field or in Chicago, although Dorsey himself spent 
May and June in Europe (Dorsey to R.S. Woodward, president, 
Carnegie Institution of Washington, 3 Oct 1905, CIW-A; Carn?
egie Institution of Washington, 1906(4):53). Murie witnessed a 
large number of ceremonies and recorded ritual songs, includ?
ing those of the Morning Star ceremony, and rituals relating to 
fire and the sun, on more than 500 wax cylinders. 
In October, Dorsey declared the Caddoan mythology work 
complete: he was reading page proofs of the Caddo volume 
(Dorsey, 1905e) and was revising the South Band narratives 
manuscript. He then repeated his request for $3,000 for the 
coming year: "With this sum I hope to bring to practical com?
pletion the accounts of all Pawnee ceremonies, with a full inter?
pretation of their rituals" (Dorsey to Woodward, 3 Oct 1905, 
CIW-A) While he was studying Pawnee ceremonies, Murie 
was also actively procuring sacred bundles for the museum, 
most significantly the Big Black Meteoric Star bundle, which 
contains a map of the heavens painted on hide (Murie to 
Dorsey, 16 Dec 1905). 
In early 1906 Murie brought to the Field Museum of Natural 
History (formerly the Field Columbian Museum) the Skiri 
Pawnee priest Roaming Scout (Running Scout), whom Dorsey 
characterized as "one of the most influential and perhaps the 
most learned of the Skiri today" (Dorsey, 1904d:329). They re?
turned to Pawnee, Oklahoma, on 6 March. The next day 
Dorsey wrote to Mooney that he had "been very busy with 
them," presumably working on the Skiri religion manuscript, 
which describes the annual round of ceremonial life. On 6 Sep?
tember Dorsey wrote to Boas to request his help with some lin?
guistic matters, then wrote more specifically on 24 September 
to say that he would like to come to New York to spend six to 
eight weeks studying Pawnee linguistics. Boas's reply was less 
than encouraging, warning that it would take a longer period to 
become familiar with linguistic methods: "I shall not be able to 
give more than a certain limited time to you, unless I should 
want to take up the study of Pawnee myself. ...Anyway, you 
may be sure that I shall do my best to assist you in your en?
deavors to familiarize yourself with linguistic methods" (Boas 
to Dorsey, 1 Oct 1906).7 
Dorsey's seemingly sudden interest in linguistics requires 
explanation. Up to this point he had been content in all his 
studies to rely on the translations of his interpreters. His inter?
est in the language itself may have been stimulated in part by 
the difficulty Murie experienced in translating the archaic and 
aphoristic ceremonial song texts, but it probably was not coin?
cidental that just at this time, the summer of 1906, William 
Jones moved to Chicago (Figure 4). A member of the Fox 
tribe, Jones was trained by Boas in linguistics and received his 
doctoral degree in 1904 (Boas, 1909). He had already re?
corded a collection of Fox texts and in 1906 was preparing for 
publication a collection of Ojibwa texts recorded under a grant 
from the Carnegie Institution. It thus seems likely that through 
personal contact Dorsey was attracted to the linguistic side of 
anthropology, which had not been available at Harvard. At the 
same time, because both were graduates of Hampton Institute, 
FIGURE 4.?Left to right, George A. Dorsey, William Jones (standing), and 
James R. Murie. Brooklyn Museum of Art Archives, Stewart Culin Archival 
Collection, Expeditions [2.1], "Report on a Collecting Trip Among the Indians 
of New Mexico and California, May-September 1907," page 212a. 
NUMBER 44 69 
it seems likely that Murie would have found Jones to be an 
impressive role model. 
In September 1906 Dorsey hosted the visit from Haddon, 
Seler, and Ehrenreich (see "The Arapaho," above). At the end 
of the month, after their failure to connect with Warden at the 
scheduled Arapaho Lime Crazy Lodge, they visited Pawnee, 
where they witnessed the performance of the Morning Star cer?
emony (see Haddon's account in Duke, 1989). 
The problem of transcribing the recorded Pawnee ritual music 
remained unsolved. Burton had made a start, but like other mu?
sicologists of his day, he harmonized American Indian music 
for the piano, thereby transposing native musical forms into a 
western one. Dorsey therefore sought to enlist the aid of Erich 
M. von Hornbostel, of the Psychological Institute in Berlin, one 
of the founders of the field that would become known as ethno-
musicology. Von Hombostel's work applied "the concepts and 
methods of acoustics, psychology and physiology to the study 
of non-European musical cultures" (Katz, 1980:716). Dorsey 
wrote to von Hornbostel, inviting him to come to the United 
States to study Pawnee music. Von Hornbostel responded favor?
ably on 4 June 1906, stating that he could come in October. In 
his annual report to the Carnegie Institution dated 15 October 
1906, Dorsey noted that von Hornbostel was in Chicago tran?
scribing and studying the recorded Pawnee music (CIW-A; Car?
negie Institution of Washington, 1907(5):55-56). 
In his report Dorsey stated that in June he had submitted for 
publication the first part of a two-part monograph on Pawnee 
myths. The first part comprised the South Band stories as well 
as the Skiri tales that included songs (Dorsey, 1906c). He an?
ticipated that the second part, containing the texts and musical 
transcriptions of songs that were sung as a part of the stories, 
as well as his comparative study of Caddoan mythology, 
would, with von Hombostel's assistance, be completed by the 
end of the year. The greater part of 1906, however, had been 
devoted to working on an account of Skiri Pawnee society and 
religion, which was about three-fourths written. In a separate 
application letter, Dorsey asked a fifth time for continued sup?
port in the amount of $2,000: "I should have preferred greatly 
to have brought my investigation to a close this year and not to 
have asked for another grant, inasmuch as my Pawnee re?
searches have been consuming each year an increasing amount 
of time. In fact, my time this year has been almost entirely 
spent on this subject" (Dorsey to Carnegie Institution of Wash?
ington, 15 Oct 1906, CIW-A). The funds were to pay for Mu?
rie's continued work, as well as the services of a stenographer 
and typist. 
About the beginning of November 1906, Murie went to 
Oklahoma with von Hornbostel. Meanwhile, Dorsey reported 
that he was continuing his linguistic studies: "I have kept old 
Scout here with me and have succeeded in getting a fine lot of 
tales, narratives, explanations, etc. on long phonographic cylin?
ders; all of which I hope to bring out in the form of a volume of 
texts" (Dorsey to Haddon, 13 Nov 1906). He also wrote to 
Boas about the recorded texts, characterizing Roaming Scout 
as "a full blood Pawnee, who speaks no English" (Dorsey to 
Boas, 13 Nov 1906). It thus seems clear the Roaming Scout 
texts were recorded in October, after Haddon left Chicago and 
before Murie left for Pawnee. 
The texts fill more than 200 cylinders and amount to over 
seven hours of narration that cover a range of ethnographic top?
ics?discussions of life, death, the nature of mysterious power, 
healing, constellations and individual stars, and religious ritu?
als?as well as Roaming Scout's autobiography, reminis?
cences, and several myths. Later, Murie transcribed the Skiri 
text of the narratives and then wrote out a literal word-for-word 
translation of them. 
Meanwhile, Dorsey pursued his arrangements with Boas, 
writing to him again to ask whether he should bring Roaming 
Scout to New York?"The old Indian I have here who speaks 
no English"?or whether he should bring his interpreter 
(Dorsey to Boas, 19 Nov 1906). Boas chose the interpreter. 
Dorsey and Murie traveled to New York and began work with 
Boas in January 1907 (Boas to Dorsey, 23 Nov 1906; Simms to 
F.W. Antelope, 25 Jan 1907). Although there are no documents 
that record the day-to-day aspects of their linguistic collabora?
tion, the focus seems to have been on phonology and grammar. 
Writing Boas after returning to Chicago, he commented, "I 
found my work with you possessing a certain quality of interest 
that I had not known before" (Dorsey to Boas, 21 Mar 1907). 
Throughout 1907 Dorsey focused his attention on the Roam?
ing Scout texts. A typewritten copy of Murie's transcription is 
covered with Dorsey's emendations in red and black ink.8 
Meanwhile, von Hornbostel made steady progress on the 
musical transcriptions. On 5 April he wrote to Dorsey that he 
had a process for making galvanaplastic copies of cylinders 
from copper negatives?a process that would allow him to re?
tain copies of the cylinders in Berlin and return the originals to 
Dorsey. On 3 June he asked Dorsey for typewritten copies of 
the song texts accompanying the Skiri tales; on 13 August he 
reported that he had sent the musical transcriptions of the tale 
songs and had returned the typescript of the song texts. He told 
Dorsey he could begin on the doctors' songs in September and 
asked him to send transcriptions of the texts. When Dorsey ac?
knowledged receipt of the musical transcriptions, he reported 
that he had fallen behind on his end of the project: 
Murie returns to Chicago within a few days, and I will take up the matter of 
filling up the words of the songs, revising the words, etc. preparing the whole 
thing for publication. I should be glad if you will take the Doctor songs next, 
but I regret to say that they have not been translated. As a matter of fact the 
words of the songs have not even been transcribed, and I shall hardly get 
around to that matter during this year. You will understand that since I took up 
the linguistic side of the investigation that my big manuscript [on Skiri society 
and religion] has been pushed to one side and that I have done practically noth?
ing with it and the linguistic work will probably consume my time between 
now and the first of the year. (Dorsey to von Hornbostel, 11 Sep 1907) 
In September, Dorsey submitted an annual report to the Car?
negie Institution: 
The work of this year has been almost entirely of a linguistic nature. Recog?
nizing the necessity of being able to interpret Pawnee in order to translate prop-
70 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
erly the large number of songs and rituals which have accumulated during the 
past five years, the work of preparing for publication certain material already 
obtained was suspended and the writer accompanied by Mr. Murie spent ten 
weeks during the winter in New York, where, under the direction of Dr. Franz 
Boas, the fundamental principles of the Pawnee language were studied and 
methods of recording texts, etc., were learned. (Dorsey to Carnegie Institution 
of Washington, 20 Sep 1907, CIW-A; Carnegie Institution of Washington, 
1908(6): 167) 
After returning to Chicago, Dorsey devoted himself to pre?
paring the Roaming Scout texts for publication, which, accord?
ing to his report, was a project he hoped to complete within the 
year: "These have all been transcribed and are now being veri?
fied from the records." He planned to introduce the volume 
with a sketch of Pawnee grammar and to use the texts to revise 
his manuscript on Pawnee society and religion. 
In a letter to Woodward, Dorsey asked for a sixth year of 
support (21 Sep 1907, CIW-A). Woodward's reply was not 
hopeful: "We have now reached the normal condition of educa?
tional and research institutions, namely, that of poverty" (25 
Sep 1907, CIW-A). Nonetheless, Dorsey submitted an applica?
tion to Woodward in which he asked for $2,000 to pay Murie 
for his expenses, his Pawnee consultants, and a stenographer as 
necessary, but it was denied (Dorsey to Woodward, 2 Oct 1907; 
Woodward to Dorsey, 24 Dec 1907, CIW-A). 
Dorsey's reply reveals no disappointment: "Owing to plans 
recently formulated by me for a rather comprehensive trip 
abroad, I am quite satisfied with the action of the Executive 
Committee. In fact, I was about to write to you that in case the 
grant were made that I should not be able to use more than a 
small portion of it [in] the forthcoming year" (Dorsey to Wood?
ward, 26 Dec, CIW-A). 
Dorsey was very busy during the fall of 1907. In addition to 
work on the Roaming Scout texts, he also lectured in anthro?
pology at the University of Chicago and in comparative anat?
omy at Northwestern University (Dorsey to Boas, 15 Oct 
1907). The reason for Dorsey's apparently sudden decision to 
abandon the Pawnee work in which he was so deeply immersed 
is not revealed in the correspondence. 
The published results of Dorsey's Caddoan project comprise 
five volumes of myths and tales, totaling more than 1,600 
printed pages, that represent each of the four surviving Cad?
doan tribes. "Traditions of the Skidi Pawnee" (Dorsey, 1904d), 
published by the American Folklore Society, begins with a sub?
stantial historical and cultural introduction and includes 90 sto?
ries illustrated with 15 plates depicting some of the narrators as 
well as bundles and other objects mentioned in the text. This 
volume includes more extensive notes than others of Dorsey's 
myth collections, but it lacks abstracts of the individual stories. 
The narratives were collected between 1899 and 1902 by both 
Dorsey and Murie, sometimes working independently, at other 
times working together. 
The other four volumes of myths and traditions were all pub?
lished in a uniform format by the Carnegie Institution; the vol?
umes are not illustrated, but they include story abstracts. "Tra?
ditions of the Arikara" (Dorsey, 1904c) presents 82 stories that 
Murie recorded in 1903. "The Mythology of the Wichita" 
(Dorsey, 1904b) presents 60 stories that Dorsey and Murie re?
corded in 1903-1904, with the assistance of Burgess Hunt; it 
also includes Burton's musical transcriptions. "Traditions of 
the Caddo" (Dorsey, 1905e) presents 70 stories that Dorsey re?
corded in 1903-1905. The final volume, "The Pawnee: My?
thology (Part I)" (Dorsey, 1906a), presents 148 stories, 103 
told by South Band narrators and 45 by Skiri narrators.9 Part 
two, which was to include the musical transcriptions and com?
parative study, was never published. The fate of von Hombos?
tel's musical transcriptions of songs included in stories in part 
one is not known, and Dorsey's comparative analysis of Cad?
doan mythology was never written. 
Dorsey's only publication of the voluminous ritual texts that 
he and Murie recorded on phonograph was "A Pawnee Ritual 
of Instruction," a brief fragment recorded by Woman Newly 
Made Chief, a Skiri, that presents a text recited to children dur?
ing the winter and refers to the origin of life, death, and the 
pipe adoption ceremony (Dorsey, 1906b). Appropriately 
enough, it was published in the Boas Anniversary Volume and 
was likely a text that Dorsey, Murie, and Boas had worked on 
together in New York. Inexplicably, the text is presented only 
in English, omitting the Pawnee. 
Dorsey also published a number of other articles on diverse 
topics relating to his Caddoan work: "An Arikara Story-Tell?
ing Contest" (Dorsey, 1904a), "Caddo Customs of Childhood" 
(Dorsey, 1905b), "One of the Sacred Altars of the Pawnee" 
(Dorsey, 1902a), "How the Pawnee Captured the Cheyenne 
Medicine Arrows" (Dorsey, 1903b), "A Pawnee Personal 
Medicine Shrine" (Dorsey, 1905a), "Pawnee War Tales" 
(Dorsey, 1906c), "The Skidi Rite of Human Sacrifice" 
(Dorsey, 1906d), "Social Organization of the Skidi Pawnee" 
(Dorsey, 1906e), "Hand or Guessing Game among the Wichi-
tas" (Dorsey, 1901a), and "Wichita Tales" (Dorsey, 1902b, 
1903d, 1904e). 
In addition to the published works, a large body of Dorsey's 
unpublished Pawnee manuscript material is archived in the 
Field Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and 
Indiana University; the cylinder recordings are preserved in 
the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University. Of 
these materials, the most significant are the Roaming Scout 
texts themselves, including the original cylinder recordings, 
Murie's transcription, Dorsey's revised transcription, and Mu?
rie's draft translations. This entire collection of texts has been 
retranscribed and retranslated by Parks in collaboration with a 
contemporary Skiri Pawnee elder (Parks, in prep.). Also sig?
nificant is the nearly completed monograph entitled "Skidi 
Pawnee Society and Religion," a detailed account of social or?
ganization and the annual round of ceremonies. Brief portions 
of the manuscript were later published by Ralph Linton 
(1922a, 1922b, 1923a, 1923b), and the section on social organ?
ization was published by Alexander Spoehr (Dorsey and Mu?
rie, 1940). A complete, edited edition is planned (Dorsey and 
Murie, in prep.). 
NUMBER 44 71 
Cumulatively, the published and unpublished materials by 
Dorsey and Murie provide a more thorough description of the 
Pawnee than what contemporary anthropologists had accom?
plished for any other Plains tribe. The volumes of myths and 
traditions, in fact, remain achievements that few anthropolo?
gists or linguists have equaled, and the Wichita and Caddo vol?
umes stand as the only collections of the mythology of those 
peoples. That the two men did not complete the projects they 
started is a great loss to anthropology, but the preservation of 
their research materials has at least allowed future generations 
to benefit from their work. 
Dorsey's Later Career 
Dorsey's 1907 report to the director of the Field Museum sug?
gests a sense of completeness to his Plains work. With the pur?
chase of new cases it had been possible to install all the Pawnee 
and Arapaho collections in the exhibit halls. Two of the three 
miniature dioramas of Pawnee ceremonies?representing the 
Morning Star sacrifice, the Medicine Lodge, and the Thunder 
ritual?were completed, and the third was well underway. 
(They are still on display today.) Moreover, Simms had re?
turned from a long trip to the Philippines, and now Dorsey was 
anxious for an extended trip abroad.10 
From January to December 1908 Dorsey's travels took him 
from Chicago to New York, England, Germany, Egypt, India, 
Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines, China, Japan, Hawaii, 
San Francisco, and back to Chicago. He kept in touch with his 
family by writing a regular letter diary of his experiences, 
which, upon his return, he showed to the editors of the Chicago 
Tribune. "The object of my journey," he later wrote in the Tri?
bune, "was to see several different types of human cultures and 
to ascertain at first hand the possibilities of ethnological inves?
tigation." Impressed with his 1908 journal, the newspaper de?
cided to sponsor Dorsey on "a three-years' tour of the world 
studying matters of vital interest in the development of and 
physical destiny of mankind" (Dorsey, 1908-1912). Of particu?
lar relevance would be Dorsey's investigation of the sources of 
American immigration and of political conditions in various 
places throughout the world. 
Dorsey was granted a leave of absence from the Field Mu?
seum and from his teaching positions at Northwestern Univer?
sity and the University of Chicago. In early July 1909 he 
sailed for Europe, arriving in Vienna before the end of the 
month. In the fall he moved on to Budapest. During 1910 he 
traveled around Hungary, Italy, and Austria, then went to 
Egypt and India. After spending the first six months of 1911 in 
India, he moved on to China. By January 1912 he was in Aus?
tralia and continued his travels until returning to the United 
States in October. 
In addition to his work as a newspaper correspondent," 
Dorsey was director of the board of the United Photo Plays 
Company, based in Chicago, which was exploring the educa?
tional uses of motion pictures. On some of his travels Dorsey 
was joined by photographers who took motion pictures in In?
dia, Japan, China, and other exotic locations; they were among 
the first travel movies ever made (Dorsey, undated memoran?
dum to Stanley Field [1913?]; clipping from Sigma Xi Quar?
terly, May-Jun 1925, in Dorsey, 1925-1926). 
Upon his return to Chicago, Dorsey resumed his position as 
curator at the Field Museum. He seems not to have continued 
any of his American Indian projects, however, and in August 
1915 he resigned ([Laufer], 1915). For several years he was oc?
cupied with writing and documentary filmmaking; after World 
War I he worked with Naval Intelligence, holding the rank of 
lieutenant commander. In 1921 he moved to New York, where 
he served as a correspondent for the London News. Beginning 
in 1925 he also lectured at the New School for Social Research. 
Just as early in his career at the Field Museum, from 1897 to 
1907, Dorsey had embraced ethnography with unbounded en?
ergy and enthusiasm, later in his career he embraced popular?
izing anthropology with the same unflagging energy and zeal. 
In 1925 he published Why We Behave like Human Beings, 
which rapidly went through many printings and editions. The 
book offered an evolutionary approach to humanity that 
sharply differentiated biological from cultural and historical 
factors. Publicizing the book, the Boston Sunday Post (1925) 
quoted Dorsey as rejecting the significance of race: "There is 
no such thing as a superior race. We are all just human be?
ings." Likewise, he poked fun at contemporary American gen?
der roles: "The girl doesn't cry for a doll and the boy for a 
drum, or at least not until the parents have taught them to do 
it." Written in a brisk, staccato style?one review character?
ized it as "jazzy" (Dorsey, 1925-1926), befitting the jazz 
age?the book touched a chord with readers who found in it 
answers to common human questions. 
During the 1920s Dorsey also published several other popu?
lar books. His writings culminated in Man's Own Show: Civi?
lization, published in 1931. Dorsey had completed correcting 
the typescript of the final chapter only an hour before his sud?
den death from an embolism on 29 March 1931 (New York 
Times, 1931). Dorsey's last book is a massive work (nearly 
1,000 pages) that examines the interplay of biological and cul?
tural factors throughout history. Dorsey took the broadest pos?
sible view, building on the accumulated works of anthropol?
ogy but taking them to a higher level of generality: "The 
anthropologist has been swamped in the attempt to find out 
and describe the vagaries of human culture. He could not see 
Man for the men, women, and children; he could not see Civi?
lization for the manners and customs; he could not see Life for 
the skulls and souls" (Dorsey, 1931 :-xiii). In this work, the 
richly detailed American Indian ethnography to which he de?
voted the early part of his career received not even a passing 
mention. 
72 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Conclusion 
During the decade that he worked on his Plains projects, 
Dorsey developed as an anthropologist. He began with an ob?
ject-oriented approach reflecting the necessity of preparing an?
thropological exhibits in the Field Columbian Museum. Ar?
ranged by culture area and centered around life groups, the 
exhibits provided context largely based on adaptation to partic?
ular environments. Soon Dorsey came to appreciate cultural 
context and the importance of understanding the significance 
of objects, particularly those representative of religious cere?
monies?an appreciation that led him to the study of social or?
ganization, mythology and other traditions, and to the docu?
mentation of ceremonies still practiced. Publication of the 
results of this research served as background for the Field Co?
lumbian Museum exhibits that depicted Sun Dance altars, bun?
dle ceremonies, and men's society regalia. Then, in the final 
stage of his Plains studies, Dorsey came to appreciate the rela?
tive superficiality of ethnography written without an under?
standing of the underlying concepts embedded in the native 
languages. His year-long study of the Skiri Pawnee language 
introduced him to the methods and complexity of such work, 
and to its time-consuming nature. 
At the same time, Dorsey pioneered many aspects of Plains 
Indian anthropology. He developed the first plan for the sys?
tematic study of Plains Indian religion and society, a plan that 
seems to have predated the similar one proposed by Boas for 
the American Museum and that was subsequently implemented 
by Clark Wissler. Field Columbian Museum exhibits led the 
way in combining life groups with exquisitely detailed minia?
ture dioramas. Dorsey's insistence that everything collected 
should be displayed lent richness to the exhibits. In his publica?
tions on the Sun Dance, he set a new standard?one never met 
again?for detail of photographic illustration. His dependence 
on educated interpreters to collect and help him organize data 
was standard practice of the day, but his bringing ritual leaders 
to Chicago for intensive interviewing and sound recording, 
though doubtless inspired by Alice Fletcher's earlier work, 
nonetheless was innovative, practical, and effective. His sound 
recordings of Roaming Scout, which represent not just tradi?
tional narratives but a wide variety of genres, including autobi?
ography, was entirely innovative and unmatched in his day, 
when most texts were written by interpreters or transcribed 
from dictation by anthropologists. Finally, his energy to under?
take multiple projects simultaneously, all at the same level of 
intensity and personal involvement, was nothing less than re?
markable. 
Dorsey failed to complete all the projects he initiated with 
Plains Indians, but his accomplishments loom larger than his 
failures. When his remaining unpublished work is finally made 
available in well-annotated editions for critical study, Dorsey's 
place as the major contributor to Plains anthropology in the 
early twentieth century will be secure. If he had not attempted 
too much, Plains scholarship today would be the poorer for it. 
Notes 
For access to manuscript collections we would like to thank Janice B. Klein, 
former registrar of the Department of Anthropology, Field Museum of Natural 
History, Chicago, Illinois; John D. Strom, facilities coordinator, Carnegie Insti?
tution of Washington, Washington, D.C; and Krista L. Ovist, archives assis?
tant, The University of Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois. We would like to 
express our special thanks to James W. VanStone, curator emeritus of the Field 
Museum, for encouraging our interest in Dorsey over many years. The manu?
script benefited from readings by the late James W. VanStone and Karen I. Blu. 
1. We have used the following sources for biographical material on Dorsey: 
Calhoun, 1991; Chicago Daily Tribune, 1931; Dorsey, 1908-1912, 1925-1926; 
Cole, 1931, 1944, 1952; Marquis, 1930; New York Times, 1931; and University 
of Chicago, 1914-1915. We have also cited unpublished correspondence. Cor?
respondence and manuscripts not cited to another repository are archived in the 
correspondence files of the Department of Anthropology, Field Museum of 
Natural History, Chicago, Illinois. Other citations of correspondence use the 
following acronyms: 
CIW-A File of correspondence with George A. Dorsey, Carnegie Institution 
of Washington Archives, Washington, D.C. 
F-LFP Alice C. Fletcher and Francis La Flesche Papers, MS 4558, National 
Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 
D.C. 
UC-A President's Papers, University of Chicago Archives, Chicago, Illinois. 
2. As secretary, Dorsey sent letters to some 40 leading anthropologists in 
April 1902, inviting them to become founding members of the new association 
and to attend the first AAA meeting, to be held in Pittsburgh in July 1902 in 
conjunction with the American Association for the Advancement of Science 
(AAAS) summer meeting (AAAS, 1901:355-357; Dorsey to Boas, 28 Apr 
1902 [form letter]; Stocking, 1960:2). 
3. For a fictionalized account of Dorsey's childhood, see Dorsey, 1917. 
4. Phyllis Rabineau (1981:32-37) has presented a brief overview of Dorsey's 
collecting activities, and Douglas Cole (1985, chapter 7) has discussed 
Dorsey's Northwest Coast collecting trips in considerable detail. Disapproving 
of the museum collecting expeditions of that era, particularly the clandestine 
collection of skeletal material, Cole was very critical of Dorsey, whom he used 
as a foil for Boas. Cole characterized Dorsey's work as "superficial," and 
charged that the 1897 expedition had "the character of a fervid rip-and-run op?
eration" (Cole, 1985:175). Although Cole's views are both biased and histori?
cally presentist, his negative portrayal of Dorsey has not been addressed in the 
literature on the history of anthropology. 
5. Dorsey initially hired Warden for two months at $40 per month plus $20 
per month for travel and expenses of securing information. 
6. For commentary, see the introduction by Jeffrey Anderson in the 1997 re?
print of Dorsey and Kroeber, 1903. 
7. In an often-quoted reminiscence written in 1956, Kroeber recalled a con?
versation with Dorsey "in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco before the earth?
quake of 1906," during which Dorsey confided that, for all his trying, he was 
never able to get close to Boas and remained "wholly shut out." Kroeber added, 
"For those who remember Dorsey and his energy, self-reliance, competitive?
ness, and hard-boiled man-of-business manner, this will seem a strangely af?
fecting confession" (Kroeber, 1956:156). Yet Boas's willingness to work with 
Dorsey privately in order to teach him basic linguistics suggests that Dorsey 
succeeded in developing the closer relationship with Boas that he desired. 
8. American Indian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, Bloom-
ington, Indiana. 
9. For further discussion of this collection, see the introduction by Douglas 
R. Parks in the 1997 reprint of Dorsey, 1906a. 
10. How Dorsey's extensive travels affected his family life is a matter of 
speculation. In 1893, after returning from South America, he married Ida 
Chadsey. They had two children, Dorothy Ann and George Chadsey. In 1922 
they divorced and in 1924 Dorsey married Sue McLellan. 
11. Beginning in August, the Chicago Tribune published Dorsey's photo-illus?
trated 1908 "Diary of a 47,000 Mile Journey" in 74 installments; in December 
it began to publish his 1909 letters in daily columns. 
NUMBER 44 
Literature Cited 
73 
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 
1901. Proeedings of the American Association for the Advancement of 
Science Fiftieth Meeting Held at Denver, Colorado; August, 1901. 
Boston. 
1903. Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of 
Science, Fifty-Second Meeting Held at Washington, D.C, Decem?
ber, 1902-January, 1903. 594 pages. Washington, D.C. 
Boas, Franz 
1909. William Jones. American Anthropologist, new series, 11:137-139. 
Boston Sunday Post 
1925. "Flirting Not Natural" Declares Dr. Dorsey, Harvard Scientist. Bos?
ton Sunday Post. 20 Dec. [See Dorsey, 1925-1926.] 
Burton, Frederick R. 
1909. American Primitive Music: With Especial Attention to the Songs of 
the Ojibways. 284, 73 [7] pages. New York: Moffat, Yard. 
Calhoun, Michele 
1991. Dorsey, George A. In Christopher Winters, general editor, Interna?
tional Dictionary of Anthropology, pages 153-154. New York: Gar?
land Publishing. 
Chicago Daily Tribune 
1931. Dr. G.A. Dorsey, Scientist and Author, Is Dead. Chicago Daily Tri?
bune, 30 March, 90(76):20. 
Carnegie Institution of Washington 
1903-1907. Year Book, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1-6. Washing?
ton, D.C. 
Cole, Douglas 
1985. Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts. 
xvi+373 pages. Seattle: University of Washington Press. [Reprinted 
in 1995 by the University of Oklahoma Press.] 
Cole, Fay-Cooper 
1931. George A. Dorsey. American Anthropologist, 33: 413-414. 
1944. Dorsey, George Amos. In Harris E. Starr, editor, Dictionary of 
American Biography, pages 258-259. New York: Charles Scribner's 
Sons. 
1952. Eminent Personalities of the Half-Century. American Anthropolo?
gist. 54:157-167. 
Dexter, Ralph W. 
1966. Putnam's Problems Popularizing Anthropology. American Scientist, 
54:315-332. 
Dorsey, George A. 
1894. An Archaeological Study Based on a Personal Exploration of over 
One Hundred Graves at the Necropolis of Ancon, Peru. 100 leaves 
with atlas of photographs. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. 
1900. The Department of Anthropology of the Field Columbian Mu?
seum?A Review of Six Years. American Anthropologist, new se?
ries, 2:247-265. 
1901a. Hand or Guessing Game among the Wichitas. American Antiquar?
ian and Oriental Journal, 23:363-370. 
1901b. The Stanley-McCormick Hopi Expeditions. Science, new series, 13: 
219-222. 
1902a. One of the Sacred Altars of the Pawnee. In Thirteenth International 
Congress of Americanists, pages 67-74. New York. 
1902b. Wichita Tales, 1: Origin. Journal of American Folk-Lore. 15: 
215-239. 
1903a. The Arapaho Sun Dance: The Ceremony of the Offerings Lodge. 
Publication, Field Columbian Museum. 75, Anthropological Series, 
4: xii+228 pages. 
1903b. How the Pawnee Captured the Cheyenne Medicine Arrows. Ameri?
can Anthropologist, new series, 5:644-658. 
1903c. Indians of the Southwest. 223 pages. [Chicago]: Passenger Depart?
ment, Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway System. 
1903d. Wichita Tales, 2: The Story of Weksalahos or the Shooting Stars. 
Journal of American Folk-Lore, 16:160-179. 
1904a. An Arikara Story-Telling Contest. American Anthropologist, new 
series, 6:240-243. 
1904b. The Mythology of the Wichita. Carnegie Institution of Washington 
Publication, 21: [vi] + 351 pages. Washington, D.C. 
1904c. Traditions of the Arikara. Carnegie Institution of Washington Publi?
cation, 17: 202 pages. Washington, D.C. 
1904d. Traditions of the Skidi Pawnee. Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore 
Society, 8: xxvi+366 pages. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mif?
flin. 
I904e. Wichita Tales, 3: The Two Boys Who Slew the Monsters and Be?
came Stars. Journal of American Folk-Lore, 17:153-160. 
1905a. A Pawnee Personal Medicine Shrine. American Anthropologist, new 
series, 7:496-498. 
1905b. Caddo Customs of Childhood. Journal of American Folk-Lore, 18: 
226-228. 
1905c. The Cheyenne, I: Social Organization. Publication, Field Colum?
bian Museum, 99, Anthropological Series, 9(1): [ix]+55 pages. Chi?
cago. 
1905d. The Cheyenne, II: The Sun Dance. Publication, Field Columbian 
Museum, 103, Anthropological Series, 9(2): xiv+ 186 pages. Chi?
cago. 
1905e. Traditions of the Caddo. Carnegie Institution of Washington Publi?
cation, 41: 136 pages. Washington, D.C. 
1906a. The Pawnee: Mythology (Part I). Carnegie Institution of Washing?
ton Publication, 59: 546 pages. Washington, D.C. [Reprinted in 
1997 by the University of Nebraska Press with an introduction by 
Douglas R. Parks.] 
1906b. A Pawnee Ritual of Instruction. In [Berthold Laufer, editor] Boas 
Anniversary Volume: Anthropological Papers Written in Honor of 
Franz Boas, pages 350-353. New York: G.E. Stechert. 
1906c. Pawnee War Tales. American Anthropologist, new series, 
8:337-345. 
1906d. The Skidi Rite of Human Sacrifice. In Fifteenth International Con?
gress of Americanists, 2:65-70. Paris. 
1906e. Social Organization of the Skidi Pawnee. In Fifteenth International 
Congress of Americanists, 2:71-77. Paris. 
1908-1912. Travels of George A. Dorsey. [Scrapbook of newspaper clip?
pings in the possession of Raymond J. DeMallie.] 
1917. Young Low. Ill pages. New York: George H. Doran. 
1925. Why We Behave Like Human Beings, xv+512 pages. New York: 
Harper and Brothers. 
1925-1926. Scrapbook. [Newspaper clippings and ephemera relating to 
Why We Behave Like Human Beings in the possession of Raymond 
J. DeMallie.] 
1931. Man's Own Show: Civilization, xvi+977 pages. New York: Harper 
and Brothers. 
Dorsey, George A., and Alfred L. Kroeber 
1903. Traditions of the Arapaho Collected under the Auspices of the 
Field Columbian Museum and of the American Museum of Natural 
History. Publication, Field Columbian Museum, 81, Anthropologi?
cal Series, 5: x + 471 pages. Chicago. [Reprinted in 1997 by the 
University of Nebraska Press with an introduction by Jeffrey 
Anderson.] 
Dorsey, George A., and James R. Murie 
1940. Notes on Skidi Pawnee Society. Edited by Alexander Spoehr. Publi?
cation, Field Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Series, 
27(2):67-119. 
In prep. Skiri Society and Religion. Edited by Douglas R. Parks, 566 
pages. [Manuscript in the editor's possession.] 
Dorsey, George A., and H.R. Voth 
1901. The Oraibi Soyal Ceremony. Publication, Field Columbian Mu-
74 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
seum, 55, Anthropological Series, 3(1): 1-59. 
Duke, Philip 
1989. The Morning Star Ceremony of the Skiri Pawnee as Described by 
Alfred C. Haddon. Plains Anthropologist, 34:193-203. 
Field Columbian Museum (FCM) 
1894. An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Field Columbian Mu?
seum. Publication, Field Columbian Museum, 1, Historical Series, 
1(1): 91 pages. 
1895-1900. Annual Report of the Director to the Board of Trustees for the 
Year 1894-95. Publication, Field Columbian Museum, 6, Report Se?
ries, 1(1-6): 512 pages. Chicago. [1(1895): 1-79; 2(1896):80-l 66; 
3(1897): 167-256; 4(1898):257-343; 5(1899):344-425; 6(1900): 
426-512.] 
Fletcher, Alice C. 
1902. Star Cult among the Pawnee?A Preliminary Report. American An?
thropologist, new series, 4:730-736. 
1904. The Hako: A Pawnee Ceremony. Twenty-Second Annual Report of 
the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithson?
ian Institution, 1900-1901, part 2:5-368. Washington, D.C. 
Holmes, W.H., Franz Boas, amd George A. Dorsey 
1903. Report of the Advisory Committee on Anthropology. Year Book, 
Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1(1902): 174?181. 
Hovelacque, Abel, and Henri Georges Herve 
1887. Precis d'anthropologic xi+654 pages. Paris: A. Delahaye and E. 
Lecrosnier. 
Katz, Israel J. 
1980. Hornbostel, Erich M(oritz) von. In Stanley Sadie, editor, The New 
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 8:716-717. New York. 
Kavanagh, Thomas W. 
1990. A Brief Illustrated History of the Manikins, Statues, Lay-Figures, 
and Life-Groups Illustrating American Ethnology in the National 
Museum of Natural History. 89 pages. [Manuscript in the possession 
of the author, Indiana University, Bloomington.] 
Kroeber, Alfred L. 
1902-1907. The Arapaho. American Museum of Natural History Bulletin, 
18. New York. [Volume 18, part 1, General Description and De-
coative Art (1902), pages 1-150; volume 18, part 2, Ceremonial Or?
ganization (1904), pages 151-230; volume 18, part 4, Religion 
(1907), pages 279^154. Reprinted in 1983 in 1 volume by the Uni?
versity of Nebraska Press, with a foreword by Fred Eggan.] 
1956. The Place of Boas in Anthropology. American Anthropologist, 
58:151-159. 
[Laufer, Berthold] 
1915. [Unsigned announcement of George A. Dorsey's resignation from 
the Field Museum of Natural History.] American Anthropologist, 
17:778-779. 
Linton, Ralph 
1922a. The Sacrifice to the Morning Star by the Skidi Pawnee. Field Mu?
seum of Natural History, Anthropology Leaflet, 6:1-18. 
1922b. The Thunder Ceremony of the Pawnee. Field Museum of Natural 
History, Anthropology Leaflet, 5:3-19. 
1923a. Annual Ceremony of the Pawnee Medicine Men. Field Museum of 
Natural History, Anthropology Leaflet, 8:1-20. 
1923b. Purification of the Sacred Bundles: A Ceremony of the Pawnee. 
Field Museum of Natural History, Anthropology Leaflet, 7:1-11. 
Mark, Joan 
1988. A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the American In?
dians, xx+428 pages. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 
Marquis, Albert Nelson, editor 
1930. Who's Who in America. Volume 16 (1930-1931), page 703. Chi?
cago, Illinois: A.N. Marquis. 
Mooney, James 
1905. Review of 77ie Mythology of the Wichita; Collected under the Aus?
pices of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, by George A. 
Dorsey. American Anthropologist, new series, 7:123-126. 
Murie, James R. 
1981. Ceremonies of the Pawnee, Part I: The Skiri; Part II: The South 
Bands. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, 27, part 1: viii+ 
1-182 pages; part 2: iv+183-497 pages. Washington, D.C. [Re?
printed in one volume in 1989 by the University of Nebraska Press.] 
New York Times 
1931. Dr. George Dorsey, Author, Drops Dead. New York Times, 30 
March, 80(26):21. 
Parks, Douglas R. 
1981. Biography of James R. Murie. In James R. Murie, Ceremonies of 
the Pawnee, Part I: The Skiri. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthro?
pology, 27':21-28. 
Parks, Douglas R., editor 
In prep. The Narratives of Roaming Scout, a Skiri Pawnee Priest. 830 
pages. [Manuscript in the possession of the editor] 
Rabineau, Phyllis 
1981. North American Indian Anthropology at Field Museum of Natural 
History. American Indian Art Magazine, 6(4):30-37, 79. 
Stocking, George W., Jr. 
1960. Franz Boas and the Founding of the American Anthropological As?
sociation. American Anthropologist, 62:1-17. 
Stocking, George W., Jr., editor 
1974. The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911: A Franz Boas 
Reader, xi+354 pages. New York: Basic Books. 
Swanton, John R. 
MS. Notes Regarding My Adventures in Anthropology and with Anthro?
pologists. [MS 4651, National Anthropological Archives, Smithson?
ian Institution. Washington, D.C] 
University of Chicago 
1914-1915. Annual Register. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago. 
VanStone, James W. 
1992. Material Culture of the Blackfoot (Blood) Indians of Southern Al?
berta. Fieldiana, Anthropology, new series, 19: iii + 80 pages. 
1996. Ethnographic Collections from the Assiniboine and Yanktonai 
Sioux in the Field Museum of Natural History. Fieldiana, Anthro?
pology, new series, 26: iv+91 pages. 
American Indian Migrations: A Neglected Dimension of Paleodemography 
Dean R. Snow 
"Migration" has been a taboo word in the archaeological lexi?
con for nearly half a century. Reasons for this were discussed at 
length by Anthony (1990) and Snow (1995), and some of them 
are quite sound. Yet the general avoidance of discussions of 
migration in recent decades has hampered our understanding of 
an important set of paleodemographic processes. This, in turn, 
has impeded realistic inferences about how human populations 
constituted themselves and how they deployed themselves on 
the landscape of the Americas before A.D. 1492; however, new 
interest in the set of processes covered by migration has arisen 
in recent years (e.g., Anthony, 1990). 
The production of the Handbook of North American Indians 
(Sturtevant, 1978-2001) has played a part in this resurgence of 
interest. By including both ethnographic summaries and ar?
chaeological syntheses, the Handbook has reaffirmed the utility 
of connections between ethnology and archaeology, and it has 
reasserted the utility of the uniformitarian principle in anthro?
pology. That is, that existing processes, or those of the recorded 
past, that effect cultural change can be expected to have ef?
fected similar culture change in the unrecorded past. 
Human demography involves several processes, not the 
least of which is movement across space and change over 
time. Everything from small, impermanent relocations to 
large-scale permanent migrations occur frequently in human 
societies, and these can involve either individuals or groups of 
various sizes. Yet until recently, archaeologists have found it 
convenient to disregard precontact migrations of American In?
dian populations as an important dimension of adaptation and 
culture change. 
Fuller understanding of why migration is important, why it 
has been neglected, and what kind of role it can play in future 
research requires a series of digressions. There are several his?
torical and logical reasons for the current state of affairs, not all 
of which may be obvious. There are also several conditions at?
tending future research of migration by archaeological means. 
Finally there are logical ramifications that have to do with our 
broader understanding of cultural evolution. I will address 
some of the more important of these digressions in turn. 
Dean R. Snow, Department of Anthropology, 409 Carpenter Building, 
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 
16802-3404, USA. 
Migration in the Era of Naive Inference 
Nineteenth century anthropologists generally assumed that 
American Indians had not been on the continent for very many 
centuries. Archaeology had not yet shown that human beings 
had been in North America since the Pleistocene, and it was 
not until nearly the middle of the twentieth century that this sit?
uation changed. 
If American Indians had not been long in North America, 
then there was little reason to be concerned about how hun?
dreds of very different American Indian societies had evolved 
from one or a few antecedents. Nineteenth century ethnologists 
were mostly interested in recording what they could of disap?
pearing cultures. It was an era in which most culture change 
was perceived as loss. Acculturation was seen as the gradual 
erosion of coherent pristine cultures that had flourished immu?
tably before the shadow of Europe fell across them. 
Early archaeologists believed that American Indian cultures 
were diverse but were neither ancient nor mutable, and they ar?
ranged their inferences accordingly. If a local archaeological 
sequence indicated that change had taken place in the past, then 
the standard explanation was that cultural replacement had oc?
curred, probably as an immigrating culture replaced the previ?
ous resident culture. If an archaeological culture bore no re?
semblance to any known North American tribe, then it had to 
be evidence of some extinct culture. In this way were born the 
Moundbuilders, presumed by many nineteenth century archae?
ologists to have been exterminated by the recent ancestors of 
Eastern Woodlands Indians (Silverberg, 1968). If a historical 
linguist could show a connection between two widely sepa?
rated languages, then one could begin to speculate about the di?
vergence of specific cultures and their movements into their 
historically known locations. 
Thus, early in the twentieth century, migration was not 
merely a frequently referenced process in the study of culture 
change, it was often considered to be in itself an explanation. 
Human populations could be treated like chess pieces on the 
landscape and moved around to explicate migration scenarios, 
which in turn were supposed to account for culture change over 
time in local archaeological sequences. Migration scenarios 
abounded, but they were rarely connected to ecological or evo?
lutionary principles, so few of them measured up to anything as 
lofty as explanation. 
75 
76 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
The Northern Iroquois case offers a convenient example. In 
1916 Arthur Parker proposed that the Northern Iroquoians had 
originated through some unspecified process around the 
mouth of the Ohio River. He proposed a scenario that led to 
some groups crossing the Detroit River and moving northeast?
ward through southern Ontario. Those that moved farthest 
east, to the vicinity of Montreal, were the Mohawks. Ancestral 
Onondagas soon moved across the Saint Lawrence to take up 
residence in Jefferson County, New York. The remainder of 
the northern branch became the ancestors of the Huron, Petun, 
and Neutral nations. He supposed that at the same time the an?
cestors of the Eries, Senecas, Cayugas, and Susquehannocks 
had moved along the southern shore of Lake Erie to their his?
toric locations. Parker thought that the Iroquoians that Cartier 
visited along the St. Lawrence River in 1534-1541 were Mo?
hawks. He ignored clear archaeological evidence for a Mo?
hawk presence in the Mohawk Valley prior to the sixteenth 
century in order to argue that they moved there from the St. 
Lawrence after Carrier's visit. He appears to have given little 
or no thought to the processes by which Iroquois culture 
might have developed or to the probable time depth of those 
developments. 
By 1940 undisciplined speculation about migrations was 
spinning out of control. Maps with broad arrows of hypothe?
sized movements continued to be developed in ever more com?
plex forms through the 1950s (e.g., Emerson, 1959). The spec?
ulative scenarios, however, were often untested and usually 
untestable, their validity resting on the perceived authority of 
their authors. Worse, they often ignored the findings of both 
ethnologists and linguists. Despite assertions about the unity of 
four-field anthropology, archaeologists often cleaved to their 
data alone, and interpreted them by their own lights. 
Still, migration scenarios were consistent with contemporary 
Euro-American concepts of cultural development, known his?
toric Indian migrations, and at least some of the details of In?
dian oral traditions. The problem was the assumption that the 
practice of working backwards in time from the perceived real?
ities of recorded history would reveal an accurate portrait of 
prehistory. 
Beginning around the middle of the twentieth century, many 
American archaeologists found good reason to reject the mi?
gration scenarios offered up by earlier students of American 
Indian societies. By that time most of the earlier scenarios 
were regarded as clearly simplistic in character and tainted as 
well by older notions about American Indian societies and the 
ways in which they changed. The fundamental misconception 
went all the way back to pre-Darwinian ideas about the fixity 
of species and races. Cultures, too, were regarded by many re?
searchers as well-bounded and fixed in terms of their at?
tributes. The work of Lewis Henry Morgan and other nine?
teenth-century cultural evolut ionis ts might have led 
anthropological thought away from the fallacy, but here too 
there were errors. By encumbering the study of culture change 
with the ideas that all societies evolved through a common se?
ries of stages and (worse) that progress was an inherent part of 
the process, the evolutionists ignored some of Darwin's most 
profound insights and set themselves up to be discredited by 
twentieth-century anthropologists. Franz Boas led the disci?
pline back to particularistic descriptive studies, and culture 
change quickly came to be couched in terms of acculturation. 
Kroeber (1948:425) defined acculturation as "those changes 
produced in a culture by the influence of another culture 
which result in an increased similarity of the two." This defini?
tion was sufficiently vague and lacking in specific mechanism 
to be simultaneously almost meaningless and very popular 
among anthropologists. Barnett (1953) later provided a mech?
anism derived from Gestalt psychology, but it was largely ig?
nored. The outcome was that American anthropologists, who 
in the early twentieth century were studying mainly American 
Indian cultures, were impressed by the dominance of Euro-
American culture in the acculturation process. Under the cir?
cumstances, American Indian cultures seemed to be doing 
most of the changing, and change for them was mainly a mat?
ter of cultural erosion in the face of the expanding dominant 
culture. 
American archaeologists shared ideas, departments, and of?
fice space with cultural anthropologists whose main goals 
were to recover and describe American Indian cultures before 
they disintegrated completely. It was not difficult to think of 
precontact cultures that were by this time nostalgic memories 
as having once been coherent and vibrant societies. In the rush 
to record them before they disappeared there was not much in?
terest in exploring how they got to be what they were in the 
first place. Culture change, after all, was most familiar in its 
more recent form, which was in turn a very sad story of loss 
and despair. 
The Demobilization of Prehistory 
By the middle of the twentieth century it was clear that Ameri?
can Indians had been in North America for a very long time, a 
dozen millennia rather than a few centuries. It was also clear 
that complex American Indian societies had evolved from sim?
pler forms and that despite the efforts of diffusion buffs to 
prove otherwise, they had done so in almost complete isolation 
from the rest of the world. Finally, it was clear that the environ?
ments of North America had also changed dramatically over 
the course of recent millennia. There had been a long Archaic 
period between Paleo-Indians and the horticultural societies of 
late prehistory, and there had necessarily been long sequences 
of evolutionary change. That being the case, it was no longer 
possible to explain long archaeological sequences by reference 
to the migrations of unchanging cultures. The focus shifted to 
culture change and efforts to relate that change to environmen?
tal change. 
James Griffin (1944, 1946), of the University of Michigan, 
was among the first to call for an end to the use of imaginary 
migrations as pseudo-explanations of the archaeological 
NUMBER 44 77 
record. Griffin and others sought to understand culture change 
over time, and the notions that prehistoric Indian societies were 
both largely unchanging and at the same time not stationary 
were of no help at all. The critics saw no objective means to 
choose between equally plausible (or implausible) scenarios. 
This kind of criticism led archaeologists to focus the burden 
of proof on migration hypotheses, leaving presumed immobil?
ity (rather than simple uncertainty) as the default hypothesis. 
Griffin trained an entire generation of young archaeologists to 
think in terms of in-place culture change as cultural adaptation. 
Irving Rouse (1958) promoted the principle that migration had 
to be demonstrated case by case and that in the absence of evi?
dence one should always assume that migration had not oc?
curred. Rouse put the burden of proof on any migration hy?
pothesis, insisting that unless certain criteria were met, one 
must assume that no migration occurred. The main points of 
his argument were that (1) an in-migrating group must be 
identified as an intrusive unit; (2) the unit must be traceable to 
a homeland; (3) it must be determined that all archaeological 
occurrences of the unit are contemporaneous; (4) favorable 
conditions for the migration must be identified; and (5) more 
economical hypotheses, such as trait diffusion, trade, or inde?
pendent development, must be tested and rejected. The very 
rigorous nature of these criteria is an indication of the strength 
of the general reaction against freewheeling migration scenar?
ios by the end of the 1950s. The change was a boon to archae?
ologists who had labored long and often fruitlessly to control 
three intractable variables: physical form, space, and time. By 
eliminating the spatial dimension in all but a few well-demon?
strated cases, archaeologists could concentrate on examining 
variations in artifact forms over time. 
The approach prevailed during the decades in which most re?
gional sequences were constructed. Willey and Phillips (1958) 
codified the approach to American archaeology known as cul?
ture history in their well-known book on method and theory. 
Their framework provided a means of organizing archaeologi?
cal evidence in local and regional sequences, which was in?
creasingly important as radiocarbon dating emerged to supple?
ment stratigraphy as a primary means of organizing the 
temporal dimension. 
Variation of forms over time became a focus of archaeologi?
cal attention. Some sequences, such as the main Southwestern 
traditions, were understood well enough to allow for explica?
tion of expansions and contractions in regional space as well, 
but most regional sequences were presented more simply, in fa?
miliar chronological charts like those scattered through Wil-
ley's 1966 book on the archaeology of North and Middle 
America. This approach to culture history came to be so well 
established that it even survived the revolution of the New Ar?
chaeology in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet the ploy of simply ig?
noring spatial movement has, as David Anthony (1990) put it, 
discarded the baby with the bath water. 
The Conservatism of Processual Archaeology 
The discussion of change over time was facilitated by the im?
mobilization of the prehistoric societies being studied. Broadly 
speaking, the principal dimensions of archaeology are time, 
space, and form. If the researcher can hold one of these con?
stant, then variation in another can be understood in terms of 
variation in the third. Freezing the spatial dimension by outlaw?
ing most purported migrations accomplished this, and archaeo?
logical attention came to focus on local sequences over time. 
One can also freeze form in order to look at variation over 
space and time. Examination of the temporal and spatial varia?
tions associated with some specific artifact type is an example 
of this approach. Curiously, there was less interest in this kind 
of research at mid-century than there had been in earlier de?
cades. 
Looking at spatial distributions of forms at points in time ef?
fectively freezes time. This is usually done at the very large 
scales seen in historical atlases. The processual archaeology of 
the 1960s and 1970s built upon earlier culture historical ap?
proaches, notwithstanding protestations to the contrary from its 
principal proponents. Local and regional sequences were still 
necessary first steps. What was new was that archaeologists 
were concerned with understanding the mechanisms of change 
over time, not just documenting the key characteristics of that 
change. Yet attention remained focused on variation over time 
rather than space. The processual archaeologists, like the pre?
historic culture historians, were not much interested in migra?
tion or in other kinds of large-scale movement over space. 
Indeed, processual archaeologists in this era tended to regard 
human individuals and even societies as irrelevant to their in?
vestigations. The biological characteristics or language of a 
prehistoric community were not relevant to the processes being 
examined. Such things mattered little if the archaeologist was 
trying to understand how the group adapted to a particular en?
vironment or how it evolved when that environment changed. 
People are people, and one could randomly swap skin colors 
and language families without affecting the basic processes be?
ing examined. It should not be surprising that many archaeolo?
gists became ever more estranged from their colleagues in cul?
tural anthropology, biological anthropology, and historical 
linguistics in the era of processual archaeology. 
One major problem with this approach was that it denied the 
importance of information in the form of ideological traditions. 
The Norse died out in Greenland because they were stubborn 
Christians who refused to adopt the less civilized survival strat?
egies of their Eskimo neighbors. They obstinately wore woolen 
clothing rather than fur, and for subsistence they depended on 
cattle and sheep, which were at their ecological limits even in 
good years. A few tough years drove them to extinction, 
whereas the Greenland Eskimos fared quite well. Had the 
Greenland Norse been able to adapt quickly, as processual ar?
chaeologists typically assume a population would do, and as 
they could have done had their ideology not constrained them, 
they would have survived. 
78 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Ideology counts, and it is sometimes necessary to understand 
a society's ideological underpinnings to understand why it suc?
ceeds or fails in an adaptive crisis. I have found, for example, 
that it is impossible to understand the adaptational choices 
made by prehistoric Northern Iroquoians without also under?
standing their cultural trajectory, the path of allowable change 
set by prior adaptive successes (Snow, 1994). Adaptive choices 
made a thousand years ago conditioned others made centuries 
later, and all of them conditioned the characteristics of historic 
Northern Iroquoian societies. Thus a knowledge of Northern 
Iroquoian ethnohistory and archaeology serves an archaeolo?
gist better than a knowledge of their archaeology alone. 
Much the same can be said about European archaeology and 
the spread of Indo-European languages. Twenty years ago a 
processual archaeologist might have argued that the spread of 
Indo-European languages was a matter of some small periph?
eral interest but was fundamentally irrelevant to the study of 
European archaeology over the last several millennia. It is now 
clear that this is not the case. Renfrew (1987; cf. Mallory, 
1989) is almost certainly wrong in arguing that Indo-European 
languages spread into Europe with Neolithic agriculture. It is 
very likely that the Indo-European languages spread into Eu?
rope after 2000 B.C., carried by mobile equestrians who found 
it possible to dominate the indigenous agricultural societies 
(Anthony, 1995). The work of Sokal and others (Sokal et al., 
1991; Sokal et al., 1992) has shown that the genetic patterns of 
Europe have been in place since around 6000 B.C., long before 
the Indo-European languages could have spread westward, 
given the archaeological and linguistic evidence presented by 
Mallory (1989) and Anthony (1995). Therefore, the Indo-Euro?
pean languages must have been established by minority domi?
nant elites after the genetic patterns of Europeans had been 
largely established, a process that has many historically docu?
mented analogues. The case illustrates how archaeology, bio?
logical anthropology, and historical linguistics can work to?
gether to develop a more complete understanding of a complex 
process. It also illustrates that it is a mistake to assume a priori 
that migration is a demographic process that one need not 
worry about in processual studies (Anthony, 1990). Knowing 
what we know now about the Indo-European case, it would be 
fatuous to think that we could understand the processes of Eu?
ropean prehistory over the last 10,000 years without reference 
to human migration. 
The Implications of Eastern Woodlands Archaeological 
Data 
The steady accumulation of new data from the Eastern Wood?
lands has enabled archaeologists to see the patterns of prehis?
tory with increasing clarity. Contract archaeology has in the 
last 20 years led to surveys of areas seldom investigated in ear?
lier decades. As a result of that work and of the continuing ef?
forts of academic archaeologists, we now have a much clearer 
understanding of where human populations were concentrated 
at various times in the past. Just as important, we have new un?
derstandings of where they were absent. 
New computer technology, particularly geographic informa?
tion systems, has allowed researchers to control masses of data 
as never before and to see both archaeological and environ?
mental patterns at very large scales. David Anderson (1991) 
has published a series of regional maps showing the distribu?
tions of human populations in the Eastern Woodlands in A.D. 
900-1100, 1250-1300, 1400-1450, and 1540, as revealed by 
clusters of archaeological sites. Although data are not included 
for New England or for some periods in New York, a general 
Eastern Woodlands pattern is apparent. The home territories of 
the populations show spotty distributions at each time level. 
Although it can reasonably be assumed that intervening areas 
were used for travel and hunting, they were for the most part 
buffer zones separating population concentrations. Figure 1, 
which is simplified from Anderson (1991:12-15, figs. 2-5), 
shows that at each time level only a portion of the whole was 
made up of home territorial ranges. The spotty patterns in Fig?
ure 1 do not correspond well to the impressions of many re?
searchers familiar with the Eastern Woodlands, and that is an 
important point. Maps compiled to show the distributions of ar?
chaeological cultures traditionally have been drawn impres-
sionistically, with poorly known areas often assumed to have 
been occupied, rather than unoccupied. Anderson's maps are 
based on a more tightly controlled assessment of archaeologi?
cal data, including negative data resulting from recent surveys. 
Whether or not they are correct in every detail, they show a 
much more patchy distribution of archaeological cultures at all 
time levels than we have customarily assumed in the recent 
past. 
More important for present purposes, the locations of popu?
lation concentrations clearly shifted over time. Anderson 
(1994) has examined this phenomenon at a smaller scale for the 
period A.D. 1000-1600, showing that the Savannah River ba?
sin was occupied in some centuries but essentially was vacant 
in others. My own work has done the same thing for Northern 
Iroquoia. Figure 2 shows nearly all of Northern Iroquoia in the 
same four periods used by Anderson. Each site is represented 
by a point with a buffer radius of 10 km. Non-Iroquoian site 
data points are not mapped, but there is good reason to believe 
that the Iroquoian data are complete or nearly so. Even without 
site data on adjoining societies, it is clear that there were large 
buffer zones between villages and village clusters. Even if one 
increases the sizes of buffers in order to accommodate assump?
tions about traditional hunting ranges around settlements, large 
buffer zones remain between village clusters. 
Figure 2 provides more detail at a larger scale than does Fig?
ure 1. It is clear from both, however, that areas that were buffer 
zones in one period were sometimes occupied in others, and 
vice versa. In other words, we cannot account for change over 
time in the Eastern Woodlands without reference to migration. 
People must have been moving if so many areas were devoid 
NUMBER 44 79 
FIGURE 1.?Distribution of home territories of eastern North American societies during four time periods (after 
Anderson, 1991, figs. 2-5). 
of population during some time periods but were occupied in 
others. 
If one adds historical linguistics to the picture the argument 
becomes even more compelling. It was once widely believed 
that we would eventually be able to match most prehistoric cul?
tures in the Eastern Woodlands to historic languages or to their 
reconstructible ancestral protolanguages. Linguists repeatedly 
attempted to reduce hundreds of North American languages to 
a handful of families, but hypothesized ancient connections, 
such as the proposed link between Algonquian-Ritwan and 
Muskogean, were subsequently abandoned for lack of compel?
ling evidence. Most historical linguists now take the more con-
80 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 2.?Distribution of home territories of Northern Iroquoian societies during the four time periods exam?
ined for Eastern Woodlands human populations by Anderson, 1991. 
servative view that we cannot demonstrate the existence of 
fewer than 21 language families in aboriginal North America 
(Coe et al, 1986:42^45). Moreover, the reconstructible proto?
languages from which each of those families descended appear 
now to have been spoken within the most recent few thousand 
years. As archaeology has pushed the earliest appearance of 
people in North America further and further back into the late 
Pleistocene it has become increasingly clear that we cannot 
hope to match more than a small, recent fraction of prehistory 
to known or reconstructible languages. 
In other words, there must have been many language extinc?
tions in the past in North America. Leaving aside Eskimo-
NUMBER 44 81 
Aleut and Athapaskan languages, it can be reasonably con?
ceded that all others probably descend from one or a few origi?
nal languages. The earliest protolanguages were spoken so long 
ago, however, that linguists may never be able to reconstruct 
them. More important for present purposes is that the landscape 
of North American Indian languages, when mapped by lan?
guage families, must represent the completion of developmen?
tal processes that were played out over just the most recent mil?
lennia. Earlier processes cannot be reconstructed on the basis 
of linguistic evidence from recorded languages. We cannot rea?
sonably expect to ever be able to map the distributions of lan?
guages spoken around, say, 5000 B.C. in North America. 
The known distribution of North American Indian languages 
suggests that the speakers of many of them must have migrated 
within the last two or three millennia prior to Columbus. For 
example, the Cherokee are sufficiently removed from the 
Northern Iroquoians to indicate that somebody must have 
moved in the past. The Athapaskan-speaking Navajos and 
Apaches clearly migrated to the Southwest from western Can?
ada. The Siouan Catawbas and Tutelos of the Southeast must 
represent some migratory separation from the main block of Si-
ouans in the middle of the continent. The Algonquian Chey?
ennes and Arapahos (not to mention the California Algonqui-
ans) must have migrated westward from the main block of 
Algonquian languages to the north and east. 
There are many more examples, but the point is that like the 
archaeological map, the language map of the Eastern Wood?
lands, and indeed of North America as a whole, makes the in?
ference of multiple pre-Columbian migrations unavoidable. We 
know from documentary history that many migrations took 
place over the last five centuries as well, but we can no longer 
justify treating them as special cases related to the disruptions 
of European contact. As uncomfortable as this may make ar?
chaeologists who have grown accustomed to ignoring popula?
tion movements, it is now clear that simple uniformitarianism 
compels us to accept that migration was a common demo?
graphic process in prehistory. 
This evidence is supported in a general way by migration 
stories preserved by many American Indian societies as parts 
of their oral traditions. Migration legends exist in oral tradition 
for reasons other than providing data for modern archaeologists 
and historians, so it is often hazardous to take them too liter?
ally. They must be tested against other lines of evidence, and 
more than one archaeologist has been embarrassed by a failure 
to carry out such testing and by taking migration legends at 
face value. Indeed, such scholarly embarrassments are what led 
many archaeologists to turn their backs on the investigation of 
migration earlier in this century. Yet in a general way the num?
ber of migration legends alone should be enough to convince 
us that American Indian populations were fluid on the conti?
nental landscape over the long term. 
The situation is similar to, and indeed related to, the issue of 
warfare in prehistory. Although romantics may continue to in?
sist, with no evidence whatsoever, that nonwestern peoples 
lived in pristine bliss until contacted by expanding capitalist 
systems, Keeley (1996) has shown this view to be nonsense. 
Warfare, too, has been common throughout human history and 
prehistory. I have no doubt that warfare and migration were of?
ten related phenomena in prehistory, just as they have been in 
history. 
The Handbook of North American Indians and most ethno?
graphic atlases (e.g., Coe et al., 1986) traditionally show North 
American Indian tribal (or national) territories as contiguous, 
their boundaries coterminous. The practice is rational, for one 
cannot calculate meaningful regional population densities un?
less all territory is accounted for by one tribal territory or an?
other. But the practice also fails to account realistically for 
buffer zones and vacant quarters. As archaeological coverage 
improves and we can say with increasing assurance that popu?
lation distributions were indeed as spotty as Anderson (1991) 
shows them to have been, our maps of native America should 
come to look less like those of European nation states and more 
like those shown in Figures 1 and 2. 
Implications for Cultural Evolution 
Diffusion is the transfer of traits across societal boundaries in 
the absence of migration. This definition includes transcultura-
tion, which is trait exchange without the loss of identity, a spe?
cial form of diffusion (Rouse, 1986:11). It also includes accul?
turation, which is another special form of diffusion in which a 
society gradually loses its unique identity through the replace?
ment of endogenous traits by exogenous traits (Rouse, 
1986:12-13). 
As with migration, these processes involve individuals and 
various groupings of individuals. I have found that the culture 
concept is not particularly useful except as a broad covering 
term for all of these processes. "Society" is a more useful term, 
for it has a clear dictionary definition as an enduring and coop?
erating social group whose members have developed organized 
patterns of relationships through interaction with one another. I 
define a national society as one constituted by people that share 
the same cultural norms and have a self-recognized corporate 
identity. Members of a national society typically share a single 
common language (whether or not it is also spoken by one or 
more other national societies) and are autonomous within a 
well-defined territory. Societies can also be subsets of national 
societies, such as voluntary associations of individuals for 
common ends, or a part of a community that is a social unit dis?
tinguishable by particular aims or standards of living or con?
duct. Other complementary definitions are possible, but in all 
cases the emphasis is on societies as sets (or subsets) of indi?
viduals. As Pearce (1996:55) put it, "Societies are people, and 
culture has no significance unless viewed as something partici?
pated in, shared, and transformed by groups of people." 
From all of this it should be apparent that a basic assumption 
is that individuals are the units of transformation (Snow, 
1996a). The process of selection is transformational at, but not 
82 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
above, that level. Moreover, selection operates simultaneously 
at multiple levels (or scales) in the sense that nested corporate 
groups may grow as individuals are born or recruited into 
them, or they may be driven to extinction as individuals die or 
leave them. Selection also operates at the level of the individ?
ual in biological evolution, but in that case the traits of the indi?
vidual are locked in its genetic code, and the individual does 
not have the option of changing its genetic code or moving to 
the breeding population of another species. 
A basic assumption is that societies (broadly defined) can 
propagate or dissolve rapidly as individuals join or abandon 
them. For individuals, however, several forms of migration en?
tail the abandonment of some or all social memberships and the 
acquisition of new ones. New societies form as individuals and 
the cultural elements they carry come together in new, adaptive 
ways. This is the process of ethnogenesis discussed by Moore 
(1994), who shows that it is a model that is much superior to 
any that assumes that human cultures develop in ways parallel 
to biological speciation. Not surprisingly, one of the best exam?
ples of this process comes from Moore's (1996:13-29) own 
work on the Cheyenne. The Cheyenne reinvented themselves 
several times as groups merged and split and merged again, at 
the same time both migrating and taking up new subsistence 
adaptations. In the seventeenth century they were wild rice 
gatherers living among the lakes of northern Minnesota. In the 
eighteenth century they were maize horticulturists living along 
the prairie rivers of southern Minnesota and the Dakotas. In the 
nineteenth century they were mounted nomadic buffalo hunters 
living on the plains of South Dakota and Wyoming. 
From this and many other examples it is clear that ethnogen?
esis and migration are more often than not tightly bound up 
with each other. The Cheyenne case is probably not unusual. 
The complex patterns we see in the distributions of languages, 
tribes, and archaeological cultures in North America result 
from the complex interactions of these processes, not some 
simpler process that we might all prefer. I have argued that 
these complex processes account for the appearance of Iro?
quoian peoples in the Northeast around A.D. 900 (Snow, 1995, 
1996b). The founding population was probably small. More 
than that, it was probably made up of migrating people carry?
ing a new innovative adaptation that was a departure from that 
of the population from which they were derived. The founders 
of later Northern Iroquoian nations may have retained only a 
modified version of the donor culture. 
What archaeology can gain from or contribute to all of this 
remains to be seen. The Cheyenne of 1800 did not look much 
like their ancestors of only a century earlier, and archaeologists 
will probably have some difficulty demonstrating the connec?
tion on artifactual grounds alone. The Northern Iroquoians of a 
millennium ago may not have resembled their immediate an?
cestors any more closely in archaeological terms, but we are 
able to see that heritage through osteological evidence (Lang-
don, 1995), and it is possible that it would be detectable 
through molecular genetics as well. I judge that we have en?
tered a period that promises (or at least will allow) a reintegra?
tion of ethnology, history, historical linguistics, biological an?
thropology, and archaeology. Great progress is currently being 
made in the study of the European Dark Ages, mainly through 
the integrated use of documentary sources, comparative lin?
guistics, molecular genetics, osteology, and archaeology. We 
can hope for similar progress in North America. 
Uniformitarian principles do indeed apply to anthropology. 
The processes of the recent past are in fact keys to the under?
standing of the processes of the more remote unrecorded past. 
Ironically, while recent history has shown that archaeology can 
go it alone politically, it cannot do so intellectually. The good 
news is that having demonstrated that migration is a nearly 
constant feature of human societies and its subsets, we have 
reason to hope that the subdisciplines of anthropology will find 
their way back to each other. 
Literature Cited 
Anderson, David G. 
1991. Examining Prehistoric Settlement Distribution in Eastern North 
America. Archaeology of Eastern North America, 19:1 -22. 
1994. The Savannah River Chiefdoms: Political Change in the Late Pre?
historic Southeast. xvii+459 pages. Tuscaloosa: University of Ala?
bama Press. 
Anthony, David W. 
1990. Migration in Archeology: The Baby and the Bathwater. American 
Anthropologist, 92:895-914. 
1995. Horse, Wagon & Chariot: Indo-European Languages and Archaeol?
ogy. Antiquity, 69(264):554-565. 
Bamett, Homer G. 
1953. Innovation: The Basis of Cultural Change, xii+462 pages. New 
York: McGraw-Hill. 
Coe, Michael, Dean R. Snow, and Elizabeth Benson 
1986. Atlas of Ancient America. 240 pages. New York: Facts on File. 
Emerson, J. Norman 
1959. A Rejoinder upon the MacNeish-Emerson Theory. Pennsylvania Ar?
chaeologist, 29(2):98-107. 
Griffin, James B. 
1944. The Iroquois in American Prehistory. Papers of the Michigan Acad?
emy of Science, Arts, and Letters, 29:357-374. 
1946. Culture Change and Continuity in Eastern United States Archaeol?
ogy. In F. Johnson, editor, Man in Northeastern North America. Pa?
pers of the Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology, 
3:37-95. Andover, Massachusetts: Phillips Academy. 
Keeley, Lawrence H. 
1996. War Before Civilization, xiv+254 pages. New York: Oxford Univer?
sity Press. 
Kroeber, Alfred L. 
1948. Anthropology: Race, Language, Culture, Psychology, Pre-history. 
x+856, xxxix pages. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 
NUMBER 44 83 
[Index separately numbered.] 
Langdon, Stephen P. 
1995. Biological Relationships among the Iroquois. Human Biology, 67: 
355-374. 
Mallory, James P. 
1989. In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and 
Myth. 288 pages. New York: Thames and Hudson. 
Moore, John H. 
1994. Putting Anthropology Back Together Again: The Ethnogenetic Cri?
tique of Cladistic Theory. American Anthropologist, 96:925-948. 
1996. The Cheyenne, ix+342 pages. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 
Parker, Arthur C. 
1916. The Origin of the Iroquois as Suggested by Their Archaeology. 
American Anthropologist, 18(4):479-507. 
Pearce, Robert J. 
1996. Mapping Middleport: A Case Study in Societal Archaeology. Lon?
don Museum of Archaeology Research Report, 25: 396 pages. Lon?
don, Ontario. 
Renfrew, Colin 
1987. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. 
xiv+346 pages. New York: Cambridge University Press. 
Rouse, Irving 
1958. The Inference of Migrations from Anthropological Evidence. In 
Raymond Thompson, editor, Migrations in New World Culture His?
tory. University of Arizona Bulletin, 29:63-68. Tucson: University 
of Arizona Press. 
1986. Migrations in Prehistory: Inferring Population Movement from Cul?
tural Remains. xiv+202 pages. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale Uni?
versity Press. 
Silverberg, Robert 
1968. Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth. 
viii+369 pages. Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society. 
Snow, Dean R. 
1994. The Iroquois, xvii+268 pages. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 
1995. Migration in Prehistory: The Northern Iroquoian Case. American 
Antiquity, 60:59-79. 
1996a. Mohawk Demography and the Effects of Exogenous Epidemics on 
American Indian Populations. Journal of Anthropological Archaeol?
ogy, 15:160-182. 
1996b. More on Migration in Prehistory: Accommodating New Evidence in 
the Northern Iroquoian Case. American Antiquity, 61:791-796. 
Sokal, Robert R., N.L. Oden, and C. Wilson 
1991. Genetic Evidence for the Spread of Agriculture in Europe by Demic 
Diffusion. Nature, 351:143-144. 
Sokal, Robert R., N.L. Oden, and B.A. Thomson 
1992. Origins of the Indo-Europeans: Genetic Evidence. Proceedings of 
the National Academy of Science, 89:7669-7673. 
Sturtevant, William C , general editor 
1978-2001. Handbook of North American Indians. 12 volumes. Washing?
ton, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
Willey, Gordon R. 
1966. An Introduction to American Archaeology, volume 1: North and 
Middle America, xiv+526 pages. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: 
Prentice-Hall. 
Willey, Gordon R., and Philip Phillips 
1958. Method and Theory in American Archaeology, x+270 pages. Chi?
cago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. 

From Ethnohistory to Anthropological History 
Shepard Krech III 
In a career spanning five decades, William Sturtevant has fo?
cused his scholarly attention on diverse aspects of American 
Indian culture and history. His contribution to a more profound 
understanding of American Indians has been especially notable 
in the area commonly known as ethnohistory. Here his work is 
distinguished by a willingness to consider as historical evi?
dence artifacts, visual imagery, and reconstructions of the past 
derived from both native testimony and the often oblique and 
layered texts written by nonnatives.1 
The essay having the longest-lasting impact is "Anthropol?
ogy, History, and Ethnohistory," which appeared in two ver?
sions in the late 1960s, first in 1967 in Ethnohistory and then 
two years later in an edited volume serving as a general intro?
duction to cultural anthropology (Sturtevant, 1967a, 1968a). A 
discussion of "the intersection of anthropology with history" 
(Sturtevant, 1967a:l), this essay ranged broadly, methodologi?
cally and theoretically, through the shared interests of anthro?
pologists and historians and their convergence in ethnohistory; 
the critical use of written sources; the relativity of historiogra?
phy, folk history, and oral tradition; and the relevance of biol?
ogy, linguistics, and archaeology to historical work. An impor?
tant statement at the time on ethnohistory, Sturtevant's essay 
serves as a point of departure for my thoughts herein on more 
recent work in ethnohistory?or, as I prefer, anthropological 
history?that has a bearing on the analysis of the native North 
American past. In the remarks that follow, which extend far 
beyond North America to consider contemporary historio-
graphical issues, I draw on several recent works (Krech, 1991, 
1997a, 1997b). 
In considering ethnohistory, or anthropological history, it is 
important to remember that in the decades before Sturtevant's 
essay, many influential anthropologists kept their distance from 
history. In 1915 Robert Lowie decided that one cannot "attach 
to oral traditions any value whatsoever under any circum?
stances whatsoever" because "we cannot know them to be 
true" (Lowie, 1915:598), and in the next decade, A.R. Rad-
cliffe-Brown (1958:40) argued that history, for the most part, 
"does not really explain anything at all." Radcliffe-Brown's ob?
jectives were no less than a science of society, and in his view, 
historical description simply did not add up to explanation. 
Shepard Krech HI, Department of Anthropology, Brown University, 
Providence, Rhode Island 02912-9127, USA. 
Historians were no better about anthropology, and for years 
they maintained healthy skepticism about anything but narra?
tive, event-based histories in which indigenous people played 
minor, passive roles?if they figured at all. Some historians 
seemed determined to dig in and resist the idea that the major?
ity of people on earth had their own histories. The most infa?
mous example?within a year of Sturtevant's opposite senti?
ments?was Trevor-Roper's (1965:9) startlingly ethnocentric 
remark that in Africa, only the history of Europeans was worth?
while?"the rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-Eu?
ropean, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject 
for history." 
Statements like these came from mainstream history as long 
as it remained uninfluenced by anthropology. And in fact the 
chasm between the disciplines remained wide until recently. 
Most twentieth-century historians have been historicists, the in?
tellectual descendants of nineteenth-century idealists who ar?
gued so strenuously with the positivists of the day. They have 
sought to understand an age in its own terms, but they have 
given practical priority to politics and great men and have pro?
duced idiographic, unique-event-based, particularist, atheoreti-
cal, intuitive, factual and truthful narrative histories (Barra-
clough, 1979). Despite their separate and specific national-
based interests, and despite their flirtation with historical issues 
at several distinct moments, ethnology and cultural and social 
anthropology have together had a different course from history, 
and they have a shared interest in theory and the implications 
of comparative analysis (Keesing, 1974; Krech, 1997a). 
Decades ago, however, American anthropologists interested 
in acculturation and ethnohistory and British social anthropolo?
gists interested in history and social change began to build 
bridges to history. Their effort was not one-sided, however, as 
certain French historians reacted in especially forceful ways to 
historicism. First came arguments that history was scientific 
not intuitive, comparative not particularist, analytical not narra?
tive, and theoretical not atheoretical?all sounding very much 
like anthropology of the day. Some started to emphasize that 
history, rather than being confined to the politics of a few great 
men or to discrete political events or wars, was, instead, the 
story of all people in society; and some saw history as rooted in 
long-term geographic and climatological structures as well as 
in shorter-term economic and demographic changes. In recent 
years, various brands of symbolic anthropology have flour?
ished in French history, and today a symbolic or interpretive 
85 
86 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
approach rules in so-called cultural history (Stone, 1977; Barr-
aclough, 1979; Kammen, 1980; Hunt, 1989; Krech, 1991; 
Krech, 1997a). 
These trends affected historical writing worldwide. At the 
time, they were not without influential critics in history, who 
correctly pointed out that "every social science is a rapidly 
moving frontier" (Stone, 1977:19) difficult to keep abreast of. 
Despite such criticism, the convergence between anthropology 
and history has been pervasive. Once widely made, the argu?
ment that history is atheoretical, particularist, idiographic, and 
moralistic and that anthropology is theoretical, generalizing, 
nomothetic, and value-free can no longer be sustained. The 
idea that scholarly inquiry can proceed without theory, or that 
theory can be opposed to ideology, today seems naive. Once, 
anthropology focused mainly on exotic people, and history, in 
contrast, dealt primarily with the nonexotic west. Today, as 
daily the people among whom they traditionally worked be?
come less exotic and remote, anthropologists conduct ethno?
graphic work throughout the world, including the urban west. 
Concurrently, historians are interested in popular culture and 
history from the bottom up or from below; Bernard Cohn 
(1980:214) once wickedly called this "proctological history." 
Rigidly separate at one time, anthropology and history are so 
no longer. In anthropological theory, history qualifies as a "key 
symbol" of work in the years since Sturtevant's influential es?
say appeared, and in the last decade alone literally hundreds of 
anthropological works incorporating history have appeared 
(Ortner, 1984:158). 
These new directions changed ethnohistory. When the label 
first came into use?decades before Sturtevant's essay?ethno?
history was the history of indigenous, usually small-scale, non-
European societies, and its sources were mainly documents. 
The American Society for Ethnohistory embraced this under?
standing of ethnohistory, as did the journal Ethnohistory, which 
in 1955 devoted itself to research on "the documentary history 
of the culture and movements of primitive peoples, with special 
emphasis on the American Indian." By "primitive" was meant 
small-scale societies. "Documents" proclaimed the privileged 
form of evidence. In this journal (and elsewhere), ethnohistory 
meant using documentary sources to talk about the past of the 
Miami, Shawnee, and other societies located mainly in North 
America. That ethnohistorians preferred the writings of literate 
nonnatives over oral, indigenous sources was due not to slavish 
adherence to Lowie's earlier positions but to the fact that in the 
1950s many ethnohistorians conducted research in the formal, 
legal context of land-rights cases before the United States In?
dian Claims Commission (Krech, 1991; Tanner, 1991). 
Sturtevant (1967a, 1968a) was among the many who sought 
to define ethnohistory in the 1960s and 1970s, decades when 
interest in American Indians built steadily. For him, ethnohis?
tory was "(the study of) the history of the peoples normally 
studied by anthropologists" (Sturtevant, 1967a:6-7). Many 
scholars stressed the catholic use of data obtained in the field, 
archive, and museum in order to write what John Ewers 
(1961:268) called "a thorough, delicately balanced tribal his?
tory" and what Wilcomb Washburn (1961:45) called "history 
in the round"; or, as James Axtell (1979:2) put it, in order to 
"gain knowledge of the nature and causes of change in a cul?
ture." From history, some said, came "cautious accuracy," and 
from anthropology came "imaginative theorization" (Wash?
burn, 1961:45) as well as culture "defined by ethnological con?
cepts and categories" (Axtell, 1979:2). Ideally, these qualities 
fused in the ethnohistorian. For Nancy Lurie (1961:90) it was 
important that the ethnohistorian take proper precautions 
against the antiquarian virus and seek "valid cultural and social 
generalizations, 'laws' if you will." The principal products of 
ethnohistory were historical ethnography, or synchronic recon?
struction of a culture or society at some past moment; folk his?
tory, or historiography in a nonliterate society; and specific his?
tory, or diachronic ethnohistorical study (including the 
archaeologist's direct historical approach) achieved by working 
(and projecting) "upstream" from the present to the past or 
"downstream" from the earliest to the most recent time period 
(Hudson, 1967; Sturtevant, 1967a, 1968a; Carmack, 1972). 
Today, in an era caught up by postmodernism, the picture is 
quite different than it was 20 and 30 years ago. One problem is 
that what was conventional then in anthropology and history is 
no longer conventional today; in a nutshell, the convergence of 
the two disciplines has caught up to ethnohistory. The result is 
disagreement over everything other than that ethnohistory is a 
method, not a discipline (Trigger, 1982, 1986; Simmons, 1988; 
Krech, 1991). For example, when one compares historiography 
on different continents, it is quickly apparent that one person's 
ethnohistory is another's history, social history, cultural history, 
or ethno-ethnohistory. In Africa, history is rarely called ethno?
history, perhaps because decades ago Jan Vansina (1960:53) 
stated that "history in illiterate societies is not different from 
the pursuit of the past in literate ones....And there is therefore 
no need to coin a special term, such as ethnohistory just for this 
reason." Writing about New Guinea, Edward Schieffelin and 
Deborah Gewertz (1985:3) expressed similar reservations, ar?
guing that to qualify as such, ethnohistory "must fundamentally 
take into account the people's own sense of how events are 
constituted, and their ways of culturally constructing the past." 
Today, much self-described ethnohistory, especially in North 
America, is chronological narrative history of a kind now con?
sidered old-fashioned by many scholars influenced by post?
modernism. What distinguishes a work as ethnohistorical 
rather than merely historical? Typically, it is only the focus on 
the Cherokee or another ethnos, or on a region, in which an?
thropologists traditionally have had stated vested interests. But 
some find fault in the concept of ethnos. They argue that ethno?
history has still not shaken its tribal referent?for classical 
Greeks, ethnic features were barbarian (Chapman et al., 1989) 
?and that it is exclusionary. Why is the history of small-scale 
indigenous ethnic groups ethnohistory, not history? Why is the 
history of minority groups usually history, not ethnohistory? 
And why is the history of people like the Germans or English 
NUMBER 44 87 
always history and never ethnohistory? Henri Brunschwig and 
Hubert Deschamps, both writing about Africa, were the first to 
forcefully raise this problem. In a searing critique, Brunschwig 
(1965:291, 300; my translation), likening ethnohistory to a 
"weed," denied that there were (as others would have it) "peo?
ple without history," and posed the unsettling question, "Is it 
then 'people without written history' that is meant by 'people 
without history', and will Blacks, wounded by this title, be re?
lieved to be named people with ethnohistory?" Deschamps's 
(1968:1434; my translation) answer: reserving ethnohistory for 
people considered "primitive" would be "resented as an unjust 
discrimination by Africans." 
Similar voices have also been raised in North America: 
Bruce Trigger (1984:22) has wondered if ethnohistory was not 
"patronizing," and James Merrell (1989b:l 15) has wondered if 
it was not "pernicious," both for essentially the same reasons 
articulated by Brunschwig and Deschamps. This problem is not 
trivial. Will ethnohistory ever consistently or logically be ap?
plied to western, urban, history-possessing ethnic groups, or 
will it forever be restricted to particular groups like American 
Indians? One would have to be unconcerned with the politics 
of historiography or with moral criticism to ignore the problem 
(Krech, 1991). 
One way out of this dilemma is to extend the label "ethnohis?
tory" to any ethnic-group focused history, but this reduces eth?
nohistory to history and most historians would probably not go 
along with it. A second way is to make ethnohistory a cognate 
of other ethno-terms, such as ethnobotany or ethnoscience, and 
reserve it for indigenous historiography, but this would shut out 
many self-proclaimed ethnohistorians. A third way is to use 
some other label for what amounts to the combination of 
method and theory current in history and anthropology, and the 
focus on history or historiography in or of some ethnic group. 
Anthropological history or historical anthropology, both of 
which remove the stigma of ethnos, would suffice. Which dis?
cipline is nominal and which is dependent might well be a mat?
ter of taste. I prefer anthropological history because, as with so?
cial or cultural history (or ethnohistory), it is history that is 
being written (Krech, 1991, 1997b). 
To generalize about the directions that the anthropological 
history of native North America has taken in recent years, one 
can refer to the same types, or genres, identified by Sturtevant 
and others several decades ago: historical ethnography, or the 
reconstruction of a culture or society at some past time; folk 
history, or historiography in a nonliterate society; and the his?
torical study of a group written either from past to present or, 
rarely, from present to past. Most common?the genre is ro?
bust?is the last mentioned, which may be narrowly focused 
in time and geography or may unfold through biography. Typi?
cally, it takes the form of a narrative. Often a straightforward 
and chronological narrative that presents the facts, it offers no 
pretentious engagement with theory and is seldom compli?
cated by theoretical musings. This is not the same as saying 
that it lacks theoretical assumptions, but these assumptions are 
almost always implicit. The aim of the historical narrative is to 
chronicle a people's (tribe's, nation's) past, or part of that past. 
Interethnic relations, particularly relations between Indians 
and whites, are often detailed, and an abiding, if implicit, 
sense of a frontier is characteristic. More often than not, the 
narrative is based on archives rather than on oral testimony, 
and on the assumption that an author can authoritatively "re?
lease" a descriptive chronological narrative from documents. 
It often displays sensitivity to native culture and society but 
not necessarily to native perspective. It sometimes emphasizes 
the cultural distinctiveness of historical tradition or, drawing 
on oral and documentary evidence, details a people's history 
but not historiography. 
Driven by data, not theory, the historical narrative is written 
by anthropologists and historians and is considered a contribu?
tion to American Indian history, studies, or ethnohistory. The 
best of this category is based on comprehensive anthropologi?
cal and historical research. It is also marked by strong narrative 
style as well as by judicious reflection upon and careful weigh?
ing and interpretation of facts, not simply their presentation. 
Recent examples?there are many, written by anthropologists 
and historians alike (see Krech, 1991)?include James Mer?
rell 's (1989a) The Indians ' New World: Catawbas and Their 
Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Re?
moval, which is a sensitive exploration of the convergence of 
Catawba and white culture and society. Others include James 
Axtell's (1981, 1985) essays, especially The Invasion Within, a 
sustained inquiry into what he calls contests of cultures. 
Because the focus of most narrative-based specific histories 
of native America is on presenting the facts rather than on artic?
ulating the theory in the light of which certain events or data are 
selected as historical fact, many theorists influenced by post?
modernism consider such histories problematic. Some anthro?
pological historians prefer instead to engage openly with the?
ory. In their histories the analysis of culture or of native 
American-European immigrant relations is explicit and is in?
formed by a strong, clearly articulated interest in theoretical is?
sues. In today's postmodern climate, theory in anthropological 
history derives not just from the two nominative disciplines but 
from cultural studies, literary criticism, political economy, and 
other fields. Today no single paradigm holds sway unless it be a 
set of general understandings about postmodernism. More than 
ever, anthropology and history are open to influence from out?
side, but as in the past, discussions rage over "what constitutes 
the grounds of credibility for the community" (Krieger, 
1989:x). As others have remarked, the major debate has been 
the age-old Manichean one over what is variously called, in an?
thropology and history, positivism and idealism, rationalism 
and historicism, or objectivity and subjectivity. In both disci?
plines each of the sides is complex. Historical objectivity, for 
example, "is not a single idea, but rather a sprawling collection 
of assumptions, attitudes, aspirations, and antipathies" (Novick, 
1988:1). Recent fragmentations in anthropology are so sharp 
that anthropologists are sometimes far better at linking their 
SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
theoretical interests to nonanthropologists than to each other. 
Theoretical perspectives may range, crudely speaking, from an 
extreme world-systemic positivism to an extreme perspectival 
relativism; but in their nuances they also belie the notion that 
they must be one or the other, positivist or idealist, objective or 
subjective (Ortner, 1984; Weiner, 1995). 
The effect of these intellectual trends on anthropological his?
tory is seen in analyses informed by a clearly articulated inter?
est in theoretical issues. Some are founded on staunchly posi?
tivist interests rooted in ecology, economy, and political 
economy and investigate mercantilism, the market economy, 
the fur trade, the world-system, control of productive re?
sources, underdevelopment, internal colonialism, dependency, 
ecology, demography, modes and relations of production, and 
commoditization. Many authors are sympathetic with the an?
thropologist Eric Wolf's emphasis on the analysis of processes 
linking societies to each other within a world-system. Wolf 
(1982) spoke more compellingly than most about what he 
called "a manifold of social and cultural processes at work," or 
the "fields of force" and "chains of causation and conse?
quence," which in the past have affected or embraced societ?
ies, and continue to do so today. 
These works ultimately derive their intellectual inspiration 
from Karl Marx and owe much to critical theoretical engage?
ment with not only Wolf but with Immanuel Wallerstein and 
Andre Gunder Frank, among others, who represent a variety of 
schools, strands, and strains of Marxian analysis. The extent to 
which local culture mediates or structures outside forces or to 
which human agency overrides systemic power varies in part 
with how much each is read into the Marxian agenda and its in?
terpolations, in which the importance ascribed to culture and 
the individual as well as the articulation of idealism with mate?
rialism have altered through time. For native North America 
these ideas have appeared prominently in sociological histories 
like Social Change in the Southwest (Hall, 1989), a sweeping 
analysis of economic transformations, variations in incorpora?
tion and types of periphery, and the ways that global, regional, 
and local changes are mutually determinative in the American 
Southwest; and in The Roots of Dependency (White, 1983), 
which is a comparative analysis of the impact of market econo?
mies linked to Europe on traditional native American econo?
mies, and the subsequent development of dependency of the 
Choctaw, Pawnee, and Navajo. Anthropologists and historians 
contribute in roughly equal numbers to these and other analy?
ses. The degree to which they engage explicitly with theory re?
mains a matter of disciplinary preference. Anthropologists tend 
to be self-conscious in their comparative and explicit analytical 
interests, whereas historians tend to privilege narrative and em?
bed analysis in text and notes to keep it from interfering with 
the telling of the story (Krech, 1991). 
Other theoretically explicit anthropological historians have 
gone in directions more compatible with the antiessentialist 
aims of postmodernists who seek to locate meanings in texts 
produced by individual authors; they have gone toward culture 
and agency. The interest in agency stems from dissatisfaction 
with political economic schemes that regard emergent relations 
between center and periphery as unidirectional and overly sys?
temic; as Ortner (1984:143) has remarked, history does not 
simply "arrive like a ship." The force fields so exhaustively ex?
plored by Wolf (and others) meaningfully expose technoeco-
nomic change, political economy, and political and economic 
differentiations as functions of capitalist development. But his?
tories of the impact of west on nonwest, center on periphery, or 
metropolis on satellite are ultimately unsatisfactory. Resistance 
and other aspects of the local scene have always affected capi?
tal expansion. To write histories of the nonwest, historians and 
anthropologists, taking cues from a number of thinkers, have 
put indigenous people as active agents into the histories they 
help make. Worldwide, anthropological historians explore not 
just oppositions to colonial relationships, but agency and how 
institutions and cultures are "created, sustained, and displaced" 
(Worsley, 1984:174; see also Asad, 1987; Roseberry, 1989). In?
dividuals are returned to center stage as culture-constructing 
makers of history or as producers of structured texts whose 
metaphors and tropes need to be read. Interests shift to individ?
uals and past cultural worlds and to the structure of history and/ 
or the historiographical conventions of indigenous historians. 
To a degree perspectival, they evoke the tension between an?
thropological history as indigenous historiography and as a 
more or less conventionally (viz., in a positivist sense) con?
ceived history of an ethnos (for discussion, see Krech, 1991). 
Outside native North America this type of anthropological 
history has been actively pursued by Renato Rosaldo, Richard 
Price, Marshall Sahlins, and others. Rosaldo's (1980a, 1980b) 
analysis of Ilongot historical consciousness and how the past is 
embedded in ethnogeographical knowledge had an early influ?
ence on cultural approaches to history. Price's (1983, 1990) 
analysis of Saramaka historical thought is a perceptive account 
of the presentist, perspectival, guarded, dangerous fragments 
Saramakas possess about the past. The Saramaka preserve and 
encapsulate their past in different rhetorical genres, which 
Price used in conjunction with other forms of evidence, all of 
which he manipulated with different typefaces to preserve dif?
ferent voices, in order to image various Saramaka pasts. In pro?
vocative but debated work on the encounter of Europeans and 
native people in Hawaii, Sahlins (1981, 1985, 1995; see also 
Obeyesekere, 1992) has influenced historiography more than 
Price and Rosaldo have. He has forced extensive discussion 
and debate with his emphasis on the conflicting interests, inter?
pretations, and schemes brought to particular structures of con?
junctures (like the death of Captain Cook); his forceful analysis 
of the cultural structure of Polynesian societies; and in the idea 
that cultural structure is either open or closed to history and 
that each orders the other. 
Worldwide, the analysis of a people's historical thought or 
historiography is common. This literature raises numerous is?
sues having to do with indigenous historiography, conceptions 
of time, inventions of culture, ideological hegemony, relations 
NUMBER 44 89 
between history and self-consciousness, the cultural specificity 
of ways of making history, and the cultural and historical con?
texts of presentist histories?whether in the insular Pacific, co?
lonial India, or nineteenth-century European intellectual cir?
cles. Related issues are how to understand the production of 
hegemonic discourse and how to capture an authentic native 
voice in texts reflecting ambivalent colonial relations. Debates 
occur over authenticity and over what constitutes history. The 
perspectival nature of cultural interpretations is often stressed 
(e.g., White, 1973; Prakash, 1990). 
Many of the works that explore culture and agency are 
deeply reflexive and return us importantly to one of Sturte?
vant's early initiatives. In an influential essay on narratives of 
native North America, Edward Bruner (1986) spoke of narra?
tives that have dominated whole eras to meaningfully and pow?
erfully structure the telling of American Indian history. One of 
the first tasks of the anthropological historian is to develop 
awareness of these narratives as well as of one's own. One 
must first appreciate the different ways that people "imagine 
the past" in order to decipher historical thought (Breen, 1989). 
Others have arrived at similar conclusions, expressed, for ex?
ample, as the importance of understanding how history "is both 
a metaphor of the past and a metonym of the present" (Dening, 
1988:2). In some circles today, there is greater appreciation 
than ever before for the perspectival and contested nature of 
history, for "how knowledge is arrived at" (Tompkins, 
1986:76-77), and for the invention of tradition (Hobsbawm and 
Ranger, 1983; Hanson, 1989; Keesing, 1990). 
Sturtevant has long held an interest in this type of approach, 
but not to the exclusion of other types of anthropological his?
tory (here he departs from others like Schieffelin and Gewertz, 
mentioned previously). Over 30 years ago, in a collection of es?
says dedicated to ethnoscience and the "new ethnography," 
Sturtevant (1964:100) spoke of ethnohistory as "the conception 
of the past shared by the bearers of a particular culture, rather 
than (the more usual sense) the history (in our terms) of 'ethnic 
groups.'" Ethnohistory is here regarded as cognate with ethno?
science, ethnobotany, ethnozoology, and so on. Perhaps be?
cause nobody paid much attention to the implications of this 
approach, Raymond Fogelson in exasperation coined "ethno-
ethnohistory" and then championed taking seriously the histor?
ically and culturally constructed worlds of Cherokees and other 
native Americans (Fogelson, 1974, 1984, 1985, 1989:134). His 
determination to privilege cultural meanings has been pivotal 
both in his own and his students' work, and it is mirrored in the 
analyses of other scholars who have equal concern for privileg?
ing culturally constituted meaning and relating changes and 
continuities in native symbolic systems to specific historical 
conditions (see Krech, 1991, for discussion). 
This kind of work is clearly heading in the direction of an in?
digenous historiography, in the promotion of which anthropo?
logical historians have been in the forefront. Some claim privi?
leged understanding of the cultural worlds of native people, on 
which basis emerge explanations of why native people partici?
pated in the fur trade (Martin, 1978), or analyses of the meta?
physics of Indian history (Martin, 1987a, 1987b), and others 
claim an ethnointellectual basis for the analysis of Indian-white 
history (Miller, 1985). But though these works pose important 
questions about cultural interpretations, they are highly dubi?
ous if not wrong-headed on methodological and theoretical 
grounds, raising questions about whether the cultural schemes 
were ever located in indigenous societies, as the authors pro?
pose, or were merely in the author's own minds (Peterson, 
1988; Krech, 1981, 1990). This is precisely the complaint 
raised long ago about ethnoscientific analysis in anthropology. 
More promising, perhaps, in revealing native voices are works 
that draw extensively on native consultants in order to con?
struct an ethnosociological account of historical events and 
processes (Whiteley, 1988) or that both draw on native testi?
mony and are written by native historians (e.g., Sando, 1983). 
The unproblematized, narrativized version of events in the last-
mentioned, however, elides questions about hegemony. 
Indigenous historiography has been at the heart of many of 
the debates of the 1990s. In this decade, the writing of anthro?
pological history has become contentious as battles have raged 
over the control of culture and history and over who has the 
right to control what appears in print in books, museum exhibi?
tion text, and other media. The Columbus Quincentenary was a 
battleground for many of the debates as controversy swirled 
about almost every aspect of a day at best commemorated, not 
celebrated, and by many vilified. Political correctness and po?
lemics ruled the production of history for fully two years build?
ing up to the day of the Quincentenary. Of the many books pub?
lished on the encounter (not discovery) by Columbus of the 
New World, in what many described as a veritable Columbus 
industry, some revisionist examinations were accused of an ex?
treme political correctness. In contrast, others were attacked 
because they ignored both sea changes undermining the master 
narrative and objectivism in history and the plurality of voices 
in postcolonial discourse. 
One work widely noticed, in part because its author played a 
key role in the development of the new historicism, was 
Stephen Greenblatt's (1991) Marvelous Possessions: The Won?
der of the New World, a series of essays on the multiple mean?
ings of Columbus's taking possession of discovered marvels. It 
received lengthy, critical, and thoughtful reviews. One was re?
lated directly to the matter of indigenous historiography. The 
reviewer, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, denigrated Green?
blatt's history compared to the "infinitely richer understanding 
of Columbus and other colonial writers" in the "troubled retell?
ings" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, and others. 
"This is so," Gonzalez Echevarria stated, "because these writ?
ers have more at stake; they see the discovery and conquest of 
the New World as part of their own history. No matter how re?
pugnant these may be from a modern perspective, they are a 
part of Latin American history. Facile condemnations from the 
safety of the American academy thus seem condescending" 
(Gonzalez Echevarria, 1992:23; see also Krech, MS). 
90 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Gonzalez Echevarria is saying two separate things. First, that 
it is patronizing to condemn facilely the encounter, or discov?
ery of the New World?with which one can but agree. Second, 
that an infinitely rich understanding of the past is possible only 
if the past is one's own. This is contentious and contestable. It 
is also ethnocentric if in fact he is demanding, as he seems to 
be, that one must share either culture or genes, or both, with 
those about whom one writes in order somehow to produce a 
more correct history. The unstated assumptions underlying this 
contention include an inherent presentism, which at the very 
least must be exposed. 
There is no debate over the context for Gonzalez Echev-
arria's remarks: in the broadest intellectual sense it is formed 
by postmodern historiography and the new historicism, with 
their questions about authority, power, contingency, and truth, 
which are themselves the products of a specific historical mo?
ment of postcolonial reflexivity. In the early 1990s the issues 
were played out in sweeping discussions concerning objectiv?
ity in historical methodology. Even though the argument is 
hardly a new one in history, the most compelling recent com?
ments can be found in Peter Novick's (1998) That Noble 
Dream, and in the reviews and forums that followed the publi?
cation of that work.2 
Descending from lofty debate to historical practice, there has 
been a growing tendency in the 1990s to regard history (de?
fined herein as the past and writing about the past) as intellec?
tual property to be "repatriated" along with human remains or 
material artifacts in the collections of museums and historical 
societies. Some indigenous people demand control over the in?
terpretation of the past as a native right. None deny that it is a 
form of empowerment. Disputes range widely and affect an?
thropological history. For example, the most visibly disputa?
tious case of interpretation?that pitting Marshall Sahlins 
(1981, 1985, 1995) against Gananath Obeyesekere (1992) over 
the meaning of Captain James Cook in Hawaiian history?is 
contentious over the matter of who may speak for whom: Sahl?
ins, the American intellectual whose knowledge of historical 
sources surrounding the death of Captain Cook may be unpar?
alleled but who dared to malign nineteenth-century Hawaiian 
chiefs in another work; or Obeyesekere, the Sri Lankan intel?
lectual who suggested that his own birth and his country's his?
tory made him a better candidate to comprehend Hawaiian his?
tory. Several Hawaiian activists unhesitatingly appropriated 
Obeyesekere to their postcolonial critique of Europe and the 
West, despite misgivings about his treatment of sources (Borof-
sky, 1997).3 
The American Indian scene is similar. Here the debates turn 
narrowly, and at times bitterly, over how to imagine Columbus, 
measure the influence of the Iroquois on the United States con?
stitution, or gauge the European role in the transformation of 
an earth-mother metaphor into a Mother Earth deity and its 
subsequent spread. Or they involve historiography at its broad?
est and the identical issue about who possesses the right to 
speak for others (Biolsi and Zimmerman, 1997). 
In these and other struggles, some who possess the right cre?
dentials (after Gonzalez Echevarria and others) ignore contrary 
interpretations and call for their own evidentiary rules and 
other historiographical conventions (Biolsi and Zimmerman, 
1997). In this context, ethnohistory or anthropological history 
can be perceived as part of a colonial agenda to control the tell?
ing of the past, or (to recall ethnohistory in the 1950s) to deter?
mine legal cases whose outcomes have had significant political 
and economic consequence for native people. For some it is not 
enough to dismiss nonnative interpretations. Even certain na?
tive interpretations may be suspect because their authors in 
"confusion" at times "identify with the wrong people, the 
wrong things, the wrong tradition" and as a result are incapable 
of understanding (Churchill, 1993:404). Only natives with ac?
ceptable ideological postures are said to speak legitimately for 
native people or native history, to qualify as revealers of truth. 
According to American Indian scholar Annette Jaimes, what is 
needed is a historical "consciousness necessary to realize the 
liberation of North America from the grip of its nazi heritage" 
(Jaimes, 1992:9). 
Although the reasons for the anger expressed here can and 
should be acknowledged, this does not begin to answer the 
need for sensitive explorations of the past and its many mean?
ings. In his review of the "objectivity question" in history, 
James Kloppenberg (1989:1030) concluded that although "the 
indeterminacy of truth and historicity of reason are now widely 
conceded," there exists nevertheless a "terrain of pragmatic 
truth" to which one can aspire in one's musings or writings on 
the past. With the caveat that truth is always deeply embedded 
in culture, Kloppenberg's optimism points the way toward a 
reasonable middle ground for interpreting the past(s). For mod?
els for indigenous North America, perhaps one can return to 
Sturtevant's aforementioned interest in ethnohistory as "the 
conception of the past shared by the bearers of a particular cul?
ture" and to the many who have followed in his wake, together 
with today's more mature approaches to problems of colonial?
ism, hegemony, and subalternity in writings about the Indians 
of Asia's subcontinent (Prakash, 1990; Chakrabarty, 1992). 
This demands acknowledging the sources?cultural, ethnic, 
psychological, and so on?of the assumptions (the biases) with 
which one operates. It demands, in other words, a reflexive 
awareness of one's historiography. All that is needed now is for 
anthropological historians, nonnative and native alike, to pro?
pel discussion onto this plane. 
Notes 
1. Sturtevant's contributions to the study of the American Indian past have 
reached the widest audience through his role as general editor of the Hand?
book of North American Indians, of which 12 volumes of a projected 20 have 
appeared; as the author of entries in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; and as 
principal consultant on a National Geographic map on Indians of North 
America. The breadth of his work is reflected in publications on the Seminole, 
among whom his ethnographic field research has been the longest. These pub?
lications range widely, from an account of a key informant's life (as well as of 
his own long relationship with that man) to a typology and history of men's 
NUMBER 44 91 
clothing and other analyses (e.g., Sturtevant, 1953, 1956a, 1956b, 1960, 
1967b). His analyses are distinguished by a command of both standard Euro?
pean and indigenous languages, exquisite detail, and reticence for unwar?
ranted generalization. Often Sturtevant is concerned with comparative analy?
sis; for example, the informant-anthropologist relationship or the visual arts 
cross-culturally. The strengths are often in the details; in revealing, for exam?
ple, the origin, two centuries before and a continent away, of Lafitau's engrav?
ing of Huron agriculture, which many had wrongly read literally (Sturtevant, 
1968b). Or in reexposing as fraudulent an engraved mammoth tusk. Offered in 
the nineteenth century as evidence of man-mammoth contemporaneity in 
North America, the tusk was soon dismissed as a fake. But the dismissal was 
forgotten, and the artifact, rediscovered in the late twentieth century, was 
newly presented as genuine (Meltzer and Sturtevant, 1983; Griffen et al., 
1988). Sturtevant's conclusions?as when he remarked, after scrutinizing the 
origin of Lafitau's image of Huron farmers, that "Illustrations are historical 
documents which must be criticized in a manner comparable to that required 
by written documents" (Sturtevant, 1968b:94)?are always cautionary and 
sometimes didactic. For more information, see William Merrill (2001), "The 
Writings of William C. Sturtevant." 
2. Discussion of That Noble Dream has been extensive: see Novick, 1988; 
Kloppenberg, 1989; Cmiel, 1990; Haskell, 1990; Gordon, 1991; Hexter, 1991; 
Hollinger, 1991; Megill, 1991; Novick, 1991; Ross, 1991; and Himmelfarb, 
1992. 
3. Of the several sources, including the two protagonists, cited by Borofsky 
and the commentators in the Current Anthropology Forum on Theory in An?
thropology (Borofsky, 1997), Kame'eleihiwa (1994) and Trask (1991) are es?
pecially revealing of the fault lines in historiography of indigenous people of 
the Pacific. 
Literature Cited 
Asad, Talal 
1987. Are There Histories of People Without Europe? Comparative Stud?
ies in Society and History, 29:594?607. 
Axtell, James 
1979. Ethnohistory: An Historian's Viewpoint. Ethnohistory, 26:1-13. 
1981. The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colo?
nial North America, xii+402 pages. New York: Oxford University 
Press. 
1985. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North 
America, xv+389 pages. New York: Oxford University Press. 
1988. After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North 
America, xii+300 pages. New York: Oxford University Press. 
Barraclough, Geoffrey 
1979. Main Trends in History. 259 pages. New York: Holmes and Meier 
Publishers. 
Biolsi, Thomas, and Larry J. Zimmerman, editors 
1997. Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of 
Anthropology, x+226 pages. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 
Borofsky, Robert 
1997. Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere, and Sahlins. Current Anthropology. 
38:255-282. 
Breen, Timothy H. 
1989. Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories, xiv+306 pages. Read?
ing, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley. 
Bruner, Edward M. 
1986. Ethnography as Narrative. In Victor Turner and Edward M. Bruner, 
editors, The Anthropology of Experience, pages 135-155. Urbana: 
University of Illinois Press. 
Brunschwig, Henri 
1965. Un faux probleme: l'ethno-histoire. Annates, Economies, Societes, 
Civilisations, 20:291-300. [In French.] 
Carmack, Robert 
1972. Ethnohistory: A Review of Its Development, Definitions, Methods, 
and Aims. Annual Review of Anthropology, 1:227-246. 
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 
1992. Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "In?
dian" Pasts. Representations, 37:1-26. 
Chapman, Malcolm, Maryon McDonald, and Elizabeth Tonkin 
1989. Introduction. In E. Tonkin, M. McDonald, and M. Chapman, edi?
tors, History and Ethnicity. A.S.A. Monographs, 27:1-21. London: 
Routledge. 
Churchill, Ward 
1993. Struggle for the Land: Indigenous Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide 
and Expropriation in Contemporary North America, vi+472 pages. 
Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press. 
Cmiel, Kenneth 
1990. After Objectivity: What Comes Next in History? American Literary 
History, 2(1): 170-181. 
Cohn, Bernard S. 
1980. History and Anthropology: The State of Play. Comparative Studies 
in Society and History, 22:198-221. 
Dening, Greg 
1988. History's Anthropology: The Death of William Gooch. xix+122 
pages. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. 
Deschamps, Hubert 
1968. Histoire et ethnologie: l'ethnohistoire. In J. Poirier, editor, Ethnolo-
gie Generate, pages 1433-1444. Paris: Gallimard. [In French.] 
Ewers, John 
1961. Symposium on the Concept of Ethnohistory: Comment. Ethnohis?
tory, 8:262-270. 
Fogelson, Raymond D. 
1974. On the Varieties of Indian History: Sequoyah and Traveller Bird. 
Journal of Ethnic Studies, 2:105-12. 
1984. Who were the Ani-kutani? An Excursion into Cherokee Historical 
Thought. Ethnohistory, 31:255-263. 
1985. Night Thoughts on Native American Social History. In The Impact 
of Indian History on the Teaching of United States History. Occa?
sional Papers in Curriculum Series, 3:67-86. Chicago, Illinois: 
Newberry Library, D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the 
American Indian. 
1989. The Ethnohistory of Events and Nonevents. Ethnohistory, 36: 
133-147. 
Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto 
1992. Review oi Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, 
by Stephen Greenblatt. The New York Times Book Review, 16 Feb, 
sec. 7:22-23. 
Gordon, Linda 
1991. Comments on That Noble Dream. American Historical Review, 96: 
683-687. 
Greenblatt, Stephen 
1991. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, ix+202 
pages. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. 
Griffin, James B., David J. Meltzer, Bruce D. Smith, and William C. Sturtevant 
1988. A Mammoth Fraud in Science. American Antiquity, 53:578-582. 
Hall, Thomas D. 
1989. Social Change in the Southwest, 1350-1880. xvi+287 pages. 
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 
92 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Hanson, Allan 
1989. The Making of the Maori: Culture Invention and Its Logic. Ameri?
can Anthropologist, 91:890-902. 
Haskell, Thomas L. 
1990. Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric Vs. Practice in Peter Nov-
ick's That Noble Dream. History and Theory, 29:129-157. 
Hexter, J.H. 
1991. Carl Becker, Professor Novick, and Me; or, Cheer Up, Professor N.! 
American Historical Review, 96:675-682. 
Himmelfarb, Gertrude 
1992. Telling It as You Like It: Post-modernist History and the Flight from 
Fact. Times Literary Supplement. 16 October: pages 12-15. 
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, editors 
1983. The Invention of Tradition, vii + 320 pages. Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press. 
Hollinger, David A. 
1991. Postmodernist Theory and Wissenschaftliche Practice. American 
Historical Review. 96:688-692. 
Hudson, Charles 
1967. Folk History and Ethnohistory. Ethnohistory, 13: 52-70. 
Hunt, Lynn 
1989. Introduction: History, Culture, and Text. In Lynn Hunt, editor, The 
New Cultural History, pages 1-22. Berkeley: University of Califor?
nia Press. 
Jaimes, M. Annette 
1992. Sand Creek: The Morning After. In M. Annette Jaimes, editor, The 
State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, 
pages 1-12. Boston: South End Press. 
Kame'eleihiwa, Lilikala 
1994. Review of The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, by Gananath Obeyes?
ekere. Pacific Studies. 17:111-118. 
Kammen, Michael 
1980. Introduction: The Historian's Vocation and the State of the Disci?
pline in the United States. In Michael Kammen, editor, The Past Be?
fore Us: Contemporary Historical Writings in the United States, 
pages 19-46. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 
Keesing, Roger 
1974. Theories of Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 3:73-97. 
1989. Creating the Past: Custom and Identity in the Contemporary Pacific. 
The Contemporary Pacific, 1:19?42. 
1990. Colonial History as Contested Ground: The Bell Massacre in the So?
lomons. History and Anthropology, 4:279-301. 
1991. Reply to Trask. The Contemporary Pacific, 3:168-171. 
Kloppenberg, James T 
1989. Objectivity and Historicism: A Century of American Historical 
Writing. American Historical Review, 94:1011-1030. 
Knack, Martha C , and Omer C. Stewart 
1984. As Long as the River Shall Run: An Ethnohistory of Pyramid Lake 
Indian Reservation, xvii+433 pages. Berkeley: University of Cali?
fornia Press. 
Krech, Shepard, III 
1990. American Indian Ethnohistory: Recent Contributions by Three His?
torians. Reviews in Anthropology, 15:91-103. 
1991. The State of Ethnohistory. Annual Review of Anthropology, 
20:345-375. 
1996. Retelling the Death of Barbue, a Gwich'in Leader. In Jennifer 
Brown and Elizabeth Vibert, editors, Reading Beyond Words: Native 
History in Text and Context, pages 182-215. Peterborough, Ontario: 
Broadview Press. 
1997a. History and Anthropology. In Thomas Barfield, editor, The Dictio?
nary of Cultural Anthropology, pages 237-240. Oxford: Blackwell 
Publishers. 
1997b. Ethnohistory. In Thomas Barfield, editor, The Dictionary of Cul?
tural Anthropology, pages 160-162. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 
MS. Anthropological History (Ethnohistory) and the Native Past. In 
Robin Fisher and Ken Coates, editors, Writing Native History, un?
published manuscript. 
Krech, Shepard, 111, editor 
1981. Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the 
Game. 207 pages. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 
Krieger, Leonard 
1989. Time's Reasons: Philosophies of History Old and New. xii+202 
pages. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. 
Lowie, Robert H. 
1915. Oral Tradition and History. American Anthropologist, 17:597-599. 
Lurie, Nancy O. 
1961. Ethnohistory: An Ethnological Point of View. Ethnohistory, 8: 
78-92. 
Martin, Calvin 
1978. Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur 
Trade, xi+226 pages. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
1987a. Introduction: An Introduction Aboard the Fidele. In Calvin Martin, 
editor, The American Indian and the Problem of History, pages 
3-26. New York: Oxford University Press. 
1987b. Epilogue: Time and the American Indian. In Calvin Martin, editor, 
The American Indian and the Problem of History, pages 192-220. 
New York: Oxford University Press. 
Megill, Alan 
1991. Fragmentation and the Future of Historiography. American Histori?
cal Review, 96:693-698. 
Meltzer, David J., and William C. Sturtevant 
1983. The Holly Oak Shell Game: An Historic Archaeological Fraud. In 
Robert C. Dunnell and Donald K. Grayson, editors, Lulu Linear 
Punctated: Essays in Honor of George Irving Quimby. Anthropolog?
ical Papers, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, 72: 
325-352. 
Merrell, James H. 
1989a. The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from Eu?
ropean Contact through the Era of Removal, xv+381 pages. Chapel 
Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 
1989b. Some Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians. Will?
iam and Mary Quarterly, 46:94?119. 
Merrill, William L. 
2001. The Writings of William C. Sturtevant. In William L. Merrill and 
Ives Goddard, editors, Anthropology, History, and American Indi?
ans: Essays in Honor of William Curtis Sturtevant. Smithsonian 
Contributions to Anthropology, 44:31?44. 
Miller, Christopher L. 
1985. Prophetic Worlds: Indians and Whites on the Columbia Plateau. x+ 
174 pages. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 
Novick, Peter 
1988. That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American 
Historical Profession, xii + 648 pages. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni?
versity Press. 
1991. My Correct Views on Everything. American Historical Review, 96: 
699-703. 
Obeyesekere, Gananath 
1992. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pa?
cific. xvii+251 pages. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University 
Press. 
Ortner, Sherry B. 
1984. Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in 
Society and History, 26:126-166. 
Peterson, Jacqueline 
1988. Review of Prophetic Worlds: Indians and Whites on the Columbia 
Plateau, by C L . Miller. Ethnohistory, 35:191-196. 
Prakash, Gyan 
1990. Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives 
from Indian Historiography. Comparative Studies in Society and 
History, 32:383-408. 
NUMBER 44 93 
Price, Richard 
1983. First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People. 189 
pages. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press. 
1990. Alabi's World, xx+444 pages. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins 
University Press. 
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 
1958. Method in Social Anthropology; Selected Essays, xxi+188 pages. 
Edited by M.N. Srinivas. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago 
Press. 
Rosaldo, Renato 
1980a. Doing Oral History. Social Analysis, 4: 89-99. 
1980b. llongot Headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History. 
vi+313 pages. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 
Roseberry, William 
1989. Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History, and Polit?
ical Economy. xiii+278 pages. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rut?
gers University Press. 
Ross, Dorothy 
1991. Afterword. American Historical Review, 96:704?708. 
Sahlins, Marshall 
1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early 
History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom, viii+84 pages. Ann Ar?
bor: University of Michigan Press. 
1985. Islands of History, xix+180 pages. Chicago, Illinois: University of 
Chicago Press. 
1995. How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example, x+318 
pages. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. 
Sando,Joe S. 
1983. Nee Hemish: A History of Jemez Pueblo, xviii+258 pages. Albu?
querque: University of New Mexico Press. 
Schieffelin, Edward, and Deborah Gewertz 
1985. Introduction. In Deborah Gewertz and Edward Schieffelin, editors, 
History and Ethnohistory in Papua New Guinea, pages 1-6. Syd?
ney: University of Sydney. 
Simmons, William S. 
1988. Culture Theory in Contemporary Ethnohistory. Ethnohistory, 35: 
1-14. 
Stone, Lawrence 
1977. History and the Social Sciences in the Twentieth Century. In CL . 
Dezell, editor, The Future of History, pages 3-42. Nashville, Ten?
nessee: Vanderbilt University Press. 
Sturtevant, William C. 
1953. Chakaika and the "Spanish Indians": Documentary Sources Com?
pared with Seminole Tradition. Tequesta, 13:35-73. 
1956a. R.H. Pratt's Report on the Seminole in 1879. Florida Anthropolo?
gist, 9(1): 1 -24. 
1956b. A Seminole Personal Document. Tequesta, 16:55-75. 
1960. A Seminole Medicine Maker. In Joseph B. Casagrande, editor, In 
the Company of Man: Twenty Portraits by Anthropologists, pages 
505-532. New York: Harper and Brothers. 
1964. Studies in Ethnoscience. In A. Kimball Romney and Roy G. D'An-
drade, editors, Transcultural Studies in Cognition. American Anthro?
pologist, 66(3), part 2 (special publication):99-131. 
1965. Ethnographic Details in the American Drawings of John White, 
1577-1590. Ethnohistory, 12(l):54-63. 
1967a ("1966"). Anthropology, History, and Ethnohistory. Ethnohistory, 
13( 1?2): 1 ?51. [Date on title page is 1966; actually published in 
1967.] 
1967b. Seminole Men's Clothing. In June Helm, editor, Essays on the Ver?
bal and Visual Arts, pages 160-174. Seattle: University of Washing?
ton Press. [Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society 
Annual Spring Meeting, 1966.] 
1968a. Anthropology, History, and Ethnohistory. In James A. Clifton, edi?
tor, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology: Essays in the Scope and 
Methods of the Science of Man, pages 451-475. Boston: Houghton 
Mifflin Co. 
1968b. Lafitau's Hoes. American Antiquity, 33(l):93-95. 
Tanner, Helen H. 
1991. Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin (1903-1988), Founder of the American 
Society for Ethnohistory. Ethnohistory, 38:58-72. 
Tompkins, Jane 
1986. Indians, Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History. In Henry 
L. Gates, editor, "Race, " Writing and Difference, pages 59-77. Chi?
cago: University of Chicago Press. 
Trask, Haunani-Kay 
1991. Natives and Anthropologists: The Colonial Struggle. The Contem?
porary Pacific, 3:159-167. 
Trevor-Roper, Hugh R. 
1965. The Rise of Christian Europe. 216 pages. New York: Harcourt, 
Brace and World. 
Trigger, Bruce G. 
1982. Ethnohistory: Problems and Prospects. Ethnohistory, 29:1-19. 
1984. Indian and White History: Two Worlds or One? In Michael K. Fos?
ter, Jack Campisi, and Marianne Mithun, editors, Extending the 
Rafters: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Iroquoian Studies, pages 
17-34. Albany: State University of New York Press. 
1986. Ethnohistory: The Unfinished Edifice. Ethnohistory, 33:253-267. 
Vansina, Jan 
1960. Recording the Oral History of the Bakuba, I: Methods. Journal of 
African History, l(l):43-53. 
Washburn, Wilcomb E. 
1961. Ethnohistory: History "In the Round." Ethnohistory, 8:31^*8. 
Weiner, Annette B. 
1995. Culture and Our Discontents. American Anthropologist, 97:14-21. 
White, Hayden 
1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Eu?
rope. xii+448 pages. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins Univer?
sity Press. 
White, Richard 
1983. The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social 
Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and the Navajos. xix+433 
pages. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 
Whiteley, Peter M. 
1988. Deliberate Acts: Changing Hopi Culture through the Oraibi Split. 
xxii+373 pages. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 
Wolf, Eric 
1982. Europe and the People without History, xi+503 pages. Berkeley: 
University of California Press. 
Worsley, Peter 
1984. A Landmark in Anthropology. American Ethnologist, 11:170-175. 

Editing a Cambridge History in a Postmodern Context 
Bruce G. Trigger 
I was fortunate to serve my editorial apprenticeship working 
for William C. Sturtevant as volume editor of the Northeast 
volume of the Handbook of North American Indians (Trigger, 
1978). This gave me a welcome opportunity to gain a detailed, 
up-to-date regional perspective on the Iroquoian peoples I was 
studying, while helping to create a major reference work. I ap?
preciated the chance to benefit from Sturtevant's vast knowl?
edge of Native Americans and Native American studies as well 
as from his editorial skills. That experience was an important 
factor predisposing me to accept a geographically even more 
challenging task, coediting the North America volume of The 
Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas 
(Trigger and Washburn, 1996). 
Recruitment 
Frank Smith, the executive editor for the social sciences for 
Cambridge University Press, visited McGill University in Oc?
tober 1984 to ask me to consider editing this volume, which 
would be part of a three-volume series that would trace the his?
tory of the aboriginal peoples of North America, Mesoamerica, 
and South America from earliest times to the present. I was 
then finishing Natives and Newcomers (Trigger, 1985), and my 
research interests already were turning to investigating the his?
tory of archaeology. Despite initial reluctance to commit a 
large block of time to editing this volume, I agreed to do so be?
cause I believed that there was a pressing need for a history that 
would transcend disciplinary boundaries, that would begin with 
the arrival of the first aboriginal people and not the Europeans, 
and that would embrace all the native peoples who lived north 
of Mesoamerica. Although there were already adequate sepa?
rate histories of the native peoples of Canada and the United 
States, and the histories of individual groups were being treated 
very thoroughly in the Handbook, there was no comprehensive 
history of the native peoples now living within the boundaries 
of those two countries and Greenland. I also believed that re?
search on native history was playing a significant role in com?
bating prejudices against native people, especially as such find?
ings became incorporated into school textbooks and the 
presentations of the mass media. I hoped that an accessible, 
Bruce G. Trigger, Department of Anthropology, McGill University, 
855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T7, Canada. 
scholarly reference work covering all of North America might 
play a special role in helping to counteract a variety of stereo?
types and prejudices. 
Being asked to edit a Cambridge history is not being given 
freedom to do whatever one wishes. Since the early twentieth 
century, Cambridge histories have sought through collaborative 
authorship to create major reference works that synthesize the 
current monographic literature relating to the history of a re?
gion, country, or people in a manner that meets the highest pro?
fessional standards but remains accessible to educated nonspe-
cialists. Even relatively young fields, such as Native American 
history, have produced a literature that is extensive and often 
forbidding to outsiders, even those who are academics and ac?
customed to reading widely. In recent years, as scholarship has 
grown increasingly chaotic, fractious, and competitive, these 
problems have increased, making responsible guides to this lit?
erature all the more important. In addition to being reference 
works, Cambridge histories are read around the world by stu?
dents, professional historians working in other fields, and peo?
ple who are interested in the history of a particular region or 
people. Thus, as a volume editor, I ensured that every sentence 
would be understandable to a German or Chinese reader who 
knew little about the history of North America and its peoples. 
Each volume in a Cambridge history series is edited by a 
specialist broadly familiar with the field, and each chapter is 
written by someone well versed in the subject matter of that 
chapter. Chapters tend to be relatively long and therefore few in 
number. Their ample length gives the authors scope, but their 
broad range means that selectivity and concision remain essen?
tial. Coverage is supposed to be balanced, not partisan; the 
style authoritative, not polemical. Illustrations are minimal and 
are usually limited to maps, although some concession was 
made to including other types of illustrations with the archaeol?
ogy chapters in the North America volume because that re?
duced the need for verbal description. 
Smith had decided that each volume oi Native Peoples of the 
Americas would be edited jointly by a historian and an anthro?
pologist chosen after informal consultation with experts in the 
field. Wilcomb E. Washburn, director of the Office of Ameri?
can Studies at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C, 
and editor of the History of Indian-White Relations volume of 
the Handbook (Washburn, 1989), was appointed as coeditor of 
the North America volume. This meant that the coeditors were 
95 
96 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
also an American and a Canadian, which it was hoped would 
facilitate recruiting authors and editing manuscripts. Finally, 
the editors' political views were far from identical. Since we 
were jointly responsible for planning the volume and also had 
to agree on the authors for each chapter, our selection by Cam?
bridge University Press might be viewed as a further guarantee 
against specific forms of political or academic bias. Yet, while 
this arrangement may have inhibited potentially innovative 
risk-taking, which is not part of the tradition of Cambridge his?
tories, it probably resulted in views being expressed in this 
work that are more diverse than those in most other aboriginal 
histories. As a result of working with Washburn, I found my?
self being exposed to unfamiliar and challenging arguments, 
and I acquired a greater awareness of the diversity of views 
concerning aboriginal history and among aboriginal people 
themselves. Hence, my editorial collaboration proved to be a 
valuable learning experience. Although we never had a chance 
to discuss the matter, I believe Washburn regarded our collabo?
ration in the same way. 
Both of us discovered that editing a Cambridge history was 
very much a cottage industry compared to editing a volume of 
the Handbook. We lacked the team of expert editorial assis?
tants, coordinators, bibliographers, illustrators, and cartogra?
phers that Sturtevant had assembled at the Smithsonian, and 
whose strenuous efforts relieved us of much routine hard work 
and anxiety about the accuracy of the material going into our 
volumes. Knowing and working with these people became it?
self a pleasure. As coeditors of a Cambridge history, we were 
ourselves responsible for performing these tasks, and this in 
turn resulted in more sustained communications with the au?
thors of the various chapters. On the other hand, the more nar?
rowly focused theme of our volume posed a much greater chal?
lenge of ensuring that each chapter covered its assigned topics 
and that there were no serious gaps or discrepancies within or 
between them. Editing a volume of the Handbook was like ed?
iting an encyclopedia, whereas the North America volume was 
an integrated narrative. 
Washburn and I worked closely on all aspects of the volume, 
although, after 1994,1 took over more editorial responsibilities 
so that Washburn could complete writing the final chapter. Al?
though later he sometimes seemed to lack his usual energy, he 
never complained of illness or failed to carry out his editorial 
responsibilities. It came as great shock to me to learn, not long 
after the volume was published, that he had died of cancer. 
Planning 
Cambridge University Press decided that, unlike the usage in 
the Handbook, the border between North America and Me?
soamerica in this series would run along the present United 
States-Mexico frontier rather than along the northern limit of 
aboriginal high civilization farther south. This was decided 
soon after the editorial teams for all three volumes had been ap?
pointed, during a general division of responsibilities, and in?
volved consultation between Cambridge University Press and 
all six volume editors. Because of these consultations, the 
whole of Mexico was assigned to the Mesoamerica volume. 
Although it was recognized that modern national borders were 
irrelevant before European contact and that Texas, the Ameri?
can Southwest, and California had been part of Mexico until 
the mid-nineteenth century, it was judged that the more recent 
development of pan-tribal institutions and identities within the 
context of national states justified this arrangement. It also 
seemed worth exploring what resulted from using a division 
different from the one that had been employed in the North 
American Handbook and in the Handbook of Middle American 
Indians (Wauchope, 1964-1976). Although one archaeological 
contributor objected strongly to this arrangement, it permitted 
later chapters of the North America volume to focus on the ex?
periences of native North Americans in relation to the United 
States, Canada, and Denmark. 
Washburn and I finalized our proposed chapter outline of the 
volume on 10 November 1984 at the annual meeting of the 
American Society for Ethnohistory held in New Orleans. We 
then also had a chance to discuss our ideas with other ethnohis?
torians. Our main challenge was to present a comprehensive, 
balanced, and well-structured history of the native peoples of 
North America within our contract's stipulated limitation of a 
maximum of 16 chapters, none of which should exceed 20,000 
(this was later expanded to 25,000) words. Our second concern 
was that North America should not be a one-volume condensa?
tion of the historical sections of the Handbook. That meant 
avoiding a tribal history approach and instead trying to explore 
more general themes in Native American history, in particular 
ones relating to changing patterns of adaptation and identity. 
The chapter outline, with accompanying annotations, that was 
drawn up that day, and which Cambridge University Press sent 
to 10 readers for comment, was followed in the published vol?
ume (Table 1), except that we had intended chapter 5, dealing 
with prehistoric Mississippian chiefdoms, to be followed by a 
chapter assessing the significance of historical linguistics for 
understanding Native American prehistory. As a result of nega?
tive comments from several prominent linguists who main?
tained that the current state of historical linguistics did not jus?
tify separate treatment, this chapter was dropped. Its essential 
elements, however, as well as pertinent information about the 
linguistic prehistory of North America, were incorporated into 
the chapters that dealt with native history before European con?
tact, especially the chapter by Dean Snow. The loss of this 
chapter has since been made good by the publication of 
Michael Foster's (1996) magisterial survey of native North 
American historical linguistics in the Languages volume of the 
Handbook. 
The final ordering of the volume reflected the coeditors' 
awareness of, and concerns about, the current postmodern pre?
occupations of history and the social sciences. It therefore was 
decided to begin with a chapter, by Peter Nabokov, surveying 
native views of history, to be followed by a second chapter, by 
NUMBER 44 97 
TABLE 1.?Contents of The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the 
Americas, volume 1, North America. 
List of illustrations 
Editorial preface 
1. Native views of history 
Peter Nabokov, University of Wisconsin, Madison 
2. Native peoples in Euro-American historiography 
Wilcomb E. Washburn, Smithsonian Institution 
Bruce G. Trigger, McGill University 
3. The first Americans and the differentiation of hunter-gatherer cultures 
Dean R. Snow, Pennsylvania State University 
4. Indigenous farmers 
Linda S. Cordell, University of Colorado, Boulder 
Bruce D. Smith, Smithsonian Institution 
5. Agricultural chiefdoms of the Eastern Woodlands 
Bruce D. Smith, Smithsonian Institution 
6. Entertaining strangers: North America in the sixteenth century 
Bruce G. Trigger, McGill University 
William R. Swagerty, University of Idaho 
7. Native people and European settlers in eastern North America, 1600-1783 
Neal Salisbury, Smith College 
8. The expansion of European colonization to the Mississippi Valley, 
1780-1880 
Michael D. Green, University of Kentucky 
9. The Great Plains from the arrival of the horse to 1885 
Loretta Fowler, University of Oklahoma 
10. The greater Southwest and California from the beginning of European set?
tlement to the 1880s 
Howard R. Lamar, Yale University 
Sam Truett, Yale University 
11. The Northwest from the beginning of trade with Europeans to the 1880s 
Robin Fisher, University of Northern British Columbia 
12. The reservation period, 1880-1960 
Frederick E. Hoxie, The Newberry Library 
13. The Northern Interior, 1600 to modem times 
Arthur J. Ray, University of British Columbia 
14. The Arctic from Norse contact to modern times 
David Damas, McMaster University 
15. The Native American Renaissance, 1960 to 1995 
Wilcomb E. Washburn, Smithsonian Institution 
Index 
Washburn and myself, examining changing representations of 
native people in Euro-American historiography. Washburn and 
I agreed that these chapters were necessary to ensure that read?
ers were aware of the socially constituted nature of history and 
of the varied political uses and misuses that are made of it. In 
our own chapter, while admitting the inevitability and desir?
ability of alternative interpretations of the past, we sought to 
counter extreme relativist assertions that there is no objective 
way to assess the truth claims of mutually exclusive interpreta?
tions of the past. We attempted to illustrate how fresh evidence 
frequently undermines accepted interpretations, even when 
these enjoy considerable ideological support, and how differing 
viewpoints often give rise to interpretations that are comple?
mentary rather than antithetical. Nabokov demonstrated that 
there was considerable variation in traditional views of the past 
from one aboriginal group to another, thereby challenging the 
adequacy of evolutionist claims that all native peoples shared a 
similar mythopoeic outlook (Martin, 1987), and he also 
showed how these views have changed and multiplied as suc?
cessive generations of aboriginal people have sought to ac?
count for new experiences. 
The next three chapters were to deal with Native American 
history before European contact. Our plan for these chapters 
was strongly criticized by a number of assessors for promoting 
an evolutionary view of native cultures, which they thought 
was ethnocentric and even racist. It is true that different types 
of cultures were to be examined in the historical order in which 
these types had first appeared, but this did not imply inevitable, 
unilinear development. Chapter 3 discusses what is known 
about the arrival of native people in the New World (alternative 
aboriginal views are presented in chapter 1) and traces the his?
tory of hunter-gatherer cultures in each region until European 
contact. It is made clear that big-game hunting and collecting 
cultures flourished over large areas of North America for more 
than 12,000 years and that these cultures had their own histo?
ries of change and development. Hunter-gathering is not 
treated as evidence of social or cultural inferiority or as nothing 
more than an ephemeral prelude to agricultural societies. Chap?
ter 4 deals with the agricultural societies that developed in the 
Southwest and East beginning in the second millennium B.C. 
Its authors stress that farming economies developed along fun?
damentally different lines in the two regions, reflecting their 
disparate origins and environmental settings. Chapter 5 dis?
cusses the complex chiefdoms that developed in the Southeast 
after A.D. 900. With the exception of the Natchez, these societ?
ies disappeared, largely as a result of European epidemics dur?
ing the sixteenth century, but before then they were the most 
complex societies evolved by any aboriginal North Americans. 
Although the archaeological chapters offer a generally famil?
iar view of the past, all three stress more than most older syn?
theses do how even those native peoples who relied the most 
heavily on agriculture knew a great deal about wild plants and 
animals and continued to use them to a considerable extent for 
food and clothing. This orientation helps to explain bizarre but 
persistent nineteenth-century Euro-American claims that all 
native peoples were hunters, whether or not they relied on agri?
culture. As shown in chapter 8, cultural prejudices prevented 
Euro-Americans from acknowledging that women could play a 
significant role in agriculture and induced them to classify 
North American Indian economies on the basis of male activi?
ties. Hence, the nineteenth century witnessed an ethnocentric 
Euro-American effort to "civilize" Indians by turning male 
hunters into farmers and female farmers into housewives. 
The third and longest section of the book (chapters 6-12) 
traces the history from 1500 to 1960 of those parts of North 
America that at least since the late nineteenth century have 
been settled mainly by people of European origin. This in?
cludes all of the United States south of the 49th parallel and 
Canada south of the boreal forest. Chapter 6 documents the 
highly varied contacts that took place between Indians and Eu?
ropeans before the end of the sixteenth century, mainly in 
98 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
southern and eastern North America. Chapters 7 to 11 survey 
what happened to aboriginal peoples in the areas of North 
America that were dominated by European settlement between 
1600 and the 1880s. Two of these chapters cover the Eastern 
Woodlands, and one each covers the Great Plains, the South?
west and California, and the Northwest Coast, southern Alaska, 
and Aleutian Islands. Each of these regions had distinctive na?
tive cultures and was colonized by Europeans of different na?
tionalities (Spanish, French, and English) and at different 
times. The cultures of the native peoples of the Plains were 
transformed by the arrival of the horse, which had been intro?
duced into the Southwest by the Spanish, well in advance of 
any significant direct contact with Europeans. The final chapter 
in this section examines the history of all native peoples living 
south of the North American boreal forest from 1880 to 1960. 
During this period most recognized Indians in the United States 
and southern Canada were confined to reservations and were 
subject to the tutelage of the United States and Canadian gov?
ernments. Yet, despite its repressiveness, the reservation period 
was when these Indians acquired a more detailed knowledge of 
Euro-American ways and began to use expanding Euro-Ameri?
can communication networks to forge pan-Indian solidarity 
and to create political movements that allowed them ever more 
effectively to resist encroachment and begin to regain control 
over their own lives. 
Key elements of chapters 6 to 12 are Michael Green's ac?
count of the development of United States Indian policy from 
1780 to 1880 and Frederick Hoxie's survey of United States 
and Canadian Indian policy from 1880 to 1960. Green chroni?
cled the shift in United States official policy in the 1820s from 
stressing assimilation to justifying removal. Indian resistance 
was tenacious, resourceful, and often well informed about 
Euro-American intentions, but Euro-American pressures to ac?
quire Indian land were remorseless and cumulative. Largely by 
letting Euro-Americans and Indians of the time speak for them?
selves, Green revealed the injustices of this period. Hoxie dem?
onstrated that these attitudes did not change significantly until 
the 1930s. Although the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, 
prompted by then United States Commissioner of Indian Af?
fairs John Collier, did not greatly enhance the living standards 
of native people, it created conditions that promoted both legal 
recognition of native self-government and the staffing of the 
United States Bureau of Indian Affairs by aboriginal Ameri?
cans. This assisted native people in their ongoing struggles to 
protect and enhance the freedoms that they had never willingly 
surrendered. 
Chapters 13 and 14 chronicle the history from first European 
contact to the present of the aboriginal peoples who continue to 
live north of the main zone of European settlement. The Sub?
arctic and Arctic regions are treated in separate chapters, the 
Arctic chapter being a history of the Inuit. These peoples re?
tained control of their destinies until recent times, but the prob?
lems that small numbers, isolation, and the cost of travel pose 
for education, employment, and social action have made the 
challenges northern peoples face as they become increasingly 
dependent on a world economy significantly different from, 
and in many ways more serious than, those confronting aborig?
inal people farther south. The most significant divide among 
native people today does not run along the Canada-United 
States border but along the southern edge of the boreal forest. 
A final chapter, written by Washburn after Nancy Lurie, a se?
nior anthropologist noted for her strong support for the struggle 
for Indian empowerment, was unable to accept our invitation to 
do so, surveys cultural, political, and economic developments 
among Native Americans since 1960 on a continental scale. It 
continues Hoxie's documentation of how aboriginal peoples 
have made progress in their struggle to regain control over their 
own lives. Considerable attention is paid to artistic, literary, 
and scholarly achievements. At the same time it indicates the 
changing but persistent external pressures with which native 
peoples still must contend as they seek to assert their tribal and 
pan-Indian identities within the North American cultural mo?
saic. Especially within those aboriginal communities in the 
United States that have successfully implemented self-govern?
ment, there has been a growing dichotomy between those Indi?
ans who reject the communal ideals of the past as an impedi?
ment to economic progress and those who view embracing a 
free-market economy as a betrayal of their traditional commu?
nity ideals. There are no easy solutions, especially for smaller 
native groups that as a result of the colonial encounter lack the 
resource or revenue base to support their legitimate aspirations. 
Although the general topics that had to be covered in each 
chapter were noted in brief descriptions prepared by the edi?
tors, the tradition of Cambridge histories is to select appropri?
ate experts to write each chapter and allow them to develop 
their material as they see fit. Washburn and I briefly considered 
the possibility that chapters might be submitted to native 
groups for comment or approval, but we decided not to do this. 
Each chapter, as a result of its broad scope, deals with many 
different peoples, all of whom in fairness would have had to be 
consulted and who often did not share the same view of their 
common past. Under these circumstances, consultation would 
have been an extremely lengthy and problematical undertaking. 
There was, however, some editorial intervention relating to 
terminology. The terms "tribe" and "band" were used only as, 
respectively, United States and Canadian government adminis?
trative designations; otherwise the terms "peoples," "nations," 
"communities," or "groups" were used. The term "prehistory" 
was banished because it is ethnocentric and patronizing to im?
ply that history began only with the arrival of Europeans (Ax?
tell, 1988:42-43). We do not deny, however, that, because of 
the absence of written records, the study of native history be?
fore the arrival of Europeans is quite different from the study of 
native history after that time. We followed Francis Jennings 
(1975:viii) in avoiding such expressions as "blacks," "whites," 
and "redskins" (except in historical quotations) because such 
references to physical appearance clearly embody outmoded 
racial stereotypes. And finally, the names of native peoples 
NUMBER 44 99 
were pluralized (Hopis, Cherokees), as other nationalities ha?
bitually are (Germans, Russians). This was done in response to 
James Axtell's (1985:xi) complaint that the "anthropological 
singular" wrongly treated Indian groups differently from other 
peoples. 
Recruiting Authors 
Washburn and I began to select authors to write chapters in the 
late 1980s; however, when we started to assemble a list of 
names, we encountered a major problem. To ensure the unity of 
each chapter, we were determined that it would be written by 
no more than two coauthors. All of our original proposals were 
for single authors, with a second author being added only at the 
request of the original one. This usually happened when the es?
say divided naturally into two parts on a geographical basis. 
Yet, even in these cases, each author had to cover a broad topic. 
We had failed to appreciate the extent to which Native Ameri?
canist scholars are specialists. The vast majority seem to focus 
on the history and ethnography of particular aboriginal peoples, 
on the study of intergroup trade in a particular region during a 
specific century, or even on more specific topics, such as Hopi 
rain dances or Iroquois warfare. Often, researching such speci?
alities becomes their life's work. I am not certain why this is 
the case. Similar specialization has been avoided in other areas 
that have a similar complexity of ethnographic subject matter. 
Moreover, it appears to be a specialization of long standing, al?
beit one that has been accentuated in recent decades by a de?
clining interest in a comparative perspective. It is an attitude 
that perhaps is encouraged by the geographical proximity of 
many researchers to the groups they are studying and also by a 
belief, which is often incorrect, that the more general studies 
have already been done. 
Whatever the reason for this problem, it was difficult to re?
cruit generalists to produce the broad syntheses we required. A 
likely source appeared to be other volume editors of the Hand?
book. This worked well in the case of David Damas on the Arc?
tic, but three others either declined our invitations or were 
forced to withdraw by the pressure of other work. Six authors 
in all failed to complete their assignments, and one chapter lost 
two sets of authors, who each failed to produce an acceptable 
draft, before being written in record time by a third recruit. 
This slowed the completion of the volume and produced a cri?
sis that was overcome only when the present slate of authors 
was settled on as part of a major reorganization of editorial re?
sponsibilities in May 1994. At that juncture Smith deployed his 
editorial skills well beyond the call of duty by working as a de 
facto third member of the editorial team until new authors were 
recruited and the production of the volume was back on sched?
ule. Almost all the authors, although selected for their exten?
sive knowledge, were required to research unfamiliar topics in 
order to complete their chapters. We therefore needed people 
who were not only experts but who were also willing and able 
to cope with challenges. 
This need for extensive and detailed knowledge, rather than 
narrowly focused specialization, did not leave the editors much 
choice. When we discussed possible authors with colleagues 
across North America, they frequently objected that the obvi?
ous choice was undesirable because he or she probably did not 
have anything new to say. But our interlocutors frequently had 
to admit that the alternatives they were proposing were either 
less informed about the subject or their judgement was less ma?
ture. Fortunately, we did discover, often when we were looking 
for late replacements, younger generalists who on short notice 
produced excellent papers. So we did not end up depending en?
tirely on old war horses. The volume was written by an excel?
lent mix of scholars who varied in age and academic rank from 
beginners to postretirement. 
Another problem was the 49th parallel. In general we found 
that anthropologists and historians who were well informed 
about native people in the United States knew little about na?
tive people in Canada or about Canadian institutions, whereas 
Canadian specialists similarly knew little about matters south 
of the border. Some authors rose above this problem in exem?
plary fashion. Neal Salisbury already had a comprehensive 
knowledge of Indian relations with Spanish, English, and 
French colonists in eastern North America, and Damas drew 
upon his experience editing the Arctic volume of the Handbook 
to survey the history of that region from Greenland to Alaska 
beginning in A.D. 900. Using the exceptional textual and hu?
man resources of the Newberry Library, Hoxie produced a 
magnificent study of the reservation period in the United States 
and Canada. His chapter contains probably the most detailed 
comparison currently available of Indian policies in those two 
countries between 1880 and 1960. Chapters 2 and 6, both of 
which had to deal equally with Canada and the United States, 
each were coauthored by an American and a Canadian. 
More serious problems came with chapters that were geo?
graphically centered within one modern nation state but ex?
tended into another. The authors of chapters 4, 8, and 9 were 
less familiar with Canadian than with American sources. In 
these instances I found myself, as editor, suggesting the addi?
tion of material relevant to southeastern Canada or the Cana?
dian Plains. On the other hand, the authors of chapters 11 and 
13 were more familiar with Canadian than with United States 
material. Robin Fisher knew the ethnohistorical sources relat?
ing to British Columbia and coastal Washington and Oregon 
thoroughly but was less familiar with the Plateau area and 
coastal Alaska. Arthur Ray, as a consequence of his intensive 
studies of the Hudson's Bay Company, had paid less attention 
to the Indians of interior Alaska than he had to those who lived 
in what is now Canada. 
Although each author tried hard to provide a balanced cover?
age, it was clearly impossible to discuss everything relating to 
the history of aboriginal North America in fifteen 25,000-word 
papers. Despite its shortcomings, this volume of Native Peo?
ples of the Americas offers a series of more balanced and com?
prehensive regional syntheses of the history of the aboriginal 
100 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
peoples of North America than does any previous work. It also 
provides a needed basis for starting to compare the relations 
between Canadian and United States governments and native 
peoples over the past several centuries. 
Washburn and I did not score well in recruiting women and 
aboriginal authors. Only two of our 16 contributors are women: 
Linda Cordell (chapter 4) and Loretta Fowler (chapter 9). I also 
regret that less attention has been paid to women's issues in this 
volume than should have been. There does not, however, ap?
pear to be a correlation between such attention and either the 
gender or the age of authors. Some of the most extensive and 
insightful coverage of gender issues is provided by Green in 
chapter 8 and Ray in chapter 13. 
We did ask a number of prominent aboriginal anthropolo?
gists and historians to write chapters, but they declined, usually 
because they were too busy. There is much interest among na?
tive people in studying aboriginal history, but for good reasons 
much of it is directed toward the investigation of specific peo?
ples or issues. This orientation is not compatible with the more 
synthetic goals of a Cambridge history. We might have tried to 
attract more native contributors as coauthors, but we feared that 
might be viewed as patronizing. 
Assessment 
I am the first admit that this is a "white man's" history. Yet, 
without being smug or apologetic, I would suggest that it may 
be appropriate, as well as historically inevitable, that the North 
America volume oi Native Peoples of the Americas has been a 
work of Euro-American scholarship. In chapter 2 the coeditors 
documented how early Euro-American historiography re?
flected and reinforced a popular image of native people as infe?
rior to European settlers and hence justified their marginaliza-
tion, spoliation, and abuse. This situation did not begin to 
change until 1930, when Harold Innis (1930) paid serious at?
tention to the important role that Indians had played in the fur 
trade. In the course of subsequent ethnohistorical research, 
Euro-American anthropologists and historians have collected a 
vast amount of data that have challenged negative stereotypes 
concerning native people that their predecessors had helped to 
create. It is now recognized not only that the history of North 
America is incomplete without knowing what has happened to 
native people but also that it is impossible to understand many 
aspects of Euro-American history fully and accurately in the 
absence of such knowledge (Trigger, 1985). The North Amer?
ica volume constitutes a significant milestone in overcoming 
and repudiating the most pernicious myths that previous gener?
ations of Euro-American scholars had fabricated. This is 
largely the cumulative result of the responsible collection and 
deployment of data that have gradually limited the scope for 
certain kinds of pernicious wishful thinking and the abuse of 
history for political ends. 
Another unexpected benefit of this volume has been the op?
portunity it affords to assess the preoccupations that currently 
dominate the academic study of aboriginal history. Although 
the racism and ethnocentrism that dominated earlier Euro-
American treatments of Native American history largely have 
been eradicated, new interpretations reflecting currently fash?
ionable commitments to political correctness, cultural relativ?
ism, and idealistically privileging subjectivity have taken their 
place, introducing new biases into the study of aboriginal his?
tory. Because, in general, theoretical issues loom larger as the 
level of synthesis increases and the use of facts becomes more 
selective, it might be expected that this volume would mirror 
currently fashionable attitudes. Yet, because the authors come 
from intellectually diverse backgrounds and have a detailed un?
derstanding of their subject matter, their chapters are more fac?
tually constrained than is often the case when a single individ?
ual writes a general survey of aboriginal history. Far from 
mirroring current prejudices, the historical accounts in this vol?
ume document a diversity of aboriginal behavior that defies 
simple classification or explanation. 
Recent scholarship has made it clear that in the past the im?
pact of European diseases upon aboriginal Americans was 
grossly underestimated (Dobyns, 1983; Thornton, 1987). Be?
ginning in the first half of the sixteenth century, vast numbers 
of Native Americans perished from European diseases against 
which they had no acquired immunity. The deaths of vast num?
bers of native people led in some instances to political and cul?
tural collapse and to the disappearance of entire peoples, and 
they weakened the ability of most native groups to resist Euro?
pean expansion. The vast overall population decline also en?
couraged an erroneous impression that North America had 
been an empty continent before European settlement. Many 
Euro-American scholars now treat this decline and the recent 
demographic recovery as the principal factors that account for 
Indian-Euro-American relations. Some native scholars have 
also begun to argue that their ancestors were vanquished by 
diseases and not by European settlers (Sioui, 1992). The au?
thors contributing to the North America volume clearly ac?
knowledged the importance of microbial disasters, but they 
also demonstrated that epidemics occurred under specific cir?
cumstances and at different times and had varied impacts in 
different regions of North America. Epidemics alone cannot 
explain the course of Indian-Euro-American relations. Europe?
ans were not obliged, except perhaps by their cultural values, to 
take advantage of Indian population decline in the ways they 
did. Too much emphasis on demographic factors diverts atten?
tion from the political, economic, religious, and cultural factors 
that were also involved in Indian-Euro-American relations. In?
voking epidemics to explain what happened to native people 
bears an uncanny resemblance to attributing it to Divine Provi?
dence, as Euro-American historians frequently did between the 
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. If the volume helps to re?
verse this trend, it has achieved something important. 
A second currently popular theme in the study of aboriginal 
history is resistance. It has become fashionable to argue that 
native history has placed too much emphasis on documenting 
NUMBER 44 101 
exploitation, suppression, and annihilation. What is needed is 
to pay greater attention to how native people struggled to pre?
serve their ethnic identity and valued aspects of their traditional 
ways of life (Merrell, 1989). There is no doubt that aboriginal 
people, as individuals and groups, displayed great resourceful?
ness in resisting colonization. Sometimes they struggled effec?
tively to maintain a traditional way of life intact, as the Hopis 
have done. In other cases they adopted many aspects of Euro?
pean social and political organization in the hope that this 
would permit them to resist European expansion. The Creeks 
and Cherokees provide excellent examples of that strategy. But 
it is evident that every native group that has survived had to 
struggle against terrible odds to do so, and they suffered major 
losses as their freedom was restricted by growing numbers of 
European settlers who were intent on controlling the resources 
of North America. The brutal, land-hungry Euro-American re?
sponse to the efforts of the "five civilized tribes" of the south?
eastern United States to adapt to the new order makes this all 
too clear. 
The North America volume provides many examples of ab?
original peoples struggling against immense odds and in many 
different ways to maintain their freedom, but it also bears wit?
ness to the failure of many of their struggles and to the terrible 
losses that all North American native peoples have suffered at 
various points in their history since 1492. For a long time In?
dian groups had great difficulty in uniting to oppose European 
settlement, and these problems became more serious as the set?
tler population increased and the native population declined. 
All too often native people aligned themselves with European 
settlers against rival native groups. It is instructive, for exam?
ple, to learn about the important role that Plains Indian scouts, 
working for the United States Army, played in forcing other 
Plains Indians onto reservations. European groups also aligned 
themselves with Indian allies against European rivals, but the 
political consolidation of European settlers almost always out?
stripped that of native peoples. European success was based not 
only on superior technology but also on greater social disci?
pline and on an ideology that encouraged greater self-discipline 
and aggressiveness. The miracle is that so many aboriginal 
groups managed to survive until eventually they learned to 
work together to expand their freedom in a sometimes very 
hostile and always very demanding political environment. Pan-
Indianism, although sometimes dismissed as a betrayal of more 
authentic or genuine forms of aboriginal identity, has in fact 
played an important role in native peoples' quests for dignity 
and freedom. The volume bears witness in equal measure to ab?
original peoples' will for collective survival and to the limita?
tions that Euro-Americans have placed on their freedom and 
the losses and injustices they have suffered. Native history can?
not be properly understood unless both these aspects are con?
sidered. 
There are also heated, theoretically grounded disagreements 
about the early impact that European contact had on aboriginal 
cultures. It has been argued that new sources of wealth often 
led to the economic and religious florescence of indigenous 
cultures. Although many examples of this can be cited (Trig?
ger, 1976), other native societies soon disintegrated as a result 
of epidemics, loss of territory, or spiralling warfare resulting 
from growing economic competition among native peoples. An 
especially bitter academic dispute relates to the impact that Eu?
ropean technology had on native peoples. Some scholars argue 
that native people quickly appreciated the value of European 
metalware and became technologically dependent on it. Their 
inability to produce iron led to increasing reliance on European 
suppliers, which encouraged intergroup warfare over trade 
routes and raw materials to trade with Europeans and which in 
the long run undermined their political independence and ad?
herence to their traditional belief systems (Trigger, 1985). Oth?
ers have argued that native groups long valued European goods 
not for their utilitarian properties but because of the meanings 
they assigned them in relation to their traditional religious be?
liefs (Miller and Hamell, 1986). It has also been claimed that 
native groups in eastern North America were so little influ?
enced by European technology that they were able to determine 
their own destinies in the midst of European colonial rivalries 
until at least 1760 (Eccles, 1986; Heidenreich, 1986; Steele, 
1994). Those who uphold this view maintain that Indian war?
fare during the early historical period was mainly a continua?
tion of longstanding conflicts, the scale of which was perhaps 
enhanced by the acquisition of European firearms and a grow?
ing need to replace escalating population losses from European 
diseases by incorporating increasing numbers of prisoners into 
their societies (Richter, 1983). Like the nineteenth-century his?
torian Francis Parkman, though without his racism (Trigger, 
1985:10-14), these analysts believe in a wholly idealistic fash?
ion that after, as well as before, European contact Indian behav?
ior was determined almost entirely by their own particularistic 
and unchanging cultural norms. Little attention is paid to the 
role played by rational calculations of individual political and 
material self-interest, whether such interest is defined in terms 
of either universal or culturally specific criteria (for a discus?
sion of universal criteria, see Brown, 1991). 
The chapters in the North America volume document that 
some aboriginal societies diminished and disappeared as a con?
sequence of lethal epidemics, whereas others that were equally 
affected managed to hold their own and even to prosper. Euro?
pean contact resulted in cultural florescence for some native 
societies and in cultural decline for others. It also resulted in 
relative autonomy for some societies but growing dependence 
on Europeans or on neighboring aboriginal groups for others, 
in resistance for some but varying degrees of collaboration 
with Europeans for others, and in what can only be described 
as the victimization of many native peoples by Europeans. 
These examples, drawn from comprehensive sources that guar?
antee their representativeness, suggest that the range of varia?
tion in relations between aboriginal societies and European in?
truders was far greater than any ideologically driven 
formulation might suggest. If any overall pattern is discernible, 
102 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
it is that epidemiological, demographic, technological, social, 
and ideological factors gave European colonists an advantage 
that allowed them to gain control of the more fertile areas of 
North America in the 400 years following 1492, but that many 
aboriginal peoples managed to survive within the context of 
Euro-American society and today have regained more freedom 
to express themselves and determine their own destiny than 
they have had since the 1870s or earlier. This was not an out?
come that would have been predicted even by the most sympa?
thetic anthropologists at the beginning of the twentieth century. 
The overall pattern does not, however, diminish the variety of 
ways in which different aboriginal groups under very difficult 
and dissimilar circumstances sought to assure their survival in 
the face of Euro-American competition. 
Concluding Observations 
I do not accept the view that only members of an ethnic group 
may rightly study that group's history. On the contrary, the 
study of English, Japanese, and German history has been en?
riched as a result of being examined from multiple ethnic per?
spectives. What makes the difference between polemic and 
productive academic discourse in such exchanges is a shared 
commitment to ascertaining the truth and to maintaining the 
highest disciplinary standards. Nevertheless, it is peculiar and 
unacceptable when a people's history is studied exclusively, or 
even primarily, by outsiders. In all studies of relatively recent 
history, it is normal that the greatest academic interest should 
come from those people whose own past and cultures are being 
investigated. They bring to such studies a commitment and per?
spectives that are important ingredients of historical research 
everywhere. To observe that the root cause of the lack of native 
representation in professional historiography is broadly social, 
rather than specifically academic, does not excuse academics 
from playing a major role in resolving it by trying to recruit 
more native people to study Native American history and an?
thropology. Although I would oppose nonnative scholars being 
excluded from contributing to the next edition of the North 
America volume oi Native Peoples of the Americas, I would 
like to see it edited and largely written by a new generation of 
native professional historians and anthropologists. That native 
people do not yet play the leading role in the professional study 
of their own history and anthropology is an anomaly that re?
quires correction. Only when this anomaly has been eliminated 
will the legacy of colonialism and ethnocentrism truly be exor?
cised from these professions. The present generation of non-
native ethnohistorians has managed to rescue Native American 
history from some of the egregious misunderstandings of pre?
vious generations of anthropologists and historians. Ahead lies 
the challenging task of writing history from a more authentic 
Native American perspective. That can be done only after more 
native people have become professional historians and anthro?
pologists. 
Note 
This paper is drawn mainly from a talk titled "Conflicts and Blind Spots: Can 
Non-Native Scholars Write a History of the Native Peoples of North Amer?
ica?" which I gave as the Sixth Seminar of the McGill Institute for the Study of 
Canada, 28 March 1995.1 thank Desmond Morton, director of the institute, for 
inviting me to give this talk, and I thank Frank Smith of Cambridge University 
Press for commenting on a draft of the paper. The paper was finished while I 
was the recipient of sabbatical leave from McGill University. 
Literature Cited 
Axtell, James 
1985. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North 
America, xv+389 pages. New York: Oxford University Press. 
1988. After Columbus: Essays on the Ethnohistory of Colonial North 
America, xii+300 pages. New York: Oxford University Press. 
Brown, Donald E. 
1991. Human Universals. x+220 pages. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Tem?
ple University Press. 
Dobyns, Henry F. 
1983. Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dy?
namics in Eastern North America, xvii + 378 pages. Knoxville: Uni?
versity of Tennessee Press. 
Eccles, William 
1986. Review of Natives and Newcomers, by Bruce G. Trigger. William 
and Mary Quarterly, 43:480-483. 
Foster, Michael K. 
1996. Language and the Culture History of North America. In William C. 
Sturtevant, genera] editor, Handbook of North American Indians, 
volume 17, Ives Goddard, editor, Languages, pages 64-110. Wash?
ington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
Heidenreich, Conrad E. 
1986. Review of Natives and Newcomers, by Bruce G. Trigger. Native 
Studies Review, 2:140-147. 
Innis, Harold A. 
1930. The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic 
History. 444 pages. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 
Jennings, Francis 
1975. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of 
Conquest, xvii + 369 pages. Chapel Hill: University of North Caro?
lina Press. 
Martin, Calvin, editor 
1987. The American Indian and the Problem of History, xiv+232 pages. 
New York: Oxford University Press. 
Miller, Christopher L., and George R. Hamell 
1986. A New Perspective on Indian-White Contact: Cultural Symbols and 
Colonial Trade. Journal of American History, 73:311-328. 
Merrell, James H. 
1989. The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from Eu?
ropean Contact through the Era of Removal, xv+381 pages. Chapel 
Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 
NUMBER 44 103 
Richter, Daniel K. 
1983. War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience. William and Mary Quar?
terly, 40:528-559. 
Sioui, Georges E. 
1992. For an Amerindian Autohistory: An Essay on the Foundations of a 
Social Ethic, xxiv+125 pages. Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen's 
University Press. 
Steele, Ian K. 
1994. Warpaths: Invasions of North America. 282 pages. Oxford: Oxford 
University Press. 
Thornton, Russell 
1987. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History 
Since 1492. xx + 292 pages. Norman: University of Oklahoma 
Press. 
Trigger, Bruce G. 
1976. The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 
1660. 2 volumes, xxiii+913 pages. Montreal, Quebec: McGill-
Queen's University Press. 
1985. Natives and Newcomers: Canada's "Heroic Age" Reconsidered. 
xiii + 430 pages. Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen's University 
Press. 
Trigger, Bruce G , editor 
1978. Northeast. In William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of 
North American Indians, volume 15, xvi+924 pages. Washington, 
D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
Trigger, Bruce G., and Wilcomb E. Washburn, editors 
1996. North America. In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of 
the Americas, volume 1: part 1, xix+564 pages; part 2, xix + 500 
pages. New York: Cambridge University Press. 
Washburn, Wilcomb E., editor 
1989 ("1988"). History of Indian-White Relations. In William C. Sturte?
vant, general editor, Handbook of North American Indians, volume 
4: xiii+838 pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. [Date 
on title page is 1988; actually published in 1989.] 
Wauchope, Robert, general editor 
1964-1976. Handbook of Middle American Indians. 16 volumes. Austin: 
University of Texas Press. 

A Historian Among the Anthropologists 
Wilcomb E. Washburn 
When I came to the Smithsonian Institution in 1958 as a histo?
rian interested in the American Indian, I soon found my way to 
Bill Sturtevant's crowded office in the Natural History Mu?
seum. I have traced that route many times since on missions in?
volving collaboration or merely to exchange views on issues of 
the day. My associations with Bill have included participation 
in the abortive Center for the Study of Man project, directed by 
Sol Tax, who came in regularly from the University of Chi?
cago; editorship of volume 4, The History of Indian-White Re?
lations of the Handbook of North American Indians under the 
general editorship of Bill; participation in the meetings of the 
Anthropological Society of Washington, the annual meetings 
of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and in?
ternational meetings, such as the one at the University of Cali?
fornia, Los Angeles, that resulted in the publication First Im?
ages of America (Chiappelli, 1976), and the one in Moscow out 
of which came Pre-Columbian Collections in European Muse?
ums (Hocquenghem et al., 1987); even shared projects, such as 
our joint article "The First Americans" (Sturtevant and Wash-
bum, 1976) for the catalog A Nation of Nations, which accom?
panied the exhibit of that name in the Museum of History and 
Technology (now the National Museum of American History) 
in 1976, and more recently an abortive attempt to do a joint re?
view of an exhibit on Pocahontas at the Virginia Historical So?
ciety, in Richmond, Virginia. These associations have fostered 
a warm relationship that I value most highly among all my 
Smithsonian relationships. 
Nevertheless, despite our shared assumptions and good 
working relations, I have always remained a historian among 
the anthropologists. The relationship has been basically 
friendly, but it has sometimes been antagonistic. The antago?
nistic debates have occurred principally in three areas, which I 
want to deal with in this paper: United States government pol?
icy toward the American Indian; anthropological participation 
in ideological debates within our society; and anthropological 
theories, such as cultural relativism. Often my critical attitude 
stimulated anthropologists, like my friend Nancy Lurie, to ask 
me rhetorically, "Where did you do your fieldwork?" Nancy 
asked me this at a meeting at the Asilomar Conference Center, 
in California, where I gave a paper on "Ethical Perspectives in 
Wilcomb E. Washburn (deceased, 1997), National Postal Museum, 
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C, USA. 
North American Ethnology" at a meeting of the American Eth?
nological Society (Washburn, 1985). In my paper I had at?
tacked Tax and the "action anthropology" with which both he 
and Nancy were closely identified. My good-natured reply to 
her needling was, "Among the anthropologists." 
The Project Camelot affair (an effort by the United States 
Army to enlist social science research for counterinsurgency) 
became a turning point for anthropologists in 1965, when their 
desire to be listened to by government was overmatched by 
their concern over the ultimate purpose for which their exper?
tise was being sought. Anthropologists raised nasty accusations 
against fellow anthropologists perceived to be working for the 
United States government against the interests of the peoples 
being studied. Vietnam in particular and Southeast Asia in gen?
eral became the first great test of whether anthropologists had 
any legitimate business working on projects designed to help 
the United States government in such areas. I thought that the 
AAA, and Bill himself, overreacted in trying to draw a cordon 
sanitaire between the government and anthropology. Of course, 
given that both Bill and I worked for the Smithsonian, a quasi-
governmental institution that receives most of its support from 
appropriated funds of the United States government, there was 
a reason to be concerned that the work of anthropology not be 
used against the interests of the peoples being studied. 
As a Marine Corps Reserve officer who had been in uniform 
during World War II and the Korean War, I occupied a particu?
larly vulnerable position. The Standing Rock Sioux author and 
educator Vine Deloria and others, when they sought to oppose 
me in scholarly meetings, would often refer to me as "colonel," 
or as a marine, as a way of instantly identifying me as hostile to 
the aspirations of men of good will. As a member of the Com?
mission on the Study of Peace of the International Union of 
Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, I have continued 
to observe how wide the breach is between those connected 
with the military and those who, like a later president of the 
United States, "loathed" the military.1 In the commission's 
newsletter, Human Peace, were to be found learned essays, 
such as the article "Witchcraft and the Cold War," in which an?
thropologist Paul R. Turner attempted to apply his knowledge 
of witchcraft in the small Indian village of Santiago in the state 
of Oaxaca, Mexico, to the relationship between the United 
States and the Soviet Union. Turner conceded that his "attempt 
to explain the Cold War in terms of witchcraft is simplistic and 
does not do justice to the complexity of the situation," but he 
105 
106 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
concluded that one could legitimately make the analogy 
(Turner, 1989:72). Turner's use of his work on witchcraft to ex?
plain the Cold War was expanded upon by others, such as the 
anthropologist Alice Kehoe, in the next issue oi Human Peace. 
"Peace Studies" scholars, particularly among political scien?
tists and historians, seemed to me to present arguments that 
were ideological, idealistic, or condescending in character. 
Like Herman Kahn, founder and director of the Hudson Insti?
tute, one of whose seminars there I had attended while on mili?
tary reserve duty, I found most peace studies irrelevant if not 
unreadable. 
Anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s moved recklessly to 
the defense of regimes that I felt deserved critical scrutiny if 
not outright condemnation. Anthropologists habitually de?
nounced United States government policy with regard to Com?
munist regimes in the Soviet Union, the Peoples Republic of 
China, Cuba, Angola, Nicaragua, and the like. At the business 
meetings of the AAA, I often participated in debates on resolu?
tions on international questions (such as the condemnation of 
the United States for the invasion of Grenada, on which issue I 
constituted the sole vote opposed to the resolution) and also on 
domestic questions involving American Indian issues. Indeed, I 
realized I had achieved a certain degree of notoriety when Bill, 
beside whom I was seated at one business meeting, asked if I 
minded if he sat somewhere else because people were begin?
ning to suspect that he might be corrupted by my proximity. 
When I reminded him of this incident many years later, he 
questioned whether it actually happened, but I believe I re?
member the incident accurately, and I have enjoyed repeating 
the story to my conservative friends over the years. 
In addition to finding myself at odds with my anthropologi?
cal colleagues on international issues, I diverged on questions 
relating to the government's American Indian policy. Often the 
issue pitted elected tribal governments against self-selected 
groups, such as the American Indian Movement (AIM), or fac?
tional elements within tribes. Anthropologists tended, in my 
opinion, to be swayed too readily by the rhetoric of the radicals 
and to join too easily in condemning so-called puppet tribal 
governments. 
In the Indian Truth, a publication of the Indian Rights Asso?
ciation, I wrote that the wild charges made by unrepresentative 
American Indian groups and individuals before the Fourth Rus?
sell Tribunal, held at Rotterdam from 24 to 30 November 1980, 
trivialized the real injustices suffered, squandered white sup?
port for the American Indian, and undermined the cause of ex?
panding Indian self-government (Washburn, 1981). I listed the 
accusers who brought the charges, a motley array: the Indepen?
dent Hopi Village of Hotevilla for the Hotevilla Hopi; Herbert 
Blatchford for the Big Mountain Dine; the Lakota Treaty 
Council for the Lakota; the Indian Law Resource Center on the 
general issue of land rights of Indians in the United States and 
the situation of the Iroquois, Lakota, Hopi, Seminoles, and 
Shoshone; Rosemary Christensen, Minneapolis Public 
Schools, for the urban Indians of Minneapolis; the Grand 
Council of the Iroquois Confederacy for the Haudenosaunee 
(Iroquois); Bruce Ellison, lawyer, for Leonard Peltier; Indian 
Law Resource Center for the Ganienkeh Territory (Mohawk); 
the Hupa Survival Group for the Hupa; and the Western Shos?
hone Sacred Land Association for the Western Shoshone. Al?
though anthropologists were not prominent among the com?
plainants, they tended to support the initiatives of the activists. 
None of these entities, I pointed out, was an official tribal 
body, none was designated by tribal governments to represent 
them, and none was elected by their tribal members to repre?
sent them. Typical of the charges was that of the organizing 
committee of the tribunal itself, which asserted that "steriliza?
tion of Indian women without permission or request has been 
alleged against many countries, but has been fully documented 
and proven with respect to the United States by a report of the 
General Accounting Office of the United States Congress" 
(cited in Washburn, 1981:8). Of course this was a pure inven?
tion and deliberate falsification of the evidence. I was later to 
run into this type of accusation abroad. At a meeting at a uni?
versity in Rome in the 1980s, where I shared the platform with 
the Tewa anthropologist Al Ortiz, the Creek medicine man 
Philip Deer, and the AIM activist Bill Means, I had to face the 
wrath of the left-leaning student body when I pointed out that 
the charges of sterilization and even of genocide, which Deer 
and Means had asserted, were nonsense and they knew they 
were nonsense. I was greeted with shouts of disbelief and out?
rage. "We know it is true!" the students shouted. I could not get 
Ortiz to join me in refuting the charge and had to congratulate 
Deer and Means at dinner that night on their successful rhetori?
cal achievement. 
At another meeting in Italy, after I had defended the sincerity 
of John Collier, commissioner of Indian affairs from 1933 to 
1945, in attempting to re-create American Indian tribal sover?
eignty through the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (see 
Washburn, 1984), the room had to be ritually cleansed by a pre?
sumed religious leader, James Youngblood Henderson, before 
the next session could go on! 
Perhaps the most divisive ideological issue involving Ameri?
can Indians stemmed from the activities of the AIM, an urban 
Indian phenomenon that obtained enormous press coverage 
throughout the 1970s and 1980s because of the charismatic 
character of its various leaders, most notably Russell Means 
and Dennis Banks. The most publicized controversy involving 
AIM was the take over at the village of Wounded Knee, South 
Dakota, in 1973. AIM radicals, led by Means, demanded a 
change in the democratically elected (and allegedly puppet) 
Oglala tribal government. The occupation was eventually 
ended, and Means failed to overthrow the elected government, 
but one of the ugly by-products of the siege was the execution-
style killing, in 1975, of two FBI agents, for which Leonard 
Peltier was convicted and sentenced to jail, where he still re?
mains. In the meantime, millions of people around the world 
(twelve million in the former Soviet Union alone) have signed 
petitions demanding his release. In books such as Peter Mat-
NUMBER 44 107 
thiessen's (1983) In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, authors have 
written that the evidence against Peltier is insufficient to estab?
lish his guilt. Matthiessen and others concede that Peltier was a 
member of the group that killed the agents, but Matthiessen as?
serts that it was another individual in the group who actually 
fired the fatal bullets. On elite campuses around the country 
support groups were set up in which the Wounded Knee issue 
was presented as a conflict between an oppressive United 
States government and victimized American Indians. 
Academic anthropologists were generally supportive of 
such groups although they often recognized the tenuousness of 
the radicals' claims. Only one professional anthropologist 
(Carol Talbert) took part in the takeover of Wounded Knee, 
and she defined her role, in a conversation with me shortly af?
terward, not as an anthropologist studying a crisis situation but 
as a committed activist, ready to do the bidding of those in 
charge. In a note in the American Anthropologist (Washburn, 
1980), I challenged Karl Schlesier's assertion that because the 
militants were the true representatives of the Oglala people, 
while the elected tribal government was by definition illegiti?
mate, more anthropologists should have supported the faction 
taking over Wounded Knee. I pointed out that anthropologists 
should be faulted not for failing to enlist as ideological guerril?
las under the AIM leadership against the Oglala Establishment 
but for failing to give us an accurate account and explanation 
of the event, as James Mooney, of the Bureau of American 
Ethnology, did with regard to the Ghost Dance movement of 
1890. Fay Cohen (1976) and Steve Talbot (1979) have written 
accounts of the AIM but were not participants at Wounded 
Knee as Talbert was. The claims of the AIM radicals about the 
injustice done to Peltier have been undermined in recent years 
by accounts such as Scott Anderson's (1995) "The Martyrdom 
of Leonard Peltier," in Outside Magazine, and it may be sig?
nificant that in his autobiography, Means (1995) mentions 
Peltier only twice, and there is no index reference to Peltier in 
the book. 
Bill and I did not always disagree, particularly when we ven?
tured outside anthropological realms. I remember vividly how 
we reacted with shared irritation to the first version of the exhi?
bition The West as America at the Smithsonian's National Mu?
seum of American Art in 1991, which became a cause celebre 
in the battle against political correctness. I had arranged to take 
the students in my graduate seminar on Material Aspects of 
American Civilization to the National Museum of American 
Art to look at the exhibition and to discuss it with the curators 
at the museum. The students got little opportunity to express 
their own views as Bill and I repeatedly challenged the curators 
about the character of their interpretation of the American 
West. One of the labels, for example, showed the same Indian 
girl before and after entering a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. 
The contrast in her clothing before and after putting on her 
school uniform was striking, but her impassive face was the 
same in both photographs?except in the label, which enjoined 
us to note how sad and despondent she became after being 
forced into the white man's school! There were even more ex?
traordinary labels, such as that describing Frederic Reming?
ton's painting, Fight for the Water Hole, in which a couple of 
desperate cowboys are preparing to defend themselves against 
a circling band of hostile Indians, as expressive of capitalism 
threatened by a resurgent labor movement. Washington Post 
columnist Charles Krauthammer (1991) keenly observed, 
"Thirty years ago in Moscow, I imagine, a party museum might 
have staged an exhibit of American art depicting the Western 
frontier as a chronicle of racist capitalist rapacity and called it 
'The American West: The Origins of Imperialism.'" But, as 
Krauthammer went on to note, "Alas, they don't do it that way 
in Moscow any more. But they do do it that way in Washing?
ton." In the comment book placed in the exhibition, Daniel 
Boorstin, librarian of congress emeritus and previously director 
of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, 
wrote: "A perverse, historically inaccurate, destructive ex?
hibit," and Simon Schama, then of Harvard University, wrote: 
"A relentless sermon, phenomenally condescending to both the 
painters and the painted."2 
The growing activism among anthropologists often seemed 
to me to leave anthropologists committed not to some schol?
arly conception of truth but to an uncritical support of "my 
people, right or wrong." Sometimes these issues came up in 
the course of scholarly debates. For example, when Joseph Jor-
gensen and Richard Clemmer (1978) and Jorgensen (1978) 
critically reviewed The Indian in America (Washburn, 1975), 
their principal criticism, referring to the Indian Reorganization 
Act of 1934, was that Collier had "made up his own statistics, 
and perpetrated a good deal of deception in order to make it 
seem as though the Hopi were seeing things his way, when 
they were not" (Jorgensen and Clemmer, 1978:70). I was 
faulted for being fooled by Collier and for reporting in my 
book that the Hopi had legitimately accepted the act and the 
Hopi Constitution. 
It was a simple matter to disprove the calculations of Jor?
gensen and Clemmer by referring merely to the published ma?
terials that they had carelessly used and incorrectly cited. But 
I went on to examine the manuscript record of the Hopi Cen?
sus of 1934 in the National Archives in order to demonstrate 
how scandalously inadequate was what they had presented as 
their research. I then went on to analyze the work of Clemmer, 
in particular his doctoral dissertation (Clemmer, 1972), in 
which he conceded that he worked actively as a partisan for a 
small faction of the Hopi tribe, which he grandiosely referred 
to as the "Hopi Resistance Movement." In his dissertation, 
Clemmer also conceded some self-doubt about his role but 
brought himself "to an activist position that I could hardly jus?
tify not taking." Why? Because "if the anthropologist's goals 
are more than simply cultural, then his activist affiliation with 
a particular faction or ethnic group is hopefully a function of 
his goals on a more cosmic level and he becomes culture-
bound only as an interpreter of certain universal laws or val?
ues" (quoted in Washburn, 1979:97). Clemmer's overt inter-
108 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
ference in the affairs of the Hopi caused me to cite his conduct 
to the Ethics Committee of the AAA as being incompatible 
with the guidelines established by the profession against such 
political involvement. As might be expected, I was not able to 
obtain a formal hearing on the subject on the grounds that my 
dispute with Clemmer was already being waged in the schol?
arly journals. 
My challenge to Clemmer and Jorgensen was followed by 
other challenges to anthropologists who insisted on identifying 
minority radical groups within American Indian tribes as the 
true representatives of those tribes and dismissed any Indian 
tainted by the electoral process as somehow a tool of the Bu?
reau of Indian Affairs. 
My concern with the growing commitment of anthropolo?
gists to ideological radicalism led me to introduce a resolution 
at the annual business meeting of the AAA in Chicago, on 18 
November 1983. My resolution followed a debate over the Yel?
low Thunder Camp, occupied by radicals in the Black Hills, 
South Dakota, in which individuals who were not Sioux pro?
fessed to speak for the Sioux, and the only Sioux present noted 
that she was not authorized by her tribe to express an opinion. 
My resolution was as follows: 
Be it resolved that any motion or resolution submitted by a member of the 
AAA for consideration by the membership either at its annual meeting or by 
mail ballot that professes to speak for the wishes of members of an American 
Indian tribe or nation include within its text or in an accompanying document 
the evidence on which the claim to speak for the wishes of members of the tribe 
is based. If the evidence does not include an affidavit or resolution from the le?
gally constituted tribal government, indicating support for the proposed motion 
or resolution, then the evidence submitted with the AAA member's motion or 
resolution must include a statement indicating which individual Indians and or 
unofficial groups of Indians support the member's motion or resolution. 
The resolution was fiercely debated and was defeated. David 
Aberle, of the University of British Columbia, was one of the 
principal opponents of the resolution. 
At the same 1983 meeting at which my resolution was re?
jected, a motion opposing relocation under the Navajo-Hopi 
Land Settlement Act of 1974 was approved. That resolution 
was offered by 11 individuals, all of whom (as Bill pointed out 
to me) had worked with the Navajo rather than the Hopi in their 
fieldwork. The AAA subsequently established a panel on the 
Hopi-Navajo land dispute, which issued a series of reports in 
the Anthropology Newsletter, reports that I considered gener?
ally banal and unrealistic when they were not one-sided. Pro?
fessors Thayer Scudder (California Institute of Technology), 
David Aberle, and Joseph Jorgensen (University of California, 
Irvine) were particularly concerned about how distressful relo?
cation would be to the Big Mountain Navajo forced to move 
under the act. Appropriate answers were provided to their 
learned commentaries by United States Senator James 
Abourezk, who noted that "we did not need an anthropologist 
to tell us [that] almost without exception people resist forced 
relocation" (cited in Washburn, 1989:740), and by Abbott 
Sekaquaptewa, chairman of the Hopi negotiating committee, 
who noted that "the Navajo Tribe has yet to explain why great 
psychological harm will be done if they move off Hopi lands, 
and similar harm is not done to them when they uproot their 
homes and families to move in on Hopi territories" (cited in 
Washburn, 1989:741). In a report on "Anthropological Advo?
cacy in the Hopi-Navajo Land Dispute" (Washburn, 1989), I at?
tributed the one-sided anthropological support of the Navajo to 
anthropology *s instinctive concern with present injustice and 
methodological unconcern with historical injustice. 
As a historian I have always looked with suspicion on an?
thropology's eager embrace of frequently changing theories. 
My greatest concern was with cultural relativism, which has 
been a mixed blessing for anthropology. On the positive side it 
has corrected some of the narrow, ethnocentric observations as?
sociated with those ignorant of other countries and convinced 
of the superiority of their own mores. But on the negative side 
it has led to increasing embarrassment in its failure to distin?
guish between cultural traits that violate the rights of other 
groups in the assertion of the validity of its own. 
When I heard Clifford Geertz's Distinguished Lecture at the 
1983 meeting of the AAA, entitled "Anti Anti-Relativism," I 
began to think about the dilemma cultural relativism posed for 
anthropology. I began to write a response to the Geertz piece, 
which I originally entitled "Anti Anti Anti-Relativism," a title 
that was replaced by the editors of the American Anthropolo?
gist by the title "Cultural Relativism, Human Rights, and the 
AAA" (Washburn, 1987b). Postulating that cultural relativism 
derived its continuing power as much from cultural anthropolo?
gists' hostility to the values of their own society as from any in?
herent theoretical logic, I began to play the historian again. In 
the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian, I 
examined the materials relating to the "Statement on Human 
Rights" submitted to the United Nations in by the Executive 
Board of the AAA (see AAA, 1947), and I incorporated the 
powerful attack on Western civilization from that statement 
into the article that I submitted to the American Anthropologist. 
I will not rehearse the argument except to point out that the 
statement asserted that individuals must be free to participate in 
"the only right and proper way of life that can be known to 
them, the institutions, sanctions and goals that make up the cul?
ture of their particular society" (AAA, 1947:543). The thought 
was expressed more directly elsewhere in the statement that 
"man is free only when he lives as his society defines freedom" 
(AAA, 1947:543). Where such a philosophy leaves an individ?
ual in societies such as Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Castro's 
Cuba, or Ortega's Nicaragua can well be imagined. I discussed 
the issue at greater length in an invited paper delivered at the 
1995 meeting of the AAA in Washington, D.C, entitled "Cul?
tural Relativism Versus Universal Human Rights." 
The radicalism of anthropology extended even to archaeology 
as I learned during my association with the Society for Histori?
cal Archaeology. (Indeed, Colonial Williamsburg archaeology 
director Noel Hume and I attribute the spelling of the last two 
words in the society's name to our involvement in an organiza?
tional meeting to set up the society. I insisted that "historical" 
NUMBER 44 109 
was the right word and not "historic," as the fashion at the time 
had it, and he that "archaeology" was infinitely superior to 
"archeology.") At one of the meetings of the society, University 
of Maryland archaeologist Mark P. Leone and his students gave 
papers that attempted to demonstrate how the archaeology of 
the colonial city of Annapolis, Maryland, revealed the pattern of 
oppression characteristic of stratified capitalistic societies. The 
streets of Annapolis were seen as "ideology... masking a signif?
icant and potent reality" (cited in Washburn, 1987a:544), and 
gardens concealed the ideological reality of class conflict. Le?
one's definition of the critical method in archaeology stated that 
"critical theory is a set of varied attempts to adapt ideas from 
Marx to the understanding of events and circumstances of 20th-
century life that Marx did not know" (Leone et al., 1987:283). I 
vigorously attacked Leone and his views in "A Critical View of 
Critical Archaeology" (Washburn, 1987a). 
Perhaps an account of an incident in which I came face to 
face with the paradoxical and ironic character of the relation?
ship between scholars and activists may serve to conclude and 
throw light on this difficult relationship. I was scheduled to 
give a talk at the University of California, Davis, one evening 
in the 1970s. As I always did when I was in the vicinity, I paid 
a quick visit to the AIM-run D-Q University, which had appro?
priated an abandoned military installation near Davis. Its head 
was then Dennis Banks. I was always accused of trying to dem?
onstrate that the university was really a Potemkin village be?
cause I would always come in unannounced to see what, if any?
thing, was going on. In any event, in this instance, Banks 
invited me to participate in a "sweat": a religious ceremony in 
which a group gathered in a small tent while hot stones, intro?
duced from outside, produced a steam bath within. I was seated 
at the spot furthest from the opening of the tent, which was oc?
cupied by Banks. All around me were Indians of various tribes 
tightly packed together. I was the biggest person there and 
hence closest to the hot stones, which virtually seared my skin. 
As prayer after prayer was said, and stone after stone was intro?
duced, I realized that Banks was playing a trick on me, trying 
to get me to cry "Uncle" because of the discomfort. So 1 gritted 
my teeth and avoided any such remark. Finally a Navajo beside 
me said, "I can't stand it any more! I've got to get out!" Banks 
responded, "Put your face down to Mother Earth!" The edge of 
the tent provided what little air was available in the small 
space, other than through the opening controlled by Banks. 
"Fuck Mother Earth!" the Navajo responded, and bolted for the 
opening. This broke up the ceremony, and I was able to get out 
and go to Davis for my lecture. I have always remained an ad?
mirer of Banks, and impressed by his political skills. When I 
was in the Ainu village of Nibutani in Hokkaido, Japan, in 
1995, I discovered Banks had recently been there and contin?
ued to exert an influence on foreign perceptions of the Ameri?
can Indian. 
The battle to create the image of the American Indian con?
tinues to be waged among Indian radicals and Indian conserva?
tives, as well as among anthropologists and historians of both 
radical and conservative persuasion. I hope my brief account 
will give some picture of the struggle as it was fought in the 
years in which Bill Sturtevant and I shared so many fond 
memories. 
Notes 
[These notes were added by the editors after the author's death.] 
1. It became known during the 1992 presidential campaign that Bill Clinton 
had written in a letter of 3 December 1969 to Col. Eugene J. Holmes, Professor 
of Military Science and commander of the ROTC program at the University of 
Arkansas: "I am writing too in the hope that my telling this one story will help 
you to understand more clearly how so many fine people have come to find 
themselves still loving their country but loathing the military" (Atlanta Consti?
tution. 13 Feb 1992:A9). This statement was widely referred to in the form of 
the paraphrase "I loathe the military," first by Clinton's critics and eventually 
in the mainstream media (for example, Tom Brokaw on Hardball, CNBC, 21 
Dec 1998). 
2. Photocopy of the comment book from The West as America exhibit, 
Smithsonian American Art Museum/ National Portrait Gallery Library. 
Literature Cited 
American 
1947. 
Anderson, 
1995. 
Chiappelli 
1976. 
Clemmer, 
1972. 
Anthropological Association (AAA) 
Statement on Human Rights. American Anthropologist, 49(4): 
539-543. 
Scott 
The Martyrdom of Leonard Peltier. Outside Magazine, 20(7):44-55, 
120-136. 
, Fredi 
First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old. 
Volume 1, xxii + 515 pages; volume 2, i-xviii, 1 leaf, 519-957 
pages. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
Richard O. 
Directed Resistance to Acculturation: A Comparative Study of the 
Effects of Non-Indian Jurisdiction on Hopi and Western Shoshone 
Communities. Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Ur-
bana-Champaign. 
Cohen, Fay 
1976. The American Indian Movement and the Anthropologist: Issues and 
Implications of Consent. In Michael A. Rynkiewich and James P. 
Spradley, editors, Ethics and Anthropology: Dilemmas in Field-
work, pages 81-93. New York: John Wiley and Sons. 
Hocquenghem, Anne-Marie, Peter Tamasi, and Christiane Villain-Gandossi, 
editors 
1987. Pre-Columbian Collections in European Museums. 303 pages. 
Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. 
Jorgensen, Joseph G. 
1978. A Century of Political Economic Effects on American Indian Soci?
ety, 1880-1980. The Journal of Ethnic Studies, 6(3): 1-82. 
Jorgensen, Joseph G , and Richard O. Clemmer 
1978. America in the Indian's Past. The Journal of Ethnic Studies, 6(2): 
65-74. 
110 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Krauthammer, Charles 
1991. "Westward Hokum: Political Correctness Comes to the Smithson?
ian." Washington Post, 31 May: A19. 
Leone, Mark P., Parker B. Potter, Jr., and Paul A. Shackel 
1987. Toward a Critical Archaeology. Current Anthropology, 28(3): 
283-302. 
Matthiessen, Peter 
1983. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, xli+628 pages. New York: Viking 
Press. [Republished in 1992 with an epilogue by Peter Matthiessen 
and an afterword by Martin Garbus.] 
Means, Russell 
1995. Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell 
Means. With Marvin J. Wolf, xviii+573 pages. New York: St. Mar?
tin's Press. 
Sturtevant, William C , and Wilcomb E. Washburn 
1976. The First Americans. In Peter C. Marzio, editor, A Nation of Na?
tions: The People Who Came to America as Seen through Objects 
and Documents Exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution, pages 
4-23. New York: Harper and Row. 
Talbot, Steve 
1979. The Meaning of Wounded Knee, 1973: Indian Self-Government 
and the Role of Anthropology. In Gerrit Huizer and Bruce Man?
nheim, editors, The Politics of Anthropology: From Colonialism 
and Sexism Toward a View from Below, pages 227-258 . The 
Hague: Mouton Publishers. 
Turner, Paul R. 
1989. Witchcraft and the Cold War. In Paul R. Turner and David Pitt, edi?
tors, The Anthropology of War and Peace, pages 66-76. Granby, 
Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey. 
Washburn, Wilcomb E. 
1975. The Indian in America, xix+296 pages. New York: Harper and Row. 
1979. On the Trail of the Activist Anthropologist; Response to Jorgensen 
and Clemmer: JES 6:2, 6:3. Journal of Ethnic Studies, 7:89-99. 
1980. "Of Indians and Anthropologists:" A Response to Karl Schlesier. 
American Anthropologist, 82:558-559. 
1981. The Russell Tribunal?Who Speaks for Indian Tribes? Indian Truth, 
240 (July-August): 8, 14. 
1984. A Fifty-Year Perspective on the Indian Reorganization Act. Ameri?
can Anthropologist, 86:279-289. 
1985. Ethical Perspectives in North American Ethnology. In June Helm 
and Stuart Planner, editors, Social Contexts of American Ethnol?
ogy, 1840-1984. Proceedings of the American Ethnological Soci?
ety, 1984:50-64. Washington, D . C : American Anthropological 
Association. 
1987a. A Critical View of Critical Archaeology. Current Anthropology, 
28(4):544-545. 
1987b. Cultural Relativism, Human Rights, and the AAA. American An?
thropologist, 89:939-943. 
1989. Anthropological Advocacy in the Hopi-Navajo Land Dispute. 
American Anthropologist, 91:738-743. 
III. Worlds Transformed 

"A Very Great Harvest of Souls"1: Timucua Indians and the Impact of 
European Colonization 
Jerald T. Milanich 
The last several years have witnessed the appearance of new 
information and interpretations regarding the Timucua Indians 
who lived in what is now northern Florida and southern Geor?
gia during the period 1513-1763 (e.g., Johnson, 1991; Worth, 
1992,1995, 1998a, 1998b; McEwan, 1993; Milanich and Hud?
son, 1993; Bushnell, 1994; Milanich, 1995,1996; Hann, 1996). 
New details about the geography of Timucua-speaking chief?
doms allow us to recognize better who the Timucua were and 
to trace more successfully the respective histories of specific 
groups within the colonial period. Particularly important is our 
greater understanding of the tempo of population decline and 
the responses to it by the Spaniards in the seventeenth century, 
the period of the Franciscan missions. 
In the early sixteenth century, native people who spoke dia?
lects of the Timucua language occupied most of the northern 
one-third of peninsular Florida, apparently not including the 
Gulf of Mexico coast. The Timucua also inhabited southeastern 
Georgia as far north as the Altamaha River (Figure 1). 
This is a large area, about 19,200 square miles (49,728 
km2), of which 63% is in present-day Florida and 37% is in 
present-day Georgia. Before contact with people from Europe, 
approximately 150,000-200,000 Timucua lived in that region, 
a population density of 7.8-10.4 people per square mile. The 
higher density figure is almost the same as that derived by 
Keegan (1992:162-163) for the native population of the Baha?
mas at the time of contact with Europeans, and, as Keegan 
noted, it is very close to the density figures recently calculated 
for indigenous societies on Hispaniola and suggested for other 
chiefdoms. 
The Timucua were never organized as a single political unit. 
Instead the people we refer to as the Timucua consisted of 25 to 
30 small chiefdoms whose populations spoke dialects of the 
same language. These simple chiefdoms were organized 
around small groups of five to 10 villages. Each chiefdom was 
led by one dominant village chief who inherited his or her posi?
tion through the ranking matrilineage. Documentary evidence 
suggests that in addition to hierarchies of civil chiefly officials, 
hierarchies of war chiefs were also present. 
Jerald T. Milanich, Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville, 
Florida 32611-7800, USA. 
In several instances, chiefdoms formed alliances that served 
both offensive and defensive military purposes and probably 
had other functions as well. Alliances must have been present 
in precolumbian times?Hernando de Soto observed some in 
1539 (Milanich and Hudson, 1993:177-178, 184)?and others 
may have formed in the early colonial period in response to the 
European military presence. 
During the 50 years following Juan Ponce de Leon's initial 
voyage to Florida, in 1513, Spain and France explored the 
coasts and portions of the interior of the southeastern United 
States, the land Ponce de Leon had named La Florida. In that 
period contacts between Europeans and Timucuan chiefdoms 
differed widely across the Timucuan region, resulting in dis?
similar impacts in terms of disease introduction. 
Shortly after the founding of the Spanish colonial settlement 
at St. Augustine, in 1565, the Timucua entered a new phase in 
their interaction with people from Europe. In 1573 Pedro 
Menendez de Aviles, founder and governor of the La Florida 
colony, arranged for Franciscan missionary friars to minister to 
the Timucua. Missions would save the souls of the Indians 
while transforming the native people into loyal Catholic sub?
jects of the Spanish crown who could be forced to labor in sup?
port of the colony. 
After two decades of little progress, Franciscan efforts took 
hold in the 1590s. The mission friars systematically mission-
ized each chiefdom, working through chiefly political struc?
tures while essentially assuming the roles once held by native 
priests (Worth, 1998a:44-78). By the 1630s nearly all of the ex?
isting Timucuan chiefdoms had received missions. 
From the Spanish point of view, colonization of the Timucua 
was a success, even though the La Florida colony would never 
produce the profits envisioned by its founders. For the Timu?
cua, however, colonization can hardly be deemed positive. 
New perspectives on the Timucua are presented here, espe?
cially information concerning their geography and history and 
the tempo of the demographic disaster that befell them. These 
data are used as a backdrop for examining how the Spanish col?
ony of La Florida sought to maximize exploitation of the Timu?
cua Indians while contending with a continually dwindling 
population. The Franciscan mission system was intimately en?
twined with forced labor, directed culture change, and resettle?
ment. Rather than being a benign system to save souls, mis?
sions were the right arm of colonialism. 
113 
114 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 1.?The region of the Timucua. 
Defining the Timucua 
The people we today call Timucua are defined on the basis of 
language: Timucua Indians spoke dialects of the Timucua lan?
guage. Delineation of Timucuan dialects comes almost entirely 
from the writings of Father Francisco Pareja, a Franciscan mis?
sionary friar who arrived in La Florida in 1595 and served Ti?
mucua Indians at the mission of San Juan del Puerto on Fort 
George Island north of the mouth of the St. Johns River until 
about 1625 (Milanich and Sturtevant, 1973). As was common 
for missionary religious orders in the Americas, Father Pareja 
translated religious treatises and other writings into the local 
native language?in this case, Timucua?even turning it into a 
written language using Spanish phonemes. 
In his writings Pareja mentions nine Timucuan dialects: 
Agua Dulce (Fresh Water), Icafui, Mocama (Salt Water), 
Oconi, Potano, Acuera (or Santa Lucia de Acuera), Timucua, 
Tucururu, and Yufera. Were there other Timucuan dialects? We 
simply do not know for certain. It is obvious from Pareja's de?
lineation of dialects that the greatest number were from the 
area nearest his home mission, probably the region he knew 
best. If the density of dialects were the same elsewhere in Ti?
mucuan territory, we would expect there was more linguistic 
variation in the region than is presently recorded. 
For delineating the region of the Timucua speakers, the writ?
ings of the Spanish colonists, friars, and soldiers who traveled 
and lived among the native people are as important as those of 
Pareja. In their day-to-day dealings with the native groups, the 
Spaniards knew who were and who were not Timucua. Thanks 
especially to the recent documentary researches of John Worth, 
Florida Museum of Natural History, and John Hann, Florida 
Division of Historical Resources, we can now list nearly all the 
native chiefdoms present in the 1590s, place them on the land?
scape, and trace their histories through the seventeenth century, 
a time in which their numbers grew fewer and fewer. 
Another help in mapping the geography of the Timucua was 
to determine who were not Timucua speakers. We know, for 
example, that the Guale Indians north of the Altamaha River on 
the Georgia coast spoke a language very different from Timu?
cua. A Muskogean language was spoken by the Apalachee In?
dians who lived west of the Aucilla River in northwest Florida, 
west of the Timucua Indians. North of the Timucua, north of 
the Altamaha River in interior Georgia, other Muskogean lan?
guages were spoken by the ancestors of the Creek Indians. 
The southerly boundaries of the Timucua similarly can be 
delineated. The Mayaca Indians in the St. Johns River drainage 
south of Lake George spoke a non-Timucuan language. To the 
Timucua's southeast Ais was spoken, still another language, 
and to the southwest, toward Tampa Bay, several languages 
were spoken, all apparently non-Timucuan. A few place names 
in the greater Tampa Bay region as well as among the Mayaca 
Indians do bear similarities to Timucuan words, suggesting that 
the languages in those areas may have been related in some 
fashion to Timucua. When all of this information is correlated 
we can be reasonably confident that the territory of the Timu?
cua Indians is the region shown in Figure 1. 
Data at hand suggest that the various Timucuan chiefdoms 
living within this territory in the early sixteenth century can be 
correlated with six archaeological cultures. Figure 2 shows the 
locations of those chiefdoms; Table 1 lists their correlations 
with dialects and archaeological cultures. 
Timucua Chiefdoms, European Explorers, and Early 
Spanish Missions 
The first Timucua to come face to face with people from Eu?
rope probably were Mocama-dialect speakers, perhaps the 
Guadalquini, who lived on St. Simons Island, Georgia. In 1525 
and again in early 1526, scout ships that preceded the Lucas 
Vazquez de Ayllon expedition landed on the northern end of St. 
Simons Island (Hoffman, 1994a). 
Another incident of early contact took place in 1528, when 
the army of Panfilo de Narvaez marched northward from 
Tampa Bay (Hoffman, 1994b) and entered the territory of the 
Yustaga (also called Uzachile), a Timucuan chiefdom, or, more 
likely, an alliance of chiefdoms occupying a large region from 
what now is Madison County, Florida, into south-central Geor?
gia up the Withlacoochee River drainage (east of the Aucilla 
River and west and northwest of the Suwannee). The Yustaga 
were the largest and most densely settled of the Timucuan 
groups. During the first half of the seventeenth century the 
NUMBER 44 115 
FIGURE 2.?Timucuan chiefdoms in the sixteenth century 
prior to the Franciscan missions. The Astina, Omittagua, and 
Onachaguara were probably near the St. Johns River some?
where beween the Calanay and the Outina. 
greatest number of Timucuan missions were found in their terri?
tory. Eight missions were established shortly after 1623, reflect?
ing the size of the Yustaga population (San Pedro y San Pablo 
de Potohiriba, Santa Elena de Machaba, Santa Cruz de Cachip-
ile, San Ildefonso de Chamile, San Matheo de Tolapatafi, San 
Miguel de Asile, San Francisco de Chuaquin, and San Augustin 
de Urihica) (Harm, 1990:470-^176; Worth, 1992:63-71). 
Following the Narvaez entrada, Yustaga territory again was 
invaded by a Spanish army when the Hernando de Soto expedi?
tion marched northward from lower Tampa Bay in 1539. De 
Soto's army first entered Timucuan territory among the Ocale 
Indians, a group living near the Withlacoochee River in west-
central Florida. In the early seventeenth century, a single mis?
sion (San Luis de Eloquale) served the Ocale. Founded by 
1630 (Hann, 1996:189), the mission was located by 1655 
among the Acuera Indians, another Timucuan group (Worth, 
1998a:69-71, 1998b:189-190). At that time a second mission 
also served the Acuera (Hann, 1996:178). 
North of the Ocale and the Acuera in northern interior Flor?
ida were other Timucua Indians also encountered by de Soto's 
army. One of these groups, the people we today call the Potano, 
may actually have been several small chiefdoms. De Soto ex?
pedition accounts record the names of five separate villages a 
day's march apart, arranged roughly from south to north along 
a trail that led from southwest of modern Ocala to the Santa Fe 
River (Itaraholata, Potano, Utinamocharra, Malapaz, and Cho-
lupaha) (Milanich and Hudson, 1993:134-147). But nowhere 
TABLE 1.?Timucuan dialects, archaeological cultures, and groups in the six?
teenth century.1 
Dialect 
Acuera 
Acuera (?) 
Agua Dulce 
Icafui 
Mocama 
Oconi 
Potano 
Tucururu 
Timucua 
Timucua (?) 
Yufera 
Culture 
St. Johns 
Northern Safety Harbor 
St. Johns 
St. Marys (?) 
St. Marys 
St. Marys (?) 
Alachua 
St. Marys (?) 
Suwannee Valley 
Lamar 
St. Marys (?) 
Groups 
Acuera, Tucuru 
Ocale 
Astina, Calanay, Chilili, Coya, Edel-
ano, Enecape, Molona, Onachaquara, 
Omittagua, Patica, Seloy 
Cascangue/Icaftii, Ibihica (?) 
Alicamani, Caravay, Casti, Guad-
alquini, Malica, Napa, Omoloa, Sat-
uriwa 
Oconi 
Potano 
Mocama-area chiefdoms, Tacatacuru 
Aguacaleyquen, Cholupaha, Napituca, 
Uriutina, Uzachile/Yustaga 
Arapaha 
Yufera 
The Outina, not included here, were probably no longer identifiable as a 
separate group when Pareja recorded information on dialects. The Northern 
Utina groups are those of the Suwannee Valley culture; the Mocama groups are 
those of the Mocama dialect. 
in the accounts is any hint that these towns were unified or al?
lied in any way. Possibly an alliance of small chiefdoms 
emerged after 1539 as a defensive measure in response to the 
passage of the Spanish army. 
Such an alliance, headed by Chief Potano, did exist in 1564 
and 1565 when soldiers from Fort Caroline, a short-lived 
116 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
French settlement near the mouth of the St. Johns River, joined 
native war parties in an attack on the main town of the Potano 
alliance, killing many villagers (Milanich and Hudson, 1993: 
173-174). In 1585 Spanish soldiers also raided the Potano, an 
incident said to be in retaliation for a 1567 Potano attack. 
By the early 1600s, four missions had been established 
among the Potano (Santa Ana, San Buenaventura de Potano, 
San Miguel de Potano, and San Francisco de Potano) (Hann, 
1990:441, 458?460), all well north of the town called Potano 
visited by de Soto and later raided by the French and Indian war 
parties. That town was probably abandoned by the time of the 
more extensive seventeenth-century mission efforts. 
When de Soto marched north out of Potano territory he en?
tered the region of the northern Utina, the name modern re?
searchers have given to a number of allied Timucua chiefdoms 
living in the area now comprising Columbia, Hamilton, and 
Suwannee counties. From Cholupaha, near the site of the later 
Santa Fe de Toloco mission, the army moved westerly to the 
village of Aguacaleyquen, probably at or near the seventeenth-
century mission of San Martin de Ayacuto. The chief of Agua?
caleyquen led an alliance of northern Utina chiefdoms (Milan?
ich and Hudson, 1993:154-157). 
From Aguacaleyquen de Soto's army turned northward to a 
small village near modem Lake City, Florida. Then the expedi?
tion turned west to the town of Uri utina, probably near the later 
location of mission Santa Cruz de Tarihica. Farther west, an?
other village, Napituca, near modern Live Oak, Florida, was 
the scene of a bloody battle between de Soto's army and the 
northern Utina. At least nine village chiefs and several hundred 
warriors were killed. Mission San Juan de Guacara, founded by 
1612, was in southwest Suwannee County south of the location 
of the Napituca massacre. The army next crossed the Suwannee 
River into the territory of the Yustaga Indians, who avoided the 
Spaniards by abandoning their main village to them (Milanich 
and Hudson, 1993:158-167). 
Northward from the Yustaga and the northern Utina in south-
central Georgia lived other Timucuan groups, all poorly 
known. One of these was the Arapaha, who occupied the upper 
reaches of the Alapaha River. A mission (Santa Maria de los 
Angeles de Arapaje) had been established there by the early 
1630s (Hann, 1990:470-471; Worth, 1992:70). 
Another interior Georgia mission serving Timucua Indians 
(Santa Isabel de Utinahica) was north of the Arapaha at the 
confluence of the Ocmulgee and Oconee Rivers (Worth, 
1992:76, 1995:124). Still another mission (Santiago de Oconi) 
served the Oconi, a Timucuan group who lived within the 
Okeefenokee Swamp in southeastern Georgia (Worth, 
1992:183, 1995:50-51, 1998b: 190-191). 
In southeast Georgia east of the Okeefenokee Swamp were 
other Timucua groups: the Cascangue, Icafui, Yufera, and Ibi-
hica. The Cascangue and Icafui, closest to the coast, may have 
been two villages within the same chiefdom, a polity consisting 
of nine or 10 villages (possibly including Lamale, Acahono, 
Tahupa, Punhuri, Talax, Panara, Utayne, and Huara) (Hann, 
1996:155, 173). The Yufera were farther inland (Hann, 
1996:11), and the Ibihica chiefdom was still farther west, just 
east of the Okeefenokee Swamp between the St. Marys and Sa-
tilla rivers (Worth, 1998b: 191). All of these southeast Georgia 
Timucua groups were visited by friars in the early seventeenth 
century, and a mission (San Lorenzo de Ibihica) was founded 
there after 1612 (Hann, 1996:153-154). 
Timucuan groups to the east along the Atlantic coast of 
Georgia included the Guadalquini on St. Simons Island and the 
Mocama on Cumberland Island. San Buenaventura de Guad?
alquini, on the south end of St. Simons, was established by 
1609. It existed until the 1680s, when Indian attacks and raids 
by privateers caused abandonment of all the Georgia coastal 
missions, both the Timucuan missions and those among the 
Guale Indians, farther north (Worth, 1995:39-40, 195-196; 
Harm, 1996:175-176). 
Another coastal mission, San Pedro de Mocama, was 
founded in 1587 in the town of Tacatacuru on Cumberland Is?
land (Hann, 1990:437). It was one of the earliest Franciscan 
missions in La Florida outside the St. Augustine locality. Fa?
ther Baltasar Lopez used the mission as a base from which he 
traveled to minister to Timucuan groups living on the mainland 
as far inland as the northern Utina (Milanich and Hudson, 
1993:175). 
Missions were also established among Timucuan groups far?
ther south along the coast. Santa Maria, on Amelia Island, was 
founded in 1606 at the town of Napa (Napica). Still another 
mission, San Juan del Puerto (founded in 1587), was on Fort 
George Island in the village of Alicamani (also spelled Ali-
macani) just north of the mouth of the St. Johns River (Hann, 
1990:436; Worth, 1995:198-199). In the locality around St. 
Augustine were the Seloy Indians. Mission Nombre de Dios, 
the first Franciscan mission in Spanish Florida, originally 
served the Seloy and the native laborers who lived and camped 
in and around St. Augustine. 
Inland from the northeast Florida coast and up (south) the St. 
Johns River were many more Timucua. Much of our informa?
tion about these people comes from documents associated with 
the 1564-1565 French colony of Fort Caroline (e.g., Lawson, 
1992) and from documents generated during the early years of 
St. Augustine (e.g., Barrientos, 1965; Solis de Meras, 1964). 
Chief Saturiwa, whose main village was on the south bank of 
the St. Johns River just inland from its mouth (near Fort Caro?
line), headed an alliance that, the French were told, included 30 
chiefs, all living on the lower portions of the St. Johns River or 
nearby on the coast. 
South of Saturiwa's alliance in the St. Johns River drainage 
was another large Timucuan alliance headed by Chief Outina.2 
Outina's main village was west of the river on the trail that 
would become the mission-period camino real, the main route 
between St. Augustine and the interior missions (Johnson, 
1991).3 In 1564 Outina's alliance, which maintained belligerent 
relations with both the Saturiwa and Potano alliances, was said 
to include 40 chiefs and villages. One village, Enecape, is the 
NUMBER 44 117 
Mount Royal archaeological site just north of Lake George and 
the location of a mission (San Antonio de Enecape) founded 
near the beginning of Franciscan mission activity in the 1590s 
(Hann, 1990:439-440, 1996:142). 
Timucuan Demography 
Between 1587 and 1630 all of the Timucuan chiefdoms still in 
existence apparently received missions, but some chiefdoms al?
ready had disappeared. Comparing Timucuan chiefdoms in the 
mid-sixteenth century with those present in 1600 leaves no 
doubt that those chiefdoms in greatest contact with Europeans 
in the sixteenth century were devastated by epidemics even be?
fore missions were established. During the seventeenth and 
early eighteenth centuries the Timucua living at the missions 
would continue to suffer epidemic-caused depopulation. 
By 1600, as the first missions were being established, the Ti?
mucuan populations that had sustained the longest and most in?
tense contact with people from Europe were those around St. 
Augustine and those from the many villages of the Saturiwa 
and Utina alliances. Essentially this was all the Timucua from 
Lake George north along the St. Johns River to its mouth and 
the Atlantic coast to the east. After 1564 and the building of 
Fort Caroline, first French and then Spanish colonists inter?
acted frequently with the Timucua of this large region. 
Those interactions served to introduce diseases. By 1600 the 
entire population of the area of most intense contact?the 
lower St. Johns River drainage and the coast?had been deci?
mated; entire chiefdoms were gone. As a consequence, less 
than a handful of widely-spaced missions were needed to serve 
all of east Florida: Nombre de Dios in St. Augustine, San Juan 
del Puerto on Fort George Island to the north, and San Antonio 
de Enecape far to the south on Lake George.4 
As missions were established, more devastation of the Timu?
cua took place. The first mission-period epidemic is docu?
mented for 1595. Then in 1612-1617 a series of epidemics 
were said to have killed half the mission villagers in La Florida 
(in Hann, 1988:175; Worth, 1998b: 10-11). According to the 
governor of La Florida, another epidemic in 1655-1656 re?
sulted in many of the Timucua being "wiped out with the sick?
ness of the plague and smallpox" (in Hann, 1986b: 111). 
Groups like the Potano suffered mightily. Even before 1612, 
two of the four original Potano missions were abandoned, and 
the surviving villages were unable to provide sufficient adult 
males to fill their conscripted labor quotas demanded by St. 
Augustine (Worth, 1992:54, 165). By 1659 the Potano were ef?
fectively gone, and the mission of San Francisco de Potano was 
said to need repopulating (Hann, 1986a:375-378). Potano terri?
tory was under the control of a northern Utina chief and had 
been for some time. 
Because of the presence of the missions, we have a reason?
ably good archival record of these seventeenth century epidem?
ics, but no such record exists for the pre-mission period (ca. 
1595) of interior northern Florida. Even so, based on the evi?
dence from the St. Johns River drainage, it is clear depopula?
tion occurred prior to the missions. The best estimate for the to?
tal Timucua population in 1600, early in the mission period, is 
between 13,500 and 27,000 (Worth, 1998b:8), reflecting a six?
teenth-century demographic decline of at least 82% from the 
150,000 figure at initial contact. At that time (1600) only 14 
chiefdoms still existed, roughly half the number present at con?
tact. But even these statistics are not as horrible as those from 
the seventeenth century: by century's end, the Timucuan popu?
lation had dropped to about 1,000 people. 
Although depopulation would eventually have doomed the 
missions and the La Florida colony to failure, that end was has?
tened by the establishment of British colonies in Virginia and 
the Carolinas. Beginning in the 1660s and increasing in the 
1680s, raids on the Timucua and Guale Indian missions by na?
tive slavers, actively abetted by British-backed interests, pres?
sured the missions (Milanich, 1996:204-208; Worth, 1995: 
15-46, 1998b: 140-146). Some Indians fled, more were cap?
tured; whole villages were abandoned. The raids would also 
lead to the resettlement of non-local Indians at old and new 
missions in northern and northeastern Florida as well as at the 
Guale Indian missions on the Georgia coast. 
The end of the Timucua missions in the interior of La Florida 
came in 1702-1705, when several large Carolinian raids de?
stroyed them (as well as those of Apalachee). Survivors moved 
to new towns close to St. Augustine, where they continued to 
live at missions served by Franciscan friars. 
A 1717 census lists 10 of these refugee villages, three of 
which housed the approximately 250 Timucua Indians who 
survived. By 1726 that number had dropped to 157 Timucua, 
and two years later it was down to 70. In 1752 there were only 
29 Timucua, all living in a single town (Hann, 1996:322-323; 
Worth, 1998b: 150-156). A decade later, in 1763, when Spain 
relinquished La Florida and St. Augustine to the British, only a 
single Timucua Indian was listed on the roster of native people 
shipped to the town of Guanabacoa in Cuba (Milanich, 1996: 
xv-xvi, 216). 
The Timucua and Colonialism 
Given the colony's need for labor, the realities of Timucua ge?
ography and political organization, and the ongoing demo?
graphic catastrophe, how did Spanish officials deal with the sit?
uation? What was the impact on the Timucua? And for what 
purposes were Indians used as laborers? 
La Florida was a royal colony that depended on a yearly sub?
sidy to fund its military and administrative needs. In effect it 
was a money loser, supported for geopolitical purposes. One 
way it could help sustain itself and even turn profits for some 
residents was to find a source of cheap labor. That source was 
the mission Indians. 
The missions harnessed the Timucuan villagers for Spanish 
use. The system of forced servitude known as repartimiento, 
with its labor quotas for each chiefdom, was organized through 
118 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
the mission villages and village chiefs. An order would be is?
sued by Spanish officials listing the number of adult males 
each mission would provide. Because missions were located in 
the main village of each chiefdom, the Spaniards presented the 
quotas to the respective village chiefs, who then ordered their 
subjects to comply and organized the sending of the laborers to 
St. Augustine. 
Technically, the laborers were to be paid for their work, but 
most often they were not paid, or they were paid in trinkets col?
lected by their chiefs. The Spaniards actively worked through 
the existing native political systems, supporting and paying 
chiefs and helping them to maintain their status. The Republic 
of Indians (Bushnell, 1989), though ultimately ruled by the 
Spaniards, continued to exist throughout the mission period. 
The major export of the colony was corn. Corn also provided 
a significant amount of the diet for the residents of St. August?
ine. As a consequence, a great deal of Indian labor went into 
the production, processing, and transportation of corn. Corn 
was produced at Spanish-owned haciendas, at missions in 
Franciscan-controlled fields, by order of entrepreneurial chiefs, 
and in fields around St. Augustine. Native people prepared 
fields, planted, hoed, harvested, shucked, and ground meal. 
The meal was then transported to St. Augustine or to the Gulf 
coast on the backs of conscripted laborers. Some was used in 
St. Augustine; larger amounts were exported. In both cases 
profits went to friars, hacienda owners, Spanish officials, and, 
sometimes, chiefs. Corn was a money maker. 
Native men were also conscripted to go to St. Augustine to 
provide labor for projects there, or they remained there after 
transporting corn or other supplies. Laborers, some of whom 
spent as many as six months of the year in town, tended fields 
there, and they helped to build forts and other buildings, 
worked as servants, cut timber, and mined coquina on Anasta-
sia Island near St. Augustine. During the 1670s several hun?
dred native people were involved in the construction of the 
stone fort, the Castillo of San Marcos. 
Working as beasts of burden and living in and around St. Au?
gustine added to health problems and increased the native pop?
ulations' susceptibility to the epidemic diseases that periodi?
cally swept though mission towns and St. Augustine itself. 
Travel along the camino real or other trails back to the missions 
quickly introduced these diseases to mission villages. 
In the mission provinces, the Timucua and other mission In?
dians maintained trails by clearing brush, repairing creek cross?
ings, and even building bridges. Where roads crossed rivers too 
deep to ford, villagers operated ferries. At the missions, men, 
women, and children performed various tasks in support of the 
friars and the mission system. The missions and St. Augustine 
could not survive without the mission Indians. 
The very existence of La Florida depended on native labor. 
When mission village populations fell because of epidemics, 
the colony's survival was threatened. To assure bodies for la?
bor, Spanish officials employed several strategies, including 
moving populations, consolidating remnant groups or even en?
tire villages, and capturing Indians who had opted to flee mis?
sion life. All the Timucua were brought to missions; non-Chris?
tian Indians were not tolerated in the mission districts. 
In the earlier decades of the seventeenth century, the worst 
depopulation may have been in those missions closest to St. 
Augustine or those where sustained contact had been longest. 
The Potano, the first interior Timucuan chiefdom to receive 
full-time friars, are one example, and there are others. For in?
stance, by mid-century the people from Santa Isabel de Utina-
hica, at the confluence of the Ocmulgee and Oconee Rivers, 
had been relocated to St. Simons Island on the coast, which 
needed repopulation (Worth, 1992:76, 1995:124). Timucua 
from southern Georgia were also moved to the Oconi mission 
to supplement the dwindling population there. Sometime be?
tween 1630 and 1655 the Ibihica were combined with the 
Oconi, most likely because of on-going depopulation. 
Several years later, the combined remnants of the Ibihica and 
Oconi were ordered to relocate elsewhere. When they refused, 
a Spanish raid destroyed them. Republic of Indians or not, fail?
ure to obey could be interpreted as a capital offense. Why 
would the Spaniards destroy the very labor force they were 
working to sustain? They probably wished to make a point. But 
they already may have written off southeast Georgia. After the 
destruction of the Oconi-Ibihica village, the names of the Ti?
mucua from that region no longer appear in documents (Hann, 
1990:464; Worth, 1998b:44-45, 117). Presumably they were 
gone, although remnants may have been moved to Timucuan 
missions elsewhere. 
Other examples of chiefdom consolidation are also found in 
the documents. The Ocale and their entire mission were moved 
among the Acuera Indians by 1655. Later, as their numbers 
continued to drop, the Ocale and Acuera were resettled on the 
St. Johns River. Still later they were moved north to a town on 
the St. Johns River, where they were to operate a ferry (Worth, 
1998b:189-190)). 
The number of movements that took place in the early seven?
teenth century as a result of depopulation may greatly exceed 
the instances we can glean from an incomplete documentary 
record. For many decades, archaeologists have noted the pres?
ence of quantities of non-local types of aboriginal pottery at the 
Timucua missions in the territories of the Potano and northern 
Utina. Most of these ceramics are Lamar culture types from 
south-central Georgia, including the Altamaha-Oconee-Ocmul-
gee River region, now thought to have been inhabited by Timu?
cua Indians. One hypothesis is that Timucua Indians from this 
Georgia region were moved south in large numbers to repopu-
late Timucua missions in northern Florida (Milanich, 1996: 
104-107). If so, the depopulation of northern Florida in the 
early seventeenth century may have been even worse than 
thought. 
By 1656 the efforts to maintain adequate population levels 
in the Potano and northern Utina missions to satisfy labor 
needs had failed. A small-scale rebellion in that year provided 
the governor of La Florida with an excuse to redistribute the 
NUMBER 44 119 
interior northern Florida missions and their Timucuan villag?
ers to maximize their use by the Spaniards (Worth, 1992, 
1998b: 38-116). The rebellion, an attempt by Timucua chiefs 
to free themselves from the demands of the Spanish military 
government, was soon put down with little loss of Spanish 
life. 
Faced with inadequate labor to maintain trails, operate fer?
ries across rivers, and provide other services, the governor or?
dered the abandonment of some missions and the relocation of 
others. A few new missions were founded, and populations 
were moved, all in an attempt to distribute the remnant Timu?
cuan population along the camino real leading to Apalachee. 
As a result, the post-rebellion Timucuan mission system west 
of the St. Johns River was very different from the one that had 
existed before the rebellion. Nearly all the remaining Timucua 
now lived in mission villages along the camino real, which 
they maintained. Their villages, spaced a day's travel apart, be?
came way stations for travelers and bearers going back and 
forth to St. Augustine. Chiefdoms that once consisted of five to 
10 villages and several thousand people each were reduced to a 
single village with a population of only a few hundred at best. 
Within some missions, villagers might actually have been Ti?
mucua Indians moved south from Georgia. 
The camino real was a pipeline into northwest Florida, 
whose missions and agricultural fields became the colony's 
breadbasket. Productive haciendas and a growing Spanish 
population living in Apalachee at the San Luis mission were 
connected to St. Augustine by the road and its Timucuan way 
stations. 
This post-rebellion reorganization of the Timucuan missions 
west of the St. Johns River has been documented through both 
archival research and archaeology. We now know, for in?
stance, that Santa Cruz de Tarihica, located at the Indian Pond 
site in modem western Columbia County, Florida, was moved 
southwest to near Little River Spring just north of the Suwan?
nee River and adjacent to the camino real (Worth, 1992:59, 
311-312, 1998b: 173-174). And we can trace the shifting of 
San Juan de Guacara from the Charles Spring site west to the 
Suwannee River at Charles Spring, where the villagers ferried 
travelers on the camino real across the river (Worth, 1992: 
312). 
Relocations and resettlement continued in the years follow?
ing the rebellion?attempts to keep the Timucua missions 
along the camino real populated. Arapaha Indians from Geor?
gia were slated to be moved south to repopulate Santa Fe in 
modem Alachua County, Florida, although it is uncertain if that 
movement took place. Two years later, Yustaga Indians were 
moved to the same mission (Hann, 1990:460), and others were 
sent to repopulate San Martin de Ayacuto (Hann, 1990:461; 
Worth, 1998b: 169), the northern Utina mission near the 
Ichetucknee River (Weisman, 1992). By 1670 four villages of 
Arapaha Indians, perhaps all of those people who remained, 
had been moved to Yustaga. 
All these efforts, however, were in vain, and the Spaniards 
were forced to begin to move non-Timucua Indians into what 
had been Timucuan territory in order to have laborers. Aban?
doned due to Timucua depopulation around 1665, mission 
Santa Maria on Amelia Island was resettled by 1673 by Ya-
massee Indians, only to be abandoned again in 1683 and then 
reoccupied the next year by Guale Indians moved from the 
Georgia coast (Worth, 1995:197-198). San Antonio de Ene?
cape on the St. Johns River at the southern end of Timucua ter?
ritory likewise was abandoned after 1655 because of depopula?
tion and then reoccupied between 1679 and 1680 by Yamassee 
Indians (Hann, 1990:504-506). 
Even this strategy did not work. Yamassee Indians suc?
cumbed to diseases just as the Timucua had before them. By 
the 1690s the northern peninsular Florida missions could not 
supply laborers, and that portion of the mission system was in 
danger of collapsing. Spanish officials then looked to central 
and southwest Florida, well south of Timucuan territory, for 
new conversions. Missions would turn the Jororo and Calusa 
Indians into Christians who later could be moved to northern 
Florida. But the missions established among those groups were 
not successful. 
In the end, the attempts to deal with the realities of Timucuan 
depopulation all failed. The Carolinian raids of the first few 
years of the eighteenth century were the final straw. By 1710 
all of northern Florida was barren. For the Timucua, coloniza?
tion had brought "a very great harvest of souls." 
Notes 
I am grateful to John Worth, who critiqued a draft of this chapter and made in?
formation available from his forthcoming books, now published, on the Timu?
cuan missions. Bill Merrill and Ives Goddard deserve gold stars for their edito?
rial labors in my behalf. Many years ago, while I held a National Endowment 
for the Humanities post-doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, Bill 
Sturtevant kindled my interest in the Timucua Indians. Always the consum?
mate scholar, Bill has been a mentor and friend since. 
1 A 1617 comment by Franciscan friars regarding one result of the epidem?
ics of 1612-1617 (in Hann, 1996:174). 
2. Chief Outina and the Outina Indians were well east of the northern Utina 
Timucuan groups. 
3. The camino real was not a single trail. In places it forked, providing alter?
native routes?a high road and a low road?that later merged. Early in the mis?
sion period it may not have even been the main mission trail. At that time the 
missions and the associated native villages were connected by a complex net?
work of trails. 
4. There are two exceptions, both of which were short-lived. For a year or 
two in the late sixteenth century, a friar was at the village of Moloa (Omoloa) 
on the St. Johns River north of modem Jacksonville (Worth, 1998a:59), proba?
bly ministering to remnants of the Saturiwa alliance. Similarly, mission San Se?
bastian on the opposite side of St. Augustine from Nombre de Dios briefly 
served a remnant population relocated from the St. Johns River (Hann, 1990: 
435^136; Worth, 1998a:45). 
120 
Literature Cited 
SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Barrientos, Bartolome 
1965. Pedro Menendez de Aviles, Founder of Florida. Translated by An?
thony Kerrigan, xviii+149 pages. Gainesville: University of Florida 
Press. 
Bushnell, Amy Turner 
1989. Ruling "the Republic of Indians" in Seventeenth-Century Florida. In 
Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley, edi?
tors, Powhatan s Mantle, Indians in the Colonial Southeast, pages 
134-150. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 
1994. Situado and Sabana, Spain's Support System for the Presidio and 
Mission Provinces of Florida. Anthropological Papers, American 
Museum of Natural History, 74: 249 pages. Athens: University of 
Georgia Press. 
Hann, John H. 
1986a. Demographic Patterns and Changes in Mid-Seventeenth Century Ti?
mucua and Apalachee. Florida Historical Quarterly, 64:371-392. 
1986b. Translation of Governor Rebolledo's 1657 Visitation of Three Flor?
ida Provinces and Related Documents. Florida Archaeology, 2: 
81-145. Tallahassee: Bureau of Archaeological Research, Division 
of Historical Resources, Florida Department of State. 
1988. Apalachee: The Land between the Rivers, xiii+450 pages. Gaines?
ville: University of Florida Press. 
1990. Summary Guide to Spanish Florida Missions and Visitas with 
Churches in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. The Ameri?
cas, 46:417-513. 
1996. A History of the Timucua Indians and Missions, xvi+399 pages. 
Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 
Hoffman, Paul E. 
1994a. Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon's Discovery and Colony. In Charles Hud?
son and Carmen Chaves Tesser, editors, The Forgotten Centuries: 
Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704, pages 
36-49. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 
1994b. Narvaez and Cabeza de Vaca in Florida. In Charles Hudson and Car?
men Chaves Tesser, editors, The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and 
Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704, pages 50-73. Ath?
ens: University of Georgia Press. 
Johnson, Kenneth W. 
1991. The Utina and the Potano Peoples of Northern Florida: Changing 
Settlement Systems in the Spanish Colonial Period, xv+498 pages. 
Doctoral dissertation, University of Florida. 
Keegan, William F. 
1992. The People Who Discovered Columbus: The Prehistory of the Ba?
hamas. xx+279 pages. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 
Lawson, Sarah, translator 
1992. The Notable History of Florida....In Sarah Lawson and W. John 
Faupel, A Foothold in Florida, The Eye-Witness Account of Four 
Voyages Made by the French to That Region,... pages 1-148. East 
Grinstead, England: Antique Atlas Publications. 
McEwan, Bonnie G., editor 
1993. The Spanish Missions of La Florida, xxvi+458 pages. Gainesville: 
University Press of Florida. 
Milanich, Jerald T 
1995. Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe, xix+290 pages. 
Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 
1996. The Timucua. xix+235 pages. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 
Milanich, Jerald T , and Charles Hudson 
1993. Hernando de Soto and the Indians of Florida, xv+292 pages. 
Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 
Milanich, Jerald T , and William C. Sturtevant 
1972. Francisco Pareja s 1613 Confessionario: A Documentary Source 
for Timucuan Ethnography. 121 pages. Tallahassee: Division of 
Archives, History, and Records Management, Florida Department 
of State. 
Solis de Meras, Gonzalo 
1964. Pedro Menendez de Aviles; Adelantado, Governor and Captain-
General of Florida. Translated by Jeannette Thurber Connor, 
xxxiv + 286 pages. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. [Fac?
simile of 1923 edition published by the Florida State Historical So?
ciety, Deland, Florida.] 
Weisman, Brent R. 
1992. Excavations on the Franciscan Frontier: Archaeology at the Fig 
Springs Mission, xvii+250 pages. Gainesville: University Press of 
Florida. 
Worth, John E. 
1992. The Timucuan Missions of Spanish Florida and the Rebellion of 
1656. xii+501 pages. Doctoral dissertation, University of Florida. 
1995. The Struggle for the Georgia Coast: An Eighteenth-Century Spanish 
Retrospect on Guale and Mocama. Anthropological Papers, Ameri?
can Museum of Natural History, IS: 222 pages. Athens: University 
of Georgia Press. 
1998a. Assimilation. In The Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida, 1: 
xxvi + 280 pages. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 
1998b. Resistance, and Destruction. In The Timucuan Chiefdoms of Span?
ish Florida, 2: xiv+272 pages. Gainesville: University Press of 
Florida. 
The Interstices of Literacy: Books and Writings and Their Use in 
Native American Southern New England 
Kathleen J. Bragdon 
Introduction 
As scholarship on vernacular literacy (i.e., native-language lit?
eracy that is adopted by previously nonliterate peoples, usually 
as a result of the establishment of colonial rule) continues to 
expand, the emphasis remains on the content, style (e.g., meta?
phorical structure and imagery), and political significance of 
newly adopted native-language literacy in colonial or postcolo?
nial settings (e.g., Fabian, 1986; Burkhart, 1989; Besnier, 1991; 
Irvine, 1993). This important body of research emphasizes the 
various ways in which vernacular literacy functions within spe?
cific cultural and historical settings, and it highlights the com?
plex relationship between vernacular literacy, the processes of 
colonialism, and the ways in which cultures are said to trans?
form and reinvent themselves. Related investigations into the 
"ethnography of reading" have also directed attention to the 
cognitive and cultural significance of visual signs (Boyarin, 
1992; Harris, 1995). An aspect of vernacular literacy that has 
received less attention is what Grey Gundaker (1993) has 
called the "peripheral" uses of literacy: the way in which peo?
ples use writing in art and ritual and as a means of symbolic ex?
pression aside from, or in addition to, its function as a graphic 
representation of speech (see also Schousboe and Larsen, 
1989). This essay examines these uses of literacy and the social 
importance of books and writings in native southern New Eng?
land in the colonial period between the years 1660 and 1775. 
The Origins of Native American Vernacular Literacy in 
Colonial Massachusetts 
At the time of contact with Europeans, the indigenous people 
of southern New England, including the Massachusett-speakers 
(also called Pokanoket, and later, Wampanoag) in southeastern 
Massachusetts and their neighbors the Narragansett, Pequot, 
and Mohegans, in Rhode Island and Connecticut, were coastal 
horticulturists whose still-heavy reliance on game and marine 
resources encouraged a "conditional sedentism" (Dunford, 
1992) with an estuarine focus. According to all contemporary 
Kathleen J. Bragdon, Department of Anthropology, P.O. Box 8795, 
College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia 23185-8795, 
USA. 
observers, established hereditary leadership and elaborate so?
cial hierarchy, made possible by such an adaptation, were char?
acteristic of the Massachusett, with social status being marked 
by, among other things, an elaborate protocol, etiquette, and rit?
ualized speech (Bragdon, 1987). Coastal societies were also 
linked to one another through networks of kinship and trade 
(Salwen, 1978). These linkages did not, however, preclude sig?
nificant dialectal and language variation within the region or a 
strong likelihood of multilingualism, at least among the elite 
(Bragdon, 1993). 
The vast literature on the contact period in the northeastern 
United States has by and large ignored the subject of linguistic 
exchange, Ives Goddard's (1977, 1978, 2000) work on pidgins 
being the notable exception. Many explorers record without 
comment evidence of a widespread knowledge of European 
languages exhibited by their Indian trading partners and guides. 
William Wood, who lived near Naumkeag (now Salem), Mas?
sachusetts, remarked, 
They love any man that can utter his mind in their words, yet are they not a lit?
tle proud that they can speake the English tongue, using it as much as their own 
when they meet with such as can understand it, puzzling stranger Indians, 
which sometimes visit them from more remote places, with an unheard lan?
guage. (Wood, 1977:110) 
Yet native people were fully alive to linguistic distinctions. 
Rhode Island founder Roger Williams's Narragansett friends 
remarked on their own and other's linguistic identity with 
phrases such as nippenowdntawem T am of another language,' 
and penowantowawhettuock 'they are of a divers language' 
(Williams, 1936:9). In an instructional dialogue illustrating a 
putative greeting are the phrases Mat nowawtau hette mina 'we 
understand not each other' (Williams, 1936:9), eenantowash 
'speak Indian' (Williams, 1936:8), and npenowauntawaumen T 
cannot speak your language' (Williams, 1936:55). 
Skillful speech was highly valued, as Wood recorded: 
In serious discourse our southern Indians use seldom any short colloquiums but 
speak their minds at large without any interjected interruptions from any, the 
rest giving diligent audience to his utterance. (Wood, 1977:110) 
Williams (1936:56), too, recognized an emphasis on speech 
skills among the related Narragansetts, noting, "if they be elo?
quent, they esteeme them as Gods." The use of mnemonics in 
the powwow's (shaman's) curing rituals and prophecies, in 
121 
122 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
greeting rituals, and in the use of practiced insult between ene?
mies, as well as "great action" in the sachems' "harangues" 
(Winslow, 1910:274), all point to a strong cultural emphasis on 
speech and its delivery, manipulation, and use as an art form 
(Bragdon, 1987). Because much of the elaborated speech and 
speech behavior recorded for the Massachusett and Narragan?
sett was that of powerful and/or high-status members of their 
communities, it appears that skilled speech and status were in?
terrelated. Social hierarchy was thus marked and reinforced by 
the ritual, formal, and public nature of speech. 
Although we can be fully confident of the important role of 
the spoken word in the formation and expression of group and 
individual identity among the American Indian peoples of 
southern New England, we know less about the visual arts in 
the precontact and early contact period. Descriptions by Euro?
peans affirm that native clothing, basketry, pottery, and other 
objects, as well as human bodies, were decorated with "antic" 
figures (Wood, 1977:108), drawings or tattoos depicting ab?
stract designs, and with representations of animals, birds, and 
other images of significance lost to non-Indians (e.g., Williams, 
1936:165, 191; Wood, 1977:103). These descriptions conform 
to petroglyphs and pictographic images found on navigable 
stretches of the Taunton River and in the Narragansett Bay re-
gion, including the famous Dighton Rock (Delabarre, 
1928:204) (Figure 1). Regionally, these signs and images show 
many similarities and appear to represent or remark upon vision 
quests and other shamanic activities (Bragdon, 1995). Images 
similar to these petroglyphs are also found on seventeenth cen?
tury documents as the signs or marks of sachems and others 
participating in land transactions or treaties. Williams (1936:42) 
noted that when writing was introduced to the Narragansetts, 
they called it "painting, for that comes the nearest." While cer?
tainly not representations of the spoken word, these images con?
stituted a visual code that evidently was widely understood. 
Tragic losses in epidemics of 1617-1619 and 1633 and the 
defeat of the powerful Pequot in 1636 caused widespread dis?
ruption in all regions of native southern New England, and 
some native people, particularly those of the interior regions, 
fled west or northward out of the reach of colonial rule. Many 
of those who remained adopted, at least nominally, a Protestant 
Christianity and settled or were confined to a number of com?
munities, some of which were called Praying Towns (Salisbury, 
1974). Although many of these were destroyed during King 
Philip's War, in 1675-1676, a surprising number survived, par?
ticularly on Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket Is?
land, where native Christians and nonbelievers lived together in 
communities organized around traditional principles of heredi?
tary leadership, communal land ownership, and shared commu?
nity resources (Conkey et al., 1978:177; Bragdon, 1981). 
The "print" culture of Puritanism in the seventeenth century 
led John Eliot and other missionaries, funded by the Society for 
the Propagation of the Bible, to develop the justly famous In?
dian Library (Kellaway, 1962). The entire Bible, translated by 
Eliot with significant contributions from a skilled Massachu-
sett-speaking consultant, appeared in 1663 and was preceded 
and followed by translations of at least a dozen significant 
works by theologians, such as Richard Baxter, Lewis Bayley, 
and John Cotton, and, later, a grammar, a set of dialogues, and a 
primer (Eliot, 1666, 1671, 1672; Pilling, 1891). Eliot also em?
barked on a vigorous campaign of education in native literacy, 
developing a Roman-based orthography that was suited to the 
sound system of Massachusett and was amenable to rapid learn?
ing, as well as being easily printed. His efforts soon exceeded 
his own expectations, as indicated in a letter written in 1651: 
^ 9 
FIGURE 1.?An artist's rendering of pictographs on Dighton Rock. (After Delabarre, 1928). 
NUMBER 44 123 
It hath pleased God to stir up the hearts of many of them this winter to learn to 
read and write, wherein they doe very much profit with a very little help, espe?
cially some of them, for they are very ingenious. And whereas I had thought 
that we must have an Englishman to be their Schoole-Master, I now hope that 
the Lord will raise up some of themselves, and enable them unto that work.1 
The small cadre of English missionaries dedicated to intro?
ducing vernacular literacy into native communities was soon 
joined by a larger number of native teachers who taught read?
ing and writing skills throughout the region, such that by the 
end of the seventeenth century nearly 30% of the native popu?
lation?men, women, and children?could read and write 
(Bragdon, 1981:55). 
The native emphasis on public speaking as an art form and 
the possible influence of a long tradition of pictographic repre?
sentation, coincident with the Puritan text-dominated mission?
ary effort, created the conditions for an "oral literacy" within 
these native Christian communities. 
Literacy and Society among Massachusett-Speaking Com?
munities 
Massachusett vernacular literacy embraced several activities, 
cross-cutting a number of traditional cultural domains. In for?
mal schools, and at home, students worked with primers and 
other teaching aids and studied translated texts. Literate indi?
viduals, usually men, kept a variety of records, including mar?
riage records, deeds, and town proprietors' records. Native of?
ficials published marriage banns and issued warrants. One 
diary or account book in Massachusett is known, and letters 
were also exchanged (Goddard and Bragdon, 1988:13-23). 
The structure and content of the surviving writings in Massa?
chusett suggest that rhetorical style and formal protocol, partic?
ularly that demanded when peoples of differing social statuses 
interacted, was preserved in written form. The Massachusett 
case appears to support Chafe and Tannen's (1987:398) argu?
ment that writing was inherently social, and that reading and 
writing were "inextricably" tied to speech, even in those modes 
of discourse that seem most exclusively a matter of writing and 
reading. 
The most prominent use of literacy in daily life among the 
Massachusett speakers was in the practice of native Christian?
ity. Much of the reading and writing that was taught was taught 
within the context of religious instruction, or in preparation for 
it: the Bible, particularly the Psalms and other books of the Bi?
ble, was used in religious services. Those literate, bilingual na?
tive students who were educated by private tutors and at Har?
vard's Indian College were destined for the ministry. 
Strong evidence suggests such religiously oriented literacy 
was highly public and social in nature. Native ministers incor?
porated Biblical texts into their sermons (e.g., Hossueit, n.d.). 
The service consisted of reading, response, and textual exege?
sis (Bragdon, 1991), but it may have been conducted in an in?
formal setting, often the home of one of the members of the 
congregation. Annotations in some of the surviving native-
owned Bibles suggest that copies were sometimes carried to 
the services, where their owners followed along in the texts and 
made their own notes. For example, the Bible owned by the 
Pilgrim Society of Plymouth, Massachusetts (Eames no. 46),2 
contains the following passage in Massachusett: 
At this time...on February 7, 1715,...have already come give great snows. 
...At this time, in the house of Pammohkauwut who lives in Duxbury, it looks 
like...its a storm. ...But we Indians still survive well on this morning. (God?
dard and Bragdon, 1988:447) 
Not all church members were literate, but all participated in 
literacy to the extent that they interacted with a reader, and 
were connected to the sermon through references to the written 
word. This participation was amplified by the frequent use of 
psalmody and the "lining" of hymns, whereby a singer would 
sing a line from the text, and the congregation would repeat it, 
alternating line by line for the length of the hymn (Becker, 
1982). Native converts on Martha's Vineyard also read to one 
another as part of daily religious practice, often conducted at 
home, with family members and neighbors (Mayhew, 1727; 
Monaghan, 1990). 
The public nature of literacy is also reflected in the vernacu?
lar writings in Massachusett. A brief survey of original docu?
ments reveals a number of characteristics that suggest the so?
ciability of the context in which they were created. Many 
include lists of numerous witnesses, whose verbatim state?
ments are often attached. Petitions, of which four are known, 
appear to have been read aloud at group meetings, and in three 
cases they are accompanied by a complete listing of those 
present. 
The inextricability of speech and writing for the Massachu?
sett is further underlined by the immediacy of expression char?
acteristic of many of the vernacular writings. Elizabeth Little 
(1980b:63) has pointed out that most of the Nantucket native-
language deeds are in reality "recorded oral land transfers." Di?
rect quotation is the standard form of reported speech in Mas?
sachusett, and these writings preserve direct quotations from 
principal participants in land transfers or at public confirma?
tions of title. 
Petitions also appear to reflect a similar immediacy. Standard 
expressions of humility, like "we beseech you," and "we are 
poor," characteristic of the speech of petitioners in the early 
contact period, also appear in written petitions. In addition, cer?
tain rhetorical expressions characteristic of speech were some?
times employed in written petitions, such as the exclamatory 
Woj 'Oh!' (Goddard, 1993:404). It is important to point out that 
such expressions are not merely remnants of the oral mode that 
survived into writing; rather, they are expressions of the ongo?
ing sociability and orality of literacy among the Massachusett-
speaking people. 
The physical condition of these documents and manuscripts, 
and the marginal annotations found in several copies of the 
Massachusett Bibles and other published books, also suggest 
that both reading and writing for the Massachusett was a con-
textualized, community event. Some documents show physical 
evidence of reuse, scrutiny by more than one writer, or revi-
124 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
sions, as though the documents were carefully preserved as rel?
ics or aids to memory. A multipart document now located in the 
Huntington Library, San Marino, California, and transcribed 
and translated line-for-line by Goddard and Bragdon 
(1988:60-65), is an example (Figure 2). It details a two-step 
conveyance of land on Martha's Vineyard at East Chop 
(Ogkashkuppeh). It has three separate records in Massachusett, 
two on one sheet of paper, and a third on a separate piece at?
tached to the base of the first. The first record, located at the 
top of the sheet, is dated 22 September 1706 and records the 
transfer of land from Thomas Dila (or Tilla) to Nathaniel Cu-
per. The second record, on the same sheet, conveys the same 
piece of land from Cuper to John Talman and is also dated 22 
September 1706. The third record, on the attached sheet dated 
14 November 1706, is a confirmation of Talman's tenure by 
Samuell Makkinnit and Qunnagkoo, who name themselves 
"defenders of the sachemship" (Goddard and Bragdon, 
1988:63, 65). The writer of the third record has added lines to 
both of the previous ones. In the first, the writer added the 
words "I Thomas Tilla, this land that I convey cost three 
pounds, (that) which I let Nathaneill Cuper have. I Nathaneill 
Cuper say it was done; I bought it for three pounds." The same 
writer added similar statements to the second record. These 
conveyances, to which were appended the evidently important 
verbatim verbal exchanges of the buyers and sellers, document 
the continuing importance of oral agreement, the presence of 
numerous witnesses, the archiving of written records, and the 
participation of several writers and readers in the creation of 
the manuscripts (Goddard and Bragdon, 1988:20-22). 
Particularly interesting examples of the way in which native 
people used writing and books to reinforce or create a sense of 
community are the annotations in several copies of Massachu?
sett Bibles owned by native speakers of that language. The 
largest percentage of surviving copies of the Bible are presen?
tation copies, which were specially bound or had distinctive ti?
tle pages in English, being designed as gifts to benefactors of 
the missionary work in New England or for clerics and other 
interested English scholars. Very few Indian-owned Bibles are 
known to have survived, but of these, at least eight have anno?
tations and other marginalia in Massachusett (Goddard and 
Bragdon, 1988:374^65). Two other books, a copy oi Massa-
chuset Psalter (Mayhew, 1709) and a copy of Manitowompae 
Pomantamoonk (Bayley, 1685), were also annotated in Massa?
chusett (Goddard and Bragdon, 1988:466-471). 
Surviving Bibles and other books with annotations in Massa?
chusett show evidence of multiple owners and/or users. The an?
notated Psalter, for example, contains the names of at least two 
native Massachusett writers, Solomon Omppan and Benjamen 
Job, of Martha's Vineyard, and it contains marginal notes dat?
ing to 1720 and 1732 (Goddard and Bragdon, 1988: 466^168). 
The Bible owned by the Library Company of Philadelphia, in 
Pennsylvania (Eames no. 45), contains the passage "This is Pa-
penau's Book. I am looking after it" (Goddard and Bragdon, 
1988:417). The Bible owned by the Pilgrim Society contains 
annotations in the handwriting of several individuals, including 
Benjamin Kusseniyeutt, Francis Ned, and Josiah Ned (Josiah 
Attaunit), presumably of Plymouth. (Goddard and Bragdon, 
1988:447). Annotations are often messages, as if to other read?
ers, such as the admonition in the Bible owned by the native 
minister Joseph Papenau, of Falmouth and Bourne (later owned 
by the minister Zachary Hossueit of Gay Head): "This is your 
book, you Papenau. Read it with concentration. Your God will 
bless you." (Goddard and Bragdon, 1988:423). Other native-
owned Bibles contain end pages and other blank pages with an?
notations in many hands, creating the impression of a cacoph?
ony of voices, or a continuous "conversation" between writers 
in and readers of these books (Figure 3). 
Before the publication of Eliot's earliest translations, there is 
evidence that handwritten extracts from the Bible were passed 
from hand to hand in Massachusett communities (Pilling, 
1891:127). The book and other printed or written matter func?
tioned as a focus for discussion and for shared religious prac?
tice rather than as a source of private instruction. In those Mas-
sachusett-speaking communities where vernacular literacy was 
common, those at the interstices of literacy participated in 
many activities in which the use of documents and books both 
signified and reinforced the importance of community action 
and understanding. Reading and writing functioned as ritual ac?
tions in which both the literate and the nonliterate could share. 
Books, many of which were in the Massachusett language, 
also appear to have been prized objects in otherwise sparsely 
furnished native homes. Late seventeenth and early eighteenth 
century inventories of the possessions of native decedents from 
Natick and Nantucket frequently mention books (Bragdon, 
1979:140), and storekeepers on Nantucket and Martha's Vine?
yard were still selling copies of works in the native language in 
the 1740s (Little, 1980a:90). 
The importance of books and writings to the Christian Indi?
ans was not lost on others, and their acquisition of literacy may 
not necessarily have improved their standing among non-Indi?
ans. American Indian students at Harvard were subjected to the 
ridicule of their English classmates, as mocking annotations in 
Indian-owned exercise books makes clear (Morison, 1936: 
356-357). During King Philip's War, nearly all copies of the 
Bible, most of which were owned by noncombatants, were de?
stroyed by English soldiers (Danckaerts, 1867:383). In the 
hands of American Indians, the symbolic authority that books 
had in the seventeenth century (Joyce et al., 1983; Vincent, 
1993) was perhaps threatening to those English settlers who 
were determined to draw sharp boundaries between themselves 
and the native Other (Murray, 1996). Some Indians, within 
Christian territories and outside them, also appear to have re?
garded books, reading, and writing, as well as objects and ac?
tivities associated with them, as endowed with manitou (super?
natural force) and thus sacred, inexplicable, and potentially 
dangerous (Williams, 1936:118, 126). It is possible that some 
N U M B E R 44 125 
fepf w 
ffriepw .(da dafidi v a t / i A j / i ' ^ ?<-vf -nmim'-X -n.cina.Xtc cim*'^/ \a 
f'\"? .y--">u^ <.v^frikfueA<,n{ *fayu a/CX?U? <??uy( ^ h v j f Jlflo < 
"i\jje?l?.6 ffemafS, < 
i/fAu/ Ti-cxMiA. ti;&tl'**inu-nnu77iniA.ucn im&n.icK ? " / ? 
*Jru.fi., 
(jjyJl
 iluWe/C4cn -nJyUe^ \fiji ncIUn-i^J.^^xL n'<'n >Lfr*n<.<//r"/* 
CA-fet x/f^u.k -n ~gafi/nXj JJarrUAul^ co/iftu wr* ,/*Uwr**-y 
n-twcn,ij7faf\u^nmnJ^ l a ^ L ? X^.Vu <\s+->l'<ffil A/C. 7, ? ' ' J f t l"f< ek' V* 
1Y10ffiiHW&L-
iAf(fi far?l*i.S TUL- ffi&%&**&>?<{ y-c r^.^fx aw>efftJfi-y&". 
aiyp 
* * f .< jQAtei, 
tKk*cn'*--\nf inrir^fKi xnn; nffrnm /uyia.0 .^"?y^ 
tS fn >A%? ?t<K.\.v/ri< wai \,X't""'Xi"-t &?)'/<?<? yf-a,{te/Afcfci 
' J . I ^ ' A O ? -UtumC nu/tfyurl & +y yi i-e-Cp-> ? ? ? 1 U&n .?/lwt Z"
1 
'{^faiypte aJ^etl ^%i** 4 & * * r S
 (x ^ L u t i n ? - ?w>-Li.k<..nj? UafX/h* a-hX X ? * # * ? ? 
vru3.r>-ifXffekf<*a y e 
Jta-ct). n r u X'-14 aXXctiiuukf'na?i"-
x
 \-'X o<uty< eJCtycn>?^ 
0 & Cc/a /n-
y*:?*\* 
? ; t-'n. /nan-ifS^-^ 
X,XXl',X?, 
I v 
r\i<"\ xiva-crij-
1/1 **5t<\ -z- i -Z 
,U^ jH 
J0S 
-rX 
UtUUlagfU ??? 
MfrX-
H-
.*i0mm*-wu.nntfdi-ea-->i.-e,*.&>- tiu^n7na.J(u.n
 7xt.ijHym<-->inu-mfliaiicn "_fc J,n/fi^.7>jan ?t u+jZcvie I 
^ i / ^ & w a n ^ X -K..X-J^f>\Z^f7^n -?*j?ii/iun/i*rj/'? aSi-i?? ? -utntneo ^ x J A a v u i ' 
a^/ou-c-cOr^ycX 
V 
'c/t n.xlnpJt 'ici^incJUcaarif^xiie 
mifAsLt)e
 TliL]>pa.pftniaoei,ic'rt.n ?n-en-vJi aMa.fu.j7 ptx-m^i eX<-*c?'\ ? 
.tig-nt jfe'rrnwwim*nn]#[{%itfUM*Ti?i/u n/LXS ^ a / z w ^ ^ . ^ ' - c a ^ .came mB'.. -
J^u* 
1 ; 
^ 
m'nnufcAx 
#"?*/<?*fiton? ttxin ty-enir y?nfa>vu/c/u/i-
:< 
;
 ? 
' ^ 
*w? t^ 
yifrX t^rr 
rrxtHlTL-nrAJif/, - , , ^ rna.^r, t . 
1 . . ? . v v . 
'* i l f ^ . H d n . g^.^i " f M ' -
ur 
FIGURE 2 .?Conveyance , Mar tha ' s Vineyard, 1706. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California 
( H M 3 9 9 3 [ 1 ] ) . 
126 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
74 
ix W 4*"?** >u< i stir/ wuf. -/i{*# ^ p *-> i/Vt ^ww ''?? "^"ris 
.txx?fj,n? m /y'M M 
4 s. 
c f 
j 
'Jrj^ 
S3 a 
<r?< 
$-**?&>. mx$L 
'- ? - I I / S 
c ?; fi I 
I 
? - ? * * * * * . 
FIGURE 3.?Verso of New Testament title page, Massachusett Bible (Eames no. 16), Nantucket. Courtesy of the 
Congregational Society Library, Boston, Massachusetts. 
NUMBER 44 127 
native people linked books and the ability to read to the per?
ceived power of Europeans and to their seeming immunity to 
disease (Axtell, 1987:305). Others may have rejected these ob?
jects as symbolic of a way of life and of a people so threatening 
to their own. 
Native American Books and Writings in Colonial Rhode 
Island and Connecticut 
The remarkable spread of vernacular literacy among Massa?
chusett speakers was not duplicated among other peoples 
closely linked to them by ties of language and culture, due to 
differences in colonial administration, the continuing power of 
native communities, and the lack of a single-minded and tire?
less missionary, such as Eliot. During the seventeenth century, 
missionary activity was limited in what is now Rhode Island 
and Connecticut. Much of the country was too remote from En?
glish settlement, or the native peoples successfully resisted 
Christianity. Among the Narragansetts, their allies the Niantics, 
and the indigenous societies of coastal Connecticut, early mis?
sionary efforts were less dramatically successful than were 
those among the Massachusett, although short-lived missions 
were established at Branford and Norwich (Conkey et al., 
1978:177). Other communities adopted Christianity during the 
Great Awakening religious movement of the 1740s (Simmons 
and Simmons, 1982). 
When the Reverend Experience Mayhew, a fluent speaker of 
the Martha's Vineyard dialect of Massachusett, toured southern 
Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut in 1717, he found little if 
any evidence of literacy skills among the native peoples he en?
countered (Mayhew, 1896). Joseph Fish, missionary to the Nar?
ragansett in the mid-eighteenth century, reported that the native 
minister Samuel Niles preached with an open Bible in front of 
him, quoting passages he evidently knew from memory, for it 
appeared that he could not read (Simmons and Simmons, 
1982). Yet books, especially the Bible, occupied places of im?
portance even in this region. For example, throughout the sev?
enteenth century, several sources document the theft of En?
glish, Greek, and Latin textbooks from English school houses 
and churches (Bragdon, 1981:49; Hall, 1994; Robert Gross, 
pers. comm., 1998). Such thefts most frequently were said to 
have been committed by non-Christian, or "strange," Indians 
(e.g., MacFarlane, 1933:564). Several seventeenth century au?
thors recall remarks made by Indians about the importance of 
books. One contemporary observer recounted with approval 
the explanation given by the Narragansett sachem Miantonimo 
to an Indian of Connecticut regarding English knowledge of 
the afterlife: 
He hath books and writings, and one which god himselfe made, concerning 
mens soules, and therefore may well know more than wee that have none, but 
take all upon trust from our forefathers. (Williams, 1936:137) 
Historical and archaeological evidence suggest that books 
and writings took on a number of social and religious functions 
even among nonliterate native people who were on the periph?
eries of literacy, both English and vernacular. James Axtell 
(1987) has suggested that in New France, writing and its mys?
teries may have been part of the perceived powers of the Euro?
peans, especially missionaries, who, it was thought, could in?
fluence supernatural powers through writing, a skill they 
jealously guarded. Archaeological finds of Bible-page frag?
ments in two historic-period graves dating to the mid-seven?
teenth century, recently excavated in southern New England, 
suggest that among the nonliterate, non-Christian people of the 
Pequot and Narragansett, writing, print, and books were indeed 
believed to be powerful. These printed pages were evidently in?
cluded as grave goods along with items of native and European 
manufacture (Amory, 1996; Kevin McBride, pers. comm., 
1996; Paul Robinson, pers. comm., 1996). 
In the mid-eighteenth century, a school for Indian people of 
southern New England was established by Rev. Samuel Whit?
man at Farmington, on the middle Connecticut River, where 
students were evidently instructed in Latin and English. A doc?
ument in Latin, composed by the Tunxis Indian John Metauan, 
in 1736, was sent by the prominent Connecticut minister Elea-
zer Wheelock, who trained Whitman, to the commissioners of 
the New England Company in the hopes they would fund Me?
tauan's efforts to enter the ministry (Szasz, 1988:188). In 1755 
Wheelock founded Moor's Indian Charity School in Lebanon, 
New Hampshire. Moor's school helped to foster the careers of 
several prominent Indian men and women, including such na?
tive ministers as the Mohegans Samson Occom and Joseph 
Johnson, who were both prolific writers, although they appar?
ently left no manuscripts in their own language (Love, 1899; 
Murray, 1996). 
The Later History of Native Literacy in Southern New 
England 
The history of native literacy becomes more difficult to trace in 
the last decades of the eighteenth century. Although no Massa?
chusett texts have been located dating to after this period, it 
seems likely that native-language literacy, or at least the ar?
chiving of vernacular texts and books in Massachusett, did not 
die out in Massachusett-speaking communities until the middle 
to late nineteenth century. When Rev. D.W. Stevens of Mar?
tha's Vineyard visited Gay Head in the 1870s, he collected 
more than 50 documents in the native language there (Pilling, 
1891:341). There is little evidence of interference from English 
in Massachusett texts dating to the third quarter of the eigh?
teenth century, although many native people were then no 
longer using that language exclusively, and others had given it 
up altogether in favor of English.3 In the latest of the docu?
ments written in Massachusett, writers were still capable of a 
highly elaborated rhetorical style (Goddard, 1993). These data 
suggest that manuscripts and books in the native language 
came to reflect its increasingly limited and symbolic function, a 
"latinization" of the language that almost always precedes Ian-
128 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
guage obsolescence (Dorian, 1981; Woolard, 1992). Although, 
aside from the publication oiSome Helps for the Indians (Pier-
son, 1658) in the Quiripi language, there is no concrete evi?
dence delineating the history of native-language literacy in 
Connecticut, Mrs. Fidelia Fielding, of Mohegan ancestry, kept 
a diary in that language in the first decade of the twentieth cen?
tury (Speck, 1928:228-251). How this attenuated, but persis?
tent, vernacular literacy coexisted with increasing bilingualism 
in English and, by the end of the nineteenth century, with the 
loss of most native languages in the region is a subject yet to be 
examined. 
Conclusions 
Books and manuscripts were important items of material cul?
ture in native southern New England, objects significant not 
only for their content and origins, but also for their functions as 
a focus for social interaction, avenues to spiritual power, and 
markers of native identity. Books and pamphlets in the Massa?
chusett language have long occupied a singular place in biblio?
graphic and antiquarian histories of colonial American printing 
(e.g., Morison, 1936; Hall, 1994). Yet, because their publica?
tion in the now extinct Massachusett language appears so quix?
otic to most modern scholars, their significance and widespread 
use among native converts to Christianity in the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries has not been well recognized. John 
Eliot, who was at the time urging the New England Company 
to fund a second printing of the Bible, wrote in a letter that 
even though most of the copies of the Massachusett Bible and 
other translations had been destroyed during King Philip's War 
"they have still fragments of their old Bibles, which they make 
constant use of."4 While commitment to Christianity was surely 
one motive for the desire for and use of religious translations in 
Massachusett, it also seems likely that these objects, like native 
languages themselves, were prized as symbols of Indian iden?
tity and persistence. The act of writing and its long associations 
(through painting and pictographic images) with shamanic 
practice and access to manitou are also clearly referenced in 
early ethnographic accounts and are implied in later descrip?
tions of Christian and non-Christian native practices. Finally, 
the importance of books and writings in English to native peo?
ples of southern New England who remained steadfastly non?
literate appears to have been widely recognized in the seven?
teenth and eighteenth centuries (Axtell, 1985). 
Much work remains to be done in understanding the ways in 
which the worldview of the Massachusett-speaking people and 
their neighbors was transformed through the adoption of ver?
nacular literacy and how the content and structure of transla?
tions into Massachusett undermined or appropriated the con?
ceptions and beliefs of native peoples. The political context of 
the unequal power relations in which Massachusett-speaking 
people acquired and used literacy in their own language must 
also be considered in understanding the meaning of literacy 
within native communities. The various uses to which books 
and writings were put, which extend beyond their function as a 
means of acculturation and control, and their significance to 
native communities both literate and nonliterate, lasting two 
hundred years after contact with Europeans, suggest that our 
understanding of literacy needs to be broadened further still, to 
encompass the social and ideological functions of reading and 
script at the interstices of literate cultures. 
Notes 
1. Eliot to Robert Boyle, 28 Apr 1651, cited in Pilling, 1891:127. 
2. A numbering system for identifying all known copies of Eliot's Bibles was 
developed by Wilberforce Eames (Pilling, 1891). 
3. Phineas Fish to Andrew Stewart, 3 Jun 1826, concerning the Mashpee In?
dians. Gallatin Papers no. 64-12, 3, 65, 66, 67, New England Miscellaneous. 
New York Historical Society, New York, New York. See also Badger, 1835. 
4. Eliot to Robert Boyle, Nov 1683, cited in Pilling, 1891:155. 
Literature Cited 
Amory, Hugh 
1996. "Preliterate Uses of Print: Two Seventeenth-Century Algonquian 
Fragments." Essay delivered at the symposium "Communicating 
with the Indians: Aspects of the Language Encounter with the Indig?
enous Peoples of the Americas, 1492 to 1800," John Carter Brown 
Library, Providence, Rhode Island, 19 Oct. 
Axtell, James 
1987. The Power of Print in the Eastern Woodlands Notes and Documents. 
William and Mary Quarterly, series 3, 44:300-309. 
Badger, Reverend Stephen 
1835. Historical and Characteristic Traits of the American Indians in Gen?
eral, and Those of the Natick in Particular.... Collections of the Mas?
sachusetts Historical Society, series 1, 5:32-45. 
Bayley, Lewis 
1685. Manitowompae Pomantamoonk.... John Eliot, translator, 333 pages. 
Cambridge, Massachusetts: [Samuel Green]. 
Becker, Laura 
1982. Ministers vs. Laymen: The Singing Controversy in Puritan New 
England, 1720-1740. New England Quarterly, 55:79-95. 
Besnier, Niko 
1991. Literacy and the Notion of the Person on a Nukulaelae Atoll. Ameri?
can Anthropologist, 93:570-587. 
Boyarin, Jonathan, editor 
1992. The Ethnography of Reading, vi+285 pages. Berkeley: University 
of California Press. 
Bragdon, Kathleen 
1979. Probate Records as a Source of Algonquian Ethnohistory. In Will?
iam Cowan, editor, Papers of the Tenth Algonquian Conference, 
pages 136-141. Ottawa, Ontario: Carleton University. 
1981. "Another Tongue Brought In": An Ethnohistorical Study of Native 
Writings in Massachusett. 210 pages. Doctoral dissertation, Brown 
University. 
NUMBER 44 129 
1987. "Emphattical Speech and Great Action": An Analysis of Native 
Speech Events Described in Seventeenth-Century Sources. Man in 
the Northeast, 33:88-101. 
1991. Native Christianity in 18th Century Massachusetts: Ritual as Cul?
tural Reaffirmation. In Barry Gough and Laird Christie, editors, 
New Dimensions in Ethnohistory, pages 119-126. Ottawa: Canadian 
Museum of Civilization. [Canadian Ethnology Service Paper, Mer?
cury Series, 120.] 
1993. "Language and Cultural Identity in Native Southern New England." 
Paper presented at the Second Mashantucket Pequot History Con?
ference, Mystic, Connecticut, Oct. 
1995. The Shamanistic Text in Southern New England. The Kroeber An?
thropological Society Papers, 79:166-176. 
Burkhart, Louise M. 
1989. The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-
Century Mexico. xii+242 pages. Tucson: University of Arizona 
Press. 
Chafe, Wallace, and Deborah Tannen 
1987. The Relation between Written and Spoken Language. Annual Re?
views in Anthropology, 16:383?407. 
Conkey, Laura E., Ethel Boissevain, and Ives Goddard 
1978. Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Late Period. In 
William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of North American 
Indians, volume 15, Bruce Trigger, editor, Northeast, pages 
177-189. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
Danckaerts, Jasper 
1867. Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour In Several of the Amer?
ican Colonies in 1679-80 by Jasper Dankers and Peter Sluyter; 
Translated from the Original Dutch Manuscript for the Long Island 
Historical Society, and Edited by Henry C. Murphy, viii, xivii + 440 
pages. Brooklyn, New York: Long Island Historical Society (Mem?
oirs, volume 1). 
Delabarre, Edmund Burke 
1928. Dighton Rock: A Study of the Written Rocks of New England. xv+ 
369 pages. New York: Walter Neale. 
Dorian, Nancy 
1981. Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect. xiv+ 
206 pages. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania 
Press. 
Dunford, Frederick J. 
1992. Conditional Sedentism: The Logistical Flexibility of Estuarine Set?
tlements in Circumscribed Environments. Paper presented at the 
fifty-seventh annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeol?
ogy, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 8-12 Apr. 
Eliot, John 
1666. The Indian Grammar Begun: Or, An Essay to Bring the Indian Lan?
guage into Rules for the Help of Such as Desire to Learn the Same, 
for the Furtherance of the Gospel Among Them. [4], 65, [3] pages. 
Cambridge: Marmaduke Johnson. 
1671. Indian Dialogues....[4], 81, [1] pages. Cambridge: [Marmaduke 
Johnson]. 
1672. The Logick Primer....[SO] pages. Cambridge: M.J. [Marmaduke 
Johnson.] 
Eliot, John, translator 
1663. The Holy Bible: Containing the Old Testament and the New. [836], 
[356] pages. Cambridge: Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson. 
[Another edition appeared in 1685.] 
Fabian, Johannes 
1986. Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation ofSwahili in the 
Former Belgian Congo 1880-1938. viii + 206 pages. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press. 
Goddard, Ives 
1977. Some Early Examples of American Indian Pidgin English from New 
England. International Journal of American Linguistics, 43:37-41. 
1978. A Further Note on Pidgin English. International Journal of Ameri?
can Linguistics, 44:73. 
1993. Two Mashpee Petitions, from 1752 (in Massachusett) and 1753 (in 
English). In Anthony Mattina and Timothy Montler, editors, Ameri?
can Indian Linguistics and Ethnography in Honor of Laurence C. 
Thompson. University of Montana Occasional Papers in Linguis?
tics, 10:397^116. 
2000. The Use of Pidgins and Jargons on the East Coast of North America. 
In Edward G. Gray and Norman Fiering, editors, The Language En?
counter in the Americas, 1492-1800, pages 61-78. New York: 
Berghahn Books. 
Goddard, Ives, and Kathleen Bragdon 
1988. Native Writings in Massachusett. Memoirs of the American Philo?
sophical Society, 185: xxiv+791 pages. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 
American Philosophical Society. 
Gundaker, Grey 
1993. "Without parse or script": Literacy and African American Art. Doc?
toral dissertation, Yale University. 
Hall, David 
1994. "Books and Literacy in Colonial New England." Essay presented to 
the Institute of Early American History and Culture, College of Wil?
liam and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, Nov. 
Harris, Roy 
1995. Signs of Writing. \'\\\+185 pages. London: Routledge. 
Hossueit, Zachary, Jr. 
n.d. [Sermon fragment.] Manuscript in the John Carter Brown Library, 
Providence, Rhode Island. 
Irvine, Judith 
1993. Mastering African Languages: The Politics of Linguistics in Nine?
teenth-Century Senegal. In Richard Handler and Daniel Segal, edi?
tors, Nations, Colonies, Metropoles. Social Analysis, special issue, 
34:27-16. 
Joyce, William L., David D. Hall, Richard D. Brown, and John B. Hench, 
editors 
1983. Printing and Society in Early America, xii+322 pages. Worcester, 
Massachusetts: American Antiquarian Society. 
Kellaway, William 
1962. The New England Company 1649-1776. 303 pages. New York: Bar?
nes and Noble. 
Little, Elizabeth 
1980a. Probate Records of Nantucket Indians. Nantucket Algonquian Stud?
ies, 2: 72 pages. Nantucket, Massachusetts: Nantucket Historical 
Association. 
1980b. Three Kinds of Deeds at Nantucket. In William Cowan, editor, Pa?
pers of the Eleventh Algonquian Conference, pages 61-70. Ottawa, 
Ontario: Carleton University. 
Love, William DeLoss 
1899. Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England, xiii+379 
pages. Boston: Pilgrim Press. 
MacFarlane, Ronald 
1933. Indian Relations in New England 1620-1760: A Study of a Regu?
lated Frontier. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. 
Mayhew, Experience 
1709. Massachuset Psalter.... [408] pages. Boston: B. Green. 
1727. Indian Converts or Some Account of the Lives and Dying Speeches 
of a Considerable Number of Christianized Indians of Martha s 
Vineyard, in New-England, xxiv+310 pages. London: J. Osborn and 
T. Longman. 
1896. A Brief Journal of My Visitation of the Pequot and Mohegan Indi?
ans, at the Desire of the Honourable Commissioners for the Propa?
gation of the Gospel.... London: Spottiswoode. 
Monaghan, E. Jennifer 
1990. "She Loved to Read in Good Books" Literacy and the Indians of 
Martha's Vineyard, 1643-1725. History of Education Quarterly, 
30:492-521. 
130 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Morison, Samuel Eliot 
1936. Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century. 2 volumes. Cam?
bridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 
Murray, Laura J. 
1996. "The Diaries of Joseph Johnson and Peter Jones." Essay delivered at 
the symposium "Communicating with the Indians: Aspects of the 
Language Encounter with the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, 
1492 to 1800," John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Is?
land, 18-20 Oct. 
Pierson, Abraham 
1658. Some Helps for the Indians.... 67 pages. Cambridge: Samuel Green. 
Pilling, James C. 
1891. Bibliography of Algonquian Languages. Bulletin. Bureau of Ameri?
can Ethnology, 13: x+614 pages. 
Salisbury, Neal 
1974. Red Puritans: The Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay and John 
Eliot. William and Mary Quarterly, series 3, 31:27-54. 
Salwen, Bert 
1978. The Indians of Southern New England: Early Period. In William C. 
Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of North American Indians, 
volume 15, Bruce Trigger, editor, Northeast, pages 160-176. Wash?
ington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
Schousboe, Karen, and Mogens Trolle Larsen, editors 
1989. Literacy and Society. 247 pages. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. 
Simmons, William, and Cheryl L. Simmons, editors 
1982. Old Light on Separate Ways: The Narragansett Diary of Joseph 
Fish, 1765-1776. xxxvii+149. Hanover, New Hampshire: Univer?
sity Press of New England. 
Speck, Frank G. 
1928. Native Tribes and Dialects of Connecticut: A Mohegan-Pequot Di?
ary. Forty-Third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnol?
ogy to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1925-1926, 
pages 199-287. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. 
Szasz, Margaret C. 
1988. Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607-1783. x+333 
pages. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 
Vincent, David 
1993. Literacy and Popular Culture: England, 1750-1914. viii+362 
pages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Williams, Roger 
1936. A Key Into the Language of America, by Roger Williams. ...[IS], 
205, [3] pages. Providence: Rhode Island and Providence Planta?
tions Tercentenary Committee, Inc. 
Winslow, Edward 
1910. Relation. In Emest Rhys, editor, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, 
pages 267-356. Boston: Everyman's Library. 
Wood, William 
1977. New England's Prospect. Edited by Alden T Vaughan, x+132 
pages. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 
Woolard, Kathryn A. 
1992. Language Convergence and Language Death as Social Processes. In 
Nancy C Dorian, editor, Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Lan?
guage Contraction and Death. Studies in the Cultural Foundations of 
Language, 7:355-368. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
From Manifest Destiny to the Melting Pot: The Life and Times of 
Charlotte Mitchell, Wampanoag 
William S. Simmons 
People who matured in the last quarter of the nineteenth century knew whence 
they came and also to what destination they moved... .From Edward Johnson's 
Wonder-Working Providence to George Bancroft's History, the message bore 
endless repetition in the New World. A known beginning and a foreseeable fu?
ture framed all particular events. Moreover, Americans were not alone in nurs?
ing such millennial dreams for their New Jerusalem, for their promised land, 
dreams that infused their nationalism and sustained faith in their manifest desti?
ny. (Handlin, 1996:335) 
Manifest Destiny 
New England colonists and their descendants defined their 
presence in North America in terms of a large and evolving 
myth that began with the Divine Providence of seventeenth-
century Puritans and merged with the Manifest Destiny of 
nineteenth-century westward migration. Given the priority of 
their claim to the continent, Native Americans are invoked in 
this myth in ways that explain their dispossession. One persis?
tent motif was that of the "good" and the "bad" Indian: that In?
dian character was split between the capacity for loyal and un?
selfish help toward pioneers and the capacity for uncontrollable 
deceit and destruction. "Good" Indians, such as Massasoit and 
Squanto, assisted colonization, and "bad" Indians, such as Sas-
sacus and Metacomet (King Philip), opposed it. That Indians 
succumbed to advancing white populations was proof that God 
and universal laws of human progress favored the winners and 
that Indians were spiritually lost and culturally lacking. An?
other tributary to this myth was that of the disappearing Indian, 
the last of their tribe, who vanished or at least lost power in the 
course of progress, but whose memory or descendants live as a 
local legend or genius loci among European Americans (Lub?
bers, 1994:44). 
Lucy Lillie, a traveller through southeastern Massachusetts 
in 1885, revealed such thoughts?split Indian character, the 
disappearing Indian, and the Indian imprint on the landscape? 
in her account of a journey from East Bridgewater to 
Fairhaven: 
We had no intention, I am sure, of making any aboriginal investigations, and 
yet we found that everywhere suggestions of the Indian in his most picturesque 
William S. Simmons, Department of Anthropology and Senior Vice 
President, Brown University, Box 1986, Providence, Rhode Island 
02912-1986, USA. 
as well as warlike moments confronted us...the gaunt, bold figure that con?
fronted Captain Standish and his men, the brave, pathetic chieftain who 
pledged and kept his faith with the white man, and as well the Indian who de?
stroyed villages and tortured captives, yet who left in that fair and fertile region 
names that are like music in the ears and rhyme upon the tongue, whose haunts 
are yet to be seen with the glamour of his best hours upon them?silent lakes 
and dim forest lands, hill-tops and plains that are called by his names, and still 
have the pensive charm and grace of his sovereignty about them. (Lillie, 
1885:813) 
Near the end of her journey, Lillie passed by Assawompsett 
Pond, in the town of Lakeville in Plymouth County, where 
Zerviah, Charlotte, and Melinda Mitchell, all descendants of 
the seventeenth-century Pokanoket, or Wampanoag, sachem, 
Massasoit, were then living. The Pokanoket, or Wampanoag, 
were a political subdivision of the Massachusett-speaking lan?
guage area of what is now southeastern Massachusetts. 
Thence from Fairhaven to Lakeville the country is rich and impressive. The 
road, when Long Plain is passed, leads to the lakes?Quitticus great and little, 
Long Pond, and Assawamsett. They inclose all the most famous country of old 
Indian times in that region, and with their belts of forest land, lie so silent, so 
sombre, and so grandly, impressively alone that one almost feels that the spell 
of the red man rests upon them never to be lifted. (Lillie, 1885:826) 
Lillie and her travelling companions found Charlotte Mitch?
ell unsettling: 
While she talked she looked at us from under her half-veiled eyelids with a cu?
rious kind of contempt, as though she felt our race entirely inferior to her own, 
and I am not sure but that as we drove away a sense of her superiority did not 
impress us more than anything else. We talked of it afterward as a curious and 
fitting ending to our journey. (Lillie, 1885:828) 
Charlotte (or Wootonekanuske) Mitchell, her mother 
Zerviah, and her sister, Melinda (or Teweeleema) lived in the 
heart of this myth-filled world where old frontier incidents, In?
dian memories, and stories of Indian ghosts were still in the 
thoughts of living people. A marker erected in 1930 on South 
Main Street in nearby Middleboro, for example, carries a mem?
ory of King Philip's War (1675-1676): 
Fifty rods east is the site of the old fort. Built about 1670 as a place of defence 
and refuge in time of need. During King Philip's War, an Indian making insult?
ing gestures on Indian Rock, across the Nemasket River, was shot from the fort. 
Charlotte and Melinda Mitchell heard a lesson in Manifest 
Destiny in 1898 at their mother's funeral in the North Abing-
ton, Massachusetts, Baptist Church: 
131 
132 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Mr. Cunningham [the white minister] had written an address, which he read 
and in which he told of the advance in civilization that had been witnessed by 
the deceased. He told of "the supplanting energy of the white man" and its ef?
fectiveness in exterminating the race of Indians, and considered this an illustra?
tion of the fact that modem civilization changes the character of the people of 
any nation. He told the congregation that Mrs. Mitchell had been proud of the 
fact that she was descended from Massasoit, and concluded a long, dry talk 
with the announcement that pride of birth counted for very little after all, and 
that death came alike to prince and pauper. Meantime the children of the prin?
cess sat before him weeping for the mother who had gone from them; they 
knew of her long life of suffering. (Kalor, 1898) 
From a Native American Perspective 
Despite their participation in a world of Anglo-American dom?
ination and myth, the Mitchells held an independent perspec?
tive on the economic and moral justification of this world and 
its idealizations. Zerviah, for example, resented the wrongs 
done by the English of Plymouth Colony to her ancestor, Mas?
sasoit: 
When their scanty provisions were gone, and they were left in a state of starva?
tion, had they not received timely aid from the noble red man they would have 
perished then and there. But what has been the reward to Massasoit and his de?
scendants, from the time of the landing of the Puritans down to the present 
hour? Nothing but deception and neglect. (Mitchell, 1972:iii) 
Similarly, Charlotte is reported to have admired both the 
"good" Indian, Massasoit, of Old Colony myth, and the "bad" 
King Philip, for his tragic effort to resist the injustices done to 
her people. Named Wootonekanuske for Philip's wife, Char?
lotte Mitchell was in a sense wedded to the historic symbol of 
her people's resistance: 
The high triumph of Wootonekanuske's life came [in 1921] when she was cho?
sen to unveil the statue of Chief Massasoit, which is on Cole's Hill in Ply?
mouth. Charlotte Mitchell, by patient review of history recorded in her memo?
ry, would often correct the townspeople who had the impression she was a 
descendant of King Philip. That warrior was her uncle, seven generations re?
moved, she would explain. She traced her ancestry to Massasoit through her 
mother, who came in direct line from Amie, the daughter of Massasoit. (Vigers, 
1983:27) 
King Philip was her uncle seven times removed, and for him she had the great?
est reverence. She used to say that Massasoit made a great mistake when he 
signed a treaty of peace with the white men. "He signed the doom of my people 
right there," said the Princess. "Although King Philip tried to right our wrongs, 
by that time the white men were too strong for us." (Thompson, 1944) 
Zerviah Gould Mitchell (1807-1898) attended public 
schools in Abington and a private school in Boston; she then 
taught for a while at a private Boston school. Zerviah's geneal?
ogy included (in addition to Massasoit, his daughter Amie, and 
Metacomet) such well-known figures from New England fron?
tier history as the Christian convert John Sassamon, whose 
death ignited King Philip's War, and the Black Sachem, Tus-
paquin, who was an ally to Philip and adversary to the English 
in that war. Zerviah Mitchell appears to have raised her chil?
dren in Abington and Cambridge, apart from known Native 
American communities of her day, but apparently she taught 
them the techniques of straw and wood splint basketry, some 
historical legends, medicinal and divining knowledge, and a 
firm attachment to their family land and Wampanoag lineage. 
Charlotte Mitchell was bora 2 November 1848 in North Abing?
ton and was educated in Abington public schools as well as in 
the Harvard Street Grammar School in Cambridge. Her father, 
Thomas C. Mitchell (d. 1859), a merchant seaman, was part 
Cherokee and part English. Charlotte was their tenth of eleven 
children (Peirce, 1884:290-297, 1972:210-219; Vigers, 
1983:9-28). 
By unbroken transmission from seventeenth-century ances?
tors, Zerviah Mitchell inherited lands at Betty's Neck on Assa-
wompsett Pond in Lakeville. Betty's Neck, a 27-acre tract 
known earlier as Nahteawanet, was named for Assowetough, 
the daughter of John Sassamon, who accepted the English 
name of Betty: 
Witneseth these presents, Pamantaquash, the pond Sachem, being weak in 
body, but of perfect disposeing memory, declared it to be his last will and Tes?
tament, concerning all his lands at Assawamsett, or elsewhere, that he is now 
possessed of, that he would after his disease leave them unto...Tuspaquin, alius 
the black Sachem, for his life, and after the sd Tuspaquin his disease unto So-
quontamouk, alius William, his sone, and to his heires forever, (ca. 1668, in 
Peirce, 1884:290) 
I, the above-named Assowetough, alias Bettey, do freely will, give, and be?
queath the above said tract of land unto My daughter Mercy, to her heirs forev?
er. Witness My hand this 14th day of May, 1696. (Peirce, 1884:293) 
Zerviah, with her unmarried daughters, Charlotte (1848-1930) 
and Melinda (1836-1919), moved from North Abington to the 
15 remaining acres of their ancestral property at Betty's Neck 
in May of 1879. In addition to knowing their genealogy for?
ward from the early seventeenth century, Charlotte Mitchell 
and her siblings also were heirs to what may have been the old?
est private property in Plymouth County that remained uninter?
ruptedly in Native American hands. By virtue of their histori?
cally significant family and their unique claim to ancient 
family property, Zerviah, Charlotte, and Melinda Mitchell cul?
tivated a very distinct Indian identity that was strongly rein?
forced by Yankee and other inhabitants of the region who simi?
larly valued genealogical ties to seventeenth-century forebears 
and priority of connection to place in defining themselves. 
Speaking for herself and her children, Zerviah Mitchell iden?
tified with the white motif of the disappearing Indian: "When 
we are gone the race of Massasoit will have disappeared from 
the face of the earth. There are but a few years left to us" 
(Anonymous, 1894). Charlotte Mitchell's obituary described 
her as "the last of the once powerful tribe of Wampanoags, 
which acknowledged Massasoit as its chief, of the direct blood 
line of leadership in the tribe, and entitled to the rank of prin?
cess" and also included what may have been her own explana?
tion for why she was the "last" of her line: "It is said she had 
never been attracted by any full blooded Indian and that she 
was averse to a marriage with less than full Indian blood, so 
that to her last days she had been a spinster by choice for 81 
years" (Anonymous, 1930). 
NUMBER 44 133 
Pilgrimages 
Whites often were sympathetic to the Mitchell's perspective on 
Indian-white history. The Mitchell's home became something 
of a shrine for white reporters, writers, children, and many oth?
ers who identified with or at least were attracted to the heroic, 
injured, and indigenous story that the Mitchells presented to 
turn-of-the century white Americans. Many were drawn to vis?
iting, hearing about, and personally communicating with this 
unique family, in whose custody then rested the only Native 
American voice in the Plymouth Colony encounter story. One 
local writer, Hezekiah Butterworth, a well-known author of 
children's and travel literature, boarded in one of the Mitchell's 
lakeside cottages on occasion and recorded a fascinating Mas?
sasoit family legend of a silver pipe: 
One of the oldest legends was related to me last summer by Mrs.... Mitchell, 
now eighty-five years of age, and the oldest member of the only surviving fam?
ily of Massasoit, who lives on...a little principality, if I may so term it, at 
Lakeville, Mass.... 
King James of England, on hearing of die goodness and virtues of Massasoit, 
once sent him a present of a silver pipe. The chieftain prized it highly as a gift 
from his "white brother over the sea." But one of his warriors did a deed of val?
or that so won his heart that he resolved to make him a present of the pipe as his 
choice treasure. The warrior, finding himself about to die, charged his squaw to 
put the silver pipe into his grave at the burial, but she, out of regard to the value 
of the treasure, hid it, and covered the grave without it. One evening she went to 
the place where she had hidden the royal present, resolving to smoke from the 
pipe alone, and to hide it again. She put out her hand to take the pipe, but it 
moved away from her. Again, but it moved away, and again and again, but a 
dead hand was moving it. Then she bitterly repented of her disobedience, and 
promised to bury the pipe if she were able. At this resolution, the pipe lay still, 
and she opened the grave, fulfilled the warrior's command, and was enabled to 
smoke in peace of mind and conscience, we may hope, the rest of her days. 
(Butterworth, 1893:16, see also 1895:235-236) 
Rudolf Haffenreffer, a notable collector of American Indian 
artifacts, owner of the Narragansett Brewery in the Arlington 
section of Cranston, Rhode Island, and owner of what had been 
King Philip's property at Mount Hope, in Bristol, Rhode Is?
land, also made the pilgrimage to Lakeville: 
I listened [in November, 1913] to the touching story told me by Queen Tee-
weelema and her two sisters, direct lineal descendants of King Philip, two of 
whom are now living at Lakeville, Mass., in a little hut surrounded by a few 
acres of land?all that the whites have left them of their glorious heritage from 
Massasoit. In their hearts, with the memories of those long bygone days, lives 
the acute sense of irresistible wrong done them by the alien in the land of their 
forefathers. (Haffenreffer, 1929:34) 
Haffenreffer also once invited Charlotte Mitchell's younger sis?
ter, Emma Safford, of Ipswich, Massachusetts, to visit his 
shrine at Mount Hope: "I am the owner of Mount Hope, where 
King Philip's chair is hewn out of the rock, and also the place 
where King Philip was killed; and any time when either you or 
any of your descendents would like to visit Mount Hope, I 
would like you or yours to communicate with me, so as to visit 
the beautiful old spot."1 
Although the Mohegan scholar Gladys Tantaquidgeon seems 
not to have visited the Mitchell family at Lakeville, she inter?
viewed Emma Safford at her Ipswich home in the summer of 
1929. Tantaquidgeon was interested in the Mitchell family 
dyed-straw basketry, which she considered to be a distinctive 
last expression of an indigenous tradition: "Data pertaining to 
the straw-grass articles... indicate that the production of this 
particular type of basket receptacle persisted among certain of 
the more conservative mainland Wampanoag until a much later 
date than had been supposed" (Tantaquidgeon, 1930:476-478). 
Charlotte Mitchell's Diary, 1896 
Charlotte Mitchell wrote in longhand a very legible diary that 
covers the period from Thursday, 2 January through Saturday, 
15 March 1896. It is one of two diaries known to have been 
written by a Native American woman of southern New Eng?
land (her contemporary the Mohegan Fidelia Fielding being the 
other) and is one of three diaries known to have been written by 
a person of Wampanoag or Pokanoket ancestry, Paul Cuffe and 
Paul Cuffe, Jr., being the others (Cuffe, 1839; Speck, 1928; 
Harris, 1972:77-262). In contrast to the isolated, dream-like 
quality of Fielding's 1902-1905 narrative, which she wrote in 
Mohegan, Mitchell documents in English the matter-of-fact de?
tails of farm activities and relationships with family, hired help, 
friends, and neighbors. With the exception of a few personal 
names and place-names, the Mitchells do not appear to have 
known the Massachusett language. 
In this brief diary, which is only a snapshot of her world and 
of her life, Mitchell records the details of farm and household 
activities that would seem to be typical of rural Massachusetts 
in the late nineteenth century. The daily and seasonal routines 
that she describes (food preparation, caring for chickens, 
horses, and cows, cutting and storing ice, marketing eggs, and 
cutting firewood) characterized the small New England family 
farm of her day. The relationships that she depicts with hired 
men, neighboring families, storekeepers, and delivery men in?
dicate that her recurrent interactions and practical interdepen-
dencies were with people of European-American and not Na?
tive American backgrounds. 
The only clearly Indian relationships that she mentions were 
with her mother and siblings. Although numerous other per?
sons of Wampanoag descent lived in nearby Fall River, Ply?
mouth, Mashpee, and New Bedford, Mitchell appears not to 
have interacted with them during these three months. By com?
parison with Fielding, Mitchell focused on immediate practi?
calities and not on inner states and spiritual concerns. The fol?
lowing passage from the 30 May 1904 entry in Fielding's diary 
suggests the difference in consciousness between the two: 
Birds. I love to see the birds, because [they are] pretty. They do not say any?
thing evil. They eat these things Mandu [manitou, god] gives, then they sing, 
because they do not want for anything. All things Mandu gives [them], that is 
so. All things! Yesterday I saw in the river a snake; he had a fish in his mouth. I 
hit him, then he gave up the fish. The fish is handsome. The snake is horrid, he 
bites you, too. ...I am afraid of the snake, snake is a spirit. (Speck, 1928:247) 
Mitchell never invoked indigenous or Christian belief in her 
daily reflections. Her voice in most respects is that of a person 
134 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
who was actively engaged with the non-Indian family farming 
community in which she, her mother, and her sister had chosen 
to live. She wrote of her Indian heritage almost inadvertently in 
references to basketry manufacture, medicinal preparation, for?
tune-telling, and a property dispute with a neighbor. The fol?
lowing excerpts from the diary give a sense of her day-to-day 
activities and what was on her mind.2 
Thursday January 2nd 
Fair and high winds-been thawing-winds very raw. After breakfast Henry [a 
hired man, apparently white] drove over to the Rock [a nearby village] after 
Lin [Melinda, her sister]. He wore his new canvas coat and Lin didn't know 
him at first sight. He stopped at Rat Sherman's and got 3 bags of hay. Paid 50 
cts for them. After dinner Henry drove over to the Wayside and brought home 
the goods the grocery man left. Before Henry got home, Old man Moranville 
[Josiah DeMaranville] and his wife drove down in here and seemed to be look?
ing round to see if anything had been cut on what he claimed. He had quite a 
talk with Lin; he seemed to be friendly. Henry got home in good season. 
Brought the bag-oats and sugar, cream tar tar & box cocoa. Mother was sick 
about all night last night with wind colic. Was better this morning. Hens laid 5 
eggs today. Warmer this evening. I put all of the bedding out on the line today, 
it was so fine. The Grocery man told Henry that there was something down at 
the station for him. Lin let the cows up tonight. 
Friday Jan 10th 
It snowed all night last night and is snowing hard this morning, but it is ever so 
much warmer; it thaws on top the house. It has been snowing all day. After din?
ner Henry went to see the men about coming to morrow to work on the ice. He 
came home just before dark. Lin went down and fed the hens. Lin roasted Jason 
[Gordon] a chime piece of pork, and they took it home for their suppers. They 
carried a half bush, of coal down at the same time. Hens laid 5 eggs to day. 
Mother has been real quiet to day; staid in her room all day. 
Saturday Jan 11 
Colder. Brown and Bill Cudworth helped them on ice to day. Silly Billy 
brought the team at noon, and Brown [and] Cudworths dinner. Jason and Salon 
eat dinner with us. Russel didnt come with the ice plough so they have got to 
cut it by hand. They had to shovel a lot of snow off the ice before they could 
commence to cut ice. Jason and Salon took tea with us. I guess they were pretty 
tired to night. Henry watered the animals at noon as usual. Will Moranville 
drove down to get Henry to help him fix up his building. Hens laid 2 eggs. 
Monday January 27 
Sun shone out quite a lot today but cloudy most of the day been thawing. Lin & 
I have been working on baskets. We put the cows out and Lin put them up. 
.. .Mother has been very good today. 
Tuesday February 4 
Cloudy & stormy. Mother kept Lin awake night before last, so I staid with her 
last night & precious little sleep I had of it. Henry worked over to Will Moran-
ville's. Got home in time for supper. He brought a postal for Lin from Robie 
Riley saying that Mr. Lee wanted 2 bottles more of the same kind of medicine 
he had before. I cleaned out the hen house, put the hen dressing into bags, what 
I didn't put into a barrel. I sent Mrs. P's [Parkhurst] magazine home by Henry. 
Hens laid 9 eggs. Henry handed me $2.00 on board. 
Saturday February 8th 
Fair and pleasant. Been thawing. Henry went to Will Moranville's and finished 
up what he had to do up there. After dinner he drove down to Middleboro with 
me & I borrowed 2.00 of White but didn't have to use it. I got 25 cts worth of 
iron for Mrs. Parkhurst for her horse; we went to Lovell & got the hams & ba?
con that was done & there is 3 more hams, they came to 2.98 cts I paid him. I 
got some wormwood for Lin to go in her medicine & a box of headache tablets. 
We got home just [at] lamplight. I got a [Boston] Globe at Drake's & [Boston] 
Record & Globe was sent Henry. I got at White's. Hens laid 8 eggs. 
Wednesday February 12 
Fair and cold. Not so high winds as yesterday. Smith was around on the grocery 
wagon himself today. Lin sent 2 bottles of medicine by him to go to New Bed?
ford by Ex. Henry went across as he calls it about 12 o'clock. Hens laid 16 
eggs. I sent White the 2.00 I borrowed by Smith. 
Thursday February 13 
Snow & rain which made it very slushy. A woman by the name of Jones drove 
over here from the Rock with her daughter & grandchild. She had both of there 
fortunes told & bought a bottle of medicine. All came to 1.50. Henry drove 
over & carried 38/i2 Doz eggs. They are 24 cts a doz. Henry got home in time 
for dinner. We had salt fish for dinner. Hens laid 8 eggs. 
Sunday February 23 
Sunny & cloudy. Henry cut me some holes through the ice & I trap[p]ed for 
fish but got none. It has been thawing all day. Henry went over to the wayside 
and got home in good season. He let the little horse out after he got back and he 
did have a good run. Hens laid 9 eggs. 
Monday March 2nd 
Stormy all day. Towards night a regular snow storm blizzard. Colder. It snowed 
so fast that it covered the ground in a very short time. Henry drove over to the 
wayside right after breakfast. Got home in time to water the cows. After dinner 
he planed some strips of board. Mother has done quite nicely for her. Lin got 
ready to color straw but didn't have enough cut up to color. Got 11 eggs today. 
Wednesday March 12 
Cold and clear. Jason went home today. Henry and I drove him down to 
Middleboro... I got some herbs for Lin's medicine and some Alcohol and a pair 
of shoes for myself. I paid the Apothecary man 20 cts that I owed him. I got 2 
doz tin boxes for Salve. We got home shortly after 2 oclock. 
Basketry, Medicin , Fortune-Telling, and Land 
The Mitchell family's Native American predecessors at Betty's 
Neck made baskets and brooms in the winter months, which 
they sold for income to purchase supplies once their stores of 
corn and grain were depleted (Bennet, 1810:1; Mandell, 
1996:199). Charlotte and Melinda Mitchell continued to make 
and sell baskets, with their distinctive family style of plaited 
and dyed rye-straw miniature baskets as one source of income: 
From this home they went out to earn their livelihood?by selling the baskets, 
brooms, and beaded work which they had made and the vegetables they had 
raised. With their wares they were frequent visitors at Sampson's Tavern, here 
in Lakeville, and at the summer resort of Onset, where Teweeleema also told 
fortunes. (Vigers, 1983:24-25) 
In her diary entry for 27 January, Mitchell noted without 
elaboration that she and her sister worked on baskets. On 2 
March she added that Melinda "got ready to color straw but 
didn't have enough cut up to color." Most probably this pas?
sage refers to the green or purple commercial dyes that both 
used to color the miniature rye-straw baskets for which they 
were best known (Tantaquidgeon, 1930:475-484; McMullen, 
1987:175; Turnbaugh and Turnbaugh, 1987:92). A brief refer?
ence on 20 February to gathering tag alder could pertain to bas?
ket manufacture, for alder was used elsewhere in the northeast 
as a natural dye (Speck, 1947:28). Around 1902, when South?
ern New England Indians were abandoning their basketry man?
ufacturing, Melinda told a newspaper reporter that she still 
made baskets but fewer than before: "It is not easy to get the 
NUMBER 44 135 
material. We used to send 400 or 500 dozen every year to firms 
in Boston, and seldom were many returned to us. Farming is 
our principal work now" (Pease, 1902). 
The Mitchells, as well as a number of other Native American 
men and women in the region, had reputations as healers 
among both the Indian and the white populations. Rebecca 
Davis, of the nineteenth-century Ponkapoag community in 
Canton, Massachusetts, for example, "gained some money by 
the sale of a salve, which she prepared from herbs according to 
the prescription of some ancient medicine-man" (Huntoon, 
1893:39; see also Mandell, 1996:200; McBride and Prins, 
1996:321-347). Mitchell's great grandmother, Lydia Tus-
paquin, who earlier lived at Betty's Neck, "claimed great skill 
in the healing art, and was in the act of gathering herbs tor 
medical purposes, when she fell from a high bank into Assa-
womset Pond and was drowned" in 1812 (Vigers, 1983:19). 
Gladys Tantaquidgeon interviewed one such herbalist, Rachel 
Ryan of Gay Head, who prepared "roots and herbs to be used 
for medicinal purposes" as recently as 1928 (Simmons, 
1986:101). One of the most noted local practitioners, William 
Perry, who had a considerable reputation among country peo?
ple and was frequently called upon to minister to white fami?
lies, lived on the Fall River Reservation, a few miles from 
Lakeville (Simmons, 1986:102-104). Although Perry died dur?
ing the period covered in her diary, Mitchell does not seem to 
have known about his death, or at least did not mention it. 
On 4 February Mitchell entered in her diary that a Mr. Lee of 
New Bedford had written her sister, Melinda, to request that 
she send him two bottles of the same medicine that she had 
made for him before. Although Melinda sent Lee the two bot?
tles (one ingredient was wormwood, see 8 February entry) on 
12 February, Mitchell mentions neither the purpose nor the cost 
of the medicine. One day later a woman named Jones drove 
over to Betty's Neck with her daughter and grandchildren from 
nearby Rock Village to have their fortunes told and to buy one 
bottle of an unspecified medicine, all for SI.50. Tom Tate, a 
white child who boarded with the Mitchell sisters for a few 
years at Betty's Neck, recalled how they "used the different 
herbs and things for medication," and that Charlotte had once 
healed his ulcerated foot with "a poultice of plantain leaves" 
(French, 1989:238). This limited information suggests that 
Melinda and Charlotte Mitchell's reputations as curers ex?
tended beyond the countryside to at least one major urban area. 
The one reference in the diary to fortune telling (on 13 Feb?
ruary) reveals that Melinda charged for the service and per?
formed it for non-Indians, but it is silent regarding the concepts 
and procedures that may have been involved. William Perry, of 
Fall River, and a number of Mitchell's contemporaries at Gay 
Head were known to have practiced a range of divinatory tech?
niques. 
In their efforts to reclaim or hold on to what they believed to 
be their territorial heritage in both Fall River and Lakeville, 
Zerviah Mitchell and her children were involved in legal pro?
ceedings with the state and with their immediate neighbors (see 
Earle, 1862:118; Lillie, 1885:828; Peirce, 1972:iii-v). Accord?
ing to a newspaper reporter who interviewed Charlotte and 
Melinda around 1902, they were then in the midst of a property 
dispute with their neighbor, Josiah DeMaranville: 
In the present land trouble, the Mitchells are respondents, Josiah DeMoran-
ville of Lakeville being the petitioner He has brought a bill in equity to restrain 
Alonzo H. Mitchell of North Abington and Melinda and Charlotte Mitchell of 
Lakeville from entering on five acres of land on Cranberry pond in Lakeville, 
and cutting and removing timber therefrom 
The Indians claim that the land is theirs by royal descent, while the petition?
er says it was deeded to him ..and that he has been in possession of it more 
than 40 years. It adjoins land occupied by the Mitchells. A short time ago Mr. 
DeMoranville started wood-cutting, and the Mitchells, after a protest, began 
themselves to cut. Court proceedings followed and now there is a truce, as both 
parties have agreed to await a decision. (Pease, 1902) 
This disagreement over wood-cutting rights and property 
lines helps illuminate Charlotte's comments on her neighbor in 
her diary entry for 2 January. Charlotte Mitchell held legal title 
to a 15-acre tract until her death on 29 April 1930, whereupon 
the estate went to her sisters, Lydia Mitchell (residence un?
known) and Emma J. Safford, of Ipswich.3 Massasoit's lineage 
surrendered this land finally and completely in October, 1943, 
for nonpayment of back taxes: 
Case# 23538. Land Court. This is to certify that the Petition of the Town of 
Lakeville vs. Emma Safford to foreclose its tax lien under a certain deed for 
non-payment of taxes, was filed in this Court Dec. 16, 1942. Thereafter due 
proceedings under said petition were instituted according to law and finally on 
Oct. 15, 1943, a decree forever foreclosing and barring all rights of redemption 
under said deed was entered and this notice of disposition of said petition is di?
rected to be recorded in the Reg. of Deeds for District of Plymouth County. 
Description in Book 1791, page 424 land with the buildings thereon as?
sessed to Emma J. Safford and is known as the Indian's Land: bounded N[orth-
er]ly. by Assawampsett Pond; W[ester]ly by the Spooner land; E[aster]ly by 
land formerly of Josiah DeMoranville; Southerly by the 68 lot sixteen shilling 
Purchase.4 
In the Backwaters of Myth 
The Mitchell family experience and Charlotte's diary speak 
from a little-known time and place in Native America. Distant 
in time by some 250 years from the Pilgrim and Puritan fron?
tiers, and living still on ancestral Pokanoket soil, the three 
women stood uniquely apart within the rural and industrialized 
postcolonial and recent immigrant populations. Whereas the 
myths of Divine Providence and Manifest Destiny took deadly 
aim at those Indian groups at the frontier's edge, they invested 
surviving enclaves in long-domesticated areas with a certain 
amount of nostalgia, identification, and idealization. Native 
American survivors in these backwaters had opportunities to 
direct their lives within the nostalgic version of the myth. By 
virtue of their esteemed lineage and their presence on ancient 
deeded land, the Mitchells occupied an important symbolic 
place in the consciousness of local whites, who saw them as a 
living connection with their own sacred history. Knowing that 
these Indians still lived somewhere in the nearby woods was 
very important to them. 
136 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Zerviah Mitchell and her daughters accepted and even culti?
vated their enhanced Indian status among whites as public fig?
ures and by marketing their traditional familial skills. With 
their non-Indian neighbors they lived near the end of the time 
when Manifest Destiny continued to give shape and historical 
meaning to the overwhelming majority of American lives. Yet 
they spoke from a uniquely Indian position in the local enact?
ment of this myth. They upheld it as symbols of long-ago sa?
cred events and also articulated its negative meaning for Indi?
ans. Interestingly, many of their white friends and 
acquaintances identified with the Indian stance. In some ways 
they were becoming like Indians. 
American Indians, Old-Line Americans, and the Melting 
Pot 
In the years following her sister's death, Charlotte Mitchell 
worked on the family farm as best she could and depended on 
white friends as well as on a small state pension for her sup?
port. She was one of the humble New England country women 
"who prefer to starve rather than say they are hungry" (Brooks, 
1940:472). A reporter who interviewed her in 1926 on the oc?
casion of her seventy-eighth birthday emphasized the interest 
local women had taken in her welfare and in her opposition to 
changing women's styles: 
For the present mode of living and its fantastic dress, Princess Wootoneka?
nuske has nothing but adverse comment. The bobbed hair of the women and 
girls is deplorable, she says... .There is a feeling of sorrow with her as the great 
white winter approaches, and if she had enough money coming to her to have 
some woman companion with her during the dreary months she would be in 
better spirits, but it looks to her as if she would have to pass the time alone, 
when for days she will not see a living person. 
Many women have tried to obtain money for her in her just rights, but as for 
any gift in a sense of charity, it is a delicate matter, for her indignant royal 
blood will not allow it. Other relatives are living in and about Abington now, 
but they make but [injfrequent visits to the hunting grounds of their fathers, for 
they have been married and have homes of their own. (Anonymous, 1926) 
In 1927 Mitchell applied without success to the state legisla?
ture for an increase, from $300 to $600, in her annual annuity. 
A white fraternal organization, the Nunkatest Tribe, 65, of the 
Improved Order of Red Men (IORM) raised funds throughout 
Massachusetts for her relief: 
With the effort to increase her annuity a failure, the legislature refusing the 
request for special aid, it remained for Nunkatest tribe of Whitman to sponsor a 
fund in aid of Princess Wootoneknuski. A committee was appointed and an ap?
peal was made last week to all Red Men throughout Massachusetts to contrib?
ute to the fund. The committee consists of Fred W. Glasier, CA. Vinton, A.W. 
Harriman, Samuel Bradshaw, OA. Smith and A.F. Blanchard. 
Already money has started coming in, and with a substantial sum received in 
the first few days, it is hoped that a fund will be raised ample to make the last 
days of Princess Wootoneknuski's life comfortable. (Anonymous, 1927) 
This was not Mitchell's first contact with the IORM. The or?
ganization raised funds for the tercentenary dedication of the 
Massasoit Memorial on Cole's Hill, overlooking Plymouth 
Rock and Harbor, and invited Mitchell to unveil the statue 
(Lemke, 1964:503, 524). The IORM was (and is) a distinc?
tively American organization, dedicated to preserving the 
moral qualities of the "good" Indian. Their character and pur?
pose are clearly portrayed in their official history, written in 
1909, at about the time that Manifest Destiny was yielding to 
the triumphal mythology of the Melting Pot: 
We are the acknowledged conservators of the history, the customs, and the vir?
tues of the original American people,?a people conceded by the early travel?
lers and writers to have been intelligent, brave, and free, loyal in its friendships, 
generous in its hospitalities, and with many traits of character worthy of emula?
tion by the civilized race. The Improved Order of Red Men is proud to perpetu?
ate the memory of this, the noblest type of man in his natural state that has ever 
been discovered. (Paton, 1909:11) 
Could a higher ambition inspire its members, than to emulate the virtues, pre?
serve the customs, and transmit to posterity the history of an extinct race? Such 
is our destiny. (Litchman, 1909:608) 
Why was the Princess Wootonekanuske then so important to 
white people, and who were the white people to whom she mat?
tered, some of whom organized themselves into Indian tribes? 
One thought is that she and her family symbolized permanence 
in the midst of industrialization, abandonment of rural liveli?
hoods, demographic change, ethnic as well as class restratifica-
tion, and a sense of loss that swept through the late nineteenth-
century northeastern United States. Women, particularly coun?
try women, were the ones who stayed at home, "where some?
thing lurked that was still sublime" (Brooks, 1940:472). In his 
story about a street not far from Lakeville, H.P. Lovecraft artic?
ulated nativist fears of displacement that appear to have been 
commonly shared by old-line Americans in the late nineteenth 
and early twentieth centuries in this region: 
Men of strength and honour fashioned that Street: good valiant men of our 
blood who had come from the Blessed Isles across the sea. (Lovecraft, 1970: 
164) 
New kinds of faces appeared in the Street, swarthy, sinister faces with furtive 
eyes and odd features, whose owners spoke unfamiliar words and placed signs 
in known and unknown characters upon most of the musty houses. Push-carts 
crowded the gutters. A sordid undefinable stench settled over the place, and the 
ancient spirit slept. (Lovecraft, 1970:166-167) 
Old-line Americans threatened by immigrants felt in a way 
like "good" Indians, for in their own minds they were a virtu?
ous indigenous people. Henry Adams, for example, wrote in 
his autobiography that as a consequence of immigration his 
"world was dead," and despite his revered lineage of "Puritans 
and Patriots," he was "no worse off than the Indians or the buf?
falo who had been ejected from their heritage by his own peo?
ple" (Adams, 1995:229). In his nativist story "The Street," 
Lovecraft (1970:164) observed, "There be those who say that 
things and places have souls, and there be those who say they 
have not." The Mitchells knew that where they lived, on Mas-
sasoit's family land in Lakeville, places and things had souls, 
or ancestral meanings, as Lovecraft seemed to mean by his use 
of this word. The local descendants of earlier white generations 
had their own sacred landscapes, monuments, and histories. 
Their places, the earliest ones named for moral ideas, English 
villages, original grantees, and Indian place names, were the 
ones Lovecraft had in mind. Having become in their own 
NUMBER 44 137 
minds like Indians being colonized, many identified with the 
"'good" Indian in the intensity of feeling and nostalgia with 
which they embraced their own objects, history, and places. 
Many also became sympathetic listeners to the Indian side of 
the story. 
Some of these listeners were anthropologists who, in the 
early years of the twentieth century, were very attentive to what 
has become known as the "memory culture" of Native Ameri?
cans. One example is Roland B. Dixon, professor of anthropol?
ogy at Harvard University, an old-line American who did ex?
tensive field research on the ancestral memories of living 
Indians in the Sacramento valley and Sierra Nevada of northern 
California. Dixon's interest in memory culmre may have been 
suggested at least in part by a sense that his indigenous culture, 
like that of Henry Adams, and like that of the California Indi?
ans, was being lost as a consequence of ethnic displacement: 
"For two centuries they [British Americans] built according to 
the pattern that was their heritage, then came the great wave of 
immigration of the last century, which wrought a fateful 
change" (Dixon, 1928:294). American anthropologists of re?
cent immigrant backgrounds, Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, and 
Robert Lowie being examples, also pursued the study of mem?
ory culture but perhaps for different motivations related to their 
separation from ancestral attachments. 
From the moments of earliest contact, Native American and 
immigrant peoples in North America revised their self under?
standings in the light of borrowings from and projections upon 
one another. In this account of Charlotte Mitchell and her im?
mediate family I have tried to show how they drew upon ances?
tral as well as European-American knowledge in ordering their 
practical activities, and beyond that, how they asserted their in?
dependent and critical perspective as players on the stage of 
old-line American sacred history. As indigenous whites felt 
themselves being displaced by nineteenth and early-twentieth 
century immigrant populations, and absorbed into this increas?
ingly pluralist world, many identified with Native Americans, 
whose displacements they had not only witnessed but caused. 
Although many indigenous and immigrant whites eventually 
reconciled themselves to the idea of the Melting Pot by con?
struing it in terms of what Lawrence Levine described as the 
"principle" of Anglo-conformity, many of them felt that the 
most recent immigrant cultures were of potentially threatening 
moral value (Levine, 1996:109). In this context, they looked 
back to their own origins for moral direction and idealized not 
only their past but also that of Native Americans, in relation?
ship to whom their American identity at least in part originated. 
That Indians continued to live in the woods near Plymouth re?
assured those who identified with the old-line American past as 
they looked beyond the older mythscapes of Divine Providence 
and Manifest Destiny to the Melting Pot and what Oscar Hand-
lin (1996:335) described as "the unmarked way" of the twenti?
eth century. At this point, the disappearing Indian faded in their 
imaginations to be replaced by a new enchantment with the 
persisting Indian, whose identity and culmre had survived what 
they knew to be even greater ordeals. 
Notes 
First thanks go to Bill Sturtevant, whose visionary Handbook of North Ameri?
can Indians project brought me back to my most cherished interest in Native 
Americana. I also would like to express my appreciation to Kathleen Bragdon, 
Mitchell Breitwieser, Ann McMullen, Peter Nabokov, and Cheryl Simmons for 
ideas along the way as I thought through this essay. Finally, I am grateful to 
Marion Delaney and Evelyn Caughlan of the Dyer Memorial Library in Abing?
ton, Massachusetts, for their hospitality while I worked in their friendly and 
unique institution. They brought the Charlotte Mitchell diary to my attention 
and graciously arranged permission for me to publish it for scholarly purposes. 
1. Haffenreffer to Emma Safford, 24 Nov, Brown University, Haffenreffer 
Museum of Anthropology. 
2. Mitchell diary, 2 Jan-15 Mar 1896, Dyer Memorial Library, Abington, 
Massachusetts. 
3. Probate Records, Plymouth County Massachusetts, volume 34, no. 39743, 
page 81 (1930). 
4. Lakeville v. Safford, Lakeville, Massachusetts, book 1855, page 126 
(1943). 
Literature Cited 
Adams, Henry 
1995. The Education of Henry Adams. Edited by Jean Gooder, 229 pages. 
London: Penguin Books. [Published by the author in 1907, Wash?
ington, D.C] 
Anonymous 
1894. Last of Their Race: Indians Who Are Descendants of the Great 
Chief Massasoit?They Are Very Proud Of Their Lineage. Clipping 
file, Dyer Memorial Library, Abington, Massachusetts. 
1926. Wampanoag Princess 78. Boston Herald, 2 Nov. Clipping file, Dyer 
Memorial Library, Abington, Massachusetts. 
1927. Nunkatest Red Men To Assist Indian Princess. 23 Mar. Clipping 
file, Dyer Memorial Library, Abington, Massachusetts. 
1930. Princess Wootonakanuse, Last of Wampanoags, Dead. 30 Apr. Clip?
ping file, Dyer Memorial Library, Abington, Massachusetts. 
Bennet, Nehemiah 
1794. Description of the Town of Middleborough, in the County of Ply?
mouth; with Remarks. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical 
Society For the Year 1794, 3:1-3. 
1810. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, for the Year 
1794. Volume 3, 304 pages. Boston: Munroe and Francis. [Origi?
nally printed in 1794 by Joseph Belknap, Boston.] 
Brooks, Van Wyck 
1946. New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915. 557 pages. Cleveland, 
Ohio: World Publishing Company. 
Butterworth, Hezekiah 
1893. Massasoit of Sowams in Pokanoket. In Massoit Souvenir, pages 
7-35. Warren, Rhode Island: Massasoit Monument Fund. 
1895. In Old New England: The Romance of a Colonial Fireside. vii + 
138 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
281 pages. New York: D. Appleton and Company. 
Cuffe, Paul 
1839. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Paul Cuffe, a Pequot Indian. 
21 pages. Vernon: Horace N. Bill. 
Dixon, Roland B. 
1928. The Building of Cultures. 312 pages. New York and London: 
Charles Scribner's Sons. 
Earle, John M. 
1862. Report to the Governor and Council Concerning the Indians of the 
Commonwealth. Commonwealth of Massachusetts House Docu?
ment No. 215, pages. 
French, Susan Ashley 
1989. Toys in the Sand: Recovering Childhood Memories in Lakeville, 
Massachusetts. 286 pages. East Freetown, Massachusetts: Susan 
Ashley French. 
Haffenreffer, Rudolf F. 
1929. Indian History of Mount Hope and Vicinity. In Proceedings of the 
Society from Its Organization in 1921 to August, 1926, pages 34-62. 
Fall River, Massachusetts: Fall River Historical Society. 
Handlin, Oscar 
1996. The Unmarked Way. The American Scholar, 65(3):335-355. 
Harris, Sheldon H. 
1972. Paul Cuffe: Black America and the African Return. 288 pages. New 
York: Simon and Schuster. 
Huntoon, Daniel TV. 
1893. History of the Town of Canton, Norfolk County, Massachusetts, xiv, 
1 leaf, + 666 pages. Cambridge: J. Wilson and Son. 
Kalor, Mary Fielding 
[1898]. Descendants of Massasoit: Mrs. Zerviah Mitchell, Grandaughter of 
Famous Indian Chief, Is Dead. Clipping File, Dyer Memorial Li?
brary, Abington, Massachusetts. 
Lemke, Carl R., editor 
1964. Official History of the Improved Order of Red Men Compiled Under 
Authority From the Great Council of the United States. 810 pages. 
Waco, Texas: Davis Bros. Publishing Company. 
Levine, Lawrence W. 
1996. The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History. 
xxiv+212 pages. Boston: Beacon Press. 
Lillie, Lucy C. 
1885. An Indian Journey. Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 71(426): 
813-828. 
Litchman, Charles H., editor 
1909. Official History of the Improved Order of Red Men Compiled Under 
Authority From the Great Council of the United States. 620 pages. 
Boston: The Fraternity Publishing Company. 
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips 
1965. The Tomb and Other Tales. 190 pages. New York: Ballantine Books. 
Lubbers, Klaus 
1994. Born for the Shade: Stereotypes of the Native American in United 
States Literature and the Visual Arts, 1776-1894. 328 pages, [40] 
pages of plates. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi B.V. 
Mandell, Daniel R. 
1996. Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massa?
chusetts. ix+255 pages. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 
McBride, Bunny, and Harald E.L. Prins 
1996. Walking the Medicine Line: Molly Ockett, a Pigwacket Doctor. In 
Robert S. Grumet, editor, Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632-1816, 
pages 321-347. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 
McMullen, Ann 
1987. Descriptive Entries for the Objects. In Ann McMullen and Russell 
G. Handsman, editors, A Key into the Language ofWoodsplint Bas?
kets, pages 172-179. Washington, Connecticut: American Indian 
Archaeological Institute. 
Mitchell, Zerviah Gould 
1972. Preface. In Ebebezer W. Peirce, Indian History, Biography and Ge?
nealogy Pertaining to the Good Sachem Massasoit of the 
Wampanoag Tribe, pages iii-v. Freeport, New York: Books for Li?
braries Press. [Published by the author in 1878, North Abington, 
Massachusetts.] 
Paton, Andrew H. 
1909. Introduction. In Charles H. Litchman, editor, Official History of the 
Improved Order of Red Men Compiled Under Authority From the 
Great Council of the United States, pages 11-15. Boston: The Fra?
ternity Publishing Company. 
Pease, Z.W. 
1902. Fighting For Royal Domain. Clipping file, Dyer Memorial Library, 
Abington, Massachusetts. 
Peirce, Ebenezer W. 
1884. History of Lakeville. In D. Hamilton Hurd, editor, History of Ply?
mouth County, Massachusetts, pages 290-320. Philadelphia, Penn?
sylvania: J.W. Lewis and Co. 
1972. Indian History, Biography and Genealogy Pertaining to the Good 
Sachem Massasoit of the Wampanoag Tribe. Freeport, New York: 
Books for Libraries Press. [Originally published in 1878 by Zerviah 
Gould, North Abington, Massachusetts.] 
Simmons, William S. 
1986. Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 
1620-1984. xi+331 pages. Hanover, New Hampshire: University 
Press of New England. 
Speck, Frank G. 
1928. Native Tribes and Dialects of Connecticut: A Mohegan-Pequot Di?
ary. Forty-Third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnol?
ogy,to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1925-1926, 
pages 199-287. Washington, D.C. 
1947. Eastern Algonkian Block-Stamp Decoration: A New World Original 
or an Acculturated Art. v+62 pages. Trenton: The Archaeological 
Society of New Jersey. 
Tantaquidgeon, Gladys 
1930. Newly Discovered Straw Basketry of the Wampanoag Indians of 
Massachusetts. Indian Notes, 7(4):475^I84. 
Thompson, Elroy S. 
1944. Day Before Yesterday. 13 Nov. Clipping File, Dyer Memorial Li?
brary, Abington, Massachusetts. 
Turnbaugh, Sarah Peabody, and William A. Turnbaugh 
1987. Weaving the Woods: Tradition and Response in Southern New Eng?
land Splint Basketry. In Ann McMullen and Russell G. Handsman, 
editors, A Key into the Language of Woodsplint Baskets, pages 
76-94. Washington, Connecticut: American Indian Archaeological 
Institute. 
Vigers, Gladys DeMaranville 
1983. History of the Town of Lakeville, Massachusetts. Lakeville Histori?
cal Commission. [Originally published in 1952 in Lakeville, 247 
pages.] 
Indian Imagery and the Development of Tourism in the Southwest 
JoAllyn Archambault 
William Sturtevant's first publication about the imagery of 
American Indians as produced by non-Indians examined an 
1838 drawing of a Seminole dance (Sturtevant, 1962). Subse?
quent publications analyzed the contributions that early artists, 
such as John White and Jacques Le Moyne, made to the under?
standing of native peoples in encounters between early Euro?
pean explorers and Native Americans (Sturtevant, 1964, 1965, 
1967,1976, 1977, 1980a). These and other publications discuss 
the value of early drawings and paintings by artist-explorers as 
a source of ethnographic data, to be considered within the con?
text provided by associated, contemporary written documents, 
such as diaries, letters, and official reports (Sturtevant, 1980b). 
These early images must be considered critically since the in?
fluence of preexisting images from European traditions is often 
apparent and, unless articulated by the researcher, will confuse 
the naive viewer (Sturtevant, 1968, 1978, 1992). The persever?
ance of such literary and visual preconceptions can lead to such 
stereotypes as the Patagonian giants (Sturtevant, 1982). 
Sturtevant's interest in imagery led to his research into early 
American Indian visitors to Europe, who provided Old World 
citizens with their first look at New World peoples. Some of 
these visitors died in Europe or otherwise disappeared from the 
historical record, but their portraits, which ranged in quality 
from fine paintings to crude engravings intended for advertis?
ing posters, were drawn by a variety of local artists. The pub?
lished portraits allowed many more Europeans to see some ap?
proximation of the appearance of these earliest American 
Indian visitors (Sturtevant, 1993). Some of them were mem?
bers of traveling entertainment groups, forerunners of the late 
nineteenth century wild west shows organized by Buffalo Bill 
and others.1 These groups traveled widely and performed be?
fore hundreds, if not thousands of Europeans eager to catch 
some glimpse of the people of the Americas. The performances 
contributed to the creation of icons associated with American 
Indians, such as the Plains Indian warbonnet, an object adopted 
by many non-Plains Indians as a pan-Indian ethnic symbol 
(Sturtevant, 1990). 
Sturtevant's writing on imagery, icons, and traveling Indian 
shows has contributed to my own work on the Gallup Inter-
JoAllyn Archambault, Department of Anthropology, MRC 112, Na?
tional Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washing?
ton, D.C. 20560-0112, USA. 
Tribal Indian Ceremonial (Archambault, 1984) (see "The Gal?
lup Ceremonial," below), the development of tourism, and the 
commodification of American Indian culture. The Ceremo?
nial's activities are an excellent example of the tandem matura?
tion of the tourism industry and the portrayal of the American 
Indian as an icon and commercial product, a process in which 
imagery plays a central role. The Ceremonial is also an excel?
lent example of cultural continuity of a theatrical spectacle. 
Sturtevant's work on imagery is founded on a deep under?
standing of the social and historical context in which the im?
ages were created and initially interpreted. His analyses are in?
formed by a thorough knowledge of the textual and visual 
lineages of the images of interest, and his interpretations have 
always been founded on data, not on simple opinion. 
The Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company 
This history properly starts with the entrance of the railroad 
into New Mexico, in 1879. Track was laid to Albuquerque by 
1880 and to what is now Gallup by 1881 (Telling, 1952). The 
Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe Railway, known locally as 
the Santa Fe Railway, gained control of the rail from Deming, 
New Mexico, to the west coast terminal in San Francisco, Cali?
fornia. This gave the Santa Fe Railway an outlet to the west 
that had great potential for pleasure travel, an opportunity the 
railroad quickly seized and exploited (McLuhan, 1985). 
Gallup started as a rough and ready section camp for railroad 
workers. There were a few Spanish-American families living in 
the area who farmed and ranched, in addition to the Navajo and 
Zuni living in portions of their original territory. Named after a 
railroad paymaster, David Gallup, Telling (1952) describes the 
town in 1882 as being a typical construction camp with saloons 
and hastily built shacks. The advent of the railroad benefitted 
all of the nascent towns along its path by providing both steady 
employment and commerce during the construction phase and 
access to markets once the line was completed. Those towns 
that became division points for the railway, as Gallup did in 
1889, were assured of a steady income from railway workers, 
freight, and the sale of locally produced coal, timber, and food. 
Gallup became the trading center of central western New Mex?
ico and adjacent Arizona and shared in the development of 
pleasure traveling. 
In 1895, with the Santa Fe Railway recovering from bank?
ruptcy, the company president, E.P. Ripley, decided to promote 
139 
140 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
southwestern tourism more aggressively (Dutton, 1983:93). 
Freight revenues generated from southwestern towns were 
small, and increased passenger travel would bring in needed in?
come. But although the Santa Fe track ran through beautiful, 
dramatic countryside and was near impressive archaeological 
sites to which trips could be arranged, the Southwest was still 
perceived as rough, untamed, and, perhaps, even dangerous. 
Most of the hostile encounters between Indians and whites had 
ceased by 1890, but the easterner was likely to need some as?
surance before traveling in what most thought to be wild coun?
try. This public perception would be skillfully assuaged by a 
publicity campaign, using exotic, sanitized, romantic images 
and describing a land that existed outside of time, full of pictur?
esque, nonthreatening, primitive peoples (McLuhan, 1985). 
The themes that emerged in Santa Fe's subsequent publicity 
campaign 
transformed the Indians into symbolic reductions of its American heritage. The 
success of that enterprise sprang from the American public's longing for be?
longing, its quest for roots, and its unconscious desire for liberation from a vio?
lent past. (McLuhan, 1985:19) 
Central to the advertising campaign were images of a heroic In?
dian archetype, at one with nature and secure in a culture that 
was exotic, picturesque, simple, and peaceful. Artists were 
commissioned to create images for the Santa Fe calendar that 
"were expected to be 'thematically pleasing and colorfully dec?
orative' and neither 'pictorially perplexing' nor 'intellectually 
challenging'... a magnification of the railway's sense of popu?
lar taste" (Coke, 1963:59, in McLuhan, 1985:29). 
The Indian calendar figures were frozen in time. They were 
portrayed in an idealized past, serene and sometimes medita?
tive, set within a landscape or against a flat background. What 
developed was a highly selective presentation of Indian society 
that stressed some decorative aspects of nineteenth century ma?
terial culture (beads, metal jewelry, hand woven textiles, 
leather clothing) set within a visual context that evoked an un?
sullied, aboriginal culmre. This was the "real, old time Indian" 
whose authenticity was unchallenged. The fact was ignored 
that some aspects of the material culture, for example, beads, 
manufactured cloth, and metal, existed only because of contact 
with non-Indians. Other elements of material culture that 
would have been common in a late nineteenth century Indian 
home, such as metal tools, buckets, paper, and mirrors, were 
never pictured. Just as Edward S. Curtis deleted from his pho?
tographs some manufactured items that he considered intrusive 
(Lyman, 1982), so the Santa Fe calendar paintings ignored sig?
nificant aspects of nineteenth century Indian life considered 
unauthentic or tacky. There was no attempt to present native 
peoples as they really lived at the turn of the century, only to 
show the Indian icon as created by the Santa Fe advertising de?
partment. The railway was both creating and preserving visual 
stereotypes of Indians. In the same process that Sturtevant de?
scribed for the Patagonian giants (Sturtevant, 1982), the visual 
images generated by the railway publicists supported generic 
stereotypes of the Indian as a simple, primitive child of nature; 
stereotypes that have circulated in western thinking since the 
sixteenth century (Berkhofer, 1978). 
The calendars were first distributed gratis in 1907 in what 
may have been the largest general mailing at that time. They 
found their way into hundreds of thousands of homes, schools, 
and businesses (McLuhan, 1985:19) and are now considered 
collectors' items. Indian images dominated the calendars, with 
dramatic landscapes being a secondary theme. In addition, the 
railway printed brochures, time tables, folders, and maps and 
took out ads in many popular magazines of the time, all of 
which featured the same idealized Indian and landscape imag?
ery (McLuhan, 1985:20). The publicity campaign was a huge 
success. In less than a decade the Santa Fe Railroad had estab?
lished a new corporate image for itself, had attracted new pas?
sengers for its trains, had helped to establish tourism as a major 
industry in the Southwest, and had created a new version of an 
old stereotype, the Noble Redman. 
The Santa Fe Railroad was not alone in its production of In?
dian imagery. The exotic appeal of Indian cultures for potential 
travelers had been recognized early on by Fred Harvey, who 
developed the famous Harvey House hotels and food service 
on the Santa Fe track from Chicago to California. The railroad 
had a symbiotic relationship with Fred Harvey. The former pro?
vided 
transportation and infrastructure, and Harvey provided standardized, high-
quality services. The Santa Fe built and owned the hotels, and the Harvey 
Company furnished and operated them as well as dining cars, newsstands, and 
other shops along the railroad's route. (Bryant, 1974:118) 
The first Harvey hotel, the Montezuma, opened in 1882 in Las 
Vegas, New Mexico (Grattan, 1980:125-126). A Harvey 
House was built in Gallup in 1895, and El Tovar debuted at the 
Grand Canyon in 1905. 
All of the hotels were given colorful names that emphasized 
the southwest region, and the architecture combined Spanish 
and Pueblo elements in what is now called the Mission style 
(Howard and Pardue, 1996). Native crafts were used to deco?
rate both public spaces and the guest rooms. Navajo rugs, 
Pueblo ceramics, baskets and textiles from many tribes, and 
paintings featuring the landscape and Indian scenes were ev?
erywhere (Thomas, 1978). Even the tableware in the dining 
rooms featured Indian motifs. The decor provided a visual con?
text for the emergent Indian-land nexus that is at the heart of 
southwestern tourism. 
The two companies played major roles in the commodifica-
tion of Indian material culture. The train stopped at every Har?
vey hotel, allowing sufficient time for travelers to eat and buy 
souvenirs. Attached to every hotel was a shop where tourists 
could purchase Indian-made items like the objects they saw 
decorating the Harvey House. The Alvarado Hotel complex in 
Albuquerque, built in 1902, was an excellent example of the 
union of form and function in a Harvey complex. "It was not 
possible to get to the main hotel facilities without first passing 
the Indian Building," with its sales rooms, museum, and artist 
demonstration area (Howard and Pardue, 1996:21). Inside, the 
NUMBER 44 141 
passenger experienced a visual cornucopia of Indian artifacts 
"arranged in the form of exhibits, cozy comers, etc. to illustrate 
to people how these things can be utilized to best advantage" 
(Howard and Pardue, 1996:15). There is no doubt that the mu?
seum, the artist demonstrations, and the sales shops were in?
tended to facilitate sales and increase profits for both compa?
nies. Herman Schweizer, head of the Harvey Company's Indian 
Department, wrote in 1930: 
Our place here was established thirty years ago on such a large scale, primarily 
as an advertising feature of the Santa Fe Railway, with a view of interesting the 
public in the Indians of the Southwest and their products, which purpose has 
admittedly been well served, and it has not only been of great benefit to the 
Santa Fe Railway, but to the Indians and all dealers in these products. (Howard 
and Pardue, 1996:15) 
Entrepreneurs dealing in Indian artifacts benefitted from an in?
creased demand, created in part from the structured marketing 
organized by the railway and the Harvey Company. 
Some Indians quickly took advantage of the opportunity for 
selling handicrafts to tourists and sold their goods directly to 
railroad travelers at the train depots and local hotels (Howard 
and Pardue, 1996). But the bulk of the sales took place in local 
gift shops, such as the Hopi House, near the El Tovar, both 
maintained by the Harvey Company. Some Indians sold di?
rectly to the gift shops, thereby avoiding middlemen, but the 
great majority had no option other than to sell to local traders, 
who then resold the goods to retailers. The Indian artisans were 
the primary producers of goods, but all evidence points to the 
fact that they earned very little in return. The middlemen and 
the retail operators realized far more profit for their efforts, in a 
classical example of capitalist economies (Adams, 1963). The 
Bureau of Indian Affairs supported craft sales as a means of 
generating income for reservation residents and incorporating 
them in a cash economy (United States Department of the Inte?
rior, Office of Indian Affairs, 1939:23). 
Indians were hired as artist-demonstrators and entertainers 
for the Harvey Houses throughout the Southwest (Howard and 
Pardue, 1966; Thomas, 1978). Sometimes trains were met by 
groups of dancers who performed for the arriving travelers, and 
some sites featured nightly dances illuminated by bonfires 
(Thomas, 1978). 
Both companies used photographs of Indians in their promo?
tional materials, but, with rare exceptions, their personal names 
were never given. In Harvey Company brochures only the Na?
vajo weaver, Elle of Ganado, and the Hopi potter, Nampeyo, 
were routinely identified in print (Howard and Pardue, 
1996:64). Virtually everyone else was an anonymous artist or 
dancer presented in typical dress or pose and identified by 
tribe. They had become archetypes of the exotic, friendly na?
tive (Dilworth, 1996:141). 
The Harvey Company interpretation of the American Indian 
included slide-illustrated lectures at some of the hotels. The La 
Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe featured such lectures, given by non-
Indians about local history, geography, and Pueblo Indians, for 
their guests in the Lecture Lounge (McLuhan, 1985:37). 
This burgeoning commercialization of Indian material cul?
ture, begun earlier by reservation traders and bolstered by the 
corporate interests of the railway and the Harvey Company, 
would culminate in the fully mature Indian art market of today. 
The economic benefits to Native American artists in this pro?
cess have been substantial and have allowed many families on 
the reservation to make a living over several generations. 
By 1905, if not earlier, the basic elements of southwestern 
tourism as created by the Santa Fe Railway and the Harvey 
Company were in place. The physical infrastructure consisted 
of railway transportation, hotels, dining rooms, and entertain?
ment venues (museum, lecture lounge, gift shops, and perfor?
mance areas). The Southwest, formerly a harsh, dangerous 
frontier, was repackaged as an exotic, safe, alluring "oasis" 
filled with colorful, friendly natives living in a place removed 
from the normal passage of time. An Indian image had become 
an icon of American identity, and carefully managed aspects of 
Indian culture became pastimes or souvenirs for the harried, ur?
ban traveler. Imagery in the form of paintings, photographs, 
and prints promoted this new vision of the railway's Southwest 
through promotional materials, slide-illustrated lectures, and 
their physical presence in hotels, homes, art galleries, and gift 
shops. All of these elements became part of the Gallup Cere?
monial's program. 
The Gallup Ceremonial 
The Ceremonial started with entertainment entrepreneur and 
trader Mike Kirk, who provided a Navajo dance team as part of 
the local attractions during the summers at the Grand Canyon. 
Kirk was typical of the entrepreneurs who booked American 
Indian performers for public events, which were very popular 
at the turn of the century (Moses, 1996). He owned a trading 
post at Manuelito, New Mexico, and by 1922 had for some 
time been taking groups of Indian dancers, runners, and crafts?
men to national and regional conventions or festivities. Encour?
aged by his experiences at the Grand Canyon, he returned to 
Gallup with plans for a traveling Indian show for the vaudeville 
circuit. He hoped to secure partial funding for this project from 
local businessmen, the return to the investors being the atten?
dant publicity for Gallup. But he was persuaded that a local 
production would stand a better chance of support from local 
investors (Carroll, 1971). 
Having decided to stage the show in Gallup, Kirk and attor?
ney John Chapman sought financial backing. Kirk's previous 
employment with the Santa Fe Railway was an asset. Railroad 
executives, impressed with the dance performances at the 
Grand Canyon, agreed to provide partial financial backing and 
publicity support as its contribution (Carroll, 1971). The Har?
vey Company also provided assistance (Inter-Tribal Indian 
Ceremonial Association (IICA), 1922). It is probable that the 
corporate support was critical to the continued success of the 
fledgling Ceremonial. Given the railroad's heavy investment in 
regional tourism, its support of a new celebration in Gallup was 
142 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
a prudent investment and evidence of the industry's importance 
in southwestern tourism. 
The Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association was incor?
porated as a nonprofit organization in August, 1922, and its 
purpose was "to preserve the purity and integrity of native In?
dian customs and culture... through staging of an annual Cere?
monial."2 The original incorporators included some of the most 
influential traders of the era and two Bureau of Indian Affairs 
agents attached to the Navajo reservation (Carroll, 1971; Ar?
chambault, 1984:30). 
Kirk was in charge of securing the Indian performers, and he 
recruited groups from the Hopi, Zuni, Isleta, Santo Domingo, 
and Navajo that year. The mayor declared a half-day holiday 
for everyone, and local citizens were requested to help with re?
pairs to the county fairground where the Ceremonial was to be 
staged that night. It was an informal affair, with the headlights 
from cars providing most of the illumination for the evening 
dances. It was a rousing success by all accounts, and so was 
born the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association 
(Carroll, 1971). In addition to the dances there were a number 
of contests (foot and horse races, tug of war, chicken pull), an 
exhibit of Indian crafts available for purchase, and products of 
the industrial training programs at the Bureau of Indian Affairs 
schools (IICA, 1922). 
A new and larger Gallup Harvey House, named El Navajo, 
was built in 1923, and the town was designated by the Santa Fe 
Railway as the hub for tours to Zuni, El Morro, and Chaco 
Canyon. Intrepid motorists were exploring the Southwest in au?
tomobiles (20 a day in Gallup), and local businessmen were 
sure they had a hit in the making (Carroll, 1971). Kirk recruited 
dancers from 12 New Mexican tribes to appear, and the format 
was the same as the year previous with afternoon dances, "In?
dian games and sports," evening dance program, and exhibits 
(IICA, 1923). In 1924, 5000 fliers were sent to auto clubs in the 
Midwest and the Pacific coast as part of a promotional cam?
paign, and they yielded results. There were so many visitors 
that, because of a shortage of hotel rooms, Gallup citizens were 
asked to house them. The event was beginning to attract the at?
tention of such people as Edward S. Curtis, who came out from 
Los Angeles to photograph the dances (Carroll, 1971). 
By 1925 the Ceremonial format was complete and would al?
ter little over the next 60 years. There was a parade, afternoon 
sports, an exhibit hall with Indian handicrafts for sale, a concert 
by an all-Indian band, an evening dance performance, and lots 
of photo opportunities. All of the performers and artists were 
Indian. Later, some of the businessmen in the exhibit hall 
would be Indian themselves, but then all were non-Indian. It 
was staged for two to three days in the late summer and at?
tracted both Indian and white audiences, all of whom spent 
money locally. Small cash prizes were given for the best art?
work, for agricultural and industrial products, and to winners of 
the athletic contests. A printed program gave short explana?
tions about the meanings of dances and gave brief sketches of 
tribes. In some years there were articles about various aspects 
of Indian life, usually the expressive arts (for example, dance, 
art, music, oral traditions), but sometimes current social condi?
tions were described, for example, education, ranching, or In?
dian veterans. The programs served as the official voice of the 
Ceremonial Association, and as such they are primary docu?
ments in my analysis. 
All of the features of the Ceremonial?native dance perfor?
mances by Indians in traditional dress, colorful athletic con?
tests, artist-demonstrators, sales of arts and crafts, and educa?
tional public lectures by non-Indian experts?were familiar 
features of southwestern tourism and were prefigured in the at?
tractions created by the Santa Fe Railway and the Harvey 
House hotels. The Indian-land nexus was visible in the land?
scape photos that appeared in later printed programs. The cele?
bration did not break new ground in the structure and presenta?
tion of its events but fit into a comfortable format that had been 
in place for two decades. 
The one element in the early Ceremonials that did not derive 
from railway-linked tourism was displays of the Bureau of In?
dian Affairs training programs in the Indian schools. One could 
see native-produced examples of the domestic arts (sewing, 
embroidery, canned goods), "industrial" products (carpentry, 
metalwork), and agricultural produce. The Bureau had been 
sponsoring similar exhibits since the Louisiana Purchase Expo?
sition in Saint Louis in 1904 and saw them as an efficient 
means of advertising its success in assimilating young Indians 
to American culture. At the reservation level, the Bureau estab?
lished agricultural fairs and encouraged friendly competition 
by awarding small prizes for the best examples of produce, do?
mestic arts, and so forth. The annual Navajo tribal fair started 
in 1909, and prizes were given for the best blankets and silver-
work, in addition to farm products (Moses, 1996), so local In?
dians were accustomed to the idea of competition for awards. 
Much of the recent interpretation of southwestern Indians, 
tourism, and popular imagery has focused on the orientalism 
that is so often apparent in literature and in fine and popular 
arts (McLuhan, 1985; Babcock, 1990, 1994; Dilworth, 1996). 
Certainly the promotional materials generated by the Santa Fe 
Railway and affiliated companies are excellent examples of 
such presentation. 
The Indian Detours, established by the Harvey Company and 
the Santa Fe Railway in 1925, designated Gallup as the hub for 
local tours. They were combinations of rail and bus travel that 
took passengers on extended trips to Indian villages and ar?
chaeological sites in northern New Mexico and Arizona far 
from the rail lines, complete with the food and housing service 
for which the Harvey company was so well known. Trips to 
some Indian pueblos were orchestrated so that the groups ar?
rived in time to see local dances (Thomas, 1978). Many of the 
travelers who booked these trips may well have attended the 
Ceremonial. 
The language used in brochures distributed by the Indian De?
tours stressed unbridled exoticism. "Motorists crossing the 
Southwestern States are nearer to the primitive than anywhere 
NUMBER 44 143 
on the continent. They are crossing a land in which a foreign 
people, with foreign speech and foreign ways, offer them spec?
tacles which can be equaled in a very few Oriental lands" 
(Thomas, 1978:196). Potential customers were encouraged to 
discover a "last frontier that has taken 350 years to sub?
due... find out buried cities...and string together age-old Pueb?
los where one may 'catch archaeology al ive '" (Thomas, 
1978:201-202). Such language, combined with imagery, sup?
ported the interpretation of the American Indian as a romantic, 
simple primitive who was one with a strange, magnificent land?
scape, living in a place outside time and the pressures of an ur?
ban lifestyle. 
Imagery of the Ceremonial 
Given the institutional history of the Gallup Ceremonial, its 
close ties to the Santa Fe Railway and Harvey Company, and 
its centrality within state tourism, one would expect to see a 
repetition of similar themes, language, and imagery in its publi?
cations. But examination of the Ceremonial's annual printed 
programs reveals conflicting images and text in a display of 
multivocality and complexity. All of the images (40 photo?
graphs and 5 drawings) used in the 1922-1928 programs por?
tray unidentified Indians in traditional clothes and in activities 
such as dancing, weaving, baking, or standing in picturesque 
poses. None of the images shows Indians engaged in modern 
activities that would have been common experiences for many, 
such as visiting an office or a medical clinic or attending 
school. The lack of images showing engagement with the mod?
em world supports an orientalist interpretation of the Indian as 
"exotic others, good and bad, tamed and wild" (Dilworth, 
1996:58), "ethnic others who were happy to remain outside 
modernity" (Dilworth, 1996:6). But upon reading the accompa?
nying text one finds a more complicated reality that is at odds 
with the imagery. The text may describe a native person who is 
assimilating to American culmre, learning new skills, and ad?
justing to the challenges of new lifeways. 
There were three major themes in the earliest programs of 
the Ceremonial. The first was that Indians were no longer dan?
gerous: "They are not the menace of fifty years ago" (IICA, 
1922:4). The second was that Indians were supervised, produc?
tive, and learning new skills?they were gainfully employed 
under the supervision of the federal government: 
[T]he Indians of today are a producing race. ...Under the tutelage of the gov?
ernment the Indians have been encouraged to continue their native craftsman?
ship and art and have been taught other lines of industry and trade... .This As?
sociation has encouraged the various tribes...to place upon exhibition 
specimens of their blankets and rugs, silverware, pottery, basketry, bead work 
and leather work....The domestic science exhibits...embroidery, canned fruit 
and vegetables, pastry and other baked goods, demonstrates what is being done 
by the Indian women. The school exhibits and exhibits of manual training 
show the result of the education of Indian children. The produce from the farm, 
garden and orchard illustrates the productiveness of a primitive race when en?
couraged and protected by a benevolent government. (IICA, 1922:4) 
Some of the exhibits mentioned above were sponsored by the 
Bureau of Indian Affairs and displayed the success of the 
forced assimilation programs in Indian schools. The third 
theme articulated the Ceremonial Association's intent to in?
form the American public about the value of Indian culture 
through its annual spectacle and associated publications and 
educational activities: 
[W]e promise that in future Ceremonials the exhibits will be more varied 
and... will demonstrate the advancement of these misunderstood people. ...To 
the uninitiated the customs and life of the Indians seem strange and meaning?
less and the Indians themselves are deemed lazy and indolent. Such is not the 
case. Each custom has its significance and the traditions of the origin of these 
customs are just as poetic and interesting as those of any race of people. This 
program has been prepared to explain briefly some of the dances and sports 
which will be produced on the different days of the Ceremonial. (IICA, 1922:5) 
This last reads like a classical statement of cultural relativism 
and social tolerance written at least 40 years before it became 
the hallmark of the turbulent 1960s. In an era when cultural 
chauvinism and conformity were the rule and the primacy of 
Anglo-American customs was unquestioned, this statement 
was politically progressive. Nor was it an attitude that was 
shared by all Gallup citizens. On at least one occasion the Cer?
emonial Association was taken to task by local ministers for 
having the parade on Sunday, which conflicted with the Chris?
tian day of worship (Archambault, 1984). Even national pan-
Indian organizations of the times, like the Society of American 
Indians, experienced conflict over the issue of traditional reli?
gion and cultural practices, with some supporting total and im?
mediate assimilation and others arguing for tolerance of the 
same (Hertzburg, 1971). 
The progressive perspective may have been inspired by simi?
lar statements written by the writers and protoanthropologists 
Hamlin Garland (1896), George Wharton James (1900, 1902), 
and Charles Lummis (1891), all of whom supported the right of 
the Hopi to practice their own religion, specifically the Snake 
Dance. Certainly it was not a position representative of most 
elected officials or government officials, although by the 1920s 
there were some supporters of the Indian right to freedom of re?
ligion even within the ranks of the government service (Moses, 
1996). 
An interpretation based on orientalism cannot account for the 
complex and multivalent themes so readily apparent in the Cer?
emonial's programs. It also displays the danger of selective use 
of evidence when using historical documents. It would have 
been easy enough to focus on the imagery to the exclusion of 
the text and make an argument for the construction of the In?
dian as icon and primitive. But consideration of all of the evi?
dence available in the programs undermines this approach. 
Even while advocating cultural acceptance and understand?
ing, the Ceremonial's annual programs illustrate the power of 
the federal government over American Indian communities. 
Whatever may have been the political aspirations of Indian 
leaders of the time, the government's program of cultural and 
economic assimilation was not to be denied. Not only had the 
United States tamed the wild Indian, but it was now teaching 
144 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
the Indian the arts of civilization. These elements reflect the 
participation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs officials who were 
members of the Ceremonial's organizing committee. Their 
presence was essential because in 1922 it would have been dif?
ficult for Indian performers to have been hired without tacit ac?
ceptance by the local superintendent, even though the govern?
ment no longer required and enforced the writing of contracts 
between native peoples and employers (Moses, 1996:142). 
While orientalism fails as an explanatory device for all of the 
complicated and conflicting streams of interest and influence 
that can be extracted from a fuller reading of the historical doc?
uments and context, the persistence of the Indian as icon in the 
Ceremonial's annual programs is undeniable. 
Moving forward to 1955, the annual program advertises an 
essentially unchanged calendar with the exception of displays 
of agricultural and industrial products, which had disappeared 
by 1935. In the exhibit hall were dozens of dealers, both Indian 
and white, selling native arts guaranteed to be authentic and 
good quality. Working Indian craftsmen were available for 
questions, and a display of a Navajo man creating a sandpaint-
ing was very popular. A seminar presented "leading [white] ex?
perts on Indian affairs speaking on topics bearing on the In?
dian" before a large audience (IICA, 1955:2). The grand entry 
of the dance groups into the performance area was well staged 
and dramatic, and the closing dance sequence was a Plains war 
dance, a proven crowd pleaser. Special accommodations were 
made for photographers. After the morning parade the dance 
groups had to be available for photographic setups, often 
staged against scenic backdrops. Photo clubs attended in large 
numbers, and some of the pictures were published in journals 
and magazines across the land (IICA, 1948, 1951). The major?
ity of the images in the program portray the Indian as exotic, 
heroic, noble, anonymous, in harmony with the land. The ori?
entalism so obvious in the tourist brochures of the early century 
was still visible in 1955. 
There were, however, some changes: the 1955 program was 
handsomely produced, with a full-color cover and eight color 
pages inside, all dedicated to images of Indian individuals and 
art except for four photos of picturesque landscapes. There are 
88 black-and-white photos and 30 color photos. On the full-
color panels, all of the 10 Indians featured in one- or two-per?
son portraits, and the 11 Indians in two group photos, are in tra?
ditional dress or dance regalia; none of them is identified by 
personal name. The captions make reference either to their 
tribe, their social status ("old mother, grandmother"), or their 
activity ("Apache Crown dancers") (IICA, 1955:9-10). In the 
32 black-and-white photos that feature one- or two-person por?
traits of Indians, three of them are named and 29 are anony?
mous. All of them are dressed in some variant of traditional 
dress or dance regalia. The three identified Indians are well-
known Indian artists. In an article about the presentation of the 
Palmes Academiques award by the French Republic to 12 
prominent Indian artists, all of the artists in two photos are 
named, as are all of the non-Indians. In the eight photos of non-
Indians, all of them are identified by name and position within 
the Association. The only non-Indians who are not identified 
by name appear in photos of visitors to the exhibition hall ac?
tivities. 
The implications are obvious. Indians are individuals less 
than they are members of a tribe. Despite the fact that many of 
the Indian dancers or artists were well known and had partici?
pated in the Ceremonial for years, they were reduced to ethnic 
symbols in the Ceremonial's program. This depersonalization 
was not a new development for this publication but was of long 
standing, and it continued to be the rule until quite recently. 
Some of the photographs, however, featured Indians dressed in 
modern clothes and living in mid-century America. A photo es?
say on the Indian encampment featured native visitors to the 
Ceremonial engaged in various activities: eating, visiting, get?
ting water, and singing at an evening social dance. While there 
was an ethnic quality inherent in all of the photos, it was very 
clear that these were contemporary native people, not icons 
trapped in a timeless past. 
The text inside the 1955 program is mixed in the same fash?
ion as the imagery, combining both an orientalist and a journal?
istic approach. Language evoked the allure of the magical and 
mystical. "This is true beauty, pageantry, mystery and enchant?
ment in a natural setting and only Gallup affords it (IICA, 
1955:7)" As the "final beat of the tom-tom fades on the night 
air, the rumbling of wagon wheels and clatter of hoofs will van?
ish into the plains from whence they came, and another Cere?
monial will be history" (IICA, 1955:7). Never mind that the In?
dian participants returned to conventional jobs, schools, and 
often substandard housing, for the moment they were the driv?
ers of "quaint wagons...pulled by typical Indian ponies... [with 
the] eyes of bashful Indian children peeking out from under the 
flaps: they're seeing 'city life' for the first time... .It is a charm?
ing and amusing scene to climax a morning parade" (IICA, 
1955:6). The Land of Enchantment populated by a native peo?
ple who possessed an authentic culture and lived outside time 
was the stuff of dreams. But it still managed to attract tourists 
from across the country to the Ceremonial, the self-styled 
"Queen" of the Indian shows. In contrast, although unstated, 
were the harried lives of the urban visitors, alienated from their 
own lives, in search of a community lacking at home. 
The text went on, however, to describe Indian artists working 
as professionals within the milieu of modern American art. The 
first article described the award of the distinguished Palmes 
Academiques, "a French civilian decoration given for meritori?
ous services rendered the arts in fitting tribute to the interna?
tional status achieved by American Indian artists and artisans 
of the Southwest" (IICA, 1955:25). 
The recipients were 12 distinguished artists known through?
out the area for the quality of their work. Paul Coze, a French 
artist and Consul to Arizona, was responsible for its conception 
and for obtaining the cooperation of the French government in 
this unusual award to American citizens. The ceremony took 
place in front of the Ceremonial's grandstands and was re-
NUMBER 44 145 
ported widely in the newspapers of the region. Its lasting im?
portance lay in the recognition of American Indian art as hav?
ing a place at the table of international art. 
The second article, by Dorothy Dunn, a long time observer 
and promoter of American Indian art, is a journalistic account 
of Indian art history, starting with the precontact period and 
ending with some of the artists who had just received the 
Palmes Academiques. Dunn argued that Indian arts could and 
should be accepted as American arts and incorporated into the 
national body of pure and applied design. Like Hamlin Garland 
(1894) before her, she believed that the future of American arts 
lay in the recognition of regional culture and its roots in the 
land, especially as understood by its native people. She de?
scribed the artists as struggling with the same dilemmas of ar?
tistic growth and vision as any other artist, thereby placing 
them in a modern context of aesthetic concept, product, con?
sumer, and marketplace. 
Gallup provided a critical source of potential sales and public 
exposure to all of the American Indian fine artists working in 
the mid-century period. Most, if not all, of the first generation 
of twentieth century American Indian artists exhibited or sold 
their work at the Ceremonial. The Studio style in which they 
worked has been discussed broadly by others, and it is gener?
ally agreed that it evoked a sense of times past, not present. The 
subject matter was the traditional culture of the nineteenth cen?
tury presented in sentimental, nostalgic, and sanitized images 
(Brody, 1971). Serious collectors and dealers attended the Cer?
emonial, and many deals were made while standing by the ex?
hibitor's booth or at the numerous parties in town. Indian ex?
hibitors were immersed in the "tangled relationships between 
artist, consumer, and art object in the marketplace" (Dilworth, 
1996:215). 
In conclusion, a close reading of the Ceremonial's programs 
provides a complicated dialogue with the past and present, not?
withstanding a superficial gloss of stereotypic imagery and 
text. Contextualizing the Ceremonial within the larger frame of 
regional tourism and federal history vis-a-vis Indian peoples, 
the annual programs illustrate the multiple, intricate, and often 
contradictory elements that are part of its history. 
Notes 
1. Research notes on Captain Hadlock, in the possession of William C. Stur?
tevant. 
2. Articles of incorporation, 1922, in the records of the Inter-Tribal Indian 
Ceremonial Association, Gallup, New Mexico. 
Literature Cited 
Adams, W.Y. 
1963. Shonto: A Study of the Role of the Trader in a Modem Navajo 
Community. Bulletin, Bureau of American Ethnology, 188: 329 
pages. 
Archambault, JoAllyn 
1984. The Gallup Ceremonial. [259] pages. Doctoral dissertation, Univer?
sity of California, Berkeley. 
Babcock, Barbara 
1990. "A New Mexican Rebecca": Imaging Pueblo Women. Journal of the 
Southwest, 32:400-437. 
1994. Mudwomen and Whitemen: A Meditation on Pueblo Potteries and 
the Politics of Representation. In S. Norris, editor, Discovered 
Country: Tourism and Survival in the American West, pages 
180-195. Albuquerque, New Mexico: Stone Ladder Press. 
Berkhofer, Robert R, Jr. 
1978. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Co?
lumbus to the Present, xvii+261 pages. New York: Knopf. 
Brody, J.J. 
1971. Indian Painters and White Patrons, xvii+238 pages. Albuquerque: 
University of New Mexico Press. 
Bryant, Keith L., Jr. 
1974. History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, xvi+398 
pages. New York: Macmillan. 
Carroll, Terry Lee 
1971. Gallup and Her Ceremonials. 311 pages. Doctoral dissertation, Uni?
versity of New Mexico. 
Coke, Van Deren 
1963. Taos and Santa Fe: The Artist's Environment, 1882-1942. 160 
pages. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press for the Amon 
Carter Museum of Western Art. 
Dilworth, Leah 
1996. Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primi?
tive Past, xiv+274 pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institu?
tion Press. 
Dutton, Bertha P. 
1983. Commerce on a New Frontier: The Fred Harvey Company and the 
Fred Harvey Fine Arts Collection. In Christine Mather, editor, Colo?
nial Frontiers: Art and Life in Spanish New Mexico, the Fred Har?
vey Collection, pages 91-104. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Ancient City 
Press. 
Garland, Hamlin 
1894. Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art, Dealing Chiefly with Lit?
erature, Painting and the Drama. ix+192 pages. Cambridge: Stone 
and Kimball. [Reissued, 1952, viii+192 pages, with an introduc?
tion by Robert E. Spiller, by Scholar's Facsimilies: Gainesville, 
Florida.] 
1896. Among the Moki Indians. Harper's Weekly, 40(August 15): 
801-807. 
Grattan, Virginia L. 
1980. Mary Colter: Builder Upon the Red Earth. x+131 pages. Flagstaff, 
Arizona: Northland Press. 
Hertzberg, Hazel W. 
1971. The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian 
Movements, ix+362 pages. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse Univer?
sity Press. 
Howard, Kathleen L., and Diana F. Pardue 
1996. Inventing the Southwest: The Fred Harvey Company and Native 
American Art. xv+150 pages. Flagstaff, Arizona: Northland Pub?
lishing. 
146 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association (IICA) 
1922. First Annual Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial; Gallup, New Mexico: 
September 28th, 29th, 30th 1922: Program. 12 pages. Gallup, New 
Mexico: Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association. 
1923. Souvenir Program: Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, September, 
13-14-15 Gallup New Mexico. [17] pages. Gallup, New Mexico: 
Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association. 
1948. [Program.] 28 pages. Gallup, New Mexico: Inter-Tribal Indian Cer?
emonial Association. 
1951. Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial; 1951 Gallup New Mexico. [32] 
pages. Gallup, New Mexico: Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Associ?
ation. 
1955. Ceremonial Magazine, 34(1): 44 pages. Gallup, New Mexico: Inter-
Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association. 
James, George Wharton 
1900. What I Saw at the Snake Dance. Wide World Magazine, 4(January): 
264-274. 
1902. The Snake Dance of the Hopis. Camera Craft, 6(l):58-62. 
Lummis, Charles F. 
1891. Some Strange Corners of Our Country: The Wonderland of the 
Southwest, xi+270 pages. New York: Century Company. 
Lyman, Christopher M. 
1982. The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by 
EdwardS. Curtis. 158 pages. New York: Pantheon Books in associ?
ation with the Smithsonian Institution Press. 
McLuhan, T.C. 
1985. Dream Tracks: The Railroad and the American Indian 1890-1930. 
208 pages. New York: Harry N. Abrams. 
Moses, L.G. 
1996. Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883-1933. 
xvii+364 pages. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 
Sturtevant, William C. 
1962. A Newly-Discovered 1838 Drawing of a Seminole Dance. Florida 
Anthropologist, 15(3):73-82. 
1964. John White's Contribution to Ethnology [and catalog commentaries 
on the North American Indian entries]. In Paul Hulton and David 
Beers Quinn, The American Drawings of John White, 1577-1590, 
with Drawings of European and Oriental Subjects, 1:37-43, 
85-113, 138-139, 140. London: The Trustees of the British Mu?
seum, and Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 
1965. Ethnographic Details in the American Drawings of John White, 
1577-1590. Ethnohistory, 12(l):54-63. 
1967 ("1965"). Catalog of Early Illustrations of Northeastern Indians. Eth?
nohistory, 12(3):272-273. [Date on title page is 1965; actually pub?
lished in 1967.] 
1968. Lafitau's Hoes. American Antiquity, 33(l):93-95. 
1976. First Visual Images of Native America. In Fredi Chiappelli, editor, 
First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, 
pages 4 1 7 ^ 5 4 . Berkeley: University of California Press. 
1977. The Ethnological Evaluation of the Le Moyne-De Bry Illustrations. 
In Paul Hulton, editor, The Work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, 
a Huguenot Artist in France, Florida and England, 1:69-74 [plus 
ethnological annotations in catalog entries on pp. 163-164, 185, 
204-214], foreword, catalog, and introductory studies by Paul Hul?
ton. [London]: Published for the Trustees of the British Museum by 
British Museum Publications Ltd. in association with the Huguenot 
Society of London. 
1978 ("1977"). The Sources of Lafitau's American Illustrations. In Joseph 
Francois Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with 
Customs of Primitive Times. 2:271-303, edited and translated by 
William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore. Toronto: The Cham-
plain Society. [Date on title page is 1977; actually published in 
1978. Series: Publications of the Champlain Society, 49.] 
1980a. The First Inuit Depiction by Europeans. Etudes Inuit; Inuit Studies, 
4(1-2)47-49. 
1980b. In Kristian Hvidt, editor, with the assistance of Joseph Ewan, 
George F. Jones, and William C. Sturtevant, Von Reek's Voyage: 
Drawings and Journal of Philip Georg Friedrich von Reck, [transla?
tions from the German on pages 45-50, plus passim identifications 
and translations of Creek and Yuchi words]. Savannah, Georgia: 
The Beehive Press. 
1982 ("1980"). Patagonian Giants and Baroness Hyde de Neuville's Iro?
quois Drawings. Ethnohistory, 27(4):331-348. [Date on title page is 
1980; actually published in 1982; errata published in 1982 (1981 on 
title page) in Ethnohistory, 28(1):99.] 
1990. What Does the Plains Indian War Bonnet Communicate? In Dan 
Eban, editor, with Erik Cohen and Brenda Danet, Art as a Means of 
Communication in Pre-Literate Societies: The Proceedings of the 
Wright International Symposium on Primitive and Precolumbian 
Art, Jerusalem 1985, pages 355-374. Jerusalem: The Israel Mu?
seum. 
1992. The Sources for European Imagery of Native Americans. In Rachel 
Doggett, editor, with Monique Hulvey and Julie Ainsworth, New 
World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492-1700, 
pages 25-33. Washington, D.C: The Folger Shakespeare Library. 
1993. The First American Discoverers of Europe. European Review of Na?
tive American Studies, 7(2):23-29. 
Telling, Irving 
1952. New Mexican Frontiers: A Social History of the Gallup Area 
1881-1901. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. 
Thomas, Diane 
1978. The Southwestern Indian Detours: The Story of the Fred Harvey/ 
Santa Fe Railway Experiment in "Detourism. " 327 pages. Phoenix, 
Arizona: Hunter Publishing. 
United States Department of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs 
1939. Pueblo Art in the Modem Home. Indians At Work, 7(8):23. 
Hawaiian Art: From Sacred Symbol to Tourist Icon to Ethnic Identity 
Marker 
Adrienne L. Kaeppler 
The arts of Hawai'i have evolved from sacred objects and 
structured sound and movement systems embedded in religious 
rituals to objects and performances that mark Hawaiian iden?
tity.1 Some of these cultural forms have taken on the additional 
dimension of tourist icons?promoted by the Hawai'i Visitors 
Bureau and abhorred by activists. During the two centuries 
since the European discovery of Hawai'i, the arts have waxed 
and waned, especially since the coming of the Christian mis?
sionaries, in 1820. Along the way there have been revivals, out?
sider's constructions, and the recent renaissance?each of 
which has been accompanied by a series of revitalized mean?
ings of the verbal and visual surface manifestations of artistic 
forms. Three main cultural revivals can be delineated: one led 
by King Kalakaua in the 1880s, one that occurred in the 1930s 
and was at least partially tied to tourism, and one that began in 
the 1970s and focused on Hawaiian identity. 
This essay focuses on featherwork and dance. It explores 
how the underlying meanings of these cultural forms were ex?
panded to make them acceptable in the nineteenth-century 
Christian world and how these forms are used as elements of 
Hawaiian identity. In effect, it addresses how sacred Hawaiian 
feathered objects and a ritual movement system were trans?
formed into works of art and how these works of art have be?
come markers of ethnic identity. 
The terms "art" and "the arts" have been used in so many 
ways, in both specialized and general contexts, that they mean 
very little. Here I regard the arts as cultural forms that result 
from creative processes that use or manipulate (i.e., handle 
with skill) words, sounds, movements, materials, scents, or 
spaces in such a way that they formalize the nonformal. Art in?
tensifies the ordinary in much the same manner as poetry inten?
sifies language. The cultural forms produced have structured 
content that conveys meaning, are visual or aural manifesta?
tions of social relations, and may be the subject of an elaborate 
aesthetic system. Aesthetics is defined here as evaluative ways 
of thinking about these cultural forms. 
Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Department of Anthropology, National Museum 
of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. 20560-
0112, USA. 
Art, in the Western sense of the word, was not a conceptual 
category of traditional Hawaiian culture, but no 'eau (skillful-
ness or cleverness) was a part of all activity and is the first im?
portant concept for the study of Hawaiian art. It can be argued 
that art did not exist, or, that art, as no 'eau, was all pervasive. 
The emphasis of no eau was on the process. The resulting 
products were passed as heirlooms from generation to genera?
tion, and the occasions on which they were used became part of 
them. They became chronicles of social relationships objecti?
fied in visual and verbal forms and were inherited not only as 
products made with skill, that is, works of art, but also as infor?
mation. The skillful process of fabrication of an object or per?
formance and its later repair or refurbishing, in addition to its 
objectified social relationships and changing symbolism, were 
aspects of an aesthetic system concerned with ongoing process 
and use (Kaeppler, 1985:109-110). 
The second important concept is kaona (veiled or layered 
meaning), which encapsulates the aesthetic of indirection, a 
concept important throughout Polynesia. Kaona can be thought 
of as a creative potential that enables understanding the invisi?
ble through the visible, thereby gaining a more profound under?
standing of both what is seen and what is unseen. The unseen is 
the underlying system of cultural and social philosophy that 
artists express through the visible. 
Hawaiian Featherwork: Sacred Symbols and Expanded 
Meanings 
Hawaiian featherwork was part of a system of sacred symbols 
and ritual objectifications. The term "symbol" is generally re?
garded as something that stands for or represents something 
else. I use the term here to refer to the visible manifestation of 
invisible concepts or knowledge, and specifically to concepts 
about embodiment of the divine. In Hawai'i the divine was 
transmitted genealogically from the gods to chiefs, whose bod?
ies were vessels of divine mana or sacredness. The most sacred 
parts of a chief's body were the head (especially the top of the 
head) and the back (especially the backbone). It was necessary 
to protect these body parts during dangerous or sacred situa?
tions, and feathered helmets, cloaks, and capes protected and 
drew attention to these body parts. Important elements were 
color, design, length, shape, and backing. 
147 
148 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FABRICATION 
The process of making feathered pieces was related to making 
an even more sacred object that embodied the divine, an 'aha 
cord. The Hawaiian concept of 'aha refers not only to cordage 
made of plant fibers, human hair, or animal intestines, but also 
to a prayer or service whose efficacy depended on recitation 
under kapu (taboo) without interruption (Pukui and Elbert, 
1986:5). 'Aha cords were described in the Hawaiian language 
newspaper Ka Nupepa Ku 'oko 'a (19 Jul 1884) as follows: 
The cords were made by chiefs and kahunas [priests] with the worship of cer?
tain gods. They were of sennit braided tight into a rope, some with a depression 
down the center, some like fish nets, others like the koko carrying net for 
wooden calabashes and still others with fringes. There were many kinds made 
by chiefs and priests who placed their faith in the gods they worshipped. The 
chiefs took the sennit cord as a sign of their high rank, of a lineage from the 
gods and also to observe the kapu of the priesthood. 
The process of making an 'aha cord consisted of one or more 
priests chanting a prayer while braiding the cord: "All of the 
chief's priests concentrated their prayers on it as it was being 
made under kapu. The priests forbade all those outside to enter, 
nor could those on the inside go out while the 'aha was being 
put in p lace , for the penal ty was death" (Kamakau, 
1991:162-163). The braiding captured the prayer and objecti?
fied it, and it became a "tool" of the kahuna (Kamakau, 
1976:143). It would be useful for chiefs to carry or wear such a 
prayer during sacred or dangerous situations, and I believe that 
is what they did. 
The base of the feathered cloak was nae, a net structure of 
olond fiber (Touchardia latifolia). This backing was often in 
small pieces, made by several people of varying skill. If the nae 
was fabricated while chanting prayers, it could entangle or cap?
ture {ho 'oheihei) them to serve as perpetual prayers to protect 
its wearer. The addition of red feathers gave the nae even more 
sanctity. Red was the sacred color in Hawai'i, as elsewhere in 
Polynesia, and red feathers were considered among the most 
sacred natural products.3 
The Hawaiian term for feather cloaks and capes is 'ahu 'ula, 
(red shoulder garments). Although some small feathered capes 
are entirely red, most feathered pieces are a combination of 
red and yellow.4 Sacred red feathers attached to a perpetual-
prayer backing would constitute protection for the sacred 
backbone of a chief. Red feathers activated that to which they 
were attached. They formed the important outer layer of god 
images and a feathered "temple" into which an 'aha cord 
could be placed. A temple ceremony, kauila huluhulu, focused 
on readorning the images with feathers (Pukui and Elbert, 
1986:135). 
An important taboo called kua 'a (flaming back) prohibited 
approaching a chief from the back; breaking this taboo was 
punishable by death (Pukui and Elbert, 1986:155). A feathered 
cloak might suspend this taboo in warfare or in a procession 
when it was appropriate for individuals of lesser status to walk 
behind a chief. Feathered helmets offered protection for the sa?
cred top of the head. The base of a helmet was intertwined 
'ie 'ie vine (Freycinetia arborea) activated by the addition of 
red feathers. Some helmets were entirely covered with feather-
covered cords similar to 'aha cords, and feather-covered cords 
were sometimes attached to the edges of the helmets. 
DESIGN 
When examining designs on cloaks and capes, it is difficult to 
determine which is figure and which is ground, what are the 
designs, and what are the spaces between them (Figure 1). Im?
portant design motifs were circles, crescents, and triangles. The 
designs and colors appear to be related to specific chiefly lines, 
and the foregrounding and backgrounding of the motifs 
changed over time. Information about design elements and 
their combinations was not recorded, nor do we know the 
"grammar" of the underlying design system. We know who 
some of the cloaks belonged to and can therefore associate 
some relationships between designs and people. Circles (po 'ai) 
seem to be related to certain chiefs, especially Kahikili of Maui 
and Ka'eo of Kaua'i. Triangles seem to be associated with the 
chiefs Kalani'opu'u and Kamehameha from the island of Ha?
wai'i. Many capes incorporate crescent designs. 
Circles have the metaphorical meanings "surrounding" and 
"besieging" (Pukui and Elbert, 1986:307) and are related to pil?
lars that hold up the earth and sky. Kamakau (1976:5) noted 
that at the edge of the ocean next to the base of the sky that lies 
around the platform of the earth, there is a circle or band (po 
'ai) called the pillars of the earth, and at the lower edge of the 
firmament are the pillars of the sky. Translating this into cloak 
designs are arrangements such as those on two eighteenth-cen?
tury cloaks: the so-called Joy cloak from Kaua'i (Figure 2) and 
a cloak in the British Museum that probably came from chief 
Kahikili from Maui (Kaeppler, 1985:112, 117). 
Hoaka (crescent) is a powerful word. Besides naming a de?
sign used in the openwork carving on pahu drums (Figure 3) 
and a motif used in tattoo, hoaka also means (1) to cast a 
shadow, to drive away, ward off, frighten; (2) a spirit, appari?
tion, ghost; and (3) brightness, shining, glittering, splendid. 
Hoaka is the term used for helmet crests and also has the figu?
rative meaning "glory" (Pukui and Elbert, 1986:68). During 
certain rituals, the arms of the human participants were raised 
skyward, forming crescents like those carved on pahu drums. 
Crescent designs could give additional sacred qualities to sa?
cred red-feather-covered, prayer-enhanced backings (Figure 4). 
FIGURE 1 (opposite, top).?Feathered cloak of Kalani'opu'u, high chief of 
Hawai'i Island during the visit of Captain Cook (1779), illustrating the diffi?
culty of separating triangle and crescent designs from background. The upper 
half was the original cape. National Museum, Wellington, New Zealand (cat. 
no. FE 327). Photograph by John C. Wright. 
FIGURE 2 (opposite, bottom).?Feathered cloak with circle design. Courtesy of 
the Bishop Museum (neg. no. XC 76891). Photograph by Seth Joel. 
NUMBER 44 149 
ACQUIRING FEATHERED OBJECTS 
Feathered cloaks and helmets were made for specific individu?
als. The cloaks often began as short capes, probably for wear 
on a specific occasion; they could be ritually renewed by 
lengthening (Figure 1) or by adding important feathers as an 
overlay. This is comparable to the ritual renewal of temples 
(heiau) that were rebuilt or refurbished for important or dan?
gerous situations. Because the cloaks and helmets had touched 
the sacred bodies of the chiefs, they carried the sacred power 
(mana) of that person and were dangerous for others to wear or 
even touch. 
Feathered cloaks could also be acquired by appropriation or 
inheritance. If a chief were killed in battle, his cloak would be 
taken as a battle prize. After a chief's natural death, his cloak 
would be kept by his son, as a symbol of his legitimate acquisi?
tion of power. Liholiho (Kamehameha II) had three cloaks? 
one that he inherited, with the sacred mana of his father, Kame?
hameha the Great; one that embedded the power of Kame?
hameha's paternal line in that it was the cloak of Kekuaokalani 
(son of Kamehameha's full brother), taken as a battle prize by 
Liholiho, thereby consolidating his power; and one that embed?
ded the sacredness of Liholiho's mother's line?it belonged to 
Kiwala'o (Liholiho's mother's father), taken as a battle prize 
by Kamehameha I. 
It is unlikely that Liholiho (or any other Hawaiian) ever wore 
these cloaks because of the important taboo against wearing 
clothing that had touched the body of someone else, especially 
the body of a high chief. Clothing embodied personal mana, 
and individuals who did not respect prohibitions associated 
with clothing were vulnerable to sorcery (Handy and Pukui, 
1958:181-182). An important clothing taboo was that a son 
could not wear the clothing of his father (or a daughter could 
not wear the clothing of her mother). A father could wear the 
clothing of his son, but apparently only if the child were not of 
higher rank through the female line. It was best not to wear 
clothing that had belonged to someone else if one did not want 
to make one's body vulnerable. 
What did a chief do with extra, potentially harmful, feathered 
cloaks inherited from ancestors or taken as battle prizes? They 
could be given to unsuspecting Europeans, who would proba?
bly not be harmed because they were obviously subject to a dif?
ferent taboo system. Although Liholiho gave feather cloaks as 
royal gifts during his trip to England in 1823, he never gave 
away the cloak of his father or that of Kiwala 'o , or 
Kekuaokalani?all of which legitimized his right to rule and 
embodied his genealogy. Which cloak was Liholiho's own is 
unknown. Presumably, he took it with him to England, where 
he died; probably it remained there, and this information was 
not given to the European who received it. It is probably a 
cloak now in Edinburgh, said to have been worn by Liholiho's 
"favorite medicine man." It is unlikely that Liholiho actually 
wore the cloak in England himself?he usually appeared in Eu?
ropean dress. It could be carried or worn by one of Liholiho's 
attendants?who would not be harmed if Liholiho willfully 
150 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 3.?Pahu drum with crescent design. Height 44.1 cm. Pitt Rivers 
Museum, University of Oxford (cat. no. 1954.4.3). Courtesy of the Pitt Rivers 
Museum (neg. no. A4f25). 
withdrew his mana while another person wore it with his per?
mission. After Liholiho's death, the chief Boki?ranking mem?
ber of Liholiho's entourage?knowing the clothing taboo, 
probably gave it away, as no one in Hawai'i could wear it, and 
Liholiho had no son to inherit it. 
FEATHERWORK AS STATUS AND ART OBJECTS 
These ritual objects, dangerous to others and incompatible with 
Christianity, were transformed along with Hawaiian society 
during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mate?
rial culture not only changed by importing and adapting West?
ern objects, but traditional Hawaiian material culture evolved 
as part of changing relationships and changing categories to 
meet the needs of a changed society. Objects were part of the 
transformation of social relationships among people, the gods, 
and the universe. 
In pre-European times, authority in its ideal Hawaiian form 
derived from the power of the most genealogically prestigious 
chiefs, especially before the charismatic chief Kamehameha 
(ca. 1758-1819) acquired guns and powerful followers. Kame?
hameha operated by what was expedient rather than by what 
was genealogically correct. He downplayed highest genealogi?
cal descent and its concomitant taboos, and he promulgated the 
change from the notion that genealogical prestige gives power 
and therefore authority, to the concept that power gives author?
ity and therefore prestige. His son, Liholiho (of higher rank 
than Kamehameha through his mother) induced his own 
changes, including the overthrow of the state gods and their re?
strictive taboos, among them the important taboo prohibiting 
men and women from eating together. The skepticism about 
traditional beliefs and practices that followed the influx of for?
eign ideas, and the unpunished lapses of taboos, induced at 
least some priests to support and encourage Liholiho. Within a 
few short years, during which Christian missionaries arrived, 
the concept "power gives authority and therefore prestige," 
evolved further to "chiefly status equals authority." Status, 
rather vaguely defined and without the sanctity of the gods, be?
came the norm. Values and traditions that continue today derive 
from this concept. The bilaterally extended kin group ('ohana) 
grew in importance as did the tradition of feasting together? 
without gender or rank proscription. 
The primarily peaceful reigns of Kamehameha's successors, 
and the influx of foreign ideas, expanded values to emphasize 
the 'ohana. Along with social changes, objects of sanctity, pro?
tection, utility, ritual, and power took on expanded value as 
works of art in the Western sense. Prestige, power, authority, and 
status became more interchangeable, and traditional Hawaiian 
objects became objects of value for the enhancement of status. 
In pre-Christian times, shared cultural knowledge was neces?
sary to understand what meanings were attached to designs or 
motifs, how they could be combined into patterned sets as a vi?
sual grammar, and how to decode the messages embodied in 
them. If chiefs were going to continue to wear feathered cloaks, 
it could be on the basis of tradition and aesthetics rather than as 
objectified prayers, which was not a concept compatible with 
Christianity. Feathered objects retained their importance as sta?
tus objects suitable for ceremonial occasions. 
With the demise of the Kamehameha line of chiefs in 1872, 
the wearing of featherwork almost ceased except for harmless 
replicas (Figure 5). A short feathered cape was made for 
Kalakaua by Mrs. John Ena (Brigham, 1918:52), but long 
cloaks were not made for King Kalakaua, Queen Kapi'olani, or 
Queen Lili'uokalani. Other featherwork pieces were acquired by 
them to become what might be called the state cloaks and capes. 
Queen Lili'uokalani posed for an 1892 photograph seated on a 
cloak on her throne, but the primary use of featherwork pieces 
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was for 
funerals (Figure 6). The techniques of fabrication were all but 
forgotten, and only recently have they been revived. Feather?
work pieces made in recent years (often by non-Hawaiians), are 
considered art objects and are used primarily for display. 
Starting with the eighteenth-century voyages of Captain 
James Cook, feathered objects became part of museum and 
private collections in Europe and America, where they were 
considered exotic "artificial curiosities," and later, art objects. 
NUMBER 44 151 
FIGURE 4.?Feathered cape with crescent design. American Museum of Natural History (cat. no. 80.0/784). 
Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History (neg. no. 335315). Photograph by A. Singer. 
Except for the important legitimizing cloaks of the Kame?
hameha chiefs mentioned above, by 1840 most cloaks and hel?
mets had been given to ship captains and prominent Europe?
ans. The last descendant of the Kamehameha dynasty was 
Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, and the remaining Kame?
hameha dynasty featherwork is now in the Bishop Museum, 
which was founded by her husband, Charles Reed Bishop, to 
conserve the difficult-to-care-for and sometimes dangerous-
to-touch art objects that she had inherited. 
Nineteenth-century Hawaiians, like most people, wanted to 
be up-to-date. In 1818 Kamehameha wanted to be painted in his 
red vest, whereas the artist, Choris, wanted to depict him in his 
traditional clothing. Liholiho and his entourage wore European-
style clothing during their visit to London in 1823, but the En?
glish artist John Hayter represented chief Boki wearing a feather 
cloak and helmet?and the cloak and helmet were left in Eng?
land. Hawaiian self-presentation enlarged nineteenth-century 
traditions. The 'ohana and values associated with it?especially 
feasts (lit 'au)?became more prominent than the eighteenth-
century values associated with warring chiefs (before 1819 it 
was forbidden for men and women to eat together). During the 
eighteenth century, feathered cloaks were protective devices 
worn during sacred and dangerous situations; during the nine?
teenth century, Hawaiian chiefs wore feathered cloaks as visual 
expressions of status and prestige on ceremonial occasions. 
Many Hawaiian objects (such as stone food pounders) be?
came obsolete technologically or taboo to their original owner's 
descendants because of clothing restrictions. It became useful to 
have treasure houses in which to keep these important artifacts, 
and museum collections have become important for forging cul-
152 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
NUMBER 44 153 
FIGURE 5 (opposite, top).?Replicas of feathered cloaks worn by the Royal 
Court during Aloha Week, Hawaiian Village, Ala Moana Park, ca. 1947. Cour?
tesy of the Bishop Museum (neg. no. CP 115,269). Photograph by Tai Sing 
Loo. 
FIGURE 6 (opposite, bottom).?Funeral of Prince Albert Kuniakea in front of 
'Iolani Palace, 1903. Courtesy of the Bishop Museum (neg. no. CA 96494). 
Photograph by F. Davey. 
rural, ethnic, or national identity. Objects serve as ethnic identity 
markers in a future that recognizes its roots in the past, and even 
if they are not worn or used, it is appropriate to keep them safe. 
Hawaiian objects, especially feathered cloaks and capes, 
were part of categories that embedded social distancing. The 
motifs and structure of specific objects were part of an aes?
thetic system based on kaona and no 'eau, embodying artistic 
memory and philosophy. With the coming of Christian mis?
sionaries in 1820, the life of objects became less sacred and 
more social and political. Since the mid-nineteenth century, 
these objects have become art in the Western sense of the term, 
and featherwork now plays a significant role in Hawaiian con?
cepts of the past. Identification with these objects reveals how 
individuals and groups perceive themselves and want to be per?
ceived by others. Today, mutual support, environmental con?
servation, and sharing are values associated with the extended 
family, while feather-cloaked "chiefs" appear in replica during 
Aloha Week events (Figure 5) and indicate points of interest to 
tourists for the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau (Figure 7). 
FIGURE 7.?Hawaii Visitors Bureau sign featuring a chief dressed in a feath?
ered cloak and helmet, directing tourists to the statue of King Kamehameha, 
Honolulu, 1990. Photograph by Adrienne L. Kaeppler. 
Ritual Movements: Sacred System to Broad Participation 
Movement systems were equally important cultural forms in old 
Hawai'i. Two movement systems existed in pre-Christian times: 
ha 'a, a ritual movement system performed as a sacrament to the 
gods on the outdoor temples, and hula, formal or informal en?
tertainment performed for a human audience. Ha 'a, performed 
as rituals for Lono?god of peace, agriculture, and fertility? 
and other gods, combined chanting, drumming, and movements 
at sacred ritual junctures. Movements objectified the sacred, 
sung texts while the performers carried out "ritual work"?ty?
ing, braiding, and placement of sacred objects, such as 'aha 
cords, into sacred receptacles?that was concerned with the 
conservation and proliferation of human, plant, and animal life. 
We have little first-hand knowledge of ha 'a movement se?
quences because the temple rituals of which they were a part 
were overthrown in 1819, but it is likely that movement se?
quences, like the texts they accompanied, would have had a 
standardized form that ideally was performed without deviation. 
After the overthrow of the state religious system, the sacred 
sung texts and movements of ha 'a were removed from the tem?
ples and went underground for nearly 60 years. During the 
Kalakaua revival in the 1880s, it was permitted to perform 
them openly again; ha 'a were transformed into hula pahu, and 
their interpretation was expanded in ways that would make 
them appropriate to new contexts in a Christian world. Reli?
gious metaphors, myths, and rituals were recontextualized, ex?
panding cultural traditions with understandings of a universe 
that also included Christian ideologies. 
Hula, in contrast to ha 'a, were usually composed in honor of 
people and places and conveyed this information in an indirect 
way through veiled or layered meaning. This kaona, especially 
in relation to words and their combinations, had a power of its 
own that could harm as well as honor. During the reign of King 
Kalakaua, some ha 'a were reconstituted as hula and were per?
formed in his honor; these eventually became associated with 
him as name songs. One of these was the most important of the 
remaining ha 'alhula pahu repertoire, "Kaulilua," derived from 
a ritual for Lono (Kaeppler, 1993). As embodied today, its ex?
panded interpretation and kaona refer to a passionate, yet dis?
dainful woman?an ancestor of Kalakaua. The movements did 
not change, but its new interpretation helped to legitimize 
Kalakaua's rise to power. In 1836, when Kalakaua was born, 
the state religion had been overthrown only 17 years. Of 
chiefly lineage, son of Kapa'akea and Keohokalohe, Kalakaua 
was no doubt filled with stories of the "olden days." He would 
have understood how Kamehameha I had used aspects of tradi?
tion to advance his own cause and legitimize his line and how 
lineage manipulation could be used for status verification. Al?
though Kalakaua was an elected king, he was also interested in 
demonstrating his high rank and status according to Hawaiian 
tradition. He encouraged performances of old dances and con?
tinued the practice of prohibiting the attendance of non-Hawai-
ians at certain dance events, such as wakes for high chiefs. 
154 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
The hula tradition that emerged from Kalakaua's court was 
basically a secular form suitable as court entertainment, com?
bining traditions of a number of hula masters into what can be 
considered the style of the Kalakaua era. This was essentially 
hula ku 'i, dance that combined old and new, usually performed 
in conjunction with chant and a gourd idiophone (ipu). In hula 
ku 7 movements interpret the text, whereas in older hula, move?
ments allude to the text. Although sometimes performed in his 
honor, hula pahu was not a significant part of the Kalakaua 
hula revival, but traditions associated with this form reap?
peared in the 1920s and spread in the 1930s. 
DANCE AND CLOTHING AS TOURIST ICONS 
A fortuitous combination of the right people at the right place 
and time stimulated a revival on the island of O'ahu in the late 
1920s. This conjunction and the characteristic Hawaiian atti?
tude expressed in the proverb All knowledge is not taught in 
one school ('a'ole ipau ka 'ike i ka halau ho'okahi), resulted 
in many older hula reappearing with renewed vigor. This time 
they moved to Waiklkr. The Royal Hawaiian Girl's Glee Club 
was formed in 1927 by Louise Akeo, and this group was 
among the first to perform at the new and elegant Royal Ha?
waiian Hotel. The Royal Hawaiian Girl's Glee Club danced for 
the entertainment of tourists with a varied hula program. This 
program included hula pahu taught to the dancers by the well-
known traditional hula master Keakaokala Kanahele. On the 
same program, the dancers performed "half foreign hula" 
(hapa haole hula) accompanied by Johnny Noble, Hawaiian 
composer and bandleader at the Hotel. In 1937 the Kodak Hula 
Show was founded, featuring Louise Akeo and the Royal Ha?
waiian Girl's Glee Club. They, and their performing descen?
dants, have performed ever since in what has become the most 
enduring show for tourists in Hawai'i (Figure 8)?still per?
formed essentially in the style of the 1930s. 
Sam Pua Ha'aheo, another well-known traditional hula mas?
ter of the 1930s, moved his talents to the secular arena in night 
clubs, such as Don the Beachcomber, Niumalu Night Club, Ha?
waiian Village, and the Queen's Surf. Sam Pua Ha'aheo was 
the musician/chanter for the entertainer Lei Conn, and later his 
premier student, Kau'i Zuttermeister, replaced him. 
In the romantic mural paintings of Eugene Savage, the tour?
ist orientation of the time is recorded. His depictions include 
the revived hula performances of the 1930s and feature the sa?
cred hula pahu, descended from the temples of old, but now in 
the service of a feather cloaked and helmeted King (Figure 9). 
These murals were painted originally for the S.S. Lurline, the 
premier tourist ship, and were reproduced as menu covers. The 
contemporary paintings of Frank Macintosh (Figure 10) were 
also reproduced as menu covers and illustrated Hawaiians in 
what became "aloha clothing." Such illustrations were at least 
partially responsible for what tourists believed Hawai'i was 
like and helped to build expectations of exotic dance, food, and 
clothing. As barkcloth and featherwork were no longer made or 
worn, however, new exotic clothing, such as the aloha shirt, sa?
rong, and mu 'umu 'u, was created to fill the void and became 
the "must have" tourist attire. This clothing was worn to a 
lit 'au, the Kodak Hula Show, and evening dance performances 
at WaikTkT Hotels?which eventually featured such luminar?
ies as Hilo Hattie and Tolani Luahine. Indeed, dance, food, and 
WM 1 
&2K 
a 
*"^ 2f 
?* \. 
FIGURE 8.?Kodak Hula Show, ca. 1961. Courtesy of the Bishop Museum (neg. no. CP 112,963). 
NUMBER 44 155 
FIGURE 9.?Menu cover based on a mural painting by 
Eugene Savage, illustrating dancers accompanied by apahu 
drum. These menus were used on the Matson ship Lurline 
in the 1940s and 1950s. National Anthropological 
Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National 
Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. 
FIGURE 10.?Menu cover by Frank Mcintosh used on 
ships of the Matson Navigation Company between 1937 
and 1947, showing exotic aloha clothing and flowers. 
DeSoto Brown Collection. Courtesy of the DeSoto Brown 
Collection. 
156 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
unusual clothing became icons for tourists who had to experi?
ence them. 
During the 1940s, performances centered on the Armed 
Forces, and movie stars, such as Dorothy Lamour, got into the 
act. Hula continued to change into Waiklkl t ou r i s t ar t and 
reached wide audiences through Arthur Godfrey, the Radio 
show "Hawaii Calls," and Hollywood films, such as Bird of 
Paradise. Traditional hula went into decline and by the 1960s 
was considered by many to be an endangered tradition. Con?
cerned Hawaiian residents?both Hawaiian and non-Hawai?
ian?decided something must be done to preserve the old 
dances and their histories, and they enlisted the services of 
knowledgeable Hawaiians who would be recognized as Ha?
waiian cultural treasures. Under the aegis of the State Founda?
tion on Culture and the Arts, an organization called the State 
Conference on Hawaiian Dance (now the State Council on Ha?
waiian Heritage) was established in 1969. The purpose of the 
group was the preservation and the perpetuation of the 
dances?and with them, the cultural heritage?of old Hawai'i. 
The group was composed of representatives of cultural institu?
tions and was backed by important living repositories of tradi?
tional dance. The renaissance of traditional dance went into 
full swing. 
In the meantime, the Merrie Monarch Festival was begun in 
Hilo, Hawai'i , in 1963. "Aloha Week" tourist festivities 
brought tourists to Honolulu, and the Merrie Monarch Festival 
was calculated to bring people to Hilo. Although the Merrie 
Monarch Festival includes craft demonstrations, parades, and 
other festivities, it is best known for its hula competitions, 
which draw some 20 group-entrants each year, and a special 
exhibition evening featuring a hula studio that has not entered 
the competition (Figure 11). Much controversy has been en?
gendered regarding whether prizes should be given for perfor?
mances that preserve traditions of old Hawai'i or for creative 
new choreographies based on old Hawaiian forms. The con?
troversy has not been resolved, and in some ways the Merrie 
Monarch Festival tends to be divisive among competing 
groups. Competition between unrelated kin groups (or dance-
groups), like the wars of old, can be harsh and bitter. For 
some, not winning means you have lost?and is, like losing a 
battle in old Hawai'i, degrading?a modern version of tradi?
tional jealousies among chiefs of warring lines. But this, too, 
is an element of ethnic identity, an identity that separates Ha?
waiians (and would-be Hawaiians) from the larger society, 
whose values are primarily Western. Hawaiian identity perpet?
uates the values of respect and support for one's own ingroup, 
sometimes at the expense of other groups, even if they, too, are 
Hawaiian. 
Unlike the revivals of the Kalakaua era and the 1930s, which 
were limited to a relatively small, select number of people, the 
renaissance of the 1970s has involved hundreds, perhaps thou?
sands, of individuals?men and women, young and old?mak?
ing hula an important outward manifestation of the Hawaiian 
renaissance. All important ethnic identity occasions, for exam?
ple, the important Ho'olokahi day ("to bring about unity"), that 
ended the "Year of the Hawaiian" on 23 January 1988, featured 
traditional hula and the playing oipahu drums. 
FIGURE 11.?Performance by the Zuttermeister Hula Studio at the exhibition evening of the Merrie Monarch 
Festival, 1990. Photograph by Adrienne L. Kaeppler. 
NUMBER 44 157 
CONTEMPORARY HULA 
Today, hula is presented in three ways: as art, as tourist enter?
tainment, and as ethnic identity marker. 
Hula as art has considerable time depth, having been part of 
entertainment for chiefs and visiting dignitaries from as far 
back as oral traditions and written sources testify. The impor?
tance oi kaona and evaluative criteria forjudging hula suggest 
that hula has always been considered art. Hawaiian Pageants 
held in the first decades of the twentieth century presented hula 
as a staged or dramatic form (Figure 12). These pageants took 
place at a beach or at Kilauea volcano, honoring chiefs or Pele 
the volcano goddess in an audience-oriented form. Hula as art 
continued into the 1930s, when Keakaokala Kanahele and her 
protege Eleanor Hiram were hired to perform in concert, at par?
ties, and at important events, such as the visit of President 
Roosevelt in 1934. Dance programs at the Honolulu Academy 
of Arts, at least as early as the 1930s, presented Hawaiian 
dance as art, and since the establishment of the ethnomusicol-
ogy program at the University of Hawai'i, Hawaiian dance has 
been presented in concert. The "Dances We Dance" concert 
dance series presents Hawaiian dance alongside other great 
dance traditions of the world as an art form. An important 
event in the recognition oi hula as an art outside of Hawai'i 
took place in July 1987, when two full evenings of the Ameri?
can Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina, were devoted 
to Hawaiian hula and featured four traditional hula schools. 
Hula as tourist entertainment was a logical extension of hula 
as art and was presented to entertain early explorers, officers of 
visiting ships, and the passengers of luxury liners. Traditional 
hula was brought into the mainstream of tourist entertainment 
when Louise Akeo and the Royal Hawaiian Girl's Glee Club 
began to perform at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in the late 
1920s. Since then, traditional and nontraditional versions of 
hula have been part of the tourist scene, from the large hotels in 
Waiklkl, with a wide range of visitors, to luxury hotels on the 
neighboring islands. 
The most important significant use of hula in recent years 
has been its emergence as an ethnic identity marker. Since the 
beginning of the Hawaiian renaissance in the late 1960s, hula 
has played an important role. Previous to this renaissance, hula 
was considered part of cultural identity and was presented as 
one of many interrelated facets of Hawaiian culture. The many 
lecture demonstrations by Kawena Pukui with Keahi Luahine, 
and later with Patience Namaka Bacon, during the 1930s and 
1940s for historical societies, museums, and schools, focused 
on dance as a vehicle for understanding Hawaiian culture. This 
has been retained in such places as the Bishop Museum, which 
presents dance performances as part of an overall cultural ex?
perience. Dance is also presented as part of cultural identity 
when Hawai'i is represented in folk festivals at Pacific Festi?
vals of Arts and other world venues. Hula was presented as a 
folk tradition, as an aspect of culture, and as an ethnic identity 
marker at the Festival of American Folklife at the Smithsonian 
Institution in 1984 as part of the Grand Generation program 
(Figure 13) and in 1989, when Hawai'i was the featured state. 
Cultural identity has taken on a political dimension as it has 
become the visual manifestation of ethnic identity. Dance, as 
FIGURE 12.?Postcard of a pageant presented at the Mid-Pacific Carnival, ca. 1910. Courtesy of the Bishop 
Museum (neg. no. CP 115,267). 
158 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 13.?Three generations of Hawaiian dancers: (left to right) Noenoelani Lewis, Kau'i Zuttermeister, and 
Hau'olionalani Lewis. From the Grand Generation Program at the Festival of American Folklife, Smithsonian 
Institution, Washington, D.C, 1984. Photograph by Adrienne L. Kaeppler. 
part of politics, can be an aural and visual statement of distinc?
tiveness. A hula pahu that developed from a temple ritual is 
'"Au'a 'ia"?often performed today in identity-promoting con?
texts because it embodies the prophecy of great changes pre?
dicted for the Hawaiian Islands and is an encouragement for 
Hawaiians to hold fast to their heritage. Originally part of im?
portant temple rituals that dealt with the war god Kuka'il-
imoku, in the 1880s it took on expanded meaning when the 
prophecy it embodied was at least partially fulfilled. Another 
important song used today in Hawaiian identity situations is 
"Kaulana na Pua" ("Famous are the Flowers"), which ex?
presses the feelings of the Hawaiians at the overthrow of the 
Monarchy and annexation by the United States. It notes that 
they would rather eat stones than sign demeaning papers. 
Art and Identity 
More Hawaiians are appreciating and championing the impor?
tance of their heritage and how it can be used to promote iden?
tity in the modem world. Identity arises from the desire of Ha?
waiians to perceive and present themselves as different from the 
surrounding cultural and social environment in which they find 
themselves after more than 200 years of foreign contact and im?
migration. Identity is promoted politically for the redemption of 
land and reparation for the cultural alienation that occurred 
since annexation. There are movements toward sovereign rec?
ognition and self-determination. Visual manifestations of iden?
tity are based on traditional Hawaiian artifacts and dance. 
In contrast to featherwork, primarily a historic art form, 
much of which is now in museums for safekeeping, more and 
more Hawaiians?male and female?are studying hula as part 
of ethnic identity. They are engaged in understanding the 
movement conventions of hula and how they communicate. 
Dance communicates, but only to those who have the 
competence5 to understand the structure of the movement sys?
tem as well as knowledge of its sociocultural background and 
history. Traditionally, hula functioned to promote prestige, 
power, status, and social distancing, but in its three revivals, it 
has fostered the renaissance of traditional Hawaiian culture. 
Unlike featherwork, Hawaiian dance has become politicized, 
and it is now widely understood that knowledge and compe?
tence in this cultural form is valued as the most important vi?
sual ingredient of ethnic identity. 
Notes 
1. Any exploration of the social life of ritual objects that fell into disuse in 
1819, and especially the meaning of designs embedded in these objects, can be 
said to be speculative. The presentation here is based on visual and literary 
metaphors in social, cultural, and historical contexts derived from observations 
of Hawaiians published in Hawaiian newspapers. English translations are in 
the Hawaiian Ethnological Notes (HEN) in the Bishop Museum Archives, Ho?
nolulu, Hawai'i. Also important is the dictionary of Mary Kawena Pukui and 
Samuel Elbert (1986). Some of the research on which this essay is based has 
been used in my earlier publications (Kaeppler, 1985, 1988, 1992, 1993; Kaep?
pler et al., 1993), which can be consulted for more ethnographic and historical 
details not relevant to the thrust of this paper. 
2. Translation in the HEN. 
NUMBER 44 159 
3. Similar concepts of sacred processes for making sacred fibrous products 
by prayer and entanglement were found in Tahiti, as was the importance of the 
addition of red feathers (see the Orsmond Manuscript in the Bishop Museum 
Archives for 20 pages of 'aha entries). 
4. Yellow feathers were rarer and more difficult to procure; they came from 
birds that were primarily black. In the nineteenth century, yellow feathers ac?
quired a political significance in that only powerful chiefs could obtain them 
(Kaeppler, 1985:121). 
5. 1 use "competence" in Dell Hymes's sense of "communicative compe?
tence," which enables viewers to understand a grammatical movement se?
quence that they have never seen before because they know the structure of the 
system that the movement sequence expresses. 
Literature Cited 
Brigham, 
1918. 
Handy, E. 
1958. 
Kaeppler, 
1985. 
1988. 
1992. 
William T. 
Additional Notes on Hawaiian Feather Work. Honolulu: Memoirs of 
the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, 7( 1): 1 -69. 
S. Craighill, and Mary Kawena Pukui 
The Polynesian Family System in Ka-'u, Hawai'i. xvi+259 pages. 
Wellington, New Zealand: The Polynesian Society. 
Adrienne L. 
Hawaiian Art and Society: Traditions and Transformations. In 
Antony Hooper and Judith Huntsman, editors, Transformations of 
Polynesian Culture, pages 105-131. Auckland, New Zealand: 
Polynesian Society. [Series: Memoir, Polynesian Society, 45.] 
Pacific Festivals and the Promotion of Identity, Politics, and Tour?
ism. In Adrienne L. Kaeppler and Olive Lewin, editors, Come Mek 
Me Hoi' Yu Han ': The Impact of Tourism on Traditional Music, 
pages 121-138. Kingston, Jamaica: Jamaica Memory Bank. 
Ali'i and Maka'ainana: The Representation of Hawaiians in Muse?
ums at Home and Abroad. In Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kraemer, 
and Steven D. Lavine, editors, Museums and Communities: The 
Politics of Public Culture, pages 458?475. Washington, D . C : 
Smithsonian Insitution Press. 
1993. Hula Pahu: Hawaiian Drum Dances, Volume 1: Ha'a and Hula 
Pahu: Sacred Movements. 289 pages. Honolulu, Hawaii: Bishop 
Museum Press. 
Kaeppler, Adrienne L., Christian Kaufmann, and Douglas Newton 
1993. L 'art Oceanien. 637 pages. Paris: Citadelles and Mazenod. 
Kamakau, Samuel Manaiakalani 
1976. 777e Works of the People of Old: Na Hana akaPo'e Kahiko. viii+ 
170 pages. Honolulu, Hawaii: Bishop Museum Press. 
1991. Tales and Traditions of the People of Old: Na Mo'olelo a ka Po'e 
Kahiko. 184 pages. Honolulu, Hawaii: Bishop Museum Press. 
Pukui, Mary Kawena, and Samuel H. Elbert 
1986. Hawaiian Dictionary: Hawaiian-English, English-Hawaiian. xxvi+ 
572 pages. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii. 

The Neets'aii Gwich'in in the Twentieth Century 
Jack Campisi 
The Neets'aii Gwich'in (also known as the Chandalar Kutchin) 
own and use 1.8 million acres (729,000 ha) of land within the 
Arctic Circle north of the confluence of the Yukon and Porcu?
pine rivers of Alaska (Figure 1). The property rises from 440 ft 
(134.1 m) above sea level (ASL) along the Yukon River to 2000 
ft (609.6 m) ASL at its northern boundary. The tree line in the 
region is at 1200 ft (365.75 m); the land below the tree line is 
covered by a boreal forest consisting mainly of white and black 
spruce, white birch, aspen, poplar, and willow. The Christian 
River marks the eastern boundary of the tribal land, and the east 
fork of the Chandalar River marks its western and part of its 
northern boundary. The entire region is subject to permafrost, 
which may reach depths of several hundred feet or more. The 
climate is subarctic, with a normal winter range of-49? F to 
+10? F (-45? C to -12? C) and a summer range of+32? F to 
+67? F (0? C to 19? C). It is not uncommon, however, for win?
ter temperatures to drop to -65? F (?48? C) and summer tem?
peratures to reach +80? F (27? C) (Caulfield, 1983:17-18). 
In addition to extensive river systems, the area has innumera?
ble streams and lakes, which contain whitefish, northern pike, 
arctic char, lake trout, burbot, and suckers. Several species of 
salmon, including king and dog salmon, occur in the Yukon 
River. While there are many species of small game animals, in?
cluding snowshoe hare, Arctic ground squirrel, and porcupine, 
and several fur-bearing species, such as black and grizzly bear, 
lynx, wolverine, mink, weasel, beaver, muskrat, martin, and 
wolf, the most important food sources for the Neets'aii 
Gwich'in are moose, Dall sheep, and caribou (Caulfield, 
1983:20-22). Although all of these animals play a part in the 
tribe's subsistence, the last mentioned, caribou?Rangifer 
tarandus?has special importance to their subsistence and 
identity. 
This paper is concerned with the Neets'aii Gwich'in in the 
twentieth century. It focuses on three aspects of their history: 
the impact of technological changes, the influence of Christian?
ity and government policies, and the role of particular tribal 
leaders in the adjustment to change and the preservation of a 
way of life. Within the past 150 years, the Neets'aii Gwich'in 
have adopted the gun, steel trap, airplane, snowmobile, radio, 
television, processed foods, tobacco, and alcohol, to mention 
Jack Campisi, Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, 
Ul Pequot Trail, Mashantucket, Connecticut 06339-3180, USA. 
but a few of the more important items. Even before technology 
could influence them, however, Christianity arrived. By the 
1870s Anglican, and later, Episcopal, missionaries had con?
verted most tribal members and had developed a contingent of 
native lay ministers to continue the proselytizing. To add to the 
factors impacting the Neets'aii Gwich'in, the United States 
purchased Alaska in 1867, and although some decades passed 
without federal government intrusion, the mineral wealth of the 
territory alone meant supervision from afar by interests igno?
rant of or hostile to native rights, needs, and desires. The grant?
ing of statehood in 1959 only increased the pressures. 
In spite of the intrusions on their culture, the Neets'aii 
Gwich'in have not given up the trap line or the hunt, and they 
continue to depend on more traditional food resources, such as 
caribou, salmon, and moose. They have adopted Christianity 
by fitting it to their belief systems, and they have been success?
ful in their struggles with and against federal and state officials 
to maintain their way of life. In large part this has been made 
possible by the combination of geographical remoteness, 
strong cultural values, and extraordinary leadership at propi?
tious moments. 
These factors have brought significant changes in technology 
and lifestyle to these people, while serving to intensify their 
view of themselves as a unique, separate people. To understand 
this evolution, an exploration of the nineteenth century 
Neets'aii Gwich'in is in order. 
The Neets'aii Gwich'in in the Nineteenth Century 
In 1847 Alexander Murray traveled to the confluence of the 
Yukon and Porcupine rivers and established Fort Yukon, then 
in Russian America, as a trading post. During his one-year stay, 
Murry met a number of people from different Gwich'in tribes, 
including the Neets'aii Gwich'in, whom he located northwest 
of the "Vanta Kootchin" (Crow River), "being right in the 
midst of the Carribeux lands, I suppose no better place could be 
found for provisions" (Murray, 1910:36). He estimated their 
number at 40 men, referring to them as the "Ney-et-se 
Kootchin' (Gens du large)" (Murray, 1910:35-36), which he 
translated as "People of the wide country" (Murray, 1910:83). 
His contact with the tribe was minimal; he reported only one 
visit by four individuals in the fall of 1847 (Murray, 1910:62). 
161 
162 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 1.?Neets'aii Gwich'in territory. 
The Neets'aii Gwich'in that Murray met so briefly at Fort 
Yukon were but one of nine (possibly 10) Athapascan-speaking 
Gwich'in tribes that occupied interior Alaska and western Can?
ada (Slobodin, 1981:514-515). These tribes ranged from the 
headwaters of the Colville River in the west to the Mackenzie 
River in the east, and north and south of the Yukon River. Os?
good (1934:172) translated Neets'aii Gwich'in as "those who 
dwell off the flats" (i.e., Yukon River). He called them the 
Chandalar River Kutchin, a name derived from the corruption 
of the French gens du large. Slobodin (1981:515) located them 
north northwest of Fort Yukon, between the Chandalar River 
on the west and the Sheenjek River on the east. 
It took less than two decades for the Gwich'in to feel the im?
pact of the Euro-Americans. Around 1860, weakened by a se?
ries of defeats at the hands of the Inupiat and Koyukon, mem?
bers of the Di'haii Gwich'in moved eastward from their 
territory at the headwaters of the Koyukon River and began 
joining the Neets'aii Gwich'in (Burch and Mishler, 1995). 
This infusion of Di'haii Gwich'in was fortuitous. The 
Neets'aii Gwich'in, along with other Gwich'in, had suffered 
grievously from a scarlet fever epidemic that struck the area in 
1863 (Burch and Mishler, 1995:158; Raboff, 1999), so the 
gradual influx of Di'haii Gwich'in survivors may well have 
been welcomed. 
The 1860s also saw the rise of an intense competition be?
tween Protestants and Catholics for the minds or, more particu?
larly, the souls of the Gwich'in. The early skirmishes in this 
battle for converts took place primarily in the westernmost 
parts of the Canadian Subarctic, at Fort Simpson, Fort McPher-
son, and La Pierre's House, but by 1861, the Anglican priest 
William West Kirkby had made his way down to Fort Yukon 
(Mishler, 1990:121). The following year, the Reverend Robert 
McDonald replaced Kirkby at Fort Yukon, after learning that 
the Oblate priest Jean Seguin was headed there with conversion 
on his mind. The competition between the two lasted more than 
a decade, with the Anglican winning out over the Oblate, partly 
because Father McDonald spoke Ojibway, Cree, and French 
fluently (he was one-quarter Ojibway). There were, however, 
other factors that made for success. The Anglican missionaries 
prevailed in part because they 
arrived first and stayed the longest but also because they were supported by the 
Hudson's Bay Company Protestant infrastructure, which included sympathetic 
bilingual interpreters and (apparently) a large supply of tobacco.... However, 
the Anglicans also prevailed because they and their American counterparts, the 
Episcopalians, encouraged a Native ministry and Native lay readers. (Mishler, 
1990:125) 
Some of the lay readers were reportedly former shamans who 
were able to integrate aspects of the new religion with tradi?
tional beliefs (Mishler, 1990:125). 
With the purchase of Alaska in 1867, the Hudson's Bay 
Company was forced to move its operation to Canada, and with 
it, in 1869, went Father McDonald. He settled at Fort McPher-
son, where he developed an Gwich'in orthography he named 
Tukudh. Subsequently, he translated the Bible, the Book of 
Common Prayers and some hymns in Tukudh (Krauss and 
Golla, 1981:78). Of perhaps more importance, MacDonald 
taught a number of Gwich'in to read and write his orthography. 
One of those who learned to write in Tukudh was Albert 
Edward Tritt. He was born on 17 May 1880, near Arctic Vil?
lage, the son of Edward Tritt and Sarah Andrew. He grew up in 
the shadow of the Brooks Range, on the upper reaches of the 
east branch of the Chandalar River. Tritt informs us through his 
journal that his first contact with Tukudh came from his father's 
daily reading of the Bible. His later conversion to Christianity 
was a result of a vision, but he was heavily influenced by his fa?
ther's devotion, as well as by a number of religious experiences 
that occurred while he was still a child. In one, a dying member 
of the tribe told of her visit to heaven and the message she re?
ceived. She had entered a house of many rooms, where she was 
provided food and given a message. She was told to "make one 
trip on earth" and to tell the people that each was being watched 
from heaven for "all kinds of doing right and wrong." She told 
NUMBER 44 163 
those present that the next day they would find ample caribou, 
and the next day they did indeed locate a small herd. Tritt, 
barely seven years old, went with his mother while "men, 
women, children got round the caribou & kill all of them. 
...When they were shooting the caribo the noise & echoe of the 
guns sure scare me it was like a thunder.... We were all happy 
everybody was" (Tritt, n.d., box 2, folder 1:4-7). 
Robert McKennan, who conducted research among the 
Neets'aii Gwich'in during the summer of 1933, met and inter?
viewed Tritt, who by that time was a well-respected preacher. 
Tritt described how he had struggled "to understand the mean?
ing of the Bible," how he had retreated to the mountains for 40 
days, how he agonized over the mysteries of the Bible, and 
how, in the end, he had received a revelation. "During this 
quest for true understanding," wrote McKennan, "in true apoc?
alyptic fashion he was struck by a blinding flash of light and 
fell into a faint. When he recovered consciousness, he was a 
new man and was sure that his vocation lay in bringing the gos?
pel to his people together with reading and writing" (McKen?
nan, 1965:87). The following winter Tritt went back to Fort 
Yukon, where he studied Tukudh and the Bible. 
Around 1910 Tritt led what McKennan characterized as a 
revitalization movement among the Neets 'aii Gwich'in 
around Arctic Village. He returned to Arctic Village and be?
gan his ministry, preaching a conservative form of Christian?
ity and advocating the return to old hunting methods. He 
stressed the use of caribou fences and, in fact, convinced his 
followers to build a caribou fence several miles in length. 
Completed around 1914, the fence was poorly located, "with 
the result that the Indians never succeeded in taking caribou in 
it, and it came to serve only as a symbol of the old hunting 
life" (McKennan, 1965:87). 
Why did Tritt decide to build a caribou fence near Arctic Vil?
lage? McKennan argued that it was a part of, indeed the major 
proof for, the nativistic content of Tritt's revitalization move?
ment. According to McKennan, Tritt had been a shaman but 
had abandoned this role after his revelation (McKennan, 
1965:86-88). It seems odd that he would give up shamanism 
and yet try to reinstate a communal hunting method as part of a 
belief in the need to return to old ways. Would not a return to 
shamanistic practices and beliefs have served better for a return 
to old ways? 
There is another explanation for the building of a caribou 
fence near Arctic Village. Before 1900 the Neets'aii Gwich'in 
relied heavily on caribou fences. Rifles were unavailable and 
the few muskets the tribal members had, although used in con?
junction with the fences, were ineffective except at close range. 
Ammunition was scarce. Tritt spoke of two or three men going 
to Old Rampart in the summer to get supplies, including ammu?
nition. "Each one got 10 or 20 bullets, a little powder, and 100 
brass caps. This was a winter's grubstake. They always had to 
look for bullet in meat to make it over and use again. This was 
the only way the supply lasted all winter" (Dalziell, 1922:2). 
In the fall, families tended their fences and waited for the 
caribou to come. If they did, all members of the family would 
surround the herd, pushing it along the fence, where some were 
caught in snares and others were trapped and killed in the sur?
round at the end of the fence. After a successful hunt the 
women and children would haul the meat and hides back to 
camp. The head was roasted, and the meat was boiled in a pot, 
and the family members ate and told the story of the hunt. 
After the feast the Chief made a speech to the people, telling them to divide 
what they have killed honestly among themselves. Don't forget old men and 
women, poor and helpless. They are the ones that got the meat for you, "in their 
minds." God wants you to take care of them. Keep all bones of meat and give 
assent with one accord. When speech is made some go out doors. Others listen 
from within tents for all can hear. No one questions the Chiefs authority, even 
if he wants them all to move to another place. (Dalziell, 1922:3) 
Families whose hunt failed moved to the camps of those who 
had been more successful and who shared their larder until all 
was consumed. Then it was time to scatter again in search of 
caribou. In Tritt's words: "Whole tribe kept together and 'not 
each man for himself" (Dalziell, 1922:3). 
During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the 
Neets'aii Gwich'in underwent a major change in their hunting 
method. Around 1890 a few tribal members crossed the Brooks 
Range and purchased three rifles from the Eskimo. A year later 
the Eskimo returned the visit, bringing with them more rifles 
(Tritt, n.d., box 1:11, 13, box 2:4?5). The use of rifles lessened 
the need for cooperative efforts and thus placed less impor?
tance on maintaining the fence and corral. Because of the 
change in hunting technique, the tribal membership scattered. 
Now, instead of having a relatively stable population around 
Arctic Village for at least part of the year, to whom Tritt could 
preach, he had to travel to bring his message. For the next half 
century, Tritt traveled continuously, preaching anywhere he 
met Gwich'in (Tritt, n.d., box 3). From this perspective, Tritt's 
interest in constructing the caribou fence related more to a de?
sire for a fixed group to whom he could preach than to a plan to 
return to past ways. 
The Development of Neets'aii Gwich'in Camps 
With the changes in hunting method and the distribution of the 
population came a change in the patterns of leadership. About 
1890 the tribe's long-time leader, Chief Peter, died (Tritt, n.d., 
box 1:12). No single successor was accepted by the tribal 
members. In his place, several men, heads of extended fami?
lies, were recognized as leaders. Among these was Chief 
Christian, born in 1866, who founded the settlement at Arctic 
Village. Tritt and Chief Christian differed over Tritt's views on 
religion, and when their differences could not be resolved, 
Chief Christian moved his followers to his camp on Christian 
River. This schism occurred around 1924. It appears, however, 
that Chief Christian spent time in both Arctic Village and 
Christian Village, and the disagreement between the men did 
not prevent their association. During the first decade of the 
164 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
twentieth century, a third leader, Old Robert, settled with his 
family at Venetie. Thus, by 1920, there were three groupings 
of Neets'aii Gwich'in. A United States Bureau of Education 
report in 1915 identified Christian Village, which it described 
as consisting of two villages "and some scattered families 
strung out for about twenty five miles" and Chandalar Village1 
(Venetie). No mention was made of Arctic Village, but it may 
have been the second village referred to in the report in con?
nection with Christian Village. 
When McKennan visited the Neets'aii Gwich'in in the sum?
mer of 1933, he found them located around three camps, which 
he referred to as bands. Each camp consisted of a few extended 
families, each related to the other and also related to families in 
the others' camps (McKennan, 1965:19). Arctic Village had a 
population of 36. The principal families were Tritt, Frank, Pe?
ter, and John. Christian Village, to the south of Arctic Village, 
had a population of 25, principally members of the Christian 
and Simon families, and on the Chandalar River, about 50 
miles (80.45 km) from its confluence with the Yukon River, 
was the village of Chandalar (also known as Old Robert's Vil?
lage or Venetie). Its population, including two nearby fishing 
camps, was 63, and the principal families were Robert and 
Leviti (McKennan, 1965:19-20). 
Except for the impact of guns on the Neets'aii Gwich'in so?
cial organization previously described, life styles changed lit?
tle during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Al?
though the camps were permanent, the tribal members were far 
from sedentary. They were still almost entirely dependent on 
game and fish for subsistence. Families moved frequently in 
search of food. In the summer, small groups visited each oth?
ers' hunting camps or returned to the permanent camps, ex?
changing information on game availability, holding potlaches 
and parties, and celebrating weddings, births, and funerals. 
Their diet consisted mostly of meat and fish, supplemented in?
frequently by small quantities of tea, sugar, flour, and dried ap?
ples. When the camp was moved, the men left first to scout the 
new location, leaving the women to take down the caribou-
skin tents, load the dogs, and then reassemble the camp. Each 
family unit made its own decisions as to where it would next 
go, reflecting the great autonomy each head of household exer?
cised (Campisi, 1989; Peter, 1992). 
In this context, it is important to understand what the 
Neets'aii Gwich'in meant by leadership. What were the quali?
ties that made an individual a leader, and what was the extent 
of that leadership? In 1962 the Neets'aii Gwich'in tribal gov?
ernment produced a remarkable document entitled, "A short 
history of the first people who gave leadership to the Native 
people in the Chandalar Country, the type of work they did and 
the future plans for the people,"2 which summarized the quali?
ties of a leader: service, generosity, and luck. People followed 
to the extent that an individual demonstrated these qualities. 
Strength and wealth were admired, but only to the extent that 
they supported service and generosity. The tribal council 
named seven individuals and in each case identified the quali?
ties that made them leaders. Three were respected because they 
were lay readers, individuals who "made service for the peo?
ple." Another was considered a leader because of his skill and 
good luck as a hunter and his willingness to share. "He was not 
the only one [who] had a muzzleloader but he always killed 
some animals. He was a good luck man for meat and split it 
with the people." 
Two of the remaining three leaders were also given recogni?
tion because of their accomplishments. Albert Tritt was, of 
course, recognized for his religious commitment and activities. 
He built and served churches in Arctic Village, Chalkyitsik, 
and Venetie. He also established a native store at Arctic Vil?
lage, constructed a trail from Arctic Village to Fort Yukon, and 
built a school at Arctic Village. 
By contrast, Chief Christian's leadership related more to his 
business acumen. He owned a store at Arctic Village and was 
known for his skill as a trader. He was the first to establish a 
permanent dwelling at Arctic Village, and, later, he founded the 
settlement of Christian Village. He was also a noted hunter: 
"1886 His community started to use him for animals and 
hunting." 
Finally, there is mention of John Fredson, who was respected 
for his education and for establishing and teaching in the 
school at Venetie. Fredson was born in 1895 along the Sheen-
jek River. While still quite young his mother died, and his fa?
ther, unable to provide for his nine children, left him in the care 
of the schoolteacher in the Gwich'in village of Circle. She 
raised him and several other children for a few years and then 
took him to St. Stephen's Episcopal Mission at Fort Yukon, 
where he impressed Archdeacon Hudson Stuck. He spent the 
next 10 years alternating between the mission school and living 
with his father and siblings. Upon completing his schooling in 
Alaska, Stuck arranged, in 1916, for him to continue his educa?
tion at Mount Hermon Academy in Gill, Massachusetts. There 
he stayed until he graduated, in 1921, except for a few months 
of service in the United States Army in the fall of 1918. After 
graduation, he returned to Fort Yukon, where he worked in the 
hospital for a year (Mackenzie, 1985). 
In 1922 he received a scholarship to the University of the 
South at Sewanee, Tennessee. It was while he was a student at 
the college that he was sought out by Edward Sapir, for whom 
he recorded stories in Gwich'in. He stayed at Sewanee for two 
years and then returned to Fort Yukon, where again he worked 
in the hospital. He completed his college education at the Uni?
versity of the South in 1930 and returned home. He lived with 
Dr. Grafton Burke and worked for a few years for the Northern 
Commercial Company. While at Fort Yukon he met and mar?
ried Jean Ribaloff. The depression had hit the area hard, and 
with a family on the way he sought more permanent and certain 
employment. Given his education and training, government 
service seemed the best avenue to follow (Mackenzie, 1985). 
Fredson moved to Venetie in 1937 to be a teacher, taking his 
family with him. He soon recognized the threat that over-ex?
ploitation of game posed to the Neets'aii Gwich'in. Less than 
NUMBER 44 165 
six months into his service, he began organizing a fur coopera?
tive to secure better prices for the Neets'aii Gwich'in trappers 
and pushing for a reservation to protect game and thus the way 
of life. In January 1938 he wrote to the Alaska Indian Service 
raising the subject of a reservation for his people: 
If the Chandalar school is to be permanent, in our opinion, the first big step is 
to put that section of the country under reservation. There is no trader there 
now. The people want the reservation. And they realize that the time has come 
when such action is necessary to protect their fur and game. 
Please note the petition attached. This is the story. The planes are rapidly 
changing methods of trapping. Two of the residents took plane this fall and in a 
short time came back with one hundred martens. How long can this keep up? 
We suggest that a section of the Chandalar country be made into a reservation 
for the Natives. Attached is a map. Also the possible boundaries.3 
The letter was accompanied by a map showing the proposed 
boundaries, as well as a petition from "We, the undersigned, 
being a group of adult Indians having a common bond of resi?
dence in Venetie, Arctic Village, Christian Village and Ka-
chick Village, Alaska do hereby respectfully petition the Hon?
orable Secretary of the Interior to grant a reserve for the use of 
the Indians in this neighborhood."4 
The Department of the Interior received Fredson's letter and 
initiated steps to implement the request; however, there were 
problems. First, the department had to develop a constitution 
and by-laws as the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), as 
amended in 1936, required. Because of the remoteness of many 
of the Alaskan villages, it was impossible for the Bureau of In?
dian Affaire's Alaskan field staff to visit the villages more than 
once a year, let alone conduct elections.5 The solution was to 
direct Fredson to carry out the necessary steps. 
On 17 June 1939 Fredson received a letter outlining the infor?
mation needed to justify the establishment of "a reservation for 
Chandalar natives."6 The information required included the 
proposed boundaries, the location of villages and fish camps, 
systems of communication and transportation, and the use of 
land. 
Fredson provided the required data and informed the Bureau 
of Indian Affairs that Johnny Frank, the chief at Venetie, had 
traveled to Arctic Village to obtain signatures on a petition 
seeking the establishment of a reservation: although he "had 
hard trail and he often had to camp out in the open," he suc?
ceeded in signing up most of the residents, although "a few 
were so far away that he could not reach them. The people of 
Arctic Village and Christian Village move back and forth so 
much that it is difficult to place them. At present they are 
camping halfway between the two places."7 Fredson informed 
the bureau that they had collected three petitions signed by a 
total of 67 tribal members. 
In January 1940 Claude M. Hirst, general superintendent in 
Alaska, forwarded the request for a reservation to Assistant 
Commissioner of Indian Affairs William Zimmerman, Jr. He 
explained that the request came from the residents of the four 
villages?Arctic Village, Christian Village, Venetie, and Rob?
ert's Fish Camp (Ka-chick)?adding that "although these vil?
lages are some distance apart the people are from closely inter?
related families and use in common the game, fur and fish 
which are the chief resources of the area." He then described 
the boundaries of the proposed reservation, adding the follow?
ing justification for its creation: 
The native Indians of this region have always been self-sustaining but their in?
come is being threatened by the intrusion of white trappers who enter the re?
gion by airplane and reach trapping grounds which are inaccessible to the na?
tives by dogteam. These white trappers are interested in securing all the furs 
possible and over trap the country leaving insufficient breeding stock to assure 
a continuing fur crop sufficient to maintain the native population. A reservation 
is necessary to protect this well-established and to date self-maintaining econo?
my of the Native people.8 
Before the reservation could be established, however, the 
Neets'aii Gwich'in had to approve a constitution. Again, Fred?
son informed the tribal members and arranged for the vote. On 
25 January 1940 a constitution was ratified at Venetie "by a 
vote of 30 for and 0 against in an election in which over thirty 
percent (30%) of the legal voters cast their ballots."9 Another 
three years passed before the Department of the Interior issued 
a proclamation setting aside 1,408,000 acres (570,240 ha) for 
the Neets'aii. (After a survey in the 1970s, it was determined 
that the area was actually 1.8 million acres (729,000 ha).) In?
cluded in this reservation was all the land from the middle and 
east forks of the Chandalar River on the west, north to Arctic 
Village, then south along the Christian River to the Yukon 
River, and west along the Yukon River to its confluence with 
the Chandalar River.10 
Before the reservation could be officially designated as such, 
one step remained: a majority of tribal members had to accept 
it. Accordingly, Fredson sent out notices that an election would 
be held on whether or not to accept the reservation. The elec?
tion took place on 1 March 1944. Fredson reported that of the 
72 eligible to vote, 49 were present, and of this number 47 
voted affirmatively. (Fredson and the chairman of the meeting 
abstained "since we directed the proceedings.") Among those 
voting was the Reverend Albert Tritt, about whom Fredson 
wrote is "counted in the Arctic Village or Sheenjek group." The 
meeting was followed by dog races, a potlach, and dancing." 
On 28 March the department informed the commissioner of In?
dian affairs that the election had been held and that the tribe 
had approved the reservation.12 
The establishment of so large a reservation caused consider?
able distress among territorial officials. Anthony Dimond, del?
egate from Alaska, asked the department for an explanation of 
the grant. In its reply, the department stressed several central 
points. There were 47 Neets'aii Gwich'in families dependent 
for their livelihood on hunting, trapping, and fishing in a region 
of severely limited resources, thus requiring the setting aside of 
an extensive area. The department closed its argument with the 
following explanation: 
The people of the four main villages of Venetie, Arctic Village, Christian Vil?
lage and Robert's Fish Camp, as well as of the semi-permanent camps are all 
more or less inter-related. Many of the trails and camps are used jointly by the 
people of the different villages. Such camps and trails are indispensable to the 
utilization of the resources of the region. Since the entire area lies north of the 
166 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Arctic Circle, the resources are sparse and large areas are required for the sup?
port of a few people. Travel over these areas in search of game and fur would 
be impossible without well developed trails and a sufficient number of shelter 
cabins or camps. 
The land reserved for the Neets'aii Gwich'in by the federal 
government corresponded generally to that requested by Fred?
son, but it differed in two essential ways. The Fredson map 
drew the boundaries some distance west of the Chandalar 
River and east of the Christian River, giving the tribe control 
of the valley of each river. His map also included all of the 
land between the 145th and 147th meridians north of the mid?
dle fork of the Chandalar River, well into the Brooks Range. 
Fredson had tried to secure for the Neets'aii Gwich'in their fa?
vorite moose, sheep, muskrat, and caribou hunting areas. In?
stead, the department ran the boundaries along the middle 
courses of the rivers and just north of Arctic Village. Nonethe?
less, Fredson had preserved for the tribe most of their tradi?
tional territory. On 23 August 1945 Fredson died of pneumo?
nia (Mackenzie, 1985:184). 
Post-Reservation Period 
For the first 10 years after its institution, the IRA-style govern?
ment had little impact on tribal life. The rules of behavior were 
still based on traditional practice, and political and social con?
trol flowed from the network of intratribal marriages and the 
harsh realities of life in the Subarctic. It was not until the 1950s 
that Arctic Village could claim a more or less year-round popu?
lation similar to Venetie. According to Caulfield (1983:92): 
Until the middle of the twentieth century, the Neets'aii Gwich'in continued a 
highly mobile way of life, utilizing semi-permanent settlements such as Arctic, 
Christian, Venetie and Sheenjeck villages as well as seasonal camps at places 
such as Old John Lake, Wind River T'sukoo, Caribou House, T'eet'ree, and the 
Koness River. Occasionally families would move to Fort Yukon or Venetie for 
a period of time and then return to their homeland. 
From 1950 on, the tendency has been for the population to 
concentrate in Venetie and Arctic Village (Table 1). A number 
of factors have influenced the gradual development of perma?
nent communities. First, the establishment of a federal govern?
ment school at Venetie in the late 1930s encouraged families to 
settle in the area. The same process was repeated in Arctic Vil?
lage two decades later. The desire to have their children edu?
cated in public schools was (and is) strong among tribal mem?
bers, as is the desire that the children learn the Gwich'in 
language, culture, and ways of subsistence. Leaders of the sta?
tus of Rev. Albert Tritt and John Fredson had strongly advo?
cated education. 
Second, the development of regular air service to the villages 
furthered the impetus for residential consolidation. It also 
spurred the move toward a cash economy and ameliorated the 
danger of famine. Scheduled flights brought in supplies, food 
that could be stored, fuel for machinery, and clothing?the ne?
cessities of modern life. Fairbanks was less than two hours 
away, and a trip to Fort Yukon that once took a week or more 
was now within an hour's reach. 
TABLE 1 .?United States Bureau of the Census data for three settlements of 
Neets'aii Gwich'in. The data do not include tribal members living in other 
Gwich'in villages, in Fairbanks, or in Anchorage. 
Settlement 
Arctic Village 
Venetie 
Christian Village 
1920 
40 
32 
1930 
24 
62 
36 
1940 
53 
86 
34 
1950 
110 
81 
1960 
85 
107 
1970 
111 
112 
1980 
96 
132 
1990 
182 
'Population summaries, 1920-1990, Washington, D.C, U.S. Government 
Printing Office. 
Third, the availability of fuel and parts made the snowmobile 
an indispensable part of village life. Trappers could now ser?
vice trap routes in excess of 100 miles (160.9 km) in length. 
Their stays on the trap line could be shortened, and their efforts 
could be made more productive. The same was true with hunt?
ing and fishing: the snowmobile expanded the range and de?
creased the reaction time for hunters. Since all of the houses 
depend on wood for heat, and since trees do not grow in abun?
dance in the subarctic climate, the wood supply close to the vil?
lages was quickly exhausted. The snowmobile provided a 
means of hauling firewood from some distance, removing the 
need for villages to move in search of fuel. 
Fourth, with the expansion of the villages and the develop?
ment of schools and airfields, came a concomitant expansion 
of public services that resulted in more or less permanent jobs. 
These services included a post office, water systems, schools, 
electric generation plants, health care, and airfield mainte?
nance. Additionally, there is seasonal work in home construc?
tion and repair, road maintenance, and forest-fire-fighting jobs 
in the summer. These produce income, some of which stays in 
the villages. Added to these tasks are services rendered by the 
more able-bodied to the elderly and infirm, who generally re?
ceive small incomes from social security and social welfare 
programs. 
The establishment of a second permanent village, the in?
creased contact with non-Gwich'in society, and the growing 
population on the reservation necessitated changes in the sys?
tem of governance. As originally written, the IRA charter cen?
tered power at Venetie. To share representation with those liv?
ing in Arctic Village, the tribe in the 1960s repeatedly 
requested that the constitution be amended, but the Department 
of the Interior took no action. As early as 1962, Arctic Village 
and Venetie attempted to form a joint council but were 
thwarted by bureaucratic inaction.14 The department continued 
to reject efforts of the Neets'aii Gwich'in to reorganize their 
government through the 1960s and 1970s, apparently because 
the reservation-wide powers of the common council conflicted 
with the same powers vested in the IRA council by the latter's 
constitution. Finally, in 1976 the tribe went ahead with its re?
structuring and formed a common council with staggered terms 
of three years each for the nine council members. The odd 
number of council members was managed by having two 
elected alternately from each village. In addition, the positions 
NUMBER 44 167 
of first and second chiefs are rotated every three years between 
the two villages. 
The tribal council deals with any issue that affects the reser?
vation as a whole. It manages controversies that arise with the 
state and federal governments, makes general rules for the use 
of the reservation, and deals with issues of tribal sovereignty. 
Matters affecting tribal enrollment and membership, children 
and the state, welfare, and taxation fall within its purview. Its 
interests include leases of land, fees for use of the landing 
strips, land development and use, and protection of the reserva?
tion's resources, particularly the Porcupine caribou herd, which 
is vital to tribal survival. 
In addition to tribal government, each village has its own 
council. They are similar in organization and carry out essen?
tially the same functions. Each operates an airfield and an elec?
tric generating plant, collecting and keeping the fees. Both sell 
fuel to the residents, run laundromats and showers for public 
use, and operate health clinics. Each village maintains its own 
roads and runway with a small fleet of bulldozers, trucks, and 
graders. Both run water systems, drawing water from the Chan?
dalar River. Venetie sells water to the school; in Arctic Village, 
the school has its own supply. 
The village governments have as primary functions the set?
tling of disputes among its residents and enforcing tribal rules. 
For example, the possession and use of alcohol and drugs are 
prohibited; violators are punished by fines and, in persistent 
cases, banishment from the reservation for specified lengths of 
time. In addition to banishment and fines, the village councils 
have a more subtle, but equally potent form of persuasion. The 
village has a limited number of paid jobs available in the sum?
mer and always has more applicants than work. The work is 
generally divided among members so that all share, but if an 
individual breaks the rules, he or she falls to the bottom of the 
list, or if the violation is particularly egregious, is taken off the 
list completely. 
Land, Subsistence, and Identity 
The strength of the Neets'aii Gwich'in's attachment to their 
land is illustrated by their reaction to the Alaska Native Claims 
Settlement Act of 1971. Under the act, the Neets'aii had the op?
tion of either taking a cash settlement and turning over the sub?
soil rights to the Doyon Native Corporation, or rejecting the 
cash and keeping all rights and ownership of the reservation. 
They chose the latter. The importance of that decision was per?
haps expressed best by Larry Williams of Venetie when he tes?
tified before the Alaska Native Review Commission. 
We'd rather have the land, and that's the way it stands today. And it's up to the 
people in the tribal council to keep up that tradition of keeping the land as it is, 
and we call ourselves a sovereign people. And that's the way it should be, be?
cause we don't have to ask anybody, we going to hunt on our land or to get tim?
ber to build our cabins. We go out and do it without any waste, and we have our 
own laws that [we] follow, that's been in existence before the White man law 
came into the village, came into the country. And we still follow that. That's a 
traditional law. (Berger, 1985:142) 
Much of the life in the two villages revolves around subsis?
tence activities. From the Neets'aii Gwich'in point of view, 
these connote a rich and varied food supply and a key dimen?
sion of tribal self-sufficiency and sovereignty. It includes the 
seasonal exploitation of the resources available on the reserva?
tion, supplemented by day labor. 
During the summer months many tribal members take tem?
porary employment with the villages or go to Fairbanks and 
Anchorage for jobs; others fish for salmon on the Yukon River 
and for burbot, graylings, pike, and whitefish in the streams 
and lakes. With the onset of autumn, individuals hunt moose 
and caribou, shoot ducks and geese, and bring in a supply of 
wood. Dall sheep are hunted in the Brooks Range, and moose 
are available in the lowlands that border the river systems. 
Trapping begins in the late fall and continues through the 
winter. Trap routes are sometime quite long and distant from 
the villages, many exceed 100 miles (160.9 km) in length, and 
men generally work the trap lines in pairs. Commonly, these 
pairs consist of brothers or other close kin. There is consider?
able preparatory work that goes into trapping. Trails must be 
cleared so that the snowmobiles can move easily; caches of 
food, fuel, traps, and tools must be distributed along the trap 
line, and cabins must be constructed and repaired. 
In 1991 there were upwards of 40 families that made their 
living trapping. So many individuals ran trap lines that there 
was not enough land available within the reservation, forcing 
trappers to extend their trap lines beyond reservation bound?
aries. The trappers are divided into two types: those who have 
short lines close to their village, that is, individuals who can 
tend the traps in a day or with an overnight stay, and those 
whose lines require them to stay out for weeks at a time. These 
trappers often put out 150 to 200 traps and an equal number of 
snares, and their trap lines often run 100 miles (160.9 km) or 
more in length. They concentrate on trapping lynx and martens 
and, to a lesser extent, wolves. 
Over the years there has evolved a general agreement among 
the Neets'aii Gwich'in regarding which areas of the reservation 
and adjoining lands are recognized as the principal hunting and 
trapping areas of each village. It is common for pairs of men 
from the two villages to hunt together, increasing the subsis?
tence opportunities when game such as caribou and moose are 
scarce in a particular area. 
There are strong cultural prohibitions against killing more 
game than is needed. Caulfield (1983:205-210), who has done 
extensive research with the Neets'aii Gwich'in, has identified 
five customary laws related to hunting and land use: (1) each 
village has "a prescribed area of use which, though not totally 
exclusive in nature, places limits upon use of the land by non-
community residents;" (2) there are prescribed subareas in 
which individual families hold a usufruct right; (3) each village 
has the authority to set limits on the game taken within the area 
recognized as its prescribed area; (4) each village may deter?
mine when there is sufficient caribou or other game to permit 
168 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
harvesting; and (5) exploitation and industrial utilization of the 
land are secondary to the protection of the habitat. 
The rules of behavior that govern the tribe and the villages 
work, to a large degree, because of the close kin networks that 
exist. These ties continue to be a decisive factor in Neets'aii so?
ciety, despite the increased frequency of contact with other na?
tive people. In 1991 there were 41 households in Arctic Vil?
lage, all descended from six patrilines: Albert Tritt, Sr., Paul 
Williams, Sr., Birchcreek James, Peter Peter, Joseph Gilbert, 
and Isias Sam. All but one of the married couples living in the 
village had Indian spouses. In Venetie, the 58 households are 
descended from seven patrilines: Old Man Robert, Old John, 
Paul Erick, Albert Tritt, Sr., Chief Christian, Johnny Frank, and 
Elijah Henry. In Venetie, the Franks are married to members of 
the John, Roberts, Tritt, Henry, and Fredson families. The 
Christians are married to the Robertses and Ericks. In Arctic 
Village the Tritt family is married to members of the Roberts, 
Christian, James, Frank, Sam, and Williams families. The 
James family is married to the Christian and John families; the 
Williams to the Ericks; the Peters to the Gilbert, Tritt, and Sam 
families (Campisi, 1989, 1991). 
Added to the importance of kinship is the Neets'aii sense of 
themselves as a tribe, one that is inextricably linked to the 
land, and more particularly, to the Porcupine caribou herd. 
This herd, numbering in excess of 150,000 (Davis, 1997:41), 
winters in western Alaska and eastern Yukon Territory, Can?
ada, and in the spring migrates to its calving grounds along the 
Arctic coast. Following the spring calving, the herd moves 
southerly to return to the boreal forests, where it disperses for 
the winter. The caribou are hunted from mid-August to their 
departure for the calving grounds in late April. Even though 
famine is no longer a danger, year-round survival would be an 
economic impossibility for the Neets'aii Gwich'in without the 
Porcupine caribou herd; the cost of transporting replacement 
food would be prohibitive. 
The importance of caribou to Neets'aii Gwich'in life cannot 
be overstated. It is a defining feature of their worldview. Indi?
viduals repeatedly say that they do not feel well unless they 
have caribou regularly. According to Slobodin (1981:526), the 
Gwich'in have a special relationship with caribou: 
Every caribou has a bit of the human heart in him, and every human has a bit of 
the caribou heart. Hence humans will always have partial knowledge of what 
caribou are thinking and feeling, but equally, caribou will have the same 
knowledge of humans. This is why caribou hunting is at times very easy, at oth?
er times very difficult. All hunted creatures are to be respected, but none, ex?
cept the bear, more so than the caribou. 
Despite the changes inflicted upon them by state and federal 
authorities, and by virtue of their adaptation of introduced tech?
nologies, the Neets'aii Gwich'in have managed to maintain a 
viable tribal society in a politically hostile world. This, in part, 
has been the result of their relative isolation, but in large mea?
sure it has flowed from their ownership of the 1.8 million acres 
that make up their property and which permits the exercise of 
political and social autonomy. Thus land and subsistence have 
become synonymous with sovereignty, and borrowings from 
the dominant culture?whether religious, technological, eco?
nomic, or governmental?have been adapted to support a 
fiercely independent way of life. 
Notes 
1. Report, "Surrounding Villages," by the Bureau of Education, Alaska 
School Service, 1915, General Correspondence 1908-35; Records of the 
Alaska Division, 1877-1940; Records of the Bureau of Indian Affaris, RG 75; 
National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. 
2. Minutes of Dec 1962, Neets'aii Gwich'in Tribal Archives (NGTA), 
Neets'aii Gwich'in Tribal Office, Venetie, Alaska. 
3. John Fredson to Claude M. Hirst, 1 Jan 1938, NGTA. 
4. Petition for Reserve, Jan 1938, NGTA. 
5. William Zimmerman, Jr., to the Secretary of the Interior, 12 May 1939, 
NGTA 
6. George A. Dale to John Fredson, 17 Jun 1939, NGTA. 
7. John Fredson to Clyde G. Sherman, 30 Dec 1939, NGTA. 
8. Claude M. Hirst to William Zimmerman, Jr., 25 Jan 1940, NGTA. 
9. Donald W. Hagerty to John Collier, 17 Feb 1940, NGTA. 
10. Venetie, Arctic and Christian Robert's Fish Camp, Alaska; Proclamation 
Designating Indian Reservation, 20 May 1943, signed by Assistant Secretary 
of the Interior Oscar L. Chapman, NGTA. 
11. John Fredson to Claude M. Hirst, 1 Mar 1944, NGTA. 
12. T.W. Wheat to John Collier, 28 Mar 1944, NGTA. 
13. Oscar W. Chapman to Anthony Dimond, 13 Dec 1944, NGTA. 
14. Minutes of 9 Dec 1962, NGTA. 
Literature Cited 
Berger, Thomas R. 
1985. Village Journey: The Report of the Alaska Native Review Commis?
sion. x+202 pages. New York: Hill and Wang. 
Burch, Ernest S., Jr., and Craig W. Mishler 
1995. The Di'haii Gwich'in: Mystery People of North Alaska. Arctic An?
thropology, 32(1): 147-172. 
Campisi, Jack 
1989. Field notes in the possession of the author. 
1991. Field notes in the possession of the author. 
Caulfield, Richard A. 
1983. Subsistence Land Use Upper Yukon?Porcupine Communities. 
Alaska Technical Paper, 16: xviii+231 pages. Fairbanks: Alaska 
Department of Fish and Game, Division of Subsistence. 
Dalziell, Winifred 
1922. Chronicle Given By Albert E. Tritt of Arctic Village. [Box 2 (4 fold?
ers) of the unpublished journals of Albert Tritt. Archives, University 
of Alaska, Fairbanks.] 
Davis, James L. 
1997. Caribou. Alaska Geographic, 23(4):26-54. 
NUMBER 44 169 
Krauss, Michael E., and Victor K. Golla 
1981. Northern Athapascan Languages. In William C. Sturtevant, general 
editor, Handbook of North American Indians, volume 6, June Helm, 
editor, Subarctic, pages 67-85. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian In?
stitution. 
Mackenzie, Clara Childs 
1985. Wolf Smeller (Zhoh Gwatsan): A Biography of John Fredson, Native 
Alaskan, xiv+201 pages. Anchorage: Alaska Pacific University 
Press. 
McKennan, Robert A. 
1965. The Chandalar Kutchin. Technical Paper (Arctic Institute of North 
America), 17: 156 pages. Montreal, Quebec: Arctic Institute of 
North America. 
Mishler, Craig 
1990. Missionaries in Collision: Anglicans and Oblates among the 
Gwich'in, 1861-65. Arctic, 42(2): 121-126. 
Murray, Alexander H. 
1910. Journal of the Yukon, 1847-48; edited with notes by L.J. Burpee. 
Publications of the Public Archives of Canada, 4: 125 pages. Ot?
tawa, Ontario: Government Printing Bureau. 
Osgood, Cornelius 
1934. Kutchin Tribal Distribution and Synonymy. American Anthropolo?
gist, 36(2): 168-179. 
Peter, Katherine 
1992. Neets 'q\\ Gwiindaii: Living in the Chandalar Country. Revised edi?
tion, retranslated by Adeline Raboff, xii+108 pages. Fairbanks: 
Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska. [First edition 
published in 1981.] 
Raboff, Adeline Peter 
1999. Preliminary Study of the Gwich'in Bands. American Indian Culture 
and Research Journal, 23(2): 1-25. 
Slobodin, Richard 
1981. Kutchin. In William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of 
North American Indians, volume 6, June Helm, editor, Subarctic, 
pages 514-532. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
Tritt, Albert Edward 
n.d. Journals. [Unpublished journals, boxes 1-4, in the Archives, Uni?
versity of Alaska, Fairbanks.] 

IV. Anthropology Evolving 

Classifying North American Indian Languages before 1850 
Elisabeth Tooker 
Anthropology, it might seem, has always been with us, and his?
tories of the discipline often so presume. The beginnings of an?
thropology, however, are more fairly dated to the last quarter of 
the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth 
century. In these decades, the words that characterize the disci?
pline?ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology (in the now 
most commonly used sense of that word)?were introduced 
and gained acceptance in various European languages, and the 
great project of nineteenth century anthropology was under?
taken: the systematic mapping of the peoples of the world. 
Fueled by the intense interest in exploration at the time, the 
premise of this great mapping project was that each "nation," 
"people," or "race"?the terms were virtually interchange?
able?could be distinguished on the basis of physical appear?
ance, customs, and language. These were the same kinds of 
criteria?physical appearance and behavior, including vocal?
izations?on which "species" of other animals were identified, 
and this led, at least in the English-speaking world, to the in?
clusion of anthropology in natural history. 
In one important respect, however, the identification of hu?
man species, as they were then often termed, differed from that 
of other animals. The latter might be best classified on the basis 
of physical characteristics; the former on the basis of language. 
This was so because each of the other animal species was gen?
erally (if imprecisely) defined as being able to breed with 
members of its own but not with other species. The definition 
of human species involved no such criterion. The various hu?
man species could interbreed with each other with the result 
that physical characteristics?skin, hair, and eye color, hair and 
head form, height, and the like?shaded from one species to 
another. So also did customs, a consequence of diffusion of 
ideas across species lines. Language was an easier and more 
convenient way of identifying what were then called nations: 
In judging of the relations between savage and civilized life, something may 
be learnt by glancing over the divisions of the human race. For this end the 
classification by families of languages may be conveniently used, if checked 
by the evidence of bodily characteristics. No doubt speech by itself is an in?
sufficient guide in tracing national descent, as witness the extreme cases of 
Jews in England, and three-parts negro races in the West Indies, nevertheless 
Elisabeth Tooker, Department of Anthropology, emerita, Temple Uni?
versity; 2 Franklin Town Boulevard, Apartment 1906, Philadelphia, 
Pennsylvania 19103-1233, USA. 
speaking English as their mother-tongue. Still, under ordinary circumstances, 
connexion of speech does indicate more or less connexion of ancestral race. 
(Tylor, 1871:43-44) 
Tylor was expressing an idea long in place and one applied 
not only to European languages in the seventeenth and eight?
eenth centuries, but also to non-European ones. For example, 
writing in 1641, the Jesuits noted of the Iroquoian languages: 
We have every reason to believe that not long ago they all made but one Peo?
ple,?both Hurons and Iroquois, and those of the Neutral Nation; and that they 
came from one and the same family, or from a few old stocks which formerly 
landed on the coasts of these regions. (Thwaites, 1898:193-195) 
Similarity of words as well as custom and physical appear?
ance was used in the seventeenth century, notably by Hugo 
Grotius and Johannes de Laet in the 1640s (Charlevoix, 
1761:16-31), to answer the question of the origin of American 
Indians. But as they employed it, the method had obvious 
faults. As Pierre de Charlevoix noted in 1744 of this work, in 
what was probably the most influential discussion of the matter 
in the eighteenth century, 
The simple resemblance of names, and some slight appearances, seemed, in 
their eyes, so many proofs, and on such ruinous foundations they have erected 
systems of which they have became enamoured, the weakness of which the 
most ignorant are able to perceive, and which are often overturned by one sin?
gle fact which is incontestable. 
But what is most singular in this, is, that they should have neglected the only 
means that remained to come at the truth of what they were in search of; I 
mean, the comparing the languages. In effect, in the research in question, it ap?
pears to me, that the knowledge of the principal languages of America, and the 
comparing them with those of our Hemisphere, that are looked upon as primi?
tive, might possibly set us upon some happy discovery; and that way of ascend?
ing to the original of nations, which is the least equivocal, is far from being so 
difficult as might be imagined. (Charlevoix, 1761:49-50) 
Establishing relationships between languages on the basis of 
their grammar requires considerable knowledge of the lan?
guages themselves, making it an unwieldy method when deal?
ing with large numbers of languages. The easier method is to 
compare vocabularies, and undoubtedly for this reason word 
lists that could be used in collecting data for comparative pur?
poses were developed by various individuals. The most notable 
was the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. 
From at least the time of Leibniz's famous appeal (Gulya, 
1974:258-259), these lists have comprised basic vocabulary, 
the kind of words taught to children and hence known to all and 
easy to collect. They are also apt to consist of words that 
173 
174 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
change relatively slowly. Although the lists compiled by vari?
ous individuals are not identical, they typically include such 
words as those for the following: family relationships (e.g., fa?
ther, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle, aunt); parts of 
the body (e.g., head, face, nose, eye, hair, mouth, hand, fingers, 
foot); natural phenomena (e.g., God, sky, sun, moon, star, air, 
wind, rain, lightning, snow, ice); animals (e.g., dog, wolf, bear, 
fox, bird, snake, fish); things ingested (e.g., food, drink, water, 
bread, meat); actions (e.g., eat, drink, speak, see, be, stand, 
laugh, sleep); seasons (e.g., spring, summer, autumn, winter); 
colors (e.g., white, black, red, green); senses (e.g., hearing, 
sight, taste, smell); and numbers (e.g., one, two, ten, twenty, 
one hundred, one thousand). 
The invention of movable type and hence the publication of 
printed books facilitated the comparative study of languages, 
and some such studies were made, but these now seem to be 
tentative steps. In the mid-1780s three individuals undertook 
research that more directly influenced modem comparative his?
torical linguistics. 
Perhaps the most famous is Sir William Jones. In an address 
before the Asiatick Society of Bengal in 1786, Jones observed 
that the similarities in both roots of verbs and forms of gram?
mar between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Germanic, Celtic, and Old 
Persian (similarities not shared with the Semitic languages) 
could not have originated by accident and thus were evidence 
of a common source. This idea was picked up by others whose 
work firmly established Indo-European as a language family. 
The second most famous is Catherine the Great of Russia. In 
contrast to the more western countries of Europe, Russia had a 
great diversity of languages, a fact that partly accounts for 
Catherine's interest in the languages of the world and the study 
of them that she undertook two years before Sir William 
Jones's famous pronouncement. Distraught over the death of 
her lover of four years, Alexander Lanskoy, in June 1784 (Key, 
1980:55), she turned her attention to the comparison of vocabu?
laries. On 9 September 1784 she wrote to a friend: 
I've got hold of as many dictionaries as I could find, including a Finnish, a 
Mari and a Vbtic [Finno-Ugric languages]; from these I compile my word-lists. 
Also, I have collected a lot of information about the ancient Slavs, and I shall 
soon be able to prove that the Slavs named the majority of rivers, mountains, 
valleys and regions of France, Spain, Scotland and elsewhere. (Cronin, 
1978:232) 
It was later, apparently, that Catherine compiled the word list 
that she used as a basis for comparison. In a letter dated 9 May 
1785 she wrote: 
I made a list of between two and three hundred radical words of the Russian 
language, and had them translated into every tongue and jargon that I could 
hear of; the number of which already exceeds two hundred. Every day 1 took 
one of these words and wrote it down in all the languages I had been able to 
collect. (Pickering, 1818:322) 
But she then wearied of the task and turned over her materi?
als to Peter Simon Pallas, who prepared them for publication. 
The results were printed in Russian in two volumes with a pre?
fixed Latin title, Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia compara-
tiva augustissimae cura collecta (Pallas, 1787-1789). In it, Pal?
las compared 285 words, 130 in the first volume and 155 in the 
second. 
About the same time, Catherine decided to expand the study 
to include data from America and Africa and, for the purpose 
of obtaining this information, in 1786 had the 285-word list 
printed. Copies were sent to various individuals who might be 
able to provide vocabularies or might know someone who 
could. One recipient was the Marquis de Lafayette,1 who on 10 
February 1786 sent copies to Benjamin Franklin, George 
Washington, and perhaps others he knew in the United States 
(Key, 1980:61-63). Whether Franklin, then 80, sent copies on 
to others is not known, but Washington did, sending Lafay?
ette's request to Thomas Hutchins, then surveying western 
lands for the Continental Congress.2 After he had written 
Hutchins, Washington learned of Richard Butler's appointment 
as superintendent of Indian affairs in the Ohio region and on 27 
November wrote to him also (Fitzpatrick, 1938, 28:525; 1939, 
29:88-90). 
Washington had more than a casual interest in Catherine's 
project. Writing to the Reverend Jonathan Edwards, Jr., on 28 
August 1788 to acknowledge receipt of Edwards's description 
of Mahican (Edwards, 1788), Washington echoed the ideas of 
Charlevoix, among others: 
You have been rightly informed relative to the application, which had been 
made to me from Europe, for Documents concerning the Indian Language. It 
seems that a Society oi Literati are endeavouring to make discoveries respect?
ing the origin and derivation of different Languages. In the prosecution of this 
curious study, all Judicious philological communications must be important, 
yours, I conceive, will not be deficient in that quality. I have long regretted that 
so many Tribes of the American Aborigines should have become almost or en?
tirely, extinct, without leaving such vestiges, as that the genius and idiom of 
their Language might be traced. Perhaps, from such sources, the descent or kin?
dred of nations, whose origins are lost in remote antiquity or illiterate darkness, 
might be more rationally investigated, than in any other mode. The task you 
have imposed upon yourself, of preserving some materials for this purpose, is 
certainly to be commended. (Fitzpatrick, 1939, 30:64) 
The year before, on 25 March 1787, Washington had written 
Lafayette that both Butler and Hutchins had assured him that 
they would obtain vocabularies for Catherine the Great (Fitz?
patrick, 1939, 29:183-184). A week before, on 18 March, 
James Madison had written Washington enclosing a Cherokee 
and Choctaw comparative vocabulary he had received from 
Benjamin Hawkins.3 In this letter, which Washington did not 
receive until 31 March (Fitzpatrick, 1939, 29:191), Madison 
wrote: 
Recollecting to have heard you mention a plan formed by the Empress of Rus?
sia for a comparative view of the aborigines of the New Continent, and of the 
N. E. parts of the old, through the medium of their respective tongues, and that 
her wishes had been conveyed to you for your aid in obtaining the American 
vocabularies, I have availed myself of an opportunity offered by the kindness 
of Mr. Hawkins, of taking a copy of such a sample of the Cherokee & Choctaw 
dialects as his late commission to treat with them enabled him to obtain, and do 
myself the honor now of inclosing it. I do not know how far the list of words 
made use of by Mr. Hawkins may correspond with the standard of the Empress, 
nor how far nations so remote as the Cherokees & Choctaws from the N.W. 
shores of America, may fall within the scheme of comparison. I presume how-
NUMBER 44 175 
ever that a great proportion at least of the words will answer, and that the laud?
able curiosity which suggests investigations of this sort will be pleased with ev?
ery enlargement of the field for indulging it. (Hunt, 1901:320-321) 
Later that same year, on 30 November, Butler sent the Shaw?
nee and Delaware vocabularies he had collected to Washing?
ton, and on 10 January 1788 Washington sent a copy of them 
along with a copy of Hawkins's Cherokee and Choctaw vocab?
ularies to Lafayette4 (Fitzpatrick, 1939, 29:373-377; Key, 
1980:67). Hutchins, however, never sent Washington the prom?
ised material. He died in April 1789, apparently before he had 
collected the information Washington had asked him to furnish. 
A second section to Pallas's Linguarum, which was to have 
contained in one volume data on the languages of America and 
Africa, was never published. In its stead was published a four-
volume edition of Pallas's materials by F.I. Yankovitch de Mir-
ievo (1790-1791), having a different arrangement and covering 
the entire world. Pallas's volumes were, however, the more in?
fluential. 
In the spring of 1796, Benjamin Smith Barton received a 
copy of the Linguarum from the noted chemist Joseph Priestly, 
who had come to the United States two years before. A native 
of Philadelphia, Barton (1787) had published a volume titled 
Observations on Some Parts of Natural History while in Edin?
burgh studying medicine. Reflecting the increased interest in 
archaeology after the founding of the Republic?part of the at?
tempt on the part of Americans to create a history of the conti?
nent separate from the history of England?Barton's study 
contained some archaeological data. While in Edinburgh, Bar?
ton also attempted to find some resemblance between Ameri?
can and Asiatic languages, but he had little success. On his re?
turn to the United States in 1789, he took up the study again 
and was somewhat encouraged by his results (Barton, 
1797:xxiii-xxiv). After receiving the book from Priestly, Bar?
ton redoubled his efforts, collecting more data from his read?
ing, through correspondence, and on his travels. In 1797 he 
published his results in New Views of the Origin of the Tribes 
and Nations of America, which was republished the following 
year with a vocabulary list extended to 70 words from the orig?
inal 54 words (Barton, 1798). Although his reasoning has 
much to commend it, later students regarded his data as being 
too inadequate to support his conclusions, and today his study 
is regarded more as an interesting curiosity than as a scientific 
contribution. 
Modem comparative studies of North American Indian lan?
guages, however, owe more to the third important figure active 
in the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson, than they do to Barton. In his 
Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1785, Jefferson 
made the same observations as Charlevoix had 40 years before 
in a work with which Jefferson was familiar: 
Great question has arisen from whence came those aboriginals of America? 
...A knowledge of their several languages would be the most certain evidence 
of their derivation which could be produced. In fact, it is the best proof of the 
affinity of nations which ever can be referred to. How many ages have elapsed 
since the English, the Dutch, the Germans, the Swiss, the Norwegians, Danes 
and Swedes have separated from their common stock? It is to be lamented then, 
very much to be lamented, that we have suffered so many of the Indian tribes 
already to extinguish, without our having previously collected and deposited in 
the records of literature, the general rudiments at least of the languages they 
spoke. Were vocabularies formed of all the languages spoken in North and 
South America, ...and these deposited in all the public libraries, it would fur?
nish opportunities to those skilled in the languages of the old world to compare 
them with these, now, or at any future time, and hence to construct the best ev?
idence of the derivation of this part of the human race. (Jefferson, 
1955:100-101) 
Late in December 1783, less than two years before Notes on 
the State of Virginia was published and a full six months before 
Catherine the Great began her linguistic project, Jefferson initi?
ated his own comparative study of the American Indian lan?
guages?sending letters requesting vocabulary lists to various 
individuals, including Benjamin Hawkins5 and Thomas Hutch?
ins (Boyd, 1952:427, 431). Only Hawkins replied, in 1787 
sending Jefferson, then in Paris, a copy of the Cherokee and 
Choctaw vocabulary that he had also sent to Madison. 
In July 1784 Jefferson sailed for England, and in 1785 he 
was appointed to succeed Benjamin Franklin as minister to 
France. He left in 1789 and the following year accepted Wash?
ington's offer to serve as his secretary of state. Back in the 
United States, Jefferson's interest in American Indian lan?
guages was renewed. On 13 June 1791, in the presence of 
James Madison and General William Floyd, Jefferson obtained 
a vocabulary list from some Unquachog (Poosepatuck) living 
in a village in Brookhaven Township, Long Island.6 By the next 
year, if not before, he had a 282-word list printed, comparable 
to Catherine the Great's but not copied from hers.7 (Jefferson 
had not then seen a copy of Pallas's Linguarum, nor did he see 
one for some years.) For 35 years, Jefferson's list was exten?
sively used in the United States; it was supplanted only by the 
list composed by Albert Gallatin, who had been Jefferson's 
secretary of the treasury. 
At the end of 1793, Jefferson resigned as secretary of state 
and returned to his home, Monticello, in Virginia. On 3 March 
1797 he became president of the American Philosophical Soci?
ety in Philadelphia, what its members saw as the American 
equivalent of the Royal Society of London. The following day 
he was inaugurated vice-president of the United States. Four 
years later he become president of the United States. 
During these years, Jefferson collected from others more vo?
cabulary lists as he could, perhaps totaling 40 (Bergh, 
1907:4-5). Jefferson also made up at least one long compara?
tive list of such data that he had on 22 languages.8 A substantial 
portion of these manuscripts were lost, however, when robbers 
stole the box that contained these papers while they were being 
shipped back to Monticello at the end of Jefferson's term as 
president. Only some were recovered, and Jefferson lost inter?
est in completing the project. 
In 1814 Jefferson resigned as president of the American 
Philosophical Society. The following year Barton died. An era 
had ended. Linguistic studies in the United States passed from 
Jefferson and Barton, who had both encouraged and criticized 
176 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
each other's work, to Peter Duponceau, John Pickering, and 
Albert Gallatin, who also exchanged information and ideas. 
Before coming to the United States from France in 1777, Du?
ponceau had served as secretary to Antoine Court de Gebelin, 
then a noted philologist and author of Monde primitif 
(1773-1782), an important study in universal grammar. Not 
until 1815, however, when the American Philosophical Soci?
ety established the Committee of History, Moral Science, and 
General Literature, did Duponceau show much interest in lin?
guistics. He became the committee's corresponding secretary, 
seeking out information as he could. One of his correspon?
dents was the Reverend John Heckewelder, a Moravian mis?
sionary whose correspondence and memoirs on the Delaware 
Indians Duponceau published (Heckewelder, 1819). Extend?
ing Barton's comparative study, Duponceau collected more 
vocabulary lists, applying to and receiving from Jefferson his 
surviving lists. And reflective of the work of European philol?
ogists, Duponceau was interested in grammar, proposing that 
American Indian languages were characterized by what he 
termed "polysynthesis"?an idea that subsequently was 
widely discussed. 
The publication of Heckewelder *s data at the instigation of 
Duponceau spurred John Pickering's interest in American In?
dian linguistics. Son of Timothy Pickering, who among other 
things had negotiated a treaty with the Iroquois and who was 
John Adams's secretary of state, John Pickering had early been 
attracted to the study of languages, becoming an authority on 
Greek. Pickering published some manuscript materials and re?
published some important early works on American Indian lan?
guages, but he is perhaps most renowned for his "On the Adop?
tion of a Uniform Orthography for the Indian Languages of 
North America" (Pickering, 1818). In it he proposed a standard 
orthography that was widely used by missionary societies, 
which in the nineteenth century were perhaps the greatest 
sources of data on American Indian languages. 
Both Duponceau and Pickering made some comparative 
studies. It was, however, Gallatin who completed Jefferson's 
project. In 1823, at the request of Alexander von Humboldt, 
Gallatin wrote a essay on the languages of North American In?
dians, which subsequently received favorable notice in Balbi's 
(1826) Atlas ethnographique du globe. In the next several 
years Gallatin undertook a more extensive study of Indian lan?
guages, collecting data, some of which he obtained from Du?
ponceau, including that collected by Jefferson. In 1826 he pub?
lished a some 600-word vocabulary list and a preliminary 
classification of 71 languages of Indians of the United States 
into 15 families.9 
Also in 1826 Gallatin went to London on a government mis?
sion, and not until 1834 did he return to the subject. The results 
of his research were published in the transactions of the society 
in 1836 under the title "A Synopsis of the Indian Tribes within 
the United States East of the Rocky Mountains, and in the Brit?
ish and Russian Possessions in North America" (Gallatin, 
1836). This volume contained vocabulary lists on 82 languages 
of North American Indians, languages Gallatin classified as be?
longing to 28 families. 
At the time, the subject of language was deemed important 
enough for a philologist to be included in the scientific person?
nel of the Wilkes Expedition, in 1838-1842, America's great 
exploring expedition to the Pacific. Horatio Hale, then just 
graduated from Harvard College, was appointed to the posi?
tion. The son of the noted editor and poet, Sarah Josepha Hale, 
he probably through her met Pickering, with whom he studied 
on an informal basis. And it may have been Pickering who en?
couraged Hale to collect and publish as a college freshman the 
data in his pamphlet Remarks on the Language of the St. 
John s or Wlastukweek Indians, with a Penobscot Vocabulary 
(Hale, 1834). John Pickering's nephew, Charles Pickering, 
was also on the Wilkes expedition and after his return pub?
lished The Races of Man and their Geographical Distribution 
(Pickering, 1848). 
Gallatin, in part because of the lack of available data, had re?
duced the number of words on his comparative list to 120. To 
extend Gallatin's classification, Hale used the same list with a 
few changes. He published the data he had collected on the lan?
guages of the Northwest Coast and the Plateau in his final re?
port, Ethnography and Philology (Hale, 1846), along with a 
nearly complete classification of the languages of the region, 
except the northernmost (Goddard, 1996:293). 
Only 250 copies of Hale's final report were printed. This cir?
cumstance and the fact that Gallatin earlier had obtained virtu?
ally no data on the languages of North American Indians west 
of the Rocky Mountains led Gallatin to excerpt from Hale's 
volume materials on Northwest Coast languages. He reprinted 
them along with a revision of his own classification in Hale s 
Indians of North-west America (Gallatin, 1848). 
Gallatin's death a year later, in August of 1849, again marked 
the end of an era. Duponceau had died in 1844, and Pickering 
in 1846. Hale, who had gone to Europe after he finished writ?
ing his report, did not return to the study of Indian languages 
for almost a quarter century. The task of classifying North 
American Indian languages passed first to William W. Turner. 
After Turner's death, in 1859, it passed to George Gibbs, and 
then after Gibbs's death, in 1873, to John Wesley Powell, 
whose "Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mex?
ico" (Powell, 1891) expanded Gallatin's classification to all 
parts of the continent?a classification that became the depar?
ture point for subsequent discussion of deeper linguistic rela?
tionships. It remains an important one to this day. 
Notes 
1. Marquis de Lafayette to Benjamin Franklin, 10 Feb 1786, American Philo?
sophical Society Library (APSL), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, cataloged in 
Freeman, 1966, Freeman no. 1171. 
2. The text of George Washington's letter of 20 Aug 1786 addressed to 
Thomas Hutchins, published in Fitzpatrick (1938, 28:52) and Abbott 
(1995:222), is from Washington's letter book. An autograph letter also dated 20 
Aug 1786 and having an identical text?a letter stated in 1907 to be in the pos?
session of A.S. Morgan (Fitzpatrick, 1938, 28:525 n. 63) and sold at auction in 
NUMBER 44 177 
1999 (Sotheby's, 1999:157)?bears at the end the notation "(Addressed to Col. 
George Morgan of Prospect near Princeton)" in an unknown hand, and for this 
reason is generally said to be a letter Washington sent to Morgan. Other evi?
dence, however, suggests this may not have been the case. More likely, this au?
tograph letter is the one Washington sent to Hutchins, the notation at the end of 
the letter having been added at some later date by someone unfamiliar with its 
history. 
When going through Hutchins's papers after his death, in 1789, George 
Morgan found a copy of Lafayette's letter to Washington and Washington's re?
quest to Hutchins. In September of that year, he wrote Washington, sending a 
copy of the Lord's Prayer in Delaware that he had obtained from David Zeis?
berger, a Moravian missionary, and offering to send Zeisberger's Delaware 
vocabulary and grammar then in the possesion of Morgan's son. Morgan also 
offered to send Washington a Shawnee vocabulary and grammar as well as a 
translation of the Lord's Prayer he had obtained from Alexander McKee 
(Twohig, 1989:591-592). If Washington had written Morgan on the same day 
he wrote Hutchins, it seems likely that Morgan would have sent Washington 
these materials then, or at least remembered the letter three years later when 
he did write Washington. It also seems likely that Morgan took Washington's 
letter to Hutchins with him. Only later, probably after Morgan's death, did this 
letter come to be regarded as one written by Washington to Morgan, and a no?
tation to this effect was added. 
3. About the same time Hawkins sent this vocabulary to Madison, he also 
sent a copy to Jefferson (see below). The copy Madison sent Washington, now 
in the Washington Papers (see note 4, below), is identical to the copy sent to 
Jefferson, now in the APSL (Freeman no. 663), except for the omission of a 
few words and phrases. An endorsement in Jefferson's hand (Boyd, 1955:203) 
at the end of his copy, stating that "This vocabulary was from Benjamin Hawk?
ins, probably before 1784," is probably in error. 
4. Washington to Lafayette, 10 Jan 1788, Papers of George Washington, 
1592-1943 (bulk 1748-1799), Library of Congress, Washington, D.C, micro?
film 12.935-124N-124P-124P (series 1-8D). 
5. Just why Jefferson selected Hawkins for this task can only be conjectured. 
Both were members of the Continental Congress in 1783, and Hawkins, a dele?
gate from North Carolina, served on a number of committees dealing with In?
dian matters, including the committee on Indian affairs (Pound, 1951:35). In 
1885-1886 he was a member of the commission that negotiated treaties with 
the Cherokee, Choctaws, and Chickasaws (Pound, 1951:45-51), and it was 
perhaps at this time that Hawkins obtained or made arrangements to obtain the 
Cherokee and Choctaw vocabularies he sent to Jefferson and Madison. From 
1790 to 1795 Hawkins served in the United States Senate. Defeated in his bid 
for a second term, he became agent to the Creeks and other southern Indians, a 
position he held until his death, in 1816. 
6. Jefferson manuscript, 1791, Unquachog Vocabulary, APSL, Freeman no. 
2335. 
7. Jefferson, Vocabulary, broadside printed ca. 1790-1792, APSL, Freeman 
no. 2051. 
8. Manuscript, 1802-1808, Comparative Vocabularies of Several Indian Lan?
guages, APSL, Freeman no. 1289. 
9. Printed circular letter of 8 pages consisting of a cover letter dated 16 May 
1826 by James Barbour; No. I: Vocabulary; No. II, Verbal Forms and Select 
Sentences; No. Ill: A Table of Indian Tribes of the United States East of the 
Stony Mountains, Arranged According to Languages and Dialects, Furnished 
by Albert Gallatin, United States Department of War, Washington, D.C; mi?
crofilm no. 234, roll 429, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 
Literature Cited 
Abbot, W.W., editor 
1995. The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series. Volume 4, 
xxv+688 pages. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia 
Press. 
Balbi, Adriano 
1826. Atlas ethnographique du globe. 2 volumes. Paris: Rey and Gravier. 
Barton, Benjamin Smith 
1787. Observations on Some Parts of Natural History. 76 pages. London: 
C. Dilly. 
1797. New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America, xii, 
cix, [3], 83, [1] pages. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: John Bioren. 
1798. New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America. Sec?
ond edition, [2], xxviii, cix, [1], 133, [1], 32 pages. Philadelphia, 
Pennsylvania: John Bioren. 
Bergh, Albert Ellery, editor 
1907. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Volume 15, xiv+494 pages. 
Washington, D.C: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the 
United States. 
Boyd, Julian P., editor 
1952. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Volume 6, xxxvi+668 pages. 
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 
1955. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 11, xxxiii+701 pages. 
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 
Charlevoix, Pierre-Francois-Xavier de 
1761. Journal of a Voyage to North-America. Volume 1. London: R. and J. 
Dodsley. [Originally published in French in 1744.] 
Court de Gebelin, Antoine 
1773-1782. Mondeprimitif analyse et compare avec le monde moderne. 9 
volumes. Paris: Chez l'auteur. 
Cronin, Vincent 
1978. Catherine: Empress of all the Russias. 349 pages. New York: Will?
iam Morrow. 
Edwards, Jonathan, Jr. 
1788. Observations on the Language of the Muhhekaneew Indians. 17, [3] 
pages. New Haven: Josiah Meigs. 
Fitzpatrick, John C , editor 
1931-1944. The Writings of George Washington. 39 volumes. Washington, 
D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office. 
Freeman, John F , compiler 
1966. A Guide to Manuscripts Relating to the American Indian in the Li?
brary of the American Philosophical Society. x+491 pages. Phila?
delphia, Pennsylvania: American Philosophical Society. 
Gallatin, Albert 
1836. A Synopsis of the Indian Tribes Within the United States West of the 
Rocky Mountains, and in the British and Russian Possessions in 
North America. Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collec?
tions of the American Antiquarian Society, 2:[xxxi+xxxii], 1-422. 
1848. Hale's Indians of North-west America, and Vocabularies of North 
America, with an Introduction. Transactions of the American Ethno?
logical Society, 2:[xxiii]-clxxxviii, 1-130. 
Goddard, Ives 
1996. The Classification of the Native Languages of North America. In 
William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of North American 
Indians, volume 17, Ives Goddard, editor, Languages, pages 
290-323. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
Gulya, Janos 
1974. Some Eighteenth Century Antecedents of Nineteenth Century Lin?
guistics: The Discovery of Finno-Ugrian. In Dell Hymes, editor, 
Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms, 
178 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
pages 258-276. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 
Hale, Horatio 
1834. Remarks on the Language of the St. John s or Wlastukweek Indians, 
with a Penobscot Vocabulary. 8 pages. Boston: Horatio Hale. 
1846. Ethnography and Philology, xii+666 pages. Philadelphia, Pennsyl?
vania: Lea and Blanchard. 
Heckewelder, John G.E. 
1819. No. I: Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian 
Nations, who once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring 
States; No. II: Correspondence between Mr. Heckewelder and Mr. 
Duponceau; No. Ill: Words, Phrases, and Short Dialogues, in the 
Language of the Lenni Lenape. Transactions of the Historical and 
Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society, 1: 
1-464. 
Hunt, Gaillard, editor 
1901. The Writings of James Madison. Volume 2, xvii+412 pages. New 
York and London: G.P. Putnam's Sons. 
Jefferson, Thomas 
1955. Notes on the State of Virginia. Edited and with an introduction and 
notes by William Peden, xxv+315 pages. Chapel Hill: University of 
North Carolina Press. 
Key, Mary Ritchie 
1980. Catherine the Great's Linguistic Contribution, xiii+200 pages. Car-
bondale, Illinois, and Edmonton, Alberta: Linguistic Research. 
Pallas, Peter Simon 
1787-1789. Linguarum Totius Orbis Vocabularia Comparativa. 2 vol?
umes. St. Petersburg. 
Pickering, Charles 
1848. The Races of Man and their Geographical Distribution. 447 pages. 
Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown. 
Pickering, John 
1818. On the Adoption of ? Uniform Orthography for the Indian Lan?
guages of North America. Memoirs of the American Academy of 
Arts and Sciences, 4(2):319-360. [Issued separately in 1820 as An 
Essay on a Uniform Orthography for the Indian Languages of North 
America, by University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.] 
Pound, Merritt B. 
1951. Benjamin Hawkins, Indian Agent, ix+270 pages. Athens: University 
of Georgia Press. 
Powell, John Wesley 
1891. Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mexico. Seventh 
Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secre?
tary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1885-1856, pages 1-142. 
Sotheby's 
1999. The Frank T. Siebert Library of the North American Indian and the 
American Frontier. Part 1, 370 +[1] pages. New York: Sotheby's. 
Thwaites, Reuben Gold, editor 
1898. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Volume 21,319 pages. 
Cleveland, Ohio: Burrows Brothers. 
Twohig, Dorothy, editor 
1989. The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series. Volume 3, 
xviii+651 pages. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 
Tylor, Edward B. 
1871. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, 
Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. Volume 1, x+453 pages. 
London: John Murray. 
Yankovich de Mirievo, Fedor Ivanovich, editor 
1790-1791. [Comparative Dictionary of AII Languages and Dialects Ar?
ranged in Alphabetical Order] 4 volumes. St. Petersburg. [In Rus?
sian.] 
Origins of Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution and 
Beyond 
William W. Fitzhugh 
Anthropological subjects were among the first fields of inquiry 
identified by the Smithsonian founding fathers in 1846. Reso?
lution number 3 of the Smithsonian Board of Regents' meeting 
of 4 December 1846 called on the secretaries of state, the trea?
sury, war, and the Navy "to furnish.. .suggestions.. .in regard to 
the procurement... of additions to the museum... especially to 
its ethnological departments."1 Resolution number 4 requested 
the secretary of war to obtain from the commissioner of Indian 
affairs "suggestions as he may deem proper regarding the pro?
curement from the Indian country of collections for the mu?
seum of the Smithsonian Institution illustrating the natural his?
tory of the country, and more especially the physical history, 
manners and customs of the various tribes of aborigines on the 
North American continent" (Board of Regents, 1847:11). 
These instructions originated the oldest institutional anthro?
pological program in the Americas and one of the earliest sys?
tematic approaches to the study of non-European cultures in 
the history of Western science. Although the discipline of an?
thropology did not become formally professionalized until 
Franz Boas established the first Department of Anthropology at 
Columbia University, in 1901, the practice of anthropology and 
its subfields?linguistics, ethnology, archaeology, and physical 
anthropology?had been pursued vigorously at the Smithson?
ian for more than 50 years and had been taught in universities 
since 1879 (Tooker, 1990). Because most anthropologists in 
North America trace their origins to the beginnings of aca?
demic anthropology, the importance of this instance of early 
museum collecting, research, and exhibition is not widely 
known. In fact, one of anthropology's deepest roots lies in nat?
ural history as it was practiced in European and American mu?
seums from the 1830s to the 1850s. 
The museum role was especially important in imparting a 
scientific method for data gathering, analysis, and classifica?
tion, not only of material culture, but of social life, behavior, 
and language. The models for these developments came origi?
nally from the early biological systematics of Linnaeus (1964), 
as applied in America by Spencer Fullerton Baird to zoological 
William W. Fitzhugh, Department of Anthropology, National Museum 
of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560-
0112, USA. 
field studies before and during his early years as assistant sec?
retary of the Smithsonian Institution. The biological ancestry of 
early anthropological field method is not widely recognized, 
probably because of the corrosive effect that evolutionary and 
racial theory (e.g., Morton, 1839) had on early anthropological 
thought (Stanton, 1960; Stocking, 1966). Aspects of these an?
thropological developments have been discussed (e.g., Hinsley, 
1981) largely without recognition of the debt owed to Baird, 
Robert Kennicott, and other early Smithsonian naturalists who 
worked under his supervision. While none of these collectors 
and researchers were trained ethnologists, their methods, 
adapted from biology, produced the Smithsonian's first impor?
tant ethnological collections and research programs. 
The Baird-Kennicott collecting program in northwestern 
British America (Lindsay, 1993) became a model for later 
Smithsonian field programs that almost always included ethno?
logical, archaeological, and linguistic components. While Ken-
nicott's ethnological collections and field observations were 
never published, his project pioneered field methods that were 
later applied by Smithsonian collectors in the Yukon-Macken?
zie region of northwestern Canada and Alaska between 1870 
and 1890. Despite advances in field method and analysis, it 
was not until John Wesley Powell arrived at the Smithsonian, 
in 1879, that analysis and publication of ethnological collec?
tions became standard practice, in the newly founded Bureau of 
American Ethnology (BAE), which Powell had succeded in 
getting Congress to establish as a permanent anthropological 
survey, with himself appointed as director. 
Origins 
The earliest and most visible product of the Smithsonian's 
charter was the publication of "Ancient Monuments of the Mis?
sissippi Valley" (Squier and Davis, 1848) in volume 1 of 
Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. As the Smithson?
ian's premier scientific publication, this series broadcast a com?
mitment to serious scholarly endeavor, and the selection of an 
archaeological contribution by the Board of Regents signalled 
their intent that cultural scholarship was one of the institution's 
core interests. This publication investigated the biggest histori?
cal mystery of the young republic, the identity of the "mound-
builders" and their relation to historic American Indian tribes 
179 
180 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
(Silverberg, 1968; Willey and Sabloff, 1980; Trigger, 1989). 
The work laid out the archaeological evidence pertaining to the 
mounds and took a skeptical view of the popular European su?
premacist theories of Indian origins (Thomas, 1894; Stanton, 
1960:11). But it was not until the publication oi Report on the 
Mound Explorations (Thomas, 1894) that their Indian origin 
was established conclusively. 
The Contributions series, presided over by Joseph Henry, 
the first secretary of the institution, established the Smithson?
ian as a scholarly "mouthpiece" for a nation whose private 
publication resources were extremely limited and were not suf?
ficient for the type of broad scientific discourse he and the 
Smithsonian founders envisioned. One thousand copies were 
printed and were sent to libraries across the country and 
throughout the world. In this way the Smithsonian's publica?
tion outreach program and the scientific credentials of the na?
scent institution were launched in one fell swoop. The fact that 
this volume and most of the published contributions that fol?
lowed were written by scientists throughout the country?from 
universities, natural history societies, amateur science societ?
ies, and others?established Smithsonian science as a broad 
national endeavor. Only later was authorization given for the 
institution to do original research and field expeditions on its 
own, an innovation that followed the appointment of Baird as 
assistant secretary, in 1850. 
This vision of the Smithsonian as a central node in a broad 
national and international network of scholarly activity and ex?
changes was at the very core of the Smithsonian's original 
charter. In those days, the institution's "public" was the dedi?
cated naturalist, the historian, and the antiquarian, for without a 
museum or any means to communicate broadly other than 
through its circulars and publications, its only real constituency 
was the educated elite. This was an age, literally, of rapidly ex?
panding horizons, of national territorial growth, and of intellec?
tual achievement in the wake of revolutionary progress in biol?
ogy and geology. The opportunities for scientific advance were 
enormous, and scholars and naturalists throughout the country, 
as well as in Europe, saw the Smithsonian as both a leader and 
a political lobbyist for the emergence of a uniquely American 
science. 
It took more than James Smithson's mandate, "the increase 
and diffusion of knowledge," to ensure that his bequest of 
$508,318.40 in 1838 dollars (about $6 to $7 million today; 
Pamela Henson, pers. comm., Apr 1997) would not be squan?
dered by Congress in other directions. There was also an urgent 
need to provide curatorial care and scientific analysis for the 
large government collection of artifacts and art held in the 
United States Patent Office in Washington, D.C. Among this 
collection were about 5000 ethnographic objects collected by 
the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842, com?
manded by Lt. Charles Wilkes, from South America, the South 
Pacific, the Oregon Territory, and the British Northwest Coast 
(Viola and Margolis, 1985). Having experienced difficulties in 
completing the scientific analyses of the Wilkes collection and 
having noted the damage incurred by curatorial neglect, includ?
ing deterioration and loss of specimens and documentation, the 
need for a national museum had become clear, not only for nat?
ural history, ethnology, and linguistic collections, but for the 
American Indian paintings of C.B. King and George Catlin, 
and for other treasures stored by various groups in Washington, 
D.C, that became consolidated in 1840 as the National Insti?
tute (Hinsley, 1981:17). 
Baird's Science 
With these problems in mind, Henry decided to hire an assis?
tant to manage the collections and to organize a scientific pro?
gram. Recommendations by Harvard's Louis Agassiz (a Smith?
sonian Regent) and other leading scholars led Henry to select 
Baird (Figure 1), who had assisted James Dwight Dana in his 
studies of the Wilkes collection. Baird arrived in 1850 with two 
railroad boxcars full of specimens collected during his natural 
history fieldwork in eastern North America. If the Smithsonian 
authorities ever meant to limit the institution's function to li?
brary and publication exchanges, as Henry and others had orig?
inally argued, they made a huge mistake in hiring Baird 
(Goode, 1897; Dall, 1915; Washburn, 1965, 1967; Rivinus and 
Youssef, 1992). 
Baird was an accomplished biologist whose research had al?
ready won him a respected place in the leadership of American 
science. He was an organizer whose efforts over more than a 
decade had established a vast array of scientific collaboration 
with scholars and amateur field collectors throughout North 
America. Ultimately, the purpose of his acquisitiveness was not 
to build a museum but to conduct scientific research.2 Today 
we cannot imagine the need for such broad-scale collecting, 
both of so much material and by so many collectors, but for a 
biologist seeking to systematize the newly discovered fauna 
and flora of the New World, it was necessary to begin by build?
ing large reference collections to which new specimens could 
be compared for purposes of scientific classification. In many 
cases the North American flora and fauna differed markedly 
from Europe's more familiar and better-studied biota. In addi?
tion, beyond the arcane methods of taxonomy and classifica?
tion, geography, climate, and environment were beginning to 
be recognized as having an impact on organism morphology, 
evolution of species, formation of ecological complexes, and 
delineation of life zones. Even species identity itself was still a 
novel and malleable biological concept. For these reasons, 
Baird believed that one had to build large collections from con?
tiguous geographical zones to understand regional variation 
and recognize diagnostic features of species and subspecies. 
To cite one example of his organizational and collecting 
techniques, Baird convinced his wife's father, General 
Sylvester Churchill, to issue a circular to military officers at 
bases in remote locations, asking them to make natural history 
collections in their spare time. Baird's circular provided details 
as to what species should be collected, what observations were 
NUMBER 44 181 
FIGURE 1.?Spencer F. Baird, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 
established and implemented the institution's field programs and documenta?
tion systems. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution (neg. no. 46853-A). 
required for each species, and what information should be re?
corded about geography and environment. Other government 
agencies conducting land and boundary commission surveys, 
naval explorations, or gathering tidal and climatic observations 
were also solicited and were provided with written instructions. 
Given the rapidly expanding United States territorial bound?
aries of the day, the result was a deluge of information and 
specimens. When Baird landed his job at the Smithsonian, his 
organizational abilities resulted in an explosion of government 
and private collaborations, and he used his position, with 
Henry's authority and concurrence, to establish the Smithson?
ian as the premier collecting and exchange center for biological 
materials in North America. Two boxcars was "peanuts" to the 
flow of collections that soon began to arrive. Yet even with 
meager assistance from Henry's budget, Baird parlayed the 
Smithsonian's unofficial "National Museum" into a national 
repository and center of scientific research. 
During these early years, Baird's goals were strictly scien?
tific and could not be considered educational or display ori?
ented. His purpose in building collections was not for public 
edification in the general sense. Rather, he wanted to compile 
large, synoptic, documented reference collections to assess bio?
logical variation and to revise earlier Linnaean classifications 
of American fauna that had been based on inadequate numbers 
of specimens from restricted geographic regions. One of 
Baird's first projects at the Smithsonian was to use the large 
collection to prepare his Catalogue of North American Reptiles 
in the Museum of the Smithsonian Institution (Baird and Gi-
rard, 1853). Scientifically, this work was an important revision 
of an earlier outdated study. It is best known today, however, 
for having infuriated his former mentor, Louis Agassiz, the 
doyen of biology at Harvard, who felt upstaged and outraged 
by the prominent role played in the project by Charles Girard, 
his estranged former student (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992: 
98-105; Lindsay, 1993:16-17). 
Baird's acquisitiveness, however, did not lead immediately 
to castle-building. In Baird's view, once basic classification 
was accomplished with the aid of large suites of specimens, 
only a few individual specimens identified as "types" needed to 
be retained in a permanent collection. Upon completing his 
studies, type specimens would be marked with small green tags 
and saved for the museum's reference collection, and the 
masses of similar specimens could then be discarded. In prac?
tice this meant large numbers of duplicate collections could be 
distributed to natural history societies and universities through?
out the country and abroad, and (with loss to the legacy of 
Smithsonian collections; see Walsh, 2002) this was done assid?
uously, accompanied by the completed publications and collec?
tion records. Thus were born the two pillars of the Bairdian 
Smithsonian legacy that have continued until the present day: a 
concern for the importance of empirical (especially natural) 
science and the importance of sharing scientific information 
and specimens. 
Baird displayed a genius for the organization of field collect?
ing, data compilation, and mapping but later was criticized for 
his lack of contributions to biological theory (Rivinus and 
Youssef, 1992:100; Lindsay, 1993:16). His method, however, 
was not without forethought. He believed that advances in this 
pioneering stage of American natural science would come from 
assiduous collecting followed by classification and compara?
tive assessment of large documented collections and subse?
quent taxonomic revisions of increasingly wider geographic 
scope. By 1854 Baird's array of collectors, often referred to as 
"Baird's missionaries" (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992:83), were 
supplying the Smithsonian from 26 different expeditions and 
numerous other government surveys. In return, Baird provided 
instructions, collecting equipment, small sums of money for 
field expenses, and return freight. All contributors received 
copies of the institution's annual reports in which full credit 
was given to each organization and collector, and many of the 
latter found their names attached to new species. 
This was the system Baird established for natural history. 
The result was exponential growth of collections, rapid publi?
cation, broad dissemination of results through the institution's 
Miscellaneous Contributions and Contributions to Knowledge 
series and annual reports, and establishment of a network of 
182 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
collectors and scientists receiving Smithsonian exchange col?
lections and publications. Operating largely outside the univer?
sities (which had few capabilities for field research at this early 
date), he sometimes ruffled the feathers of the university elite. 
But on the other hand, he trained a new, independent breed of 
field naturalist whose careers lay largely outside the cluttered, 
elitist hierarchies of academy life, and whose contributions 
brought the newly explored and largely undisturbed regions of 
North America within the sphere of the scientific establishment 
(including talented amateurs) for the first time. In most cases it 
was not until after 1900 that university-based scientists arrived 
in America's "outback." In short, Baird had created a populist 
scientific revolution. 
Six years into his term as Secretary, Henry summed up what 
he saw as the role of the Smithsonian: 
The prominent idea embraced in the Smithsonian organization is that of coop?
eration and concerted action with all institutions and individuals engaged in the 
promotion of knowledge. Its design is not to monopolize any part of the wide 
fields of nature or of art, but to invite all to partake in the pleasure and honor of 
their cultivation. It seeks not to encroach upon ground occupied by other insti?
tutions, but to expend the funds in doing that which cannot be as well done by 
other means. It gives to the words of Smithson their most liberal interpretation, 
and "increases and diffuses knowledge among men" by promoting the discov?
ery of new truths, and by disseminating these in every part of the civilized 
world. (Board of Regents, 1853:31) 
This, I think, outlines the mission and politics of the Smith?
sonian in a fashion that is as relevant today as it was 150 years 
ago. There are, indeed, many things that can be done by the 
Smithsonian that are completely unique and national in scope. 
Synoptic programs like the Smithsonian's National Museum of 
Natural History exhibitions, the Handbook of North American 
Indians series, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall, 
the National Science Information Service, the Smithsonian 
Traveling Exhibition Service, Folkways Recordings, and the 
recently established Institute for Conservation Biology are ex?
amples of the Smithsonian's response to a broad national man?
date that reaches beyond individual research to the understand?
ing and stewardship of the world at large. 
Early Ethnological Collecting 
Despite the fact that it was Baird, a biologist, who was respon?
sible for hiring and directing the naturalists who made the 
Smithsonian's first ethnographic collections, it was primarily 
Henry's interest in ethnology and archeology, before Baird was 
hired, that established a place for human studies under the 
Smithsonian's "big tent." 
Soon after arriving at the Smithsonian, in 1846, Henry re?
ceived a letter from the eminent New York ethnologist, Henry 
Rowe Schoolcraft, urging him to adopt his "Plan for the Inves?
tigation of American Ethnology," which incorporated a library 
of philology, archaeological investigations of the earthworks of 
the Mississippi Valley, and a "Museum of Mankind" for collec?
tions of America's native peoples (Schoolcraft, 1846; Hinsley, 
1981:20). Henry, already aware of the contributions made dur?
ing previous decades by philological and archaeological stud?
ies of the ancient world, became convinced that the answer to 
Thomas Jefferson's question, "from whence came those ab?
originals of America" (Jefferson, 1955:100), might also be set?
tled in a similar manner, by dedicated cultural, archaeological, 
and linguistic field studies. 
It has often been noted that, compared to the hard sciences 
and many social sciences, anthropology has been slow to de?
velop scientific methods, and that its theory is largely borrowed 
from other disciplines. This appears to have been true in the 
emergence of Smithsonian anthropology, in which biology and 
linguistics played a formative role. The collecting instructions 
of George Gibbs, a philologist who had been an active member 
of the Northwest Boundary Survey Commission of 1857-1861 
(see "Baird, Kennicott, and Systematic Museum Anthropol?
ogy," below), although formulated outside the context of ex?
plicit cultural theory, recognized the importance of combining 
evidence from archaeology, ethnology, philology, and other 
fields and laid the foundation for Boas's later formation of an 
integrated science of culture. By establishing systematic data-
collecting techniques, by building an empirical database, and 
by systematizing the collections and organizing exhibitions 
that explored cultural theory and cultural classifications, the 
Smithsonian made important contributions several decades be?
fore the establishment of anthropology in other museums and 
universities (Fitzhugh, 1996). 
In searching for the origins of museum anthropology as it de?
veloped at the Smithsonian, I have been impressed by the con?
tributions made by the Bairdian system of science described 
above. In this respect, the earliest phase of American museum 
anthropology had a different history from academic anthropol?
ogy as the latter began to be practiced in the 1890s. If we may 
judge from modern tendencies reviewed below, museum an?
thropology may also have a different future as well. 
Anthropological collecting, of course, was not a Smithsonian 
invention, even as a concerted museum-based activity. The Eu?
ropean "Cabinet of Curiosities" was clearly the forerunner in 
this field (Urry, 1984). The European cabinets were devoted to 
the preservation and display of natural and "artificial" curiosi?
ties. For most of these cabinets, scientific inquiry was not a 
guiding force. Indian materials that arrived in Europe in the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were collected in a haphaz?
ard manner as examples of the arts and industries of Native 
Americans and usually lacked scientific documentation. 
The European cabinets, called "Kunstkammers" after about 
1600, began in the mid-1500s in Florence, Prague, Dresden, 
Vienna, and other European locations. Copenhagen was one of 
the first cities to begin to collect, store, and display curiosities, 
which included ethnographic materials from Europe and many 
other areas of the world. As early as the early seventeenth cen?
tury these collections were displayed in the Wormianum Mu?
seum maintained by Ole Worm, a widely-traveled physician 
and naturalist. Although his museum and its later incarnations 
had a staff, a catalog (maintained systematically beginning in 
NUMBER 44 183 
1825), and a cultural and typological basis of object organiza?
tion, it was not until 1841, when a new curator named Christian 
Thomsen separated the non-European materials within the 
Kunstkammer and created the Ethnographical Department, that 
a scientific plan emerged (Dam-Mikkelsen and Lundbaek, 
1980). Although Thomsen is best known for developing "three-
age" systematics (stone, bronze, iron) for archaeology, in 1839 
he also began supporting ethnographic collecting, and orga?
nized these collections in a systematic manner. 
In an earlier era, the Cook voyages of the 1770s represented 
a step forward from previously undocumented collecting, 
thanks to the scientific and geographical observations of Jo?
seph Banks and a dedicated natural history program conducted 
by the father and son team, Reinhold and George Forster 
(Kaeppler, 1978:2). The result was a more systematic approach 
to collecting, but one that still emphasized artificial curiosities. 
The fact that some specimens were described in print and oth?
ers have survived in museum collections permits some under?
standing of the cultures encountered. Even so, the charge to the 
scientists by the British Admiralty was vague and unstructured. 
Cook was to collect materials illustrating characteristic features 
of native peoples that would serve to identify them to voyagers 
rather than for purposes of scientific description or compara?
tive study (Kaeppler, 1978:37^18). 
Sir Hans Sloane described his artifact collections, which 
were purchased by the British Crown in 1753 and founded the 
British Museum (MacGregor, 1994), as "miscellanies." They 
lacked any systematic basis, either in their collection or cata?
loging, other than their chronology of accession (King, 
1994:231), and reflected Sloane's primarily antiquarian inter?
est. His collecting began during his service as a physician and 
amateur naturalist in Jamaica in the late seventeenth century. 
Only his botanical collections showed scientific organization, 
due to the more advanced state of this field. Like Ashton Lever, 
founder of the Leverian Museum, which displayed Cook col?
lections in the 1780s (Kaeppler, 1972, 1978:12-15), Sloane 
rarely traveled, seems not to have grasped the importance of 
cultural context, and his collection was assembled secondhand 
from others. 
During this early period, Russia developed a strong aware?
ness of the value of specimens as scientific documents (Kinzh-
alov, 1983; Dzeniskevich and Pavlinskaya, 1988). The Kunst?
kammer established by Peter the Great in St. Petersburg in 
1714 is an early museum collection that exhibited anthropolog?
ical materials. Most Russian expeditions to America began col?
lecting ethnological and biological materials in the 1780s, 
when Governor Boehm of Kamchatka transmitted objects pur?
chased from the James Cook expeditions to the Russian Acad?
emy of Science's Kunstkammer (today the Museum of Anthro?
pology and Ethnology (MAE)) in St. Petersburg. Later, Joseph 
Billings and Gavril Andreevich Sarychev donated ethnological 
materials to the MAE from their North Pacific voyages of 
1785-1794. The Russian Admiralty Museum acquired materi?
als from the Krusenstern and Lisianski voyages to Alaska 
(1803-1806), and 100 of these specimens were transmitted to 
the MAE after 1930. Other Russian expeditions, including 
those commanded by Golovnin (1817-1818), Kashevarov 
(1830-1860s) , Arkimandritov (1840s), and Zagoskin 
(1842-1844) all provided Alaskan specimens to the MAE. 
As early as 1741, German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller, 
on Vitus Bering's voyage to Alaska, speculated on relation?
ships between the native peoples of Alaska and Kamchatka on 
the basis of linguistic similarities (Steller, 1988). In Russia, 
however, Ilyia Voznesenskii's work in Russian America (south?
east Alaska to central California) between 1839 and 1849 most 
closely marks the transition from informed observation to sci?
entific purpose. Voznesenskii, who was then a preparator in the 
Kunstkammer, was sent to Alaska specifically to make docu?
mented collections for the Russian Academy of Science muse?
ums. The Academy gave him explicit instructions for collect?
ing ethnological specimens. His collection of about 1000 
objects was documented to tribe, place, name, function, and 
material. Many specimens were noted in his diaries and were 
drawn. According to Dzeniskevich and Pavlinskaya (1988:85), 
his collecting methods "were unusual for ethnography at the 
time: Voznesenskii collected objects systematically across 
functional categories, so that the MAE acquired synoptic series 
of clothing, canoes, masks, and other artifact types" (see also 
Liapunova, 1967). Some of Voznesenskii's objects and other 
specimens from earlier Russian expeditions appeared in the 
joint American-Soviet traveling exhibition Crossroads of Con?
tinents (Fitzhugh and Crowell, 1988; Liapunova, 1994). 
One of the little-known contributions to early ethnology and 
material culture studies involved Philipp Franz von Siebold's 
collections from Japan, made between 1823 and 1829 at the 
Dutch trading entrepot at Dejima in Nagasaki (Kreiner, 
1993:27, 1996). A medical doctor and amateur naturalist em?
ployed by the Dutch to gather information about Japan, Siebold 
purchased books, manuscripts, and maps; made large natural 
history collections of botanical, zoological, mineral specimens; 
and compiled an extensive ethnographic collection of Japanese 
objects and some Ainu materials (Forrer, 1996; Brown, 1996). 
Although purchased from friends and shops, Siebold pursued 
what documentation was available on these materials. Japan 
was still officially closed to foreigners at this time, and Siebold 
almost lost his life when Japanese officials discovered prohib?
ited items (maps, images of shoguns, drawings of ship-building 
equipment, etc.) in his collections (Brown, 1996:121). Accused 
of spying and expelled, Siebold returned to Holland where he 
organized his collection and opened a private museum in the 
1830s. He was a prodigious writer and published a five-volume 
Flora Japonica (Siebold, 1835-1870) and two volumes (crus?
taceans and reptiles) in Fauna Japonica (Siebold, 1833-1850). 
Although he failed to publish his ethnographic collections di?
rectly, discussions of these materials appeared in his monumen?
tal work, Japan (Siebold, 1930), and his museum arranged 
them in systematic cultural categories. Here, the organizing 
principle was cultural region, that is, grouping together Japa-
184 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
nese materials from Honshu, Ainu, Yezo (Hokkaido), and so 
on. And although he considered his organization inferior to the 
cross-cultural comparative organization that grouped similar 
objects from different regions and cultures together as done by 
Edme-Francois Jomard (Forrer, 1996:26) in his museum in 
Paris, perhaps Siebold was the wiser, anticipating Otis Mason's 
culture area principle of ethnographic organization nearly 50 
years later. Siebold's was certainly an ethnographic museum in 
the making, as one eye-witness account from 1835 confirms: 
There is probably nothing comparable to what is exhibited in the three rooms 
containing the systematically exhibited treasures which Mr. Von Siebold 
brought from Japan. One is transferred among all inventions, customs, habits, 
the art, science, and industry of a population which was, until recently, as un?
known as man on the moon. From the toiletries of ladies, one enters into the 
studio of the artisan, from the golden pagoda and schools into an armoury, and, 
as to leave out nothing, whole streets in miniature with their wares, temples for 
their gods, and houses of pleasures are exhibited. They have been made over 
there by the Japanese themselves, which is a gTeat safeguard for their authen?
ticity." (Major-General Ludwig Freiherr von Welden, in Forrer, 1996:30) 
Later, the fine arts portion of Siebold's collections, and similar 
items gathered after him by his son, Heinrich, found their way 
to the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, and the ethnographic ma?
terials went to Leiden. While Siebold's collections were not 
gathered directly from their makers and lack direct documenta?
tion and precise geographic placement, they represent an im?
pressive inventory of cultural materials, and his museum's 
carefully classified organization of objects had an inherently 
scientific purpose (Forrer, 1996:24-25). 
Another collecting program of the early 1800s that contrib?
uted (though more marginally) to the development of system?
atic museum studies is that of Jean Louis Berlandier (Ewers, 
1969; Berlandier, 1980) in northern Mexico and Texas. Ber?
landier 's surveys between 1825 and 1834 were originally com?
missioned by the eminent botanist Augustin Pyramus de Can-
tolle through the Academy of Natural Sciences in Geneva 
(Muller, 1980:xi-xxxvi). Although Berlandier's focus was on 
natural history, which was his specialty, he also acquired an?
thropological materials, but the project was poorly organized, 
and Berlandier, who continued to live in Mexico, died there in 
1851 before completing his major publication. His collections, 
consisting primarily of zoological and botanical specimens 
with some archaeological and ethnological materials, were sold 
after his death with the assistance of Baird, who acquired some 
of the zoological and ethnological specimens for the Smithson?
ian (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992:90). The records on these mate?
rials were spotty, consisting of journal notes and unfinished 
manuscripts, and while his information on American Indian 
culture is useful, his ethnological collecting was not informed 
by detailed description or scientific method. 
It appears likely that American collecting prior to 1848 did 
not meet the contemporary Russian Academy standards, which 
in turn may have been inspired by German methods (William 
C. Sturtevant, pers comm., 1985). Other than Meriwether 
Lewis and William Clark, whose collections for Jefferson dis?
played differences among Indian groups but lacked scientific 
method, one of the earliest major American collecting enter?
prises was the United States Exploring Expedition of 
1838-1842 (also known as the Wilkes Expedition), the first 
United States expedition to explore the Pacific Ocean and 
which reached as far north as the Columbia River. The Wilkes 
Expedition had a designated scientific team (Viola and Marg-
olis, 1985), and its members were instructed to gather and doc?
ument natural history, ethnology, and native language. Horatio 
Hale (1846) wrote a monograph on ethnography and philology 
which provides extensive linguistic detail but has little useful 
ethnographic description, and no systematic catalog was pre?
pared. More serious intent was shown by Titian R. Peale, son 
of the artist Charles W. Peale, who collected ethnological mate?
rial for his father's "American Museum"?the Peale Mu?
seum?in Philadelphia, but these specimens were later dis?
persed by sale. There seems to have been little scientific 
purpose to the ethnological collecting other than to secure arti?
facts typifying different cultures and regions or to ascertain 
whether some practical value might be discovered in them. 
Kaeppler (1978:20) notes that "most of the objects were col?
lected primarily as curios and as evidence for the prevailing 
evolutionary view of culture. Detailed information about where 
the objects were collected or how they were made or used was 
often not recorded and kept with the objects." The end result 
was an amalgam of objects of various cultural provenance. Fol?
lowing analysis of the Wilkes collection at the Patent Office in 
Washington, 25 sets of duplicates (about half of the original 
collection of 2500 catalogue numbers, which totaled in all 
about 5000 objects) were given away or exchanged with other 
museums. Slightly fewer than 2000 Wilkes specimens remain 
in the Smithsonian collection today.3 
Despite the movement toward more extensive field docu?
mentation and classification of objects, and the fact that these 
early collectors to varying degrees followed an informed 
method of systematic collecting, the purpose of classification 
was to organize and present objects in museums rather than for 
scientific comparison and accumulation of systematic knowl?
edge. Ethnological and archaeological objects still were con?
sidered as curiosities of unique interest rather than as objects 
expressing an underlying system of human knowledge set in 
geographical, chronological, and cultural context. Finally, none 
of these collections was gathered with the express purpose of 
building large collections for scientific description and com?
parison. 
Lewis Henry Morgan 
The closest example of "systematic" ethnology collecting of an 
American Indian group dating to this era is Lewis Henry Mor?
gan's work with the Seneca and other Iroquois groups con?
ducted in the late 1840s for the regents of the University of the 
State of New York (Sturtevant, 1987; Tooker, 1994). Briefly, 
the history of this collection is as follows. In 1847, the regents 
decided to add a "historical and antiquarian" collection to the 
NUMBER 44 185 
state's Cabinet of Natural History, in Albany, founded in 1843 
to house New York State's geological and natural history sur?
vey collections. To further this end, the regents sent a general 
request to the citizens of New York for objects. Morgan re?
sponded by sending from his personal collection about 50 ob?
jects in 1848, most of them archaeological, and about 35 more 
in 1848, over half of them ethnological. At the same time he 
suggested to the regents that a larger collection of ethnological 
objects be made. As he wrote the regents, "If a scholar of after 
years should ask of our age an account of our predecessors, 
such a collection would be the most acceptable answer it could 
render. It would enable the Red Race to speak for itself through 
these silent memorials" (Morgan in Tooker, 1994:45). The re?
gents concurred, and with their financial support, Morgan 
made a collection of Seneca ethnological objects in 1849 and 
another of Seneca and other Iroquois objects in 1850. He trans?
mitted with both collections catalogs and descriptive notes that 
included native names, raw materials and other documentation, 
which were published in the regents' reports. In making these 
collections, Morgan had the assistance of his Iroquois friend 
Ely S. Parker, who accompanied him to the Six Nations Re?
serve in Canada in 1850 and who may have helped to identify 
materials and to supply names and other information. In all, 
Morgan sent about 500 archaeological, ethnological, and eth-
nobotanical specimens to the New York Cabinet. A large num?
ber of these materials were destroyed in a fire that gutted the 
capitol building in 1911. Fortunately, Morgan had duplicated 
much of this collection with materials acquired on the 
Tonawanda Seneca Reservation, most of them from members 
of Parker's family who lived there, and this collection survives 
in the Rochester Museum and Science Center, Rochester, New 
York. 
Sturtevant (1987) noted that a possible stimulus for the cre?
ation of the Albany collection may have been a visit made in 
1847 by New York Governor John Young to the Hartford His?
torical and Antiquarian Museum, which displayed an American 
Indian collection. But in Sturtevant's view, a more direct moti?
vation probably was Morgan's visit in 1846 to the United 
States Patent Office exhibitions: 
He [Morgan] wrote in his 1848 report that the proposed New York State Cabi?
net, by adding an Indian collection to the existing natural history collections, 
might soon "not be unworthy of comparison with the more universal collec?
tions of the National Government at the Patent Office." That is where the col?
lections of the so-called National Institute were displayed from 1841 until they 
were transferred to the Smithsonian in 1857. A floor plan published in 1844, 
two years before Morgan's visit, shows that there were many natural history 
exhibit cases, and eleven cases displaying ethnographic items. Nearly all of 
these were from the United States Exploring Expedition in the Pacific under Lt. 
Charles Wilkes in 1838-1842. Evidently the entire Wilkes expedition ethno?
graphic collection was exhibited?amounting to over 2500 pieces, of which 
about 300 were North American (from California and Oregon), including 85 
bows and arrows, and the largest number from one region was 1202 objects 
from Fiji, exhibited in four cases?something like 300 objects per case?which 
allows very little space for labels and no opportunity for any rational arrange?
ment. (Sturtevant, 1987:5-6) 
Morgan employed a type concept (probably adapted from his 
familiarity with the New York State natural history surveys) 
and systematically classified, described, and published the ma?
terial culture and ethnobotanical samples of a single ethnic 
group. As Sturtevant has noted, Morgan, beginning in 1850, or?
ganized his collection in types rather than as separate objects. 
[H]e had a notion of artifact types, which he must have gotten by paying close 
attention to what the Senecas told him, and probably especially to what Ely 
Parker explained. These were ethnographic collections, in a narrow, technical 
sense... .So here and elsewhere the types are Seneca ones. Morgan's essay is a 
description of types... .He does say that the specimens on his list "are classified 
under their aboriginal names into 83 distinct classes, and number in all about 
300." (Sturtevant, 1987:9-10; emphasis in original) 
Morgan's collection demonstrates a significant advance in 
American thought about scientific anthropology. Like Baird's 
work, which was being conducted at the same time, it seems 
likely that Morgan began with a biological model?indeed, he 
sometimes refers to his types as "species." But here the Baird-
ian analogy ends, for Morgan did not employ the biological 
concept of morphological variation to investigate cultural sys?
tems and culture change over space. He was not concerned 
with collecting large numbers of similar objects to ascertain 
variation within classes. He did not distinguish cultural differ?
ences between artifacts collected from the Seneca from those 
he collected among the Canadian Iroquois. Rather, his types 
were culturally defined by what conveyed a particular sense of 
a general Iroquoian "genius." These value judgments were not 
part of the Bairdian system and may represent Morgan's aware?
ness of an important difference between biological and cultural 
systems, the idea that types may not exist in cultural systems in 
the same way they do in biology. He did not seek to exclude 
nonindigenous materials or elements or styles that indicated 
European influence. Rather than collecting ethnological data 
for the study and analysis of Seneca culmre in time or space, 
Morgan was stimulated by the desire to record and thus to pre?
serve in a museum setting selected features of a vanishing cul?
ture for posterity. As noted by Sturtevant (pers. comm., Dec 
1995), his work predates the development of "salvage" ethnol?
ogy that motivated later nineteenth century collecting, espe?
cially as espoused by the BAE, and his Iroquois materials were 
not so heavily "traditional" as the idealized systematic BAE 
collections of 1880-1920. 
In sum, it appears that Morgan worked within a classic natu?
ral history paradigm (not surprising for a scholar who had also 
authored a monograph on the American beaver) and employed 
a more anthropological concept of culture than did Baird's col?
lectors, but his collection tells us little of cultural variation in 
space. Lacking large series of objects from a broad region, 
Morgan's Iroquois collections could not have been used for 
studies of geographic cultural variation even if the Albany col?
lection had survived. Nevertheless, the collection presented an 
unvarnished view of Seneca material culture at an important 
period in time. Morgan's work was a more faithful representa?
tion of the humanistic dimension linking objects, ethnography, 
1! SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
and culture?i.e., what was to become the essence of Boasian 
anthropology?than what was being studied in the Smithson?
ian's early collecting program. One could only have wished 
that Baird and Morgan had collaborated on their visions, both 
for the enhancement of Iroquoian studies and for improvement 
of the Smithsonian's field collection and publication program. 
Finally, Morgan's writings are full of surprises. Those famil?
iar with recent Smithsonian history may find his musings to 
Ely Parker apocalyptic: "What would be a pretty name for a 
'Collection of Indian Antiques', or 'Indian Relics', or 'Aborig?
inal Curiosities', or 'Cabinet of Indian History', or 'Indian 
Museum'?...One word would be preferred. It must all be in 
one word." (Morgan to Parker, in Tooker, 1994:56). This, from 
150 years ago, sums up the conundrum in the 1970s when 
Smithsonian Institution Secretary S. Dillon Ripley searched for 
a suitable name and concept for a Museum of Man. It is by this 
circuitous route we emerge at the doorstep of the Smithsonian 
Castle in 1850 once again, with the ascension of Baird as direc?
tor of the Smithsonian's informal national museum. 
Baird, Kennicott, and Systematic Museum Anthropology 
During the 1850s Baird consolidated his position at the Smith?
sonian and developed a strong relationship with Henry, whom 
he greatly admired but fought constantly with over the need for 
official recognition for the museum. Henry refused to accept 
the Patent Office collections into the museum without specific 
congressional authorization and funding. But Baird's rapid col?
lection-building program finally paid off in 1858, when Con?
gress officially authorized expenditures for the United States 
National Museum. In the meantime, the biological and ethno?
logical collections had been pouring in and were classified and 
organized by a staff of volunteers and part-time employees. 
Henry's interests in cultural studies continued to remain prima?
rily in historical, archaeological, and linguistic research. In ad?
dition to "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley" 
(Squier and Davis, 1848), he also published "Aboriginal Mon?
uments of the State of New York" (Squier, 1849), "Archaeol?
ogy in the United States" (Haven, 1856), and several treatises 
on American Indian languages prepared with the assistance of 
William W Turner. 
With Turner's death in 1859, his place as the Smithsonian's 
(unpaid) Indian linguistic collaborator was taken up by George 
Gibbs. Gibbs immediately set to work preparing circulars for 
distribution to Baird's network of collectors and in 1862 pub?
lished "Instructions for Archaeological Investigations in the 
United States" (Gibbs, 1862). This remarkable document pre?
sented a rationale for detailed observation of archaeological 
stratigraphy and time sequencing. It was obviously influenced 
by geological and archaeological developments in Europe, both 
in terms of theory and field method. Jefferson had conducted 
stratigraphic excavations in a Virginia Indian burial mound al?
most 100 years earlier, and published his results (Trigger, 
1989:69), but his work had since been forgotten. 
The following year Gibbs (1863) published a second pam?
phlet of instructions that specified the types of collections and 
information desired, including crania and specimens represent?
ing native artifacts and arts, "hints for ethnological inquiry" in?
tended "to place before us a moving panorama of America in 
the olden time" (Gibbs, 1863:7), names of tribes, geographical 
location, population numbers and trends, physical features, lan?
guage and writing, dress, food, dwellings, arts, trade, religion, 
government, social life, war, medicine, literature, astronomy, 
history, and antiquities. Concerning the latter, he noted that "if 
the work [excavation] cannot be thoroughly done, it is better to 
leave the mound unopened for a more favorable opportunity" 
(Gibbs, 1863:12). After Gibbs's death the task of collecting and 
classifying linguistic data from American Indian tribes was 
taken up with great fervor by Powell, who spent two decades 
mapping the distribution of Native American languages in 
North America (Goddard, 1996). These developments in 
American anthropological collecting occurred 14 years before 
the British Museum extended its instructions for systematic bi?
ological collecting to the field of ethnology in its Notes and 
Queries series (British Association for the Advancement of 
Science, 1874; Lindsay, 1993:36)4 and effectively modernized 
its ethnography program (King, 1994:238). 
Kennicott in Rupert's Land 
At the same time the Smithsonian expanded its contacts in a 
new direction. Baird had expressed interest in developing a 
collecting program in the Mackenzie region of northwestern 
Canada as early as 1850 (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992:85-87). 
With the United States Army and other government agencies 
fully engaged with the Civil War, Baird turned his attention to 
Central and South America and to the newly accessible north?
western frontier, known to the Hudson's Bay Company trad?
ers as "Rupert's Land" (Lindsay, 1993:7). In 1857 he had 
Henry send a letter of introduction to Sir George Simpson, 
governor of the Hudson's Bay Company's operations in Can?
ada, asking for permission and collecting assistance from its 
"servants" (post directors, known as "factors") in the Macken?
zie region. The idea of collecting was not new to the Hudson's 
Bay Company (HBC), which had since the mid-eighteenth 
century encouraged its field managers to collect natural his?
tory specimens for the Royal Society in London, the members 
of which included many HBC governors (Rivinus and 
Youssef, 1992:83; Lindsay, 1993:42).5 Soon after receiving 
official permission from Simpson in 1859, Baird sent Robert 
Kennicott (Figure 2), a young, gifted (but somewhat mercu?
rial) Chicago naturalist, north to organize a collecting effort 
with the assistance of the HBC factors.6 The project was spon?
sored jointly by the Smithsonian Institution, the University of 
Michigan, the Audubon Club of Chicago, and the Chicago 
Academy of Science. Baird's intent was to gather from this 
unknown land a complete record of natural history and ethnol?
ogy. In the process, he also wanted to establish a systematic 
NUMBER 44 187 
FIGURE 2.?Robert Kennicott, Baird's eminent field naturalist, opened British 
America and Alaska to American science. 
collection that extended west into Russian America, so that 
one could begin to assess the relationship of northwestern 
North American biota and cultures with Siberia and the Old 
World. Here was a grand scheme indeed! One that excited 
Kennicott and could provide the Smithsonian with specimens 
and information from a part of North America totally new to 
American science. 
Although he probably was Baird's most gifted student, be?
cause of his premature death, at age 31, Kennicott is a little-
known figure in American science. He has been described by 
biographer Donald Culross Peattie as a budding John James 
Audubon or Alexander von Humboldt (Peattie, 1936:94). Bom 
in New Orleans in 1835, Kennicott later moved to Illinois 
where he was trained in natural history by the physician Jared 
P. Kirtland, who was recognized as the most eminent naturalist 
in the west and who was well known to Baird. In 1853, at Kirt-
land's urging, Kennicott began corresponding with Baird, to 
whom he had been sending rattlesnakes and other specimens 
for several years. Baird had a huge effect on Kennicott's devel?
opment (Vasile, 1994), and in 1857 Kennicott came to Wash?
ington, D.C, to work on Baird's reptile classification project. 
He spent the winters of 1857-1858 and 1858-1859 in Wash?
ington, and while home during the intervening summer, he 
helped found the Chicago Academy of Sciences and a natural 
history museum at Northwestern University. It was during this 
period that he made his first trips into Canada, to the Red River, 
in 1857. In spring of 1859, utilizing the trading post infrastruc?
ture of the Hudson's Bay Company, Kennicott began his major 
collecting program in northern British America with $2000 of 
private cash provided by Baird. 
Between 1859 and 1862 Kennicott organized a collecting 
network that supplied the Smithsonian with nearly 12,000 
specimens from more than 23 collectors (Lindsay, 1993:131). 
Five hundred of these were ethnological collections from the 
Mackenzie Inuit (Inuvialuit) and Dene Indians; the remainder 
were animal and bird pelts, bird eggs (by the thousands), fish, 
plants, and minerals (Figure 3). About half of these materials 
were collected by HBC traders Roderick MacFarlane and Ber?
nard Ross. Ross had previously participated with the Smithson?
ian, through his association with George Gibbs, on the North?
west Boundary Survey Commission in 1857. MacFarlane and 
Ross, in turn, acquired many of their specimens from native 
people by purchase or exchange. During this period Kennicott 
spent much of his time training HBC men and native Dene and 
Inuvialuit to document and prepare specimens. Writing to 
Baird, he noted, "you know that there is very little chance of 
my ever killing such things as musk oxen, barren ground bear, 
and reindeer... .1 can only hope to get them by hiring the Indi?
ans to bring them in from a great distance" (Rivinus and 
Youssef, 1992:86). 
The Kennicott project produced the largest and most system?
atically gathered collection of natural history and ethnological 
materials acquired by the Smithsonian up to that time. It estab?
lished a method of operating in remote regions using the local 
native population and the existing infrastructure, in this case, 
that of the HBC, which was offered to the Smithsonian nearly 
free of charge. Company men were more than eager to provide 
188 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
J " . . . " .4 
i-fn^~2 
J 
0 26/, CiVa^c *- SA* JZU-,1 & 
FIGURE 3.?Extract from Kennicott's field ledger. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, 
Department of Vertebrate Zoology. 
assistance (Coates, 1984; Lindsay, 1993). Given the drab fare 
of company instructions received by the factors, "there is no 
doubt that this was one circular they took seriously" (Thomas, 
1985:291). Native peoples received financial credit at the posts 
for contributing objects and documentation, and the HBC men 
were listed as Smithsonian collaborators and donors. In some 
instances they found their names credited in subspecies desig?
nations. Bernard Ross became so interested in natural history 
that he began to write original contributions for the Smithson?
ian Annual Report and other biological publications. 
The Kennicott enterprise rivals Morgan's Seneca collection 
as the first intensive American effort to develop a systematic 
collection of ethnological materials gathered according to a 
prescribed scientific plan. The collection was undertaken us?
ing Baird and Gibbs's system of documentation and was the 
Smithsonian's first attempt to develop a comprehensive cul?
tural collection from a circumscribed geographic region. Be?
cause Kennicott's ethnological collections were never fully 
published they are relatively unknown, but they represent an 
important development in anthropological field collecting, in?
corporating detailed descriptions and observations of place, 
tribal affiliation, and native terminology; they also utilized na?
tive people as collectors and informants to a greater degree 
than was the case for collections made in previous decades, 
such as those by Lewis and Clark, Berlandier, Catlin, and 
Voznesenskii, or those of Prince Maximilian, who collected 
on the upper Missouri in 1832-1834 (Maximilian, 1906; 
Ewers etal., 1984). 
Unlike Morgan's collection, which, though published, had 
few intellectual offspring, the Kennicott-Baird program in the 
Mackenzie District began a long and productive tradition of 
scientific collecting at the Smithsonian. In 1865-1866, after 
Kennicott's return from the Mackenzie, Baird sent him to Rus?
sian America to lead a survey team charting a route across 
Alaska to Siberia for the Western Union Telegraph Company 
(Collins, 1946; Fitzhugh and Selig, 1981) (Figures 4, 5). The 
project was complex and had strategic importance for emer?
gent United States interests in the Northwest. But with West?
ern Union in charge, the Smithsonian science program re?
mained a remote second priority. After an auspicious 
beginning, the scientific program fell prey to conflicted goals. 
Bound by contract to complete a rapid survey, Kennicott be?
came overwhelmed by the problems of running a huge explo?
ration party in unknown country where logistic support like 
that provided by the HBC in the Mackenzie was absent. Fits of 
depression set in, and on 13 May 1866 he was found dead of 
unknown causes on the banks of the Yukon River.7 Later that 
year a rival company completed the trans-Atlantic cable. 
Western Union cancelled the survey, and the scientific team, 
now led by William Healy Dall, returned to Washington to re?
port its findings. Despite problems, the Kennicott expedition 
produced the first significant scientific information on Russian 
America made by American observers, and during the next 
year Baird publicized the findings in Congress and circulated 
scientific reports to his network of state natural history societ?
ies, urging them to support the purchase of what some had 
dubbed "Seward's Folly." Although the political significance 
of Baird's campaign to convince Congress to purchase Alaska 
has been disputed (Sherwood, 1965), Kennicott's Mackenzie 
and Alaska surveys laid the groundwork for an explosion of 
Smithsonian survey and field collecting activities following 
the annexation of Alaska, in 1867. 
NUMBER 44 189 
V*. 
Iff it/ . dp ' \ V * ? ? ? ? ? ? f # t i 
FIGURE 4.?Caribou hide tunic collected for Robert Kennicott by Bernard R. Ross of the Hudson's Bay Com?
pany from Peel River Loucheux, British America, in 1866. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Nat?
ural History, Department of Anthropology (catalog no. 1855-6). Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution (neg. 
no. 85-1379). 
190 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
A P P E N D I X 
Flag of the Scientific Corps. 
M E M B E R S . 
ROBERT KENNICOTT, 
W. H. DALL, H. W. ELLIOTT, 
H . M. BANNISTER, J. T. ROTHROCK, 
FERDINAND BISCHOFF, CHARLES PEASE. 
FIGURE 5.?Flag of the Western Union "Scientific Corps" (from Alaska and Its 
Resources (Dall, 1870)). 
Baird's Alaska Program 
Kennicott's opening of Alaska began a heyday for Smithson?
ian field collecting and natural history. Over the next 10 years 
Baird set up collecting programs that covered the entire 
Alaska territory and adjacent parts of Canada and Russia 
(Fitzhugh, 1988). His techniques were similar to those used 
by Kennicott in the Mackenzie District. Baird was assisted by 
the Alaska Commercial Company (the successor to the Rus?
sian America Company), other private trading companies, and 
a network of United States Government installations estab?
lished by the Army, Coast Guard, and Signal Corps, to gather 
meteorological and natural resource data and administer gov?
ernment services. Baird convinced these agencies to hire his 
naturalists to conduct government studies and in their spare 
time had them gather collections and data for the Smithsonian. 
Baird provided instruments, collecting materials, credit in 
trade goods at posts, and freight for shipping specimens to 
Washington. 
Dall, a charter member of Kennicott's Telegraph Survey 
team, became honorary curator of mollusks at the Smithsonian 
and wrote Alaska and its Resources (Dall, 1870), the first En?
glish language book on Alaska (Figure 6). His surveys of 
western and southern Alaska netted large natural history col?
lections, and he published important papers and monographs 
on anthropological materials. Dall was emphatic in recom?
mending to Baird the opportunities for biology and ethnology 
in the lower Yukon region, with the result that Lucien Turner, 
another Smithsonian naturalist, was posted at St. Michael, 
near the entrance of the Yukon River, to begin a collecting 
program in 1871. In 1877 Turner was shifted to Unalaska to 
make room for a more accomplished young Smithsonian natu?
ralist, Edward William Nelson, who took up residence at St. 
Michael from 1877 to 1881 (Figure 7). During this period 
Nelson collected more than 12,000 ethnological items, all 
fully documented, and thousands of biological specimens. 
Most important, Nelson was the first of Baird's northern col?
lectors to publish his collections completely, reporting on ge?
ography (1882), natural history (1887), and ethnology (1899) 
(Figures 8-10).8 
Nelson represents the epitome of Baird's naturalists. Like 
Kennicott, his collecting program was conducted with Native 
American assistants whose work, combined with Nelson's own 
extensive collecting trips, created a huge inventory of cultural 
and biological materials from thousands of square miles of 
western Alaska, the Bering Strait, and adjacent coastal 
Chukotka. Nelson's ethnology collections are important today 
because he collected with the impartial eye of a naturalist. His 
scientific writings on people and cultures are relatively free of 
the evolutionary paradigms and western superiority that tainted 
much early ethnological field observation until well after the 
Boasian revolution that followed 1900. Nelson's diaries 
(though sometimes less objective) are rich in anthropological 
detail (Nelson, 1877-1881), and his 1899 monograph "Eski?
mos About Bering Strait" describes Alaskan Eskimo cultures 
with the same descriptive clarity found in his reporting of natu?
ral history and animal behavior. 
Baird's impact is best seen in the following (partial) list of 
naturalists whose biological and ethnological collecting he pro?
moted in Alaska and other regions of Arctic and Subarctic 
North America. These include Kennicott in British America 
(1859-1862) and in interior Alaska (1865-1866); Dall in 
Alaska (1865-1885); Turner in St. Michael (1871-1877), the 
Aleutians (1877-1878), and northern Quebec (1882-1884); 
Nelson in the Yukon-Kuskokwim, Seward Peninsula, and Ber?
ing Straits region (1877-1881); John Murdoch at Barrow 
(1881-1883); Charles MacKay in Bristol Bay (1881-1883); 
William J. Fisher in Kodiak Island (1880-1885); and James G. 
Swan (1850-1880s), John J. McLean (1883-1884), Robert Ni-
NUMBER 44 191 
K EG I K T O W R U K I N T H E F A L L . 
FIGURE 6.?"Kegiktowruk in the Fall." Yupik Eskimo village drawn by Dall and published in Alaska and Its 
Resources (Dall, 1870). 
black (1885-1887), and Lt. George T Emmons (1882-1900) in 
southeast Alaska. These men provided the Smithsonian with 
magnificent collections of Alaskan natural history and anthro?
pological materials. The fact that these collections and their 
documentation were gathered and have been preserved and 
protected down through the years is one of the most important 
contributions the Smithsonian has made to northern science 
and cultural studies. 
But there was also a downside. Except for Dall, Nelson, 
Turner, Niblack, and Murdoch, few of these naturalists pub?
lished their ethnology collections. None were anthropologists 
(nearly an unknown breed until the 1890s in any case), and 
only Dall became a Smithsonian employee. By the 1880s Baird 
had succeeded in recruiting the services of volunteers and cura?
tors in various fields, and it was they who took on the task of 
publishing segments of the Alaska collections. As a result, 
Alaskan ethnographic collections were partly published by 
Dall (1870), Otis T. Mason, Walter Hough, Charles Rau, Walter 
Hoffman (1897), and others recruited to the effort by Baird and 
his successor to the directorship of the National Museum, 
George Brown Goode. For the most part these works were ty?
pological and comparative and failed to capture the "living" 
ethnology and first-person veracity seen in the Nelson and 
Murdoch monographs. For these reasons the publications and 
the museum exhibits that followed (Gibbs, 1882; Holmes, 
1903; Ewers, 1959; Fitzhugh, 1996) were criticized by Boas 
and others for their flawed evolutionary underpinnings and 
lack of cultural context (Hinsley, 1981:98). 
Nelson's approach to ethnography is evident in his writings 
(1899). He knew that cultures were not monolithic, and he 
recognized that geographic variation operated in culture as 
well as in biology and understood that evidence of history and 
cultural influence could be elicited from field data collected 
with spatial precision. Nelson's huge systematic collection 
from throughout western Alaska and Beringia crossed linguis?
tic, geographic, and cultural borders and thus presented an 
ideal data set for analysis following principles of cultural and 
biological variation. Nelson commented at one point, "In the 
evening I secured a small vocabulary from a Nunivak Native 
who is here [in Tununak, a Yupik village in Nelson Island be?
tween the mouths of the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers]. The 
language is almost identical with that spoken here, and the 
people have no trouble in communicating with each other" 
(Nelson, 1877-1881, entry for 22 Dec 1879). But his profes-
192 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 7.?Edward W. Nelson on one of his trips up 
the Yukon River, ca. 1880. Courtesy of the Smithson?
ian Institution (neg. no. SI-6342). 
sion was ornithology, and when he finally found time to pre?
pare his ethnological monograph, more than 10 years after re?
turning from Alaska, it is not surprising that he did not pursue 
its full theoretical potential. Nevertheless, even today his col?
lection of more than 8000 specimens, housed in the Smithson?
ian's National Museum of Natural History (which contains the 
collections of the former United States National Museum), 
can be used for detailed spatial studies like those Baird con?
ducted on eastern North American reptiles, or like those Boas 
(1903) planned for the Jesup North Pacific Expedition and 
which Leroi-Gourhan (1946) accomplished partly in 
"Archeologie du Pacifique-Nord." 
Following the close of the first chapter of anthropological 
collecting in the north, the Smithsonian's United States Na?
tional Museum began to focus on research and collecting ef?
forts in the Plains, Southwest, and California, and these were 
paralleled by vigorous programs launched by the BAE (Hins?
ley, 1981:83-125). Arctic collecting continued to provide the 
Smithsonian with specimens, but by this time exhibition and 
description of existing collections occupied the museum staff, 
and field work began to come under the purview of newly hired 
cultural specialists whose research interests lay further south. It 
therefore fell to others, especially to the National Museum's 
anthropology curator, Otis Mason, to translate Baird's collect-
NUMBER 44 193 
^-*^e-<_ J?~^yx 
iKZf^xuAs. I 
FIGURE 8.?"Native village [Gambell] on SW. Point of St Lawrence Is. Copied from sketch by J[ohn] Muir, 
Summer 1881. At this place about 100 dead natives victims of famine two years ago were found?Only about 15 
survivors in two summer houses on the hills" (Nelson, 1877-1881, entry for 3 Jul 1881). 
FIGURE 9.?Ingaliks from Lower Yukon, photographed by Edward W. Nelson in 1880. Courtesy of the 
Smithsonian Institution (neg. no. SI-6367'/2). 
194 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 10.?Norton Sound kayak hunting photographed by Edward W. Nel?
son and hunting visor (right) collected from this hunter. Smithsonian Institu?
tion, National Museum of Natural History, Department of Anthropology (cata?
log no. El 76207). Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution (neg. no. 3846) and 
the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution (neg. no. 83-
10730). 
ing and research method into "museum anthropology." As 
noted by Hinsley: 
In 1883 he [Mason] referred to anthropology as "the application of the instru?
mentalities and methods of natural history to the study of man"; Franz Boas 
recognized a few years later that biological analogy was the "leading idea" in 
Mason's work. ..."Culture history" he [Mason] once proposed, "takes up the 
thread of human social groupings where biology drops it and traces its further 
weavings." Mason's first step with a specimen was to identify its geographic 
and ethnographic provenance, shape, structure, purpose, and unique proper?
ties, [in Mason's words] "just as a naturalist would with a plant or an animal." 
(Hinsley, 1981:91) 
This was fine method for a Bairdian naturalist, but for the 
emerging field of academic ethnology, more would be required. 
Baird's Legacy 
Despite their different views about the future of the Smithson?
ian, both Henry and Baird shared a fundamental belief in the 
importance of empirical evidence in science and a skepticism 
of unsubstantiated theory. Powell was of similar mind. All the 
publications and projects conducted by the Smithsonian during 
its first 50 years emphasized the contributions of basic data and 
incremental knowledge, and these goals continue to inspire the 
institution's programs today. Baird's approach, involving the 
integration of increasingly larger sets of data, was as suitable a 
NUMBER 44 195 
method for anthropology as it was for biology, and the field 
methods employed by early naturalists following the Bairdian 
system produced excellent building blocks for broader cultural 
analysis and integration. 
Baird's record was less substantial when it came to analysis 
and publication of cultural materials. Kennicott never got to 
publish his collections, but his followers?Dall, Nelson, 
Turner, and some others?urged on by Powell, had more suc?
cess. None, however, carried the plan to completion as antici?
pated by Baird, that is, detailed analysis of ethnological collec?
tions with respect to geographic distribution and regional 
differences. This task was taken up at the level of artifact types 
by Hough and Mason in the 1890s, and in the early 1900s eth?
nologists Gudmund Hatt, Eric Holtved, and Kaj Birket-Smith, 
using arctic collections in Denmark, extended the method to 
whole ethnological culture complexes, in essence conducting 
an "archaeology" of the present. But by this time, questions 
were being asked of ethnology other than trait-list comparison 
and distribution, and new studies required richer contextual 
data, history, linguistic information, and other evidence. It was 
in these directions, away from formal material culture studies, 
that Smithsonian ethnologists turned during the development 
of the BAE. 
Other than Mason's culture-area hypothesis, these Smithson?
ian programs had little impact on later developments in anthro?
pology, which veered strongly away from its earlier biological 
and evolutionary underpinnings. One could argue that Baird 
had little impact on the development of anthropological theory 
because he was working with a biological paradigm and had 
only a general sense of anthropological research problems. 
Boundaries of cultural types and forms rather than interactions 
in time or space were the features motivating Mason's and 
Hough's studies of the arctic collections. In later years, under 
Powell and Holmes, history became the paradigm of choice, 
and this framework has dominated Smithsonian work to the 
present day. Baird's naturalists made their greatest contribu?
tions in securing large, comprehensive documented field col?
lections that would not have survived otherwise, and they pro?
vided a firm material culmre baseline and cultural descriptions 
useful for later archaeological and ethnological studies. 
Powell and Mason documented language and culmre areas 
but did not seek understandings about how those boundaries 
came to be. Perhaps it was enough that they recognized that 
boundaries did not conform easily to geographic or ecological 
zones and were not strictly environmentally determined. It re?
mained for Boas to approach the problem of cultural process 
from a different direction, from the inner workings of culture 
itself, and of unique histories. This was an approach that the 
arctic naturalists could not have accomplished, since few 
(other than Nelson) ever became proficient in the native lan?
guage of their research areas. In short, when advances began 
to be made in Smithsonian anthropology, the Bairdian para?
digm was a necessary but insufficient means for anthropologi?
cal success. Powell, James Dorsey, James Mooney, Frank 
Cushing, and others turned primarily to non-material culture 
studies and saw material culture collections as of secondary 
importance. While the tradition of field documentation contin?
ued, the questions changed. In short, the legacy of Baird for 
arctic research was in the collection, field documentation, and 
preservation of large systematic collections, and occasional 
extremely important descriptive publications (assisted by 
Powell and the BAE), rather than in advancing the frontier of 
anthropological theory, which Baird's naturalists were not 
equipped to do. 
Museum Anthropology and the Native Constituency 
Ironically, 150 years later and after many decades of eclipse, 
material culture studies of the type promoted by Baird are 
again emerging at the cutting edge of anthropological re?
search, revitalized by new theory and by the emergence of Na?
tive American interest and scholarship. As a result, today the 
arctic collections of the National Museum of Natural History 
(NMNH) seem poised for a somewhat different future than 
was envisioned by the salvage and research paradigm under 
which they were collected. At that time it was assumed that 
the cultures of arctic peoples, though better "preserved" than 
those of native peoples further south, would eventually disap?
pear in the wave of westernization sweeping the country. Pre?
served, documented, and published in part, the northern col?
lections offer great potential for future researchers and Native 
American artists and cultural specialists. Because the Smith?
sonian never hired a curator of northern ethnology, these col?
lections lay dormant and were used only occasionally for ex?
hibit renovations or loans to other institutions.9 Without 
adequate funds and display space for developing exhibits that 
take advantage of these rich inventories, more than 99.9% of 
the Smithsonian's northern materials have been resting in 
quiet splendor on shelves in the Museum Support Center in 
Suitland, Maryland, awaiting future publication and exhibition 
opportunities. 
Recently, media reports about Smithsonian anthropology 
have emphasized the collections of the newly acquired Na?
tional Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) without refer?
ence to the older collections of the NMNH. Although less-well 
documented and less published, the NMAI materials contribute 
importantly to the Smithsonian's overall holdings of arctic peo?
ples, adding much twentieth-century Alaskan and Canadian 
materials where the older NMNH collections are weak. Gener?
ally, the NMNH collections are strongest for the earliest peri?
ods, from the 1840s to the 1920s, while the NMAI northern 
collections are strongest for the period between 1910 and the 
1950s and have important eighteenth century materials that 
George Heye purchased from early but largely undocumented 
European and American collections. The NMAI also has strong 
collections of Latin American antiquities, mostly purchased by 
Heye's collectors without documentation. Together, the 
NMNH and NMAI collections provide one of the largest col-
196 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
lections of American Indian research and exhibition materials 
in the world. 
Today, in a time of new populism and ethnic awareness, 
these collections do not need to remain under one roof in 
Washington, D.C, and would be better used if a portion could 
be placed closer to people with specific interest in them. Even 
if we someday find a way to create a Smithsonian "Museum of 
Cultures," I believe we nevertheless need to explore new cura?
torial arrangements that bring portions of our northern collec?
tions closer to the native peoples who created them and who 
continue to see them as unique, "living" cultural treasures. 
Keeping these treasures in vaults in Washington or New York 
has preserved them effectively for the past 150 years. But inter?
est in the repatriation movement shows that collections are not 
only of interest to scholars but have a wider constituency that 
includes Alaska Natives and state residents. 
In the future our mission as a national museum of cultures 
has to be broader than it has been in the past. While scholarly 
collecting, archiving, and research must continue, in the 
twenty-first century, Smithsonian research in anthropology will 
be conducted as museum-community partnerships, not by sci?
entists with notepads and collecting bags combing the "hinter?
lands" as in days of yore. The repatriation movement is the har?
binger of a new phase of community interest that will 
invigorate research conducted in collaboration with local 
knowledge and initiative. Native peoples and museum special?
ists need to think more about how this will be done. While I am 
certain that the museum anthropology practiced by our prede?
cessors largely as an isolated academic research enterprise is 
dead, today's community-focused museum anthropology is 
showing vigorous signs of life. 
The Smithsonian's Arctic Studies Center has been experi?
menting with new approaches to bring our northern collec?
tions into closer contact with their cultural roots in the North 
(Krupnik, 2000; Loring, 2001). Since 1988, when congres?
sional support for a continuing program of northern research 
and education began, we have sought to present Smithsonian 
collections to the scholarly community and public through a 
variety of exhibitions. The most ambitious was the joint So?
viet-American exhibition Crossroads of Continents: Cultures 
of Siberia and Alaska. Versions of this exhibit toured nation?
ally in 1988-1991, visited rural settlements in Alaska in 
1993-1996, and were seen in the Russian Far East in 
1996-1997. Scholarly publications and educational materials 
have been created for a variety of audiences, and internet and 
film programming now bring collections from the Smithson?
ian and other institutions with North Pacific holdings before 
even wider audiences. 
In 1993 an agreement with the Anchorage Museum of His?
tory and Art permitted the Arctic Studies Center to open a re?
gional office in Anchorage, and this program has steadily ex?
panded its offerings and impact on the cultural life of Alaska. 
Workshops and training programs, plans for small regional ex?
hibitions, and collaboration with Alaskan institutions have cre?
ated a niche that offers great potential for preserving Alaska's 
cultural heritage and for training a new generation of Native 
cultural specialists in museum practice.10 The value of this ap?
proach will not only enhance access to museum collections and 
documentation; it will also lead to new collecting and docu?
mentation projects both in traditional arts and in novel types of 
cultural media now emerging. 
The crucial link yet to be made is to begin a transfer of col?
lections and research materials from Washington, D.C, to our 
new facility in Anchorage. We plan to shift a portion of the 
Museum's Alaskan ethnographic collections from each of the 
major tribal groups (Inupiat, Yupik, Aleut (Unangan), Kodiak 
(Alutiiq), Athapaskan, Tlingit, Haida) to a supervised storage 
facility at our facilities in the Anchorage Museum of Art and 
History where they can be used for traveling exhibits prepared 
with Native trainees and curators, and for museum training pro?
grams, publications, Native arts, and general educational activ?
ity. The NMAI is participating in this project and will also loan 
parts of its collections to Alaska. The rationale for this collec?
tion sharing or "affiliation program" (the official Smithsonian 
designation for this practice) is based on the need to provide 
representative materials from early collections not available in 
other Alaskan museums for direct use in Alaska. Alaskan mu?
seums have significant ethnological collections, but early col?
lections are few and often lack documentation. By making 
Smithsonian collections available first-hand in Alaska, unique 
cultural resources can help perpetuate and invigorate living 
cultural traditions. Their presence will also contribute to eco?
nomic development, professional training of Alaska Natives, 
and local museum growth. Having these materials available on 
a rotating basis, under professional care, we can also ensure 
that these materials remain in the public domain, where they 
can be appreciated by all. This is not the case today, where the 
great collections from early Alaska are geographically remote 
and largely inaccessible to a growing, newly recognized native 
and northern constituency. 
In the long run, to pursue the past curatorial policy of collec?
tion growth without use and diffusion is to court disaster, for 
the Smithsonian's cultural collections are only as secure as the 
national will for stewardship. After 150 years of "increase" it is 
time to share cultural treasures and expertise that the institution 
has with great care and diligence acquired and maintained. The 
efforts of Baird and Kennicott, and those of many who fol?
lowed, have given us extraordinary resources to work with. 
History has shown that collections must circulate and 
"breathe," or they will eventually be lost through neglect or po?
litical contrivance. The Arctic Studies Center program is de?
signed to enhance the use and availability of these invaluable 
collections to all sectors of society. In this goal we are in close 
agreement with Smithson's original mandate and the pioneer?
ing legacy of Henry and Baird, who established documentation 
standards and institutional goals that became indispensable for 
the foundation of museum anthropology. 
NUMBER 44 197 
Notes 
This paper was originally prepared for the Smithsonian symposium "What 
About Increase" and was presented on 13 Mar 1995. A revised version was 
given at the Smithsonian Archives Forum on 13 Dec 1995. I gratefully ac?
knowledge contributions made by William C. Sturtevant to these drafts and for 
the generous use of his unpublished manuscript material (Sturtevant, 1987). 
Elisabeth Tooker provided important information, especially on the Morgan 
connection. John C. Ewers, Adrienne Kaeppler, Edmund Carpenter, and Jane 
Walsh also provided helpful advice, and I thank Ron Vasile of the Chicago 
Academy of Science for information on Kennicott's biography. Previous re?
search by Hinsley (1981), Rivinus and Youssef (1992), and Lindsay (1993) 
have been crucial to this effort. 
During the preparation of this paper it became evident to me that the early 
history of anthropological collecting at the Smithsonian and elsewhere is less 
well known than I had imagined. In fact, research on this subject has only be?
gun. The notes offered herein are intended primarily as a stimulus in this direc?
tion. I had initially intended to focus primarily on Kennicott, but the broader 
aspects of the roles of Kennicott and Baird took this project farther afield, leav?
ing much research still remaining to be done on the history of Kennicott's field 
activities. Perhaps this paper will challenge others to assess the Baird-Kenni-
cott legacy in establishing a scientific framework for systematic ethnological 
field collecting in the Americas. If so, it will not only have honored the career 
of one of museum anthropology's strongest proponents, William C. Sturtevant, 
but it will stimulate interest in understanding the origins and future of museum 
anthropology. 
1. As Sturtevant has noted (pers. comm., 1996), the broadest mid-nineteenth 
century meaning of "ethnology'' approximated the "four-field" meaning of an?
thropology today, while in its narrower context it stood related to but apart 
from archaeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics. Franz Boas welded 
these fields into a unified science of anthropology in the 1890s. 
2. See Lindsay (1993:13-37) for an extensive discussion of Baird's science 
program in general and in northwestern North America. 
3. The Smithsonian's early policy of distributing its collections, carried out 
most vigorously during the 1880s and 1890s, continued well into the twentieth 
century. According to Smithsonian anthropologist Jane Walsh (pers. comm., 
1997), determining the inventory history of the Wilkes Collection is problem?
atic because objects were frequently cataloged in lots, with numerous speci?
mens assigned to a single catalog number. 
4. Notes and Queries was issued in five editions, through 1929, by the British 
Association for the Advancement of Science, with a sixth edition (1951) pub?
lished in cooperation with the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain. 
5. Baird was the first American scientist to explore the possibility of working 
with the HBC, an idea that may have resulted from his awareness of collections 
made by HBC factors for the Royal Society in London, for Edinburgh (through 
Daniel Wilson's impetus), and for Canadian institutions (Lindsay, 1993: 
41-43). 
6. For works on Kennicott's biography, northern expeditions, and the HBC's 
Smithsonian connection, see the Smithsonian Institution's annual reports for 
1859-1866; Anonymous, 1867-1869; Preble, 1908; James, 1942; Nute, 1943; 
Collins, 1946; Deignan, 1947; Fitzhugh and Selig, 1981; Coates, 1984; 
Thomas, 1985; and Vasile, 1994. 
7. Stroke, heart failure, and suicide have been cited as possible causes of 
Kennicott's death, but the truth will probably never be known. In fact, Kenni?
cott had been unhealthy as a child but had overcome his frailty by drive and 
will power. On the other hand he was emotional and temperamental, and in the 
days before his death he had been depressed and under great stress. 
8. Nelson later went on to conduct the first natural history survey of western 
Mexico; founded and led the United States Department of Agriculture's Bio?
logical Survey from 1916 to 1927, negotiated and wrote the first international 
legislation protecting migratory bird species (The Migratory Bird Treaty Act) 
and the Alaska Game Law of 1925?all the products of a bachelor who in later 
life resided in the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C, until his death, in 1934 
(Goldman, 1935; Lantis, 1954; Collins, 1982). 
9. Recent research and exhibition use of the Alaska collections began with 
the exhibition The Far North (Collins etal., 1973). This was followed by inten?
sive study of the E.W. Nelson collection for the exhibition Inua: Spirit World of 
the Bering Sea Eskimo (Fitzhugh and Kaplan, 1982). In the 1980s Jean-Loup 
Rousselot studied the Kennicott, MacFarlane, and Ross materials, but his work 
remains unpublished, and these founding collections of Smithsonian ethnogra?
phy have never been exhibited. A fourth project, the analysis and exhibition of 
the William J. Fisher ethnographic collection from Kodiak Island and the 
Alaska Peninsula, has been published by Aron Crowell and others (Crowell, 
1992; Crowell etal., 2001). 
10. See the Arctic Studies Center Newsletter (1993-2001, Arctic Studies Cen?
ter, NMNH, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C), and see its website at 
http://www.nmnh.si.edu/arctic. 
Literature Cited 
Anonymous 
1867-1869. Biography of Robert Kennicott. Transactions of the Chicago 
A cademy of Sciences, 1 (2): 13 4. 
Baird, Spencer F , and Charles Girard 
1853. Catalogue of North American Reptiles in the Museum of the Smith?
sonian Institution, Part I: Serpents. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Col?
lections, 2 (article 5): 172 pages. Washington, D .C: Smithsonian 
Institution. 
Berlandier, Jean Louis 
1980. Journey to Mexico during the Years 1826-1834. Introduction by 
Charles H. Muller, translated by Sheila M. Ohlendorf, Josette M. 
Bigelow, and Mary M. Standifer, 2 volumes, 1: xxxvi, 1 leaf+287 
pages; 2: vii, 2 leaves +[289]-672 pages. Austin: University of 
Texas Press and Texas State Historical Association in cooperation 
with the Center for Studies in Texas History. 
Board of Regents, Smithsonian Institution 
1847. [First] Annual Report from the Board of Regents, submitted to Con?
gress,...of the Smithsonian Institution. 29th Cong., 2d sess., S. Doc. 
211, 38 pages. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. 
1853. Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian 
Institution for the Year 1852. 32nd Cong. 2d sess., S. Misc. Doc. 53, 
96 pages. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. 
Boas, Franz 
1903. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition. American Museum Journal, 
3(5):72-119. 
British Association for the Advancement of Science 
1874. Notes and Queries on Anthropology for the Use of Travellers and 
Residents in Uncivilized Lands, xiv+146 pages. London: E. Stan?
ford. 
Brown, Yu-Ying 
1996. The Von Siebold Collection in the British Library. In Josef Kreiner, 
editor, Die Japansammlungen Philipp Franz und Heinrich von Sie?
bold. Deutsches Institut fur Japanstudien der Philipp Franz von Sie?
bold Stiftung, Miscellanea, 12:117-138. Tokyo. 
Coates, S.K. 
1984. The Kennicott Network: Robert Kennicott and the Far Northwest. In 
Proceedings of the Yukon Historical and Museums Association, 
2:25-32. Whitehorse, Yukon: Department of Library and Informa-
198 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
tion Resources, Government of Yukon. 
Collins, Henry B. 
1946. Wilderness Exploration and Alaska's Purchase. The Living Wilder?
ness, 11(19): 17?18. Washington, D.C: The Wilderness Society 
1982. The Man Who Buys Good-For-Nothing Things. In William W. 
Fitzhugh and Susan A. Kaplan, editors, Inua: Spirit World of the 
Bering Sea Eskimo, pages 29-37. Washington, D .C: Smithsonian 
Institution Press. 
Collins, Henry B., Frederica De Laguna, Edmund Carpenter, and Peter Stone 
1973. The Far North: 2000 Years of American Eskimo and Indian Art. xxx 
+289 pages. Washington, D.C: National Gallery of Art. [Reprinted 
by the Indiana University Press, Bloomington, in 1977.] 
Crowell, Aron L. 
1992. Postcontact Koniag Ceremonialism on Kodiak Island and the 
Alaska Peninsula: Evidence from the Fisher Collection. Arctic An?
thropology, 29(1): 18-37'. 
Crowell, Aron L., Amy F. Steffian, and Gordon L. Pullar, editors 
2001. Looking Both Ways: Heritage and Identify of the Alutiiq People. 
Fairbanks: University of Alsaka Press. 
Dall, William H. 
1870. Alaska and Its Resources, xii+627 pages. Boston: Lee and Shepard. 
1915. Spencer Fullerton Baird: A Biography, xvi+462 pages. Philadel?
phia, Pennsylvania: J.B. Lippincott Co. 
Dam-Mikkelsen, Bente, and Torben Lundbaek, editors 
1980. Ethnographic Objects in the Royal Danish Kunstkammer 
1650-1800. Nationalmuseets Skrifter, Etnografisk Raekke, 17: xxxii 
+260 pages. Copenhagen: Nationalmuseet. 
Deignan, Herbert G. 
1947. The HBC and the Smithsonian. The Beaver, outfit 278(June):3-7. 
Winnipeg, Manitoba: The Hudson's Bay Company. 
Dzeniskevich, Galena I., and Larisa P. Pavlinskaya 
1988. Treasures by the Neva: The Russian Collections. In William W. 
Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell, editors, Crossroads of Continents: Cul?
tures of Siberia and Alaska, pages 83-88. Washington, D.C: Smith?
sonian Institution Press. 
Ewers, John C. 
1959. A Century of American Indian Exhibits in the Smithsonian Institu?
tion. Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1958:513-525. 
Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
Ewers, John C , editor 
1969. The Indians of Texas in 1830, by Jean Louis Berlandier. Translated 
by Patricia Reading LeClercq, xi+209 pages. Washington, D .C: 
Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Ewers, John C , Marsha V. Gallagher, David C. Hunt, and Joseph C. Porter, 
editors 
1984. Views of a Vanishing Frontier. 103 pages. Omaha, Nebraska: Joslyn 
Art Museum; Lincoln: Distributed by University of Nebraska Press. 
Fitzhugh, William W. 
1988. Baird's Naturalists: Smithsonian Collectors in Alaska. In William 
W. Fitzhugh and Aron L. Crowell, editors, Crossroads of Conti?
nents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska, pages 89-96. Washington, 
D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
1996. Ambassadors in Sealskins: Exhibiting Eskimos at the Smithsonian. 
In Amy Henderson and Adrienne Kaeppler, editors, Exhibiting Di?
lemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smithsonian, pages 
206-245. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Fitzhugh, William W., and Aron L. Crowell, editors 
1988. Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska. 360 
pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Fitzhugh, William W., and Ruth O. Selig 
1981. The Smithsonian's Alaska Connection: Nineteenth Century Explor?
ers and Anthropologists. In Virginia McKinley, editor, Alaska Jour?
nal: A 1981 Collection, pages 198-208. Anchorage: Alaska 
Northwest Publishing Company. 
Forrer, Matthi 
1996. The Leiden Collections of Philipp von Siebold. In Josef Kreiner, ed?
itor, Die Japansammlungen Philipp Franz und Heinrich von Siebold. 
Deutsches Institut fur Japanstudien der Philipp Franz von Siebold 
Stiftung, Miscellanea, 12:15-33. Tokyo. 
Gibbs, George 
1862. Instructions for Archaeological Investigations in the United States. 
Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institu?
tion for the year 1861. 37th Cong., 2d sess., H. Misc. Doc. 77, pages 
392-396. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. 
1863. Instructions for Research Relative to the Ethnology and Philology of 
America. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 1 (article 11): 54 
pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
[Gibbs, George] 
1882. The Organization and Objects of the National Museum. Proceedings 
of the United States National Museum, 4(1881), appendix, Circular 
15: 4 pages. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. 
Goddard, Ives 
1996. The Classification of the Native Languages of North America. In 
William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of North American 
Indians, volume 17, Ives Goddard, editor, Languages, pages 
290-323. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
Goldman, Edward. A. 
1935. Edward William Nelson?Naturalist, 1855-1934. The Auk, 52(2): 
135-148. 
Goode, George B., editor 
1897. 77;e Smithsonian Institution 1846-1896: The History of Its First 
Half Century, x+856 pages. Washington, D.C: Divine Press. 
Hale, Horatio 
1846. Ethnography and Philology. In United States Exploring Expedition, 
during the Years 1838-1842, Under the Command of Charles 
Wilkes, U.S.N., volume 6: xii+666 pages. Philadelphia, Pennsylva?
nia: C. Sherman. 
1856. Archaeology in the United States, or Sketches Historical and Biblio?
graphical, of the Progress of Information and Opinion Respecting 
Vestiges of Antiquity in the United States. Smithsonian Contribu?
tions to Knowledge, 8(article 2): 1-168. Washington, D.C: Smith?
sonian Institution. 
Hinsley, Curtis M., Jr. 
1981. Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Devel?
opment of American Anthropology, 1846-1910. 319 pages. Wash?
ington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Hoffman, Walter J. 
1897. The Graphic Art of the Eskimos, Based upon the Collections in the 
National Museum. Annual Report of the United States National Mu?
seum, 1895:739-968. Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing 
Office. 
Holmes, William H. 
1903. The Exhibit of the Department of Anthropology. In Frederick W. 
True, William H. Holmes, and George P. Merrill, Report on the Ex?
hibit of the United States National Museum at the Pan-American 
Exposition, Buffalo, New York, 1901. Annual Report of the United 
States National Museum, 1901: 200-231. Washington, D.C: U.S. 
Government Printing Office. 
James, James A. 
1942. The First Scientific Exploration of Russian America and the Pur?
chase of Alaska. Northwestern University Studies in the Social Sci?
ences, 4: xii + 276 pages . Evanston, I l l inois: Northwestern 
University Press. 
Jefferson, Thomas 
1955. Notes on the State of Virginia. Edited and with an introduction and 
notes by William Peden, xxv+315 pages. Chapel Hill: University of 
North Carolina Press. 
NUMBER 44 199 
Kaeppler, Adrienne 
1972. The Use of Documents in Identifying Ethnographic Specimens from 
the Voyages of Captain Cook. The Journal of Pacific History, 7: 
195-200. 
1978. "Artificial Curiosities": Being an Exposition of Native Manufac?
tures Collected on the Three Pacific Voyages of Captain James 
Cook, R.N....xvi+293 pages. Honolulu, Hawaii: Bishop Museum 
Press. [Bishop Museum Special Publication, 65.] 
1985. Anthropology and the U.S. Exploring Expedition. In Herman J. Vi?
ola and Carolyn Margolis, editors, Magnificent Voyagers: The U.S. 
Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842. pages 119-148. Washington, 
D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
King, Jonaman CH. 
1994. Ethnographic Collections: Collecting in the Context of Sloane's 
Catalogue of 'Miscellanies.' In Arthur MacGregor, editor, Sir Hans 
Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the Brit?
ish Museum, pages 228-244. London: British Museum Press in as?
sociation with Alistair McAlpine. 
Kinzhalov, R.V. 
[1983.] History of the American Collections in the Museum of Anthropol?
ogy and Ethnography, Leningrad. In Henry N. Michael and James 
VanStone, editors, Cultures of the Bering Sea Region: Papers from 
an International Symposium, pages 311-324. New York: Interna?
tional Research and Exchanges Board. 
Kreiner, Josef 
1993. European Images of the Ainu and Ainu Studies in Europe. In Josef 
Kreiner, editor, European Studies on Ainu Language and Culture. 
Deutsches Institut fiir Japanstudien der Philipp Franz von Siebold 
Stiftung, Monograph, 6:13-62. Tokyo. 
Kreiner, Josef, editor 
1996. Die Japansammlungen Philipp Franz und Heinrich von Siebold: 
200 Jarhe Siebold. Tokyo: Doitsu-Nihon Kenkyujo. 
Krupnik, Igor I. 
2000. Our Words Put to Paper: Sourcebook in St. Lawrence Island Yupik 
Heritage and History, 2000. 463 pages. Washington, D . C , and 
Nome Alaska: Arctic Studies Center. 
Lantis, Margaret 
1954. Edward William Nelson. Anthropological Papers of the University 
of Alaska, 3(1):5-16. 
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre 
1946. Archeologie du Pacifique-Nord. Travaux et Memoires de I'Institut 
d'Ethnologie, 42: 542 pages. Paris: Institut d'Ethnologie. 
Liapunova, Roza G. 
1967. [I.G. Voznesenskii's Expedition and Its Significance for the Ethnog?
raphy of Russian America.] Sbornik Musei Antropologii i Et-
nografii, 24:5-33. [In Russian.] 
1994. Eskimo Masks from Kodiak Island in the Collections of the Peter 
the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in St. Peters?
burg. In William W. Fitzhugh and Valerie Chaussonnet, editors, An?
thropology of the North Pacific Rim, pages 175-204. Washington, 
D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Lindsay, Debra 
1993. Science in the Subarctic: Trappers, Traders and the Smithsonian In?
stitution. xvii+176 pages. Washington, D .C: Smithsonian Institu?
tion Press. 
Linnaeus, Carl von 
1964. Systema Naturae, 1735. 30+[19] pages. Nieuwkoop: B. de Graff. 
[Facsimile of the first edition.] 
Loring, Stephen 
2001. Repatriation and Community Anthropology: The Smithsonian Insi-
tution's Artie Studies Center. In Tamara L. Bray, editor, The Future 
of the Past: Archaeologists, Native Americans, and Repatriation, 
pages 185-198. New York and London: Garland Publishing. 
MacGregor, Arthur, editor 
1994. Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father 
of the British Museum. 308 pages. London: British Museum Press in 
association with Alistair McAlpine. 
Maximilian, Prince of Wied 
1906. Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832-1834. In Reuben 
Gold Thwaites, editor, Early Western Travels, 1748-1846, volumes 
24, 25. Cleveland, Ohio: Arthur H. Clark Co. 
Morton, Samuel G. 
1839. Crania Americana; or, a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various 
Aboriginal Nations of North and South America. 3, [iii]-v, 296 
pages. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J. Dobson. 
Muller, Charles H. 
1980. Introduction. In Jean Louis Berlandier, Journey to Mexico During 
the Years 1826-1834, translated by Sheila M. Ohlendorf, Josette M. 
Bigelow, and Mary M. Standifer, pages xi-xxxvi. Austin: University 
of Texas Press and Texas State Historical Association in cooperation 
with the Center for Studies in Texas History. 
Nelson, Edward W. 
1877-1881. Field diaries in Alaska, 1877-1881. [Edward W. Nelson Pa?
pers, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Smithsonian Institution, 
Washington, D.C] 
1882. A Sledge Journey in the Delta of the Yukon, Northern Alaska. Pro?
ceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of 
Geography, new series, 4:667-681. 
1887. Report upon Natural History Collections Made in Alaska Between 
the Years 1877 and 1881. 337 pages. Washington, D .C: Govern?
ment Printing Office. [U.S. Army Signal Service, Arctic Series of 
Publications, 3.] 
1899. The Eskimo about Bering Strait. In Eighteenth Annual Report of the 
Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian 
Institution, 1896-1897, pages 3-518. Washington, D.C: U.S. Gov?
ernment Printing Office. 
Nute, Grace L. 
1943. Kennicott in the North. The Beaver, 274(September):28-32. Win?
nipeg, Manitoba: The Hundson's Bay Company. 
Peattie, Donald C. 
1936. Kennicott, Knight of the North. Esquire, March: 94-128. 
Preble, Edward A. 
1908. Biological Investigation of the Athabaska-Mackenzie Region. In 
North American Fauna, 27:70-71. U.S. Department of Agriculture, 
Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. 
Ripley, S. Dillon 
1978. The Sacred Grove: Essays on Museums. 159 pages. Washington, 
D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Rivinus, Edward F , and E.M. Youssef 
1992. Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian, x+228 pages. Washington, D.C: 
Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Schoolcraft, Henry R. 
1846. Plan for the Investigation of American Ethnology. [Manuscript in 
possession of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, 
D.C] 
Sherwood, Morgan B. 
1965. Exploration of Alaska 1865-1900. xiv+207 pages. New Haven, 
Connecticut: Yale University Press. 
Siebold, Philipp Franz von 
1833-1850. Fauna Japonica.... 5 volumes. Leiden: Published privately. 
1835-1870. Flora Japonica.... 2 volumes. Leiden: Published privately. 
1930. Nippon: Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan; Vollstandiger Neu-
druck der Urausgabe, herausgegeben von Japaninstitut Berlin. 5 
volumes. Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth. 
Silverberg, Robert 
1968. Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth, viii 
+369 pages. Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society. 
200 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Squier, Ephriam G. 
1849. Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York, Comprising the 
Results of Original Surveys and Explorations. Smithsonian Contri?
butions to Knowledge, 2(1 ):9?188. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian 
Institution. 
Squier, Ephriam G., and Edwin H. Davis 
1848. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, Comprising the Re?
sults of Extensive Original Surveys and Explorations. Smithsonian 
Contributions to Knowledge, 1:1-306. Washington, D.C: Smithson?
ian Institution. 
Stanton, William Ragan 
1960. The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes towards Race in America, 
1815-59. ix+244 pages. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago 
Press. 
Steller, Georg Wilhelm 
1988. Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741-1742. Edited by O. W. Frost, 
translated by Margritt A. Engel and O.W. Frost, vi+252 pages. Stan?
ford, California: Stanford University Press. 
Stocking, George 
1966. The History of Anthropology: Where, Whence, Whither? Journal of 
the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1:281-290. 
Sturtevant, William C 
1987. Morgan on Material Culture and Cultural Material. [Paper delivered 
to the American Anthropological Association, 18 Nov 1987; manu?
script in the possession of William C Sturtevant.] 
Thomas, Cyrus 
1894. Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology. 
Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the 
Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1890-1891, pages 3-730. 
Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. 
Thomas, Greg 
1985. The Smithsonian and the Hudson's Bay Company. Prairie Forum, 
10(2):283-305. 
Tooker, Elisabeth 
1990. A Note on Undergraduate Courses in Anthropology in the Latter 
Part of the Nineteenth Century. Man in the Northeast, 39:45-51. 
1994. Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture, xxii+325 pages. 
Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 
Trigger, Bruce G. 
1989. A History of Archaeological Thought, xv+500 pages. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press. 
Urry, James 
1984. A History of Field Methods. In R.F. Ellen, editor, Ethnographic Re?
search: A Guide to General Conduct, pages 35-61. New York: Aca?
demic Press. 
Vasile, Ronald S. 
1994. The Early Career of Robert Kennicott, Illinois's Pioneering Natural?
ist. Illinois Historical Journal, 87:150-170. 
Viola, Herman J., and Carolyn Margolis, editors 
1985. Magnificent Voyagers: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842. 
303 pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Walsh, Jane MacLaren 
2002. Collections as Currency. In William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard, 
editors, Anthropology, History, and American Indians: Essays in 
Honor of William Curtis Sturtevant. Smithsonian Contributions to 
Anthropology, 44:201-209. 
Washburn, Wilcomb 
1965. The Museum and Joseph Henry. Curator, 8:35-54. 
1967. Joseph Henry's Conception of the Purpose of the Smithsonian Insti?
tution. In Walter M. Whitehill, editor, A Cabinet of Curiosities, 
pages 106-166. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 
Willey, Gordon R., and Jeremy A. Sabloff 
1980. A History of American Archaeology. Second edition, xiii+313 
pages. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co. 
Collections as Currency 
Jane MacLaren Walsh 
The Smithsonian Institution was created by an act of the United 
States Congress in 1846 with the $500,000 bequest of a British 
scientist, James Smithson, who mandated that the institution 
accomplish two things?the increase and the diffusion of 
knowledge. The first two secretaries of the Smithsonian, Jo?
seph Henry and Spencer Fullerton Baird, interpreted this man?
date in accordance with their own particular scientific perspec?
tives. Henry believed the institution's principal function should 
be research and publication; Baird viewed the formation of col?
lections and their description as paramount. This paper consid?
ers Baird's point of view more closely, particularly with regard 
to the collections he amassed and dispersed, but it is abun?
dantly clear that both secretaries' activities contributed to the 
increase and diffusion of knowledge. 
Henry was a physicist who, among his myriad accomplish?
ments, invented and operated the first electromagnetic tele?
graph. One of the most highly respected physical scientists of 
his day, he had no serious competition for the post of founding 
secretary of the insti tution. As George Brown Goode 
(1897:116) wrote, "For two decades he lived in the laboratory 
and the lecture-room, and at the end of that period he was ac?
cepted as one of the world's great investigators, distinguished 
alike for skill and originality in experiment and for breadth and 
philosophic comprehensiveness in deduction." Henry had a 
clear vision of what he wished the Smithsonian Institution to 
become: a research center that would establish and maintain 
close connections with a worldwide network of scientists and 
scientific reporters. As an initial step toward this end, in 1847 
Henry established a program for the exchange of Smithsonian 
publications (Board of Regents, 1848:183). 
In 1849 and 1850 the institution exchanged its first publica?
tion in the series Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 
Squier and Davis's "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi 
Valley," with 173 institutions throughout the world (Gwinn, 
1996:221). This early initiative developed into the Interna?
tional Exchange Service, which acted as a clearing house for 
scientific publications from universities and learned institu?
tions throughout the United States and Europe. European 
monographs were sent to the Smithsonian and sorted and sent 
Jane MacLaren Walsh, Department of Anthropology, National Mu?
seum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 
20560-0112, USA. 
out to American recipients; American publications, requested 
via circular, were sent free of charge to European addresses 
(Winlock, 1897:399-400). The importance of this service can?
not be overstated. Ten years after its inception, Secretary 
Henry wrote that "few, if any, American institutions of note, 
publishing transactions or reports, have any other medium of 
exchanging them with foreign correspondents" (Board of Re?
gents, 1859:45). The creation of the exchange service was an 
affirmation of Henry's conviction that "the worth and impor?
tance of the institution are not to be estimated by what it accu?
mulates within the walls of its building, but by what it sends 
forth to the world" (Board of Regents, 1853:20). 
In late 1849 Henry chose Baird, a 26-year-old naturalist, as 
assistant secretary. Upon his arrival in 1850, Baird more than 
quadrupled the number of extant natural history specimens 
simply by the addition of his own collection, which he brought 
with him in two railroad boxcars (Goode, 1897:167; Rivinus 
and Youssef, 1992:27-28). The institution had begun to collect 
natural history specimens sometime before the appointment of 
Baird, but it is to the young naturalist that credit must be given 
for bringing the Smithsonian Institution into the museum busi?
ness. That was his intention from the beginning of his tenure 
with the institution, and indeed one he had discussed in corre?
spondence with James Dwight Dana prior to his appointment. 
Dana, who had been a member of the "Scientific Corps" of the 
first government-sponsored international scientific exploration, 
the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 (or Exp. 
Exp. in the shorthand of the day), was in 1849 a professor at 
Yale. He cautioned the young Baird, "As to your application to 
Prof. Henry?The fact is that Henry has no idea of requiring, 
yet a while, a Curator. He intends to have nothing to do with 
the Exp. Exp. collections, or any other government property."1 
Not easily deterred, Baird obtained the position, with the assis?
tance of Dana and others. 
Henry "was not a museum man?most of the time" (Hinsley, 
1981:54). His feelings about the Smithsonian's becoming the 
caretaker of the government's massive collections housed in 
the United States Patent Office, in Washington, D.C, under?
scored his general lack of enthusiasm for collections?he 
viewed the material as a large jumble of curiosities without any 
real scientific value. "The formation of a museum of objects of 
nature and art requires much caution," he wrote. Referring spe?
cifically to the Patent Office material (principally the Explor-
201 
202 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
ing Expedition collections), he pointed out that "this museum 
was collected at the expense of the government, and should be 
preserved as a memento of the science and energy of our navy, 
and as a means of illustrating and verifying the magnificent 
volumes which comprise the history of that expedition" (Board 
of Regents, 1851:20).2 Having said that, the secretary cautioned 
that the collection was so large it would "immediately fill the 
space allotted for collections [in the castle]," and that "in a 
short time another appropriation would be required for the 
erection of another building" (Board of Regents, 1851:21). In a 
final effort to avoid the burden of the Exploring Expedition 
collection, the Secretary appealed to the Senate's xenophobia. 
"It could not be the intention of the Congress that an institution 
founded by the liberality of a foreigner, and to which he has af?
fixed his own name, should be charged with the keeping of a 
separate museum, the property of the United States" (Board of 
Regents, 1851:21). 
Baird, by contrast, subscribed fully to Dana's notion that 
collections were "better than books to the naturalist," contain?
ing "the whole that was ever put in words on the subjects they 
illustrate and a thousand times more."3 He hoped to build the 
largest and most comprehensive natural history collection in 
the world, and he quickly saw that Henry's International Ex?
change Service and the steadily enlarging network of scien?
tists and reporters could be put toward that end. After all, 
Baird had been recruiting collectors to exchange specimens 
since he was 17. As a boy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he had 
initiated a correspondence with the legendary John James Au?
dubon and had exchanged specimens with Audubon he had 
himself gathered (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992:30-31). Al?
though naturalists have always traded duplicate specimens to 
gain others not already represented in their own collection, the 
new assistant secretary would eventually develop this strategy 
into a museum industry. 
Early in 1850 Baird prepared a letter to be circulated to 
"friends of science generally, and especially...officers of the 
Army and Navy." In it he requested assistance in the collection 
of specimens of animals, plants, minerals, and fossil remains to 
"lay the foundations of a collection of American Natural His?
tory" (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992:82-83). Within five short 
years of this circular even Secretary Henry was extolling 
Baird's collecting abilities. In the annual report for 1855 he 
wrote, "No collection of animals in the United States, nor in?
deed in the world, can even now pretend to rival the richness of 
the museum of the Smithsonian Institution in specimens which 
tend to illustrate the natural history of the continent of North 
America" (Board of Regents, 1856:31). 
The institution, now firmly on the path to forming a national 
museum, was compelled finally in 1858 to accept the curation 
of the government's collections, which were transferred to the 
Smithsonian by congressional order. As Henry had predicted in 
his objections of 1850, the institution was simultaneously 
forced to request an appropriation for the care and disposition 
of the material. 
The transfer of the government's collections enlarged the in?
stitution's general holdings by approximately 20% but in?
creased its anthropological collections by more than 300%. The 
size and scope of the Patent Office material was impressive on 
all counts, comprising 
about 1,000 books and pamphlets, 50 maps and charts, 500 castings in plaster 
(medals and seals), 186 paintings, about 1,600 bird-skins, 160 skins of quadru?
peds, 50 skins of fishes; 200 jars, 2 barrels, and 10 kegs of fishes, reptiles, etc., 
in spirits; 50,000 botanical specimens, 3,000 insects, several hundred thousand 
shells, 500 corallines, more than 2,000 crustaceans, 300 starfishes, etc., 100 
sponges, 7,000 separate specimens of minerals, and 50 boxes of the minerals 
and geological specimens. (Goode, 1897:307-308) 
Not mentioned in this list are some 5000 ethnographic and 
archaeological objects collected by the United States Exploring 
Expedition, or those objects gathered by later expeditions, such 
as those to Africa (1843) and Japan (1853-1854) commanded 
by American naval officer Matthew Perry, and perhaps another 
1500 to 2000 objects of Native American manufacture col?
lected by soldiers and Indian agents. 
In 1856, perhaps in anticipation of the transfer of the govern?
ment's collections, Baird traveled the four and one-half blocks 
from the Smithsonian to the great hall of the Patent Office to 
take a closer look at the objects. Writing his initial impressions 
on a single page, he proposed that "no country has better col?
lections of so large an area or as good." The specimens, once 
stored in better surroundings in the Smithsonian, and "subject 
to scientific supervision?can be arranged in proper order? 
duly classed and cataloged; carefully labeled?so as to be intel?
ligible to all," he added (Baird, 1856). The notes seem intended 
as part of an argument, presumably to Henry, for the acquisi?
tion of this material. The assistant secretary obviously saw 
these specimens as an important resource, and he was deter?
mined to make them available to everyone once they were 
combined with the extant Smithsonian collections. He even en?
visioned "handbooks or manuals of the different collections 
prepared for more critical study and understanding of speci?
mens." The end result of having a central repository of natural 
history and ethnographic collections would be that "any associ?
ation or individual can send collections," and using the govern?
ment's collections and the Smithsonian's own considerable 
holdings for comparison, they could then have "labeled series 
returned" (Baird, 1856). 
Despite, or perhaps because of, his admiration of and eager?
ness to obtain the government's collections, at three separate 
points on the page Baird noted the numerous duplicate speci?
mens, for which he saw obvious and immediate use: They 
"should be weeded out and distributed among other American 
museums," and the "collections will thereby occupy much less 
space" (Baird, 1856), a potential selling point to Secretary 
Henry. The other anticipated result of distributing these collec?
tions to other museums, although one not written down by 
Baird, would be that exchanging these famous artifacts would 
bring a return of more, and perhaps rarer, specimens. 
NUMBER 44 203 
In 1859 the "burden" of the government collections brought 
a yearly endowment of $3650 to cover incidental expenses 
(Goode, 1897:322). Listed as 12 separate collections, the 
Patent Office material joined another 23 government collec?
tions already housed in what came to be called the United 
States National Museum. Throughout the 1850s Baird had 
been amassing large numbers of "mammals, birds, reptiles, 
fish, shells, and minerals from the exploring and surveying ex?
peditions of federal departments, as well as from state govern?
ments, local scientific societies, and individuals" (Hinsley, 
1981:66-67). While fewer in number, specimens of anthropo?
logical and archaeological interest had also been gathered by 
the Pacific Railroad Survey, the Mexican Boundary Survey, 
surveys of the Amazon River basin, and explorations of Nica?
ragua, among other government expeditions exploring the "na?
tional domain" (Goode, 1897:317). By the end of 1858, the in?
stitution had managed to catalog some 25,506 specimens, 
including mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, skeletons and 
skulls, Crustacea, and bird eggs.4 Almost as soon as the collec?
tions were cataloged, duplicates were laid aside "to be distrib?
uted to other parties... not only for the purpose of supplying a 
great want, but also of relieving the shelves and cases of the 
Institution of a redundancy of material" (Board of Regents, 
1859:59). To govern the processes of lending and exchanging 
specimens of undescribed taxa and effectively distributing du?
plicates of specimens of described taxa, the Smithsonian de?
veloped a series of rules. 
The first and foremost rule concerned the institution's origi?
nal mandate?the advancement of science. To accomplish this 
purpose, duplicate specimens would be distributed as widely as 
possible to scientific institutions in the United States and 
abroad, to be used in the identification of species already 
known to science. The second rule dictated that museum per?
sonnel make full sets of properly labeled general duplicates, 
which would in mm be presented to colleges and other institu?
tions of learning to promote education. The third rule specified 
that all due credit would be given to the Smithsonian Institution 
in the labeling of the specimens and in all published accounts. 
The fourth and fifth rules concerned what was anticipated, or 
expected, in return for the institution's generous gifts. In the 
distribution of specimens abroad, type specimens illustrating 
species described by foreign authors would be required in ex?
change. Specimens presented to American colleges and other 
institutions in the United States would be given in exchange for 
collections from specified localities in their own particular re?
gions. Thus if colleges wished to obtain duplicate collections 
from the Smithsonian, they would be required to come up with 
representative collections of birds or fishes or minerals from 
their own regions (Goode, 1897:318). 
Undescribed specimens were covered under a slightly differ?
ent set of rules. In this case, the first rule was that uncataloged 
items would never be entrusted to inexperienced persons and 
that preference would be given to individuals engaged in pre?
paring complete monographs on the subject. Investigators 
would be allowed to take specimens to their places of residence 
and keep them for a reasonable amount of time. Sets of type 
specimens from these collections, including all duplicates, 
were to be returned to the institution, and, as always, credit was 
to be given to the Smithsonian in any publication (Goode, 
1897:319). 
The distribution of undescribed specimens provided consid?
erable assistance to the young institution, which lacked funds 
and staff. "Collections which would have remained useless for 
years were rapidly classified by competent naturalists and sep?
arated into series, some to be reserved by the Institution and 
others to be distributed to kindred scientific establishments and 
to colleges and schools" (Goode, 1897:319). The list of collab?
orators includes almost every name prominent in American 
natural history in the last half of the nineteenth century. 
The annual report for 1858, with its list of 25,506 specimens 
cataloged, makes no mention of ethnological or archaeological 
material (Board of Regents, 1859:57). This is because the an?
thropological collection was first systematically described and 
numbered beginning on 9 March 1859. This material was 
sorted for duplicates for exchange the same year. By the close 
of 1867, with nearly two ledger books filled, the institution had 
cataloged some 5000 objects from ethnographic and archaeo?
logical contexts. The Smithsonian distributed 1048 of these 
carefully cataloged specimens, or about one-fifth of the de?
scribed material, that same year (Board of Regents, 1868:72). 
By the end of the institution's first quarter century, ledger 
books indicate that the majority of the anthropological collec?
tion originated from the North American continent. It consisted 
specifically of Arctic and Subarctic specimens collected by 
Smithsonian naturalist Robert Kennicott with the assistance of 
various members of the Hudson's Bay Company, such as Ber?
nard Ross and Roderick McFarlane. The Northwest Coast of 
North America was represented by objects collected by Dr. J. 
Evans and the displaced New Englander James Swan, two of 
the many important collectors listed in the ledger books. The 
western and central Plains material was collected by the 
Wheeler and Hayden expeditions of the 1870s, by Lt. G.K. 
Warren, who explored the Missouri River region, and by a vari?
ety of other collectors, such as soldiers, Indian agents, and 
United States Army doctors. The remaining curiosities came 
from just about everywhere else: Japan and Africa via Perry; 
Thailand as royal gifts to American presidents; Mexico from 
the Swiss naturalist Jean Louis Berlandier, the American diplo?
mat Brantz Mayer, and United States Ambassador to Mexico 
Joel Poinsett; and from numerous islands in the Pacific, col?
lected by the United States Exploring Expedition. 
For the year 1871, the Smithsonian Board of Regents noted 
that the general collection then numbered 169,360; of this fig?
ure the "ethnological specimens" numbered 10,931. To the end 
of 1871, the number of ethnological specimens distributed was 
1342, or about 12%. The final count that year for all the dupli?
cate specimens distributed, however, is astounding: 308,080. 
This figure, which included all specimens exchanged from all 
204 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
branches of natural history, is more than twice the total number 
of specimens cataloged (Board of Regents, 1873:42). 
Baird, by all indications, took particular, personal interest in 
the distribution of all duplicate materials. In 1867 Baird super?
vised the assembly of numerous sets of duplicate natural his?
tory and cultural specimens for distribution. These included 
sets labeled "mammal skins," "Pacific fishes," "shells," "bird 
skins," "eggs & nests," "Minerals & Rocks," "Esquimaux curi?
osities" and "Fejee curiosities."s 
The 25 "Fejee" sets provide an interesting example of a sort 
of museum starter kit composed almost exclusively of United 
States Exploring Expedition duplicates. As a sampler it was 
meant to illustrate the expedition's around-the-world voyage, 
but in actuality the institution sent the objects it had in greatest 
supply, its most exotic specimens. Each set contained about 15 
objects, including a bow and arrows from Oregon Territory or 
from northern California, some halibut or eel hooks from the 
Northwest Coast, and a variety of items from Pacific islands, 
principally Fiji. This portion of the selection included samples 
of Samoan, Hawaiian, and Fijian bark cloth;6 a Samoan or a 
Hawaiian fish hook; a basket; grass skirt; three to five spears; 
four to six war clubs; and a number of shell ornaments from 
Fiji. "Esquimaux" sets were assembled using the "Anderson 
River Esquimaux" collections, including specimens principally 
collected by Robert McFarlane. These sets mostly also con?
tained about 15 specimens, although occasionally as many as 
77 objects were packed up and sent off7 In addition to the Es?
kimo and Fijian sets, there were duplicate collection boxes la?
beled simply "Ethnologica," which contained an unspecified 
number of objects. 
The list of distribution recipients is also quite interesting. It 
details various mid-nineteenth century institutional affiliations 
and the personal connections that formed a kind of nine?
teenth-century naturalist network. It also gives us some indica?
tion of the number of then-extant university museums and nat?
ural history societies. In the case of the Exploring Expedition 
duplicates, in the space of a single year, 1867, sets were sent to 
the universities of Michigan, Kentucky, Toronto in Canada, and 
Cristiania in Norway. They also went to Amherst, Dartmouth, 
Harvard, Williams, West Point, Yale, and the City College of 
New York. Fiji sets of similar size and composition were deliv?
ered to the cabinets of natural history societies in Albany, New 
York; Portland, Maine; Montreal, Quebec; Springfield, 
Worcester, and Salem, Massachusetts; Bloomington and 
Springfield, Illinois; Montpelier, Vermont; Jefferson, Missouri; 
and St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1872, the remaining sets were de?
livered to Wells College in Aurora, New York; Columbia Col?
lege in New York City; and Brown University in Providence, 
Rhode Island. The majority of the specimens sent to colleges 
and universities can still be found in the collections of those in?
stitutions. The items distributed to natural history societies 
found their way into state museums, and in both instances a 
large proportion of specimens are still on exhibit. 
Sets of ethnologica are listed in 1872 as shipped to such En?
glish institutions as the Blackmore Museum in Salisbury, the 
Christy collection in London, and the Peabody Museum in 
Cambridge as well as to the National Museum in Lisbon, Por?
tugal. These gifts numbered 151 specimens. Larger collections 
consisting of several hundred objects from cultures of the Arc?
tic to the South Pacific were sent in 1867 to the Royal Ethno?
logical Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, and to the Acad?
emy of Sciences in Chicago, Illinois, the latter entirely 
destroyed in the great fire that consumed the city.8 Once again 
the material distributed was culled from the largest collections, 
those from the Arctic and the Pacific, perhaps somewhat 
skewing the nineteenth-century museum-goer's view of world 
ethnography. 
A number of the sets sent out in 1867 were payment in kind 
for specimens already received from those institutions.9 By the 
end of 1868 the catalog ledgers already gave a strong indica?
tion of the importance and value to the Smithsonian of these 
exchanges as a means of enhancing its collections. They list as 
museum acquisitions a collection of archaeological material 
from J.W.P. Jenks,10 later of Brown University; prehistoric 
stone tools from Professor Jillson of Sweden; and specimens 
from Herr R.L. Vortisch of Germany, M. Edouard Lartet of 
France and Spain, and Sr. Sartorius of Mexico. Henri de Saus-
sure sent Swiss archaeological specimens, Minister Crampton 
sent objects from British Guiana, and G.R. Gliddon exchanged 
a small collection of Egyptian artifacts, all within a decade of 
the first ethnographic cataloging. 
Although collections from other departments were distrib?
uted and exchanged in far greater numbers, ethnographic and 
archaeological specimens also seem to have been in great de?
mand. Perhaps the most popular items were southwestern ce?
ramics, particularly Zuni pots. Beginning in the late 1850s and 
lasting well into the early 1960s, the anthropological collec?
tions were diffused to museums, colleges and universities, high 
schools, elementary schools, schools for the blind and deaf, 
asylums, public libraries, and societies and private collectors in 
the Americas, Europe, India, Asia, Africa, Australia, New 
Zealand, and Tasmania." 
In addition to already cataloged items considered to be dupli?
cates, some traded specimens had never been entered into the 
record. Significant smaller collections were separated out from 
the larger body of material and sent to foreign institutions by 
collectors often while still in the field. For example, a hand?
written index card in the records of the registrar records a dis?
tribution transaction without giving too much detail. Dated 3 
June 1885, it reads "Oxford, England, University Museum. 
Specimens of Pottery, Bureau of American Ethnology. Baird. 
#4296."12 The corresponding invoice for distribution #4296 is 
missing from the record, but the Smithsonian's Bureau of 
American Ethnology (BAE) correspondence files in the Smith?
sonian National Anthropological Archives contain a 40-page 
document and letter signed by John Wesley Powell, founder of 
the BAE, which fills in the particulars of this single transaction. 
NUMBER 44 205 
Powell sent 10 boxes of material to E.B. Tylor and H.N. Mose-
ley at Museum House in England in June, 1885. Included in 
this shipment were published reports of the Smithsonian and 
the BAE, a collection of photographic illustrations showing 
general views of southwestern pueblos, and a series of native 
portraits, along with a descriptive catalog of these images ap?
parently written by James Stevenson of the BAE. Powell also 
sent more than 200 specimens, principally pottery, from Zuni, 
Hopi, Acoma, Santa Clara, Cochiti, and San Ildefonso pueblos. 
These artifacts had been culled from a much larger collection 
made by Stevenson and his wife, Matilda, another BAE collab?
orator, in 1884. Stevenson, according to Powell's letter, had 
"been arranging and labeling the collection made by him last 
summer, [and] he has from time to time set apart the articles 
which I now ship to you. At the same time he has made a care?
ful catalog of the whole material, and added such notes as he 
deemed would be of value in connection therewith."13 Powell 
noted that the collection was to be divided between Tyler and 
Moseley. The objects, now mostly housed in the Pitt Rivers 
Museum, Oxford, have only Stevenson numbers, 1-213, as?
signed to the collection, and they bear no other marks connect?
ing them to the institution. 
This is one example, among what I believe to be dozens, for 
which the transactions records are either difficult to locate or 
do not exist at all. Indeed, further complicating the historical 
picture, and the possibility of recreating the size and scope of 
the original collections, is the fact that numerous trades of al?
ready cataloged specimens were never entered into the catalog 
record and only exist as index cards describing "boxes of eth?
nologica." Too often specimens came into the institution, were 
accessioned, cataloged, and eventually exchanged or sent as 
gifts, with no official record kept. Occasionally one finds an in?
dex entry but no description of individual objects or catalog 
numbers. 
Despite innumerable omissions, I have been able to docu?
ment the exchange or gift of a total of more than 12,000 objects 
from the anthropology collections from 1867 to 1960. This fig?
ure encompasses principally ethnographic objects. The number 
of archaeological specimens dispersed is many times that fig?
ure, usually including objects removed in groups of six or eight 
from large lots. For example, in a lot comprising several hun?
dred arrow heads, described by a single catalog number, as 
many as 75 are listed as exchange pieces.14 
It is also important to note that many of the exchanged items 
cannot in any sense be described as duplicates, even by nine?
teenth-century standards. I have located numerous unique spec?
imens that were traded away, leaving our own collections un?
represented by even the type. Harvard's Peabody Museum, for 
instance, was given two full-size Chinook wooden cradles in 
1888, nearly identical, and both of them early. The two came 
from the collection of George Catlin, and one of them, accord?
ing to a notation in the Peabody catalog, was "probably col?
lected by Lewis and Clark, preserved in the Gov. Clark collec?
tion and given to George Catlin" (Susan Haskell, pers. comm., 
27 Oct 1997). The cradles the institution retained are neither 
the size nor the quality of those it gave away. In 1867 the 
Smithsonian gave the Danish Museum in Copenhagen a rare, 
even in the nineteenth century, Fijian "oracle," a seed-en?
crusted, carved coconut. According to the catalog, the institu?
tion had two, but the second one is missing from inventory. 
Haida ship pipes and carved argillite objects, each a unique cre?
ation, were traded off before the turn of the century with as?
tounding regularity. 
The institution, particularly under Baird's auspices, used its 
collections, at least the anthropological collections, as a kind of 
excess currency, currency to be exchanged for specimens and 
collections it lacked, to repay other museums for objects and 
natural history specimens already sent, to purchase specific 
items from dealers, and to purchase material other than collec?
tions, such as publications. Collections even became a sort of 
political currency, used for gifts to foreign ambassadors and 
heads of state, perhaps in exchange for favors. 
It should also be mentioned that many of the trades reflect 
important collegial relationships cultivated by members of the 
institution. Harvard's Peabody Museum was by far the most 
visible, particularly during the tenure of Frederick Ward Put?
nam; Secretaries Henry and Baird established numerous joint 
research projects with Harvard scientists. One result of this 
longstanding relationship is that the Peabody was the recipient 
of the largest number of distributed anthropological speci?
mens. To be more precise, out of the 12,000 identified objects 
exchanged with some 500 institutions and individuals, Har?
vard received more than 1200 specimens, or 10% of the total. 
The closest competitors to Harvard were Denmark's National 
Museum in Copenhagen, also an early research partner and the 
recipient of some 600 objects between 1867 and 1930, and the 
Trocadero in Paris, with another 600 objects, nearly all sent in 
1885. Two museums in Buenos Aires, Argentina, received a 
total of 603 archaeological objects and 244 ethnographic spec?
imens around the turn of the century. The institution also 
helped foster museums and collectors in smaller, less powerful 
countries. A prime example of this is Louis Guesde, a private 
collector on the island of Guadeloupe in the West Indies who, 
in return for an album of 68 watercolor drawings of pre-Co?
lumbian objects in his own collection, received more than 300 
archaeological specimens, books, and ethnographic objects 
between 1881 and 1890. 
Universities and public museums were not the only benefi?
ciaries of Smithsonian largess. Individual collectors and the 
proprietors of private museums received substantial collections 
as well, usually in trade, although occasionally as gifts. George 
T. Emmons, of Princeton, New Jersey, received more than 100 
ethnographic specimens in trade over a period of two decades. 
Italian collectors Enrico Giglioli, of Florence, and Luigi Pigo-
rini, of Rome, along with American circus magnate Phineas T 
Barnum, whose collections went to Tufts University, all re?
ceived sizable amounts of material. Edward Lovett, of Eng?
land, made a series of trades netting himself some 300 ethno-
206 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
graphic specimens; his collection is now in the Manchester 
Museum. J.W. Hudson, of Ukiah, California, traded baskets, 
and E.W. Keyser added to his collection of Arapaho and Chey?
enne material in Washington, D.C. Victor J. Evans, also of 
Washington, and George G. Heye, of New York, traded with 
the institution over the space of several decades. The Evans 
collections was returned to the institution as a bequest in the 
1940s, and the Heye collection, now the National Museum of 
the American Indian, came full circle as a result of yet another 
act of Congress. 
Some individuals with whom the institution traded appear to 
have been dealers, as was evidently the case with Anton Heit-
muller, the proprietor of an antique shop on 14th Street in 
Washington, D.C. The numerous transactions with this gentle?
man were overseen by William Henry Holmes, head curator in 
the Department of Anthropology, and do not represent what 
can in any way be described as good horse trading. These in?
credibly lopsided transactions appear to be an indication of 
perceived value at the turn of the century. Between 1900 and 
1915 Heitmuller received nearly 300 ethnographic objects, 
some from the earliest collections of the United States Explor?
ing Expedition. One transaction in 1900 involved two items 
from Heitmuller's collection?two altars, whose provenance 
was a Catholic church in Hildesheim, Germany. In exchange 
for these two items, Holmes sent Heitmuller 12 alabaster carv?
ings from India, 140 pieces of pottery (about half were from 
Zuni and Acoma pueblos and the rest were pre-Columbian 
vessels from Chiriquf, Panama), 4 brass plaques, 8 baskets, 1 
bible, 1 flag, and 1 priest's robe from Ceylon. As if this were 
not more than sufficient, in response to a complaint from Heit?
muller that the list was four items short, Holmes sent a second 
batch of 55 pueblo pots "to complete the exchange."15 In 1915, 
in exchange for 68 "heating and illumination devices" consist?
ing principally of candles and candle sticks from the same 
German church and some colonial American pieces, the insti?
tution sent Heitmuller 61 specimens of ethnologica, including 
four United States Exploring Expedition artifacts, a variety of 
Plains Indian objects, African and Japanese weapons, and yet 
another dozen Zuni pots. 
By contrast, some exchanges resulted in spectacular addi?
tions to the collection. One transaction of this type consists of 
an East African shield and spear that were exchanged with 
W.W. Rockhill, of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, for 83 eth?
nographic specimens from Tibet. This particular collection 
constitutes one of the earliest and most important from that re?
gion of the world in the Smithsonian. This exchange took place 
in 1891 under the auspices of Otis T. Mason of the National 
Museum. 
When the institution used its collections to purchase political 
favors, specimens appear to have been given away wholly for 
diplomatic purposes, such as those to ambassadors and heads 
of governments. The German ambassador to Washington, for 
instance, received 43 stone implements as a gift in 1894, Baron 
Ludwig Ambrozy of Austria was given 17 baskets in 1905,'6 
and the Sultan of Turkey was given a fully dressed "Sioux 
Chief lay figure" or manikin in 1897.17 
Political figures closer to home apparently enjoyed a certain 
inside track as far as gifts and exchanges were concerned. 
There are a number of distribution invoices listing individuals 
with the title "Honorable" before their name. Most of these ap?
pear to be members of the United States Congress who, it is 
likely, had some influence on Smithsonian funding. In several 
instances Southwestern pottery, particularly Zuni and Acoma 
specimens, were sent out as gifts or in exchange for publica?
tions. The case of Joel P. Heatwole, representative from North-
field, Minnesota, is puzzling. This gentleman was the recipient 
of a number of separate gifts of "duplicate pottery specimens" 
(7 Acoma, 3 Hopi, 1 Zia, and 19 Zuni pots and 5 prehistoric 
Chiriquf pots from Panama) in July 1898, in exchange for 
"$100.00 worth of publications, Volumes of Proceedings of the 
National Museum."18 In 1900 the Heatwole was shipped 60 
pots and 7 baskets in exchange for publications valued at 
$30.00. According to William H. Holmes, "The pottery is all of 
the modern ware of Moki [Hopi], made for trade, and of no 
Museum value whatever, the commercial value being, as nearly 
as Professor Mason can determine about twenty-five cents per 
specimen."19 The appended list does indicate some 40 Hopi 
vessels. In addition to these, however, are three pre-Columbian 
Zapotec pots from the collection of Lewis H. Ayme, from Oax?
aca, Mexico, and about 12 Acoma and Zia pots collected by the 
Stevensons. 
In attempting to reconstruct events leading up to these ex?
changes, I assume that the institution sent its own publications 
for distribution to members of the House and Senate. Presum?
ably some members had more books than they needed, but 
why the institution was compelled to exchange its collections 
for the return of its own publications remains unclear. One 
would hope that the collections were given to museums in the 
representatives^ districts, although this is also not certain. 
Whatever was happening, it was not an isolated event, at least 
at the beginning of the twentieth century. Another member, 
Ernest W. Roberts, received 20 ethnographic specimens in 
1906 in exchange for Smithsonian publications and, in a letter, 
also noted receiving a set of "coins recently issued by the 
United States for the Philippine Islands." Continuing, Con?
gressman Roberts wrote, "I have at my home quite a number 
of Smithsonian publications, which I will also forward as soon 
as I return to Massachusetts."20 Senator A.F. Barrott, in publi?
cations exchanges, received in 1906 six archaeological pots 
excavated by J.W. Fewkes of the BAE, four pots in 1907, three 
Chiriqui pots in 1909, one Jeddito pot in 1910, and two deco?
rated dishes in 1913.21 
Another series of exchanges, or gifts, which took place in 
1914, must surely indicate a different sort of intervention on 
the part of a representative, whose district would have included 
Brooklyn, New York. In this case Smithsonian largess was at 
its most expansive: nearly every public and parochial school in 
Brooklyn received a variety of sets of duplicate specimens, in-
NUMBER 44 207 
eluding marine invertebrates, mammals, birds, Indian baskets, 
and casts of archaeological specimens. 
Over the past 150 years, the Smithsonian Institution not only 
has used its treasury in countless barters, trades, and diplomatic 
pursuits, for the most part very wisely, but it has also been ex?
traordinarily generous in spreading the wealth of its collections 
throughout the world. The records show that the institution sent 
collections to nearly every country in Europe, with many na?
tions receiving collections for several major museums. Lenin?
grad, Moscow, and Irkutz, in the former Soviet Union; India; 
China; Korea; Japan; and the Philippines are also represented. 
Egypt and South Africa were trading partners in the early part 
of the 1900s, as were several museums in Australia and New 
Zealand. Mexico was an early exchange partner, along with 
Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Cuba, Puerto Rico, 
Guadeloupe, and nearly every country in South America. 
One unfortunate aspect of the distribution history was the un?
even nature of selections made for dispersal, which necessarily 
involved collections the institution had in the greatest supply. 
This fact may have had the unintended consequence of creating 
a somewhat narrow view of North American ethnography, par?
ticularly in museums outside of the United States. The largest 
proportion of duplicates distributed to foreign institutions came 
from the American Southwest and the Arctic. Southwestern In?
dian artifacts alone account for 34% of the distributed dupli?
cates, with Zuni and Hopi material comprising half of that in?
ventory and Arctic specimens making up another 20% of the 
total. I have visited a number of museums with which the 
Smithsonian had an exchange history and where the American 
collections are almost exclusively from the Smithsonian; inevi?
tably, nearly all are from the Arctic or the Southwest. 
Conclusions and Possibilities 
Baird used the biological collecting model?type specimens 
supported by series of duplicates?as his starting point for all 
museum collections. Clearly there are some drawbacks to this 
concept when applied to anthropological collections. Despite 
the fact that, generally speaking, distributed artifacts are well 
represented within the collections retained by the institution, no 
single artifact is an exact duplicate of another. Obviously, the 
Smithsonian lost some of the enormous diversity of specimens 
originally collected and diminished to some extent what might 
have been seen in the nineteenth century as an embarrassment 
of riches. Nevertheless, I believe that such drawbacks to collec?
tions dispersal are outweighed by the benefits to the population 
at large. The case of the United States Exploring Expedition 
collection, one of the institution's earliest and most extensive, 
provides a good example of the consequences and beneficial 
aspects of the distribution policy. The 25 distribution sets, orig?
inally selected by Baird and his assistants, were made up of ar?
tifact types considered to be the most numerous and representa?
tive of the collection. Within these artifact categories, 
occasionally more than half the objects collected were ex?
changed, although normally the percentage did not exceed one-
third. The point should also be made that within the entire col?
lection, the majority of artifact categories remained untouched. 
A good example of an artifact type chosen for distribution is 
that of the Fijian liku, or woman's skirt (a wide, woven, vegeta?
ble fiber belt). The original official collection listed 120 liku, of 
which 35 were exchanged with 28 museums. The exchanged 
examples, including four now in the Bishop Museum in Ha?
waii,22 allow for a much broader viewing of this highly perish?
able item of clothing worn by Fiji islanders in the 1830s, which 
otherwise would be unavailable to interested observers and stu?
dents of culture. Even though no two of these belts are exactly 
alike, the institution's collection of some 85 of them provides 
sufficient and eloquent testimony to the ingenuity and creativ?
ity of Fijian women in the manufacture of their clothing. 
Once all instances of distributions are added up, the United 
States Exploring Expedition collection had been diminished by 
approximately 23%. A comparison of Exploring Expedition ar?
tifacts distributed to museums in the United States and Europe 
with those retained in the institution's collection indicates that 
near-duplicates or items of a highly similar nature were, in fact, 
selected for exchange. One or two unique items were sent out 
with the duplicates, but those, as with the majority of ex?
changed Exploring Expedition artifacts, remain in the collec?
tions of the recipient museum and can still be studied. In the fi?
nal analysis, the Smithsonian Institution maintained the 
majority of artifacts amassed by the United States Exploring 
Expedition, retaining approximately four-fifths of the collec?
tion. The remainder are cared for in the storehouses and exhibi?
tion halls of some 40 museums and institutions of higher learn?
ing. The reconstruction of the original official collection has 
required considerable research and extensive travel, but it has 
been possible to refit nearly all of the pieces into the puzzle. 
The era of museum building in this country began with 
Baird's collecting collectors. Baird understood that by sharing 
the Smithsonian's great wealth, he could increase it and 
broaden its scope. Museums worldwide gained access to Amer?
ica's premier ethnographic and archaeological objects and were 
assisted in building their own American collections. In return, 
the institution's world view was broadened, and its holdings 
became truly international. Baird clearly believed James 
Dana's words, that "collections are better than books." The his?
torical evidence of the world's material culture offers us in?
sights into the universal human condition and our own human?
ity as well. Each object is a book waiting to be read and is a 
different book to every reader. 
Collections are yet to be formed to illustrate the material cul?
ture of the twenty-first century, but those of the last two centu?
ries should not be allowed to gather dust. The institution is now 
in need of a twenty-first-century Baird. The collections he 
amassed so diligently and comprehensively are in need of a 
dusting off and airing out. As the new century opens to us, we 
need to view the institution's great treasury of nineteenth- and 
twentieth-century collections not as a burden, or, as a few have 
208 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
suggested, the evidence of a failed idea, but as Baird saw 
them?currency to be used in a new marketplace of ideas. Af?
ter 150 years of exchange and gift-giving, the business to enter 
into now is that of loans, perhaps even the development of a 
museum lend-lease act for the year 2001. 
The Smithsonian has always lent its specimens for study and 
for exhibition, and has recently begun to actually contemplate 
furnishing museums that address the culture and history of 
specific groups or regions. The proliferation of ethnic-specific 
museums and study centers creates an opportunity for the 
Smithsonian to lengthen its educational reach and encourage 
greater use of stored collections. The Arctic Studies Center of 
the Department of Anthropology, for example, has directly ad?
dressed the concerns and interests of arctic peoples through 
small traveling exhibitions designed for town and village 
schools or public buildings, and it is now conducting research 
to prepare loans to a Smithsonian affiliate, the Anchorage Mu?
seum of History and Art, and Alaskan tribal museums as well 
(see Fitzhugh, 2002). The institution is attempting to carry this 
idea a few steps further by entertaining proposals for 
long-term loans of artifacts to illustrate the cultural history of 
countless Native American and immigrant American commu?
nities and in so doing finally move far beyond the National 
Mall in Washington, D.C, to a series of satellite museums and 
research institutions throughout the United States. Through 
the affiliations program, Smithsonian collections can be used 
to form a core for research and exhibition and could be ex?
panded and broadened by the addition of regional material, 
much in the way Baird did in the nineteenth century. In this 
manner the institution will diffuse knowledge to an ever-wid?
ening audience and, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, 
combine the best ideas of its first two secretaries, Henry and 
Baird. The Smithsonian can carry on the tradition of exchang?
ing specimens started by Baird while reaffirming Henry's be?
lief that the worth of the institution is measured not by what it 
holds in its storehouses but rather by what it sends forth to the 
world. 
Notes 
1. Dana to Baird, 27 Aug 1849, New Haven, Connecticut, record unit 7002, 
Spencer F. Baird Papers, 1833-1889, box 19, private incoming correspon?
dence, 1847-1887, folder 4, Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA), Washing?
ton, D.C. 
2. The reference is to the 13 volumes published in 1845 by the United States 
Exploring Expedition. 
3. See note 1, above. 
4. The statistics for collection-building can be found in Board of Regents, 
1858. In 1851, the year after Baird's arrival, there were 911 entries in the 
Smithsonian catalog ledgers, all "skeletons and skulls." By 1856 there were 
11,222 entries, with the categories of mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes 
added. Two years later the described collection had more than doubled (Board 
of Regents, 1858:59). 
5. Record unit 120, second series, volume 3:93, SIA. 
6. Large pieces of bark cloth, some with intricate painted and stamped deco?
rations, were cut up into six or eight pieces and were distributed to as many in?
stitutions. 
7. Record unit 120, second series, volume 3:96, SIA. 
8. Record unit 120, second series, volume 3:94, SIA. 
9. C.C. Ram, of Copenhagen, had sent Danish prehistoric stone tools in 1852 
(Board of Regents, 1853:67). 
10. Jenks, the founder of the Natural History Museum at Brown University, 
and a close personal friend of Baird, was another prodigious collector. 
11. Large-scale exchanges of anthropological material effectively ceased dur?
ing the late 1920s. 
12. Record unit 120, card index, SIA. 
13. Powell to E.B. Tylor and H.N. Moseley, 2 Jun 1885, Washington, D.C, 
National Anthropological Archives, Bureau of American Ethnology correspon?
dence, letters sent. 
14. The ledger pages on which these transactions were recorded are truly 
amazing to behold, although they are extraordinarily difficult to read. 
15. Record unit 186, distribution invoice nos. 13952 and 14129, and record 
unit 305, accession file no. 37132, SIA. 
16. Record unit 120, card index, SIA. 
17. Record unit 186, distribution invoice no. 19490, SIA. 
18. Record unit 186, box 18, distribution invoice no. 11970, SIA. 
19. Memorandum from W.H. Holmes to F.W. True, 18 Jun 1900, Washington, 
D.C, record unit 186, distribution invoice no. 13723, SIA. 
20. Roberts to Richard Rathbun, 5 May 1906, Washington, D.C, record unit 
186, distribution invoice no. 20689, SIA. 
21. Record unit 186, distribution invoice no. 20654, Smithsonian Institution, 
Department of Anthropology, original catalog ledger books, SIA. 
22. The liku in the Bishop Museum are such exceedingly rare specimens they 
are still on prominent display. The National Museum in Suva, Fiji, has only 
two liku from this period. 
Literature Cited 
Baird, Spencer F. 
1856. Miscellaneous notes. Record unit 7002, Spencer F. Baird Papers, 
1833-1889, box 63, Smithsonian Institution reports and memo?
randa, etc., folder 7, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, 
D.C. 
Board of Regents, Smithsonian Institution 
1848. Second Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institu?
tion,...during the Year 1847. 30th Cong., 1st sess., S. Misc. Doc. 23, 
208 pages. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. 
1851. Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian In?
stitution,...during the Year 1850. Special sess., March 1851, S. 
Misc. Doc. 1, 145 pages [extra edition of 326 pages.] Washington, 
D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office. 
1853. Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian 
Institution,...during the Year 1852. 32d Cong., 2d sess., S. Misc. 
Doc. 53, 96 pages. Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing 
Office. 
1856. Tenth Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian In?
stitution,...up to January 1, 1856. 34th Cong., 1st sess., S. Misc. 
Doc. 73; H. Misc. Doc. 113, 438 pages + [1] errata page. Washing?
ton: U.S. Government Printing Office. 
1859. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian 
NUMBER 44 209 
Institution,...for the Year 1858. 35th Cong., 2d sess., S. Misc. Doc. 
49; H. Rep. 57, 448 pages. Washington, D . C : U.S. Government 
Printing Office. 
1868. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian 
Institution,...for the Year 1867. 40th Cong., 2d sess., S. Misc. Doc. 
86, 506 pages. Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office. 
1873. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian 
Institution, ...for the Year 1871. 42d Cong., 1st sess., S. Misc. Doc. 
149,473 pages. Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office. 
Fitzhugh, William W. 
2002. Origins of Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution 
and Beyond. In William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard, editors, An?
thropology, History, and American Indians: Essays in Honor of Wil?
liam Curtis Sturtevant. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, 
44:181-202 
Goode, George B., editor 
1897. The Smithsonian Institution 1846-1896: The History of Its First 
Half Century, x + 856 pages. Washington, D . C : Government 
Printing Office. 
Gwinn, Nancy E. 
1996. The Origins and Development of International Publication Ex?
change in Nineteenth-Century America, vii+413 pages. Doctoral 
dissertation, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. 
Hinsley, Curtis M., Jr. 
1981. Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and Develop?
ment of American Anthropology 1846-1910. 319 pages. Washing?
ton, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Rivinus, E.F., and E.M. Youssef 
1992. Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian, x+228 pages. Washington, D. C : 
Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Winlock, William C. 
1897. The International Exchange System. In George Brown Goode, edi?
tor, The Smithsonian Institution 1846-1896: The History of Its 
First Half Century, pages 397-418. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian 
Institution. 

The Creation of Anthropological Archives: A California Case Study 
Ira Jacknis 
The contemporary interest in ethnographic representation, es?
pecially in writing, has led to a new consideration of how field-
notes are created and used and their relation to "native reality" 
and to published ethnographies (Sanjek, 1990). Rarely men?
tioned, however, is what happens to these fieldnotes after they 
are no longer used by their creator, due to either loss of interest 
or death. In the past they were regarded as private documents 
that were made obsolete by their analysis and publication. 
There was also the all-too-common difficulty of properly deci?
phering and understanding someone else's notes. Today, how?
ever, after more than 150 years of professional activity, these 
now substantial archives have become the subject of intense in?
terest among both fieldworkers and native peoples (Silverman 
and Parezo, 1995; Parezo, 1996). These preserved field materi?
als may, in some cases, be the only records of languages and 
cultures that have vanished or have changed radically. Cared 
for by the alternate disciplines of archivists and librarians but 
long ignored by anthropologists, anthropological archives can 
be considered as a distinctly "anthropological problem" (Hal-
lowell, 1965). As this case study shows, anthropological ar?
chives have been situated in complex socio-cultural fields, sub?
ject to differing and, at times, competing claims by changing 
sets of creators, curators, and users. 
Fieldnotes and other ethnographic inscriptions have a double 
existence. First, they are representations, carriers of meanings, 
which may be transcribed or reformulated, especially if they 
are formed of words. With the exception of native-made arti?
facts, all are mediated by the anthropologist and by the record?
ing device, capturing some cultural elements and losing others. 
Second, they are physical and enduring objects subject to their 
inherent physical limitations (Kopytoff, 1986; see also Ken-
worthy et al., 1985). They can, and typically do, move from 
hand to .hand. They may be destroyed, modified, copied, or fi?
nally deposited in an archives. A study of how anthropological 
archives come to be is analogous to the investigation of forma?
tion processes in archaeology, or of taphonomy in paleontology 
(see Fowler and Fowler, 1996:132-133; Parezo, 1996). All 
these studies investigate how the objects of study?vanished 
Iifeways or organisms?leave records in material deposits. 
Ira Jacknis, Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of 
California, Berkeley, California 94720-3712.USA. 
An investigation of the formation processes of field records 
is thus a cognate of the recent burgeoning attention to the his?
tory of artifact collections in museums, one of William Sturte?
vant's (1973) abiding interests, as well as a reflection of his 
joint concern for ethnohistory and the history of anthropology. 
Like the history of collections, the history of anthropological 
archives must ultimately be conducted comparatively. Never?
theless, we may use this case study to sketch the fundamental 
processes. The choice of a California example is particularly 
appropriate to honor Sturtevant, who as an undergraduate ma?
jored in anthropology at the University of California (UC) at 
Berkeley and who himself has contributed to its archives.1 
Historical Perspectives 
The anthropological archives at UC Berkeley is one of the old?
est and largest collections of anthropological manuscripts in 
the country.2 These holdings were begun very soon after the 
1901 appointment of Alfred L. Kroeber (1876-1960) to the 
newly founded Department and Museum of Anthropology at 
the university. An even older and larger collection, and a con?
scious model for Kroeber, was the archives at the Smithsonian 
Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), Washing?
ton, D.C, founded in 1879 (now the National Anthropological 
Archives). The other principal collection, the library at the 
American Philosophical Society (APS) in Philadelphia, Penn?
sylvania, has collected manuscripts on American Indians since 
the eighteenth century, but its focus on specifically anthropo?
logical materials is relatively recent. The donation of the Franz 
Boas Collection of Materials on American Linguistics to the 
APS in 1945 stimulated further donations, such as Boas's own 
papers (1961-1964) and those of his students and colleagues 
(van Keuren, 1986).3 The anthropological archives in Berkeley 
is unusual in size and scope for a university or museum. In?
stead it serves a regional sphere, largely, as Kroeber argued in a 
letter to the BAE, because California was more than a state; it 
was an entire Native American cultural area (Kroeber to 
Hodge, 20 Jun 1913, cited in Darnell, 1998:203). And since 
1901, the University of California was the place to study it (or 
at least so thought Kroeber). 
The 1901 founding date was relatively early in the establish?
ment of academic departments of anthropology. In fact, Berke?
ley was the first department of anthropology west of Chicago. 
Boas had started teaching anthropology at Columbia only in 
211 
212 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
1896, and Kroeber was awarded Columbia's first anthropology 
doctorate in 1901. Joining Kroeber at the inception was Pliny 
E. Goddard (1869-1928), who earned his doctorate in linguis?
tics from Berkeley in 1904. 
In the early years, collecting and research tended to predomi?
nate over teaching, although Kroeber lived to have at least two 
generations of graduate students. Samuel Barrett earned Berke?
ley's first anthropology doctorate in 1908, and although 
younger colleagues like Thomas T. Waterman and Nels Nelson 
studied at Berkeley, after J. Alden Mason's degree, in 1911, 
there was not another anthropology doctorate there until Will?
iam Duncan Strong in 1926. A larger group of students, includ?
ing Julian Steward, Ralph Beals, Lila O'Neale, and Anna Gay-
ton, began in the twenties, followed by an even larger group in 
the thirties, among them Cora Du Bois, Margaret Lantis, Philip 
Drucker, George Foster, and Robert Heizer. 
As was common at the time, Kroeber had a fairly domineer?
ing mode of professorial direction; he assigned ethnographic 
work in California to virtually all his students. Among those 
were some who were more drawn to other subfields and other 
regions: Mason, who later became a Peruvian archaeologist, 
worked with the Salinan in 1910, and Du Bois, who did psy?
chological anthropology in Indonesia, made a field trip to the 
Wintu in 1929. With Kroeber's retirement, in 1946, there was a 
shift to more diverse research on California with the hiring of 
Heizer, the establishment of the UC Archaeological Survey, 
and the founding of the Department of Linguistics under Mur?
ray Emeneau and Mary R. Haas. Instruction in other regions of 
the world was also added to the curriculum, beginning in 1946 
with the hiring of David Mandelbaum, a specialist in India. 
The single most important factor in the formation of the an?
thropological archives at UC Berkeley was Kroeber's theoreti?
cal proclivities (Jacknis, 1993, 1996b; Buckley, 1996). Among 
the most decisive was Kroeber's Boasian approach to ethnog?
raphy, a set of linked implications that has come to be known as 
the "salvage paradigm" (Clifford, 1987). Kroeber's initial as?
sumption was that his primary subject?Native American cul?
ture?was vanishing, and as these were nonliterate cultures, it 
was up to the anthropologist to create the objects that would 
form the basis of study for future generations of scholars. Kroe?
ber shared these tenets with most of his colleagues, but he also 
confronted a unique situation in California. Because of the 
great diversity of native cultures in the state and the compara?
tive lack of study, there was a need for survey and mapping. 
Given the pressures of time and the lack of graduate students, 
research had to be collaborative. Because of his personal ambi?
tions, Kroeber wanted to be the one to direct and centralize this 
research (Long, 1998). 
Although survey work had been conducted by the university 
since Kroeber's arrival, it was formalized in 1903 by the estab?
lishment of the Ethnological and Archaeological Survey of 
California, with funding from Phoebe Hearst, the founding pa?
tron of the anthropology department and museum. In this ef?
fort, Kroeber saw himself as continuing in California the sur?
vey work of the BAE (Darnell, 1998:199-209). Most of his 
own fieldwork came in his first decade in California; by the 
second decade, he had turned to summarizing it, along with the 
research of others, in the "Handbook of the Indians of Califor?
nia," essentially completed by 1918 but not published until 
1925. In the preface he acknowledged making use of the work 
of many colleagues and students: Barrett, Roland Dixon, Ed?
ward Gifford, Goddard, John P. Harrington, Philip M. Jones, 
Llewellyn Loud, Mason, Nelson, Edward Sapir, and Waterman 
(Kroeber, 1925:viii). In the thirties, Kroeber launched a collab?
orative survey, the Culture Element Distribution Survey of Na?
tive Western North America, carried out in the field between 
1934 and 1938 (Kroeber, 1939). Among the many who partici?
pated were Gifford, Steward, and Harold Driver. Because the 
goal from the beginning was to have comparative data that 
could be analyzed statistically, the research materials had to be 
shared and be accessible to Kroeber and those drawing the con?
clusions. At about the same time, Kroeber and the University 
of California participated in yet another survey?the Commit?
tee on Research in Native American Languages (Leeds-Hur-
witz, 1985). Between 1927 and 1937, the Committee sponsored 
the Native Califomian research of associated scholars such as 
Jaime de Angulo, Hans-Jorgen Uldall, and Harrington. 
Gradually, these several surveys led to the accumulation of a 
substantial archives, whose exact beginnings, however, remain 
obscure in the historical records. At least by 1909, Kroeber was 
thinking of archival preservation. Writing to his Harvard col?
league Dixon, he noted: "As to the Chimariko material, when?
ever you are entirely through with the notebooks we should 
like to keep them here as part of permanent record."4 Moreover, 
it is clear that Kroeber himself used manuscript material?orig?
inally created by others?from the start, first for compiling his 
Handbook, wherein he acknowledged "the abundant use made 
of manuscript data" (Kroeber, 1925:viii), and then in analyzing 
the data from the Culture Element Distribution Survey.5 
The Collections and Their Repositories 
There is no single anthropological archives at UC Berkeley, but 
at its core are the relevant materials currently housed in the 
University Archives in The Bancroft Library.6 Perhaps the most 
important of these are the so-called ethnological documents or 
manuscripts, 216 numbered items (some containing many sep?
arate subgroups). The collection has been known as such at 
least since 1971, when student assistant Dale Valory (1971) 
prepared a guide to the papers. The previous year they had been 
transferred to the University Archives from the Museum of An?
thropology. The manuscripts collection is diverse, consisting of 
manuscript drafts; fieldnotes; linguistic, ethnographic, and eth-
nobotanical card files; genealogical data; photographs; and 
maps. According to the University Archives, this material to?
tals over 50,000 pages. Another relevant holding of the ar?
chives is the Department and Museum of Anthropology corre?
spondence, 1901-1956. Although not primarily composed of 
NUMBER 44 213 
field materials, the collection contains much that is relevant in 
contextualizing the field documentation.7 
Unlike the manuscripts or the departmental correspondence, 
which in a sense never left the university, a major group of ma?
terial was kept by the creator and only donated after his or her 
death. These personal papers (kept in the Bancroft's Manu?
scripts Division) often included large bodies of fieldnotes, cor?
respondence, manuscripts, and other kinds of records. Perhaps 
the premiere collection is Kroeber's own, donated in 1961, 
with subsequent additions. Kroeber had had a fair amount of 
his own material on deposit in the department but removed it 
sometime before 1957. Among the groups of personal papers 
rich in California material are those of Barrett (1879-1965) and 
Heizer (1915-1979). Other anthropologists represented are 
Robert Lowie (1883-1957), Theodore McCown (1908-1969), 
Mandelbaum (1911-1987), and William Bascom (1912-1981), 
all university faculty members. 
The Bancroft also houses one major collection of Native Cal-
ifornian documentation not produced by a UC anthropologist: 
the papers of C. Hart Merriam (1855-1942). Originally a natu?
ralist with the United States Biological Survey, Merriam spent 
much of the last three decades of his life in meticulous ethno?
logical fieldwork. Beginning in 1910, this research was sup?
ported by a trust administered by the Smithsonian Institution. 
Merriam and Kroeber had maintained a distant relationship 
(Griset, 1993:36-37), but in 1950?four years after Kroeber's 
retirement?Merriam's journals and field notes were loaned to 
Berkeley's Department of Anthropology from the Smithsonian, 
where they had been deposited by Merriam's daughters. The 
intention was to keep them accessible in California so they 
could be analyzed and published (Heizer, 1969; see also Mer?
riam, 1955). Heizer supervised the papers, depositing them 
gradually in the Bancroft between 1954 and 1977. Along with 
rich textual materials is an important collection of over 4400 
photographs. Because of family sentiment, Merriam's artifact 
collection went to the anthropology department at UC Davis. 
In addition to archival material created by anthropologists, 
The Bancroft Library holds other important bodies of material 
concerning Indians of western North America, such as explor?
ers' accounts and mission records. Much of this material was 
included in the collection amassed by historian Hubert Howe 
Bancroft, which was acquired by the Berkeley library in 1905. 
Other relevant holdings are the ethnohistorical research records 
of UC professor Sherburne F. Cook and manuscripts of Al-
phonse Louis Pinart, a nineteenth century French linguist and 
ethnologist. 
While the Bancroft has the largest body of anthropological 
archives on the Berkeley campus, there are other, specialized 
collections. In the early years of the department, research in ar?
chaeology and linguistics was conducted, but Kroeber did not 
stress training in either field. After his retirement, in 1946, both 
fields began to be actively taught on the campus, and both, in 
turn, generated fieldnotes. 
The UC Archaeological Survey was established in 1948, un?
der the direction of Heizer, and was succeeded by the Archaeo?
logical Research Facility (ARF) in 1960, which continues to 
this day. The Archaeological Survey was the repository for the 
reports of many of the excavations undertaken by university 
personnel, especially after Heizer's arrival. Until about 1975, 
when a series of regional centers was established, it acted as 
the central repository of archaeological site reports in the state. 
Apparently from very early on, the Archaeological Survey got 
control of relevant archaeological manuscripts that had been 
accumulating on the campus, with an especially large transfer 
coming in 1965 (Heizer, 1948, 1972).8 As Heizer (1972:38) re?
ported, "This archive is varied in its coverage and quality and 
consists of original fieldnotes, maps, old manuscripts which 
have been published and which are mainly of historical inter?
est." In 1990 the ARF manuscript collections were transferred 
to the custody of the Lowie (now Hearst) Museum of Anthro?
pology, Berkeley, California. 
When the Department of Linguistics was established at UC 
Berkeley, in 1953, it included the Survey of California Indian 
Languages, initially under the direction of Emeneau and Haas 
(1910-1996). Haas soon became the director, a position she 
held until her retirement, in 1977 (Hinton, 1996:93-138; Parks, 
1997). The Languages Survey was dedicated to preserving 
records of endangered languages and generated its own collec?
tion of fieldnotes and sound recordings. Most were produced 
by graduate students, but the survey also acquired some lin?
guistic manuscripts, as had the Archaeological Survey, of older 
material from other units on campus (Golla, 1995:150-151). 
Since the early 1960s, the sound recordings of the Department 
of Linguistics have been housed in the language laboratory 
(now the Berkeley Language Center) (Rodriguez-Nieto, 1982). 
The survey collection includes not only unique, primary mate?
rials but also secondary records, such as photocopies that are 
not usually preserved in archives run by librarians. 
Although the Hearst Museum still preserves some fieldnotes 
in accession records, along with various sorts of institutional 
records, most of its anthropological material is in the form of 
non-literary media: artifacts, still photographs, films and video?
tapes, and sound recordings. The latter?mostly wax cylinders 
that have been transferred to tape?include both song and 
speech (Keeling, 1991; Jacknis, in press). Almost all the exten?
sive document files that the museum once held have been 
transferred to the Bancroft. Thus, many collections generated 
by a given anthropologist?Kroeber, or Bascom, for instance? 
have been split up between the museum and the library, with 
the former taking the photographs and sound recordings and 
the latter holding the extensive written notes that accompany 
them. 
As one can see, these various collections reside in various 
institutional homes, and they have moved around during their 
existence. It is uncertain where much of this material was 
housed during the years when the anthropology department 
was in Berkeley and the museum was in San Francisco 
214 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
(1903-1931); it may have resided in both venues. When the 
museum moved to Berkeley, it took up residence in the old 
civil engineering building (1931-1959), and by 1951, at least, 
most of the ethnological documents seem to have been stored 
in the seminar room of the university library, a room kept 
locked when not in use. Shortly after the museum moved to its 
new home in Kroeber Hall in late 1959, all of the anthropolog?
ical archives were likewise transferred to the anthropology li?
brary, in the same building (arriving in 1961). While the per?
sonal collections of scholars have generally remained under 
their control during their lifetime, many of them were actually 
stored in departmental quarters. 
Scope, Creators, and Curators 
Given the original focus of the department, it is not surprising 
that most of the ethnological manuscripts at The Bancroft Li?
brary deal with California. There is, however, material from 
neighboring regions, such as the Great Basin and the South?
west, as well as from the more distant regions of Alaska, Brit?
ish Columbia, and Mexico. The non-New World material is 
primarily from the Philippines (Roy Barton and John 
Garvan9)?a special interest of Kroeber and University Presi?
dent David P. Barrows?with a little from Gifford's work in 
Oceania. The geographical balance of campus anthropological 
archives did not shift until the 1980s, when The Bancroft Li?
brary acquired the personal papers of Bascom (Africa) and 
Mandelbaum (India). These geographical emphases match al?
most exactly the foci of department research, at least until the 
recent past. (More recent records have yet to be deposited). In 
terms of date, the material comes from throughout the depart?
ment's history, although with a concentration from the 1930s in 
the ethnological manuscripts collection. 
As one would expect, these records were created primarily 
by UC faculty and students, particularly those whose research 
was funded by the university. But not everyone was repre?
sented equally. By happenstance, Goddard, Gifford, Frank Ess-
ene, and Waterman are more heavily represented in the ethno?
logical manuscripts.10 (Although, ironically, not all their 
material can be presently located.) Almost all of Kroeber's 
fieldnotes are in his personal papers. In fact, essentially for rea?
sons of control, the fieldnotes of faculty tended to come in as 
personal papers after the individual's death, whereas student 
records were more often incorporated into the department col?
lection of ethnological manuscripts soon after they were writ?
ten. The working assumption seems to have been that students 
had to deposit their records at the university when their re?
search was funded by or through the university, as it so often 
was. Several collections came from former students who did 
not go on to a career in anthropology. For instance, Paul-Louis 
Faye was a student of Kroeber's in the twenties. When he 
shifted fields from anthropology to French, Faye turned over 
his material on Cupeno myths to Kroeber. A related situation 
was that of Hugh W. Littlejohn, a graduate student in anthro?
pology who died "some years" after his 1928 field work on 
Nisenan (Kroeber, [1958]:20). 
The collections also contain a good bit from those not di?
rectly associated with the university, people whose work was of 
special interest to Kroeber for its value to California Indian 
studies. A case in point is Philip Stedman Sparkman, who had 
recorded linguistic data from the Luisefio and other southern 
Californian groups. After Sparkman's death, in 1907, Kroeber 
managed to obtain his manuscripts. "Even the slight discrepan?
cies," Kroeber noted, "resting on information independently ob?
tained and representing significant differences of point of view, 
may have value for future students" (in Sparkman, 1908:188). 
The various keepers (curators or archivists) of these collec?
tions have been diverse and have included both those holding 
ultimate authority (such as faculty members) and those respon?
sible for day-to-day maintenance (a clerk or archivist). We 
know little about the caretaking of the collection in its early 
years, but it was probably performed by a clerk or secretary, 
working under Kroeber's supervision. Quite a number of items 
were kept personally by Kroeber in his office safe. Toward the 
end of his life, Kroeber seemed to have been especially con?
cerned with the archives." During 1957-1958, he spent much 
time sorting through and annotating the collection. In the 
course of his dictated commentary, Kroeber suggested some 
basic principles of archival method, as he saw it. For instance, 
necessary transcriptions should be performed by people who 
are familiar with the material, so that errors in reading Native 
American names, locations, and so on, are not introduced, and 
any lists, labels, or finding aids should "give the most essential 
facts conveniently," in order not "to leave essential guiding in?
formation to be searched out afresh each time by going to the 
documents themselves" (Kroeber, [1958]:21, 25). Although 
sound principles in any case, one notes in them the viewpoint 
of a practicing scholar. 
The sixties was the period of greatest activity for the forma?
tion of the archives as an ordered collection. This effort had 
been initiated by Kroeber's review and annotation of the mate?
rial in 1957-1958, but the most intense work was begun at the 
end of 1966 by Valory, then an anthropology graduate student, 
who did most of the processing (Kroeber and Valory, 1967). 
Valory's own motivation was to use this material, especially 
Goddard's Tolowa and Tututni notes, in his dissertation (Val?
ory, 1970). "This project was undertaken voluntarily by me," 
he reported, "under the supervision of Dr. A. B. Elsasser of the 
Lowie Museum. The work involved examination and evalua?
tion of the collections themselves, library research to determine 
whether or not materials had been published, ought to be, could 
be, etc.; and correspondence with authors or with experts who 
might be concerned with the best possible use and/or evalua?
tion of the materials."12 This work continued until Valory re?
vised his guide and the material was transferred to the Ban?
croft, where university archivists currently care for the 
collection. The archaeological manuscripts were first curated 
by Heizer in his Archaeological Research Facility and cur-
NUMBER 44 215 
rently are curated by the Hearst Museum. The Linguistics De?
partment still supervises the records in the Survey of California 
and Other Indian Languages (as it was renamed in 1965). 
One can discern in this history a process of gradual "institu?
tionalization," in several senses. First, there is an increasing 
specialization, with separate collections formed to match the 
growth in the amount and scope of research. It has also entailed 
the replacement of personal and ad-hoc practices by regular?
ized procedures, with a dedicated staff and space. But most sig?
nificant has been the shift from a period in which matters were 
decided largely on the basis of their relevance to anthropology 
to one where principles of archivism and librarianship take pre?
cedence. Leanne Hinton, the current director of the California 
Language Survey, glosses this as a distinction between a 
"working archives" (the survey) and a "preservation archives" 
(the Bancroft). She added, "As these materials get more valu?
able, they tend toward the Bancroft" (Hinton, pers. comm., 28 
Oct 1996), meaning that over time the feeling grows that they 
should be cared for not by individuals but in an archives where 
they can be preserved and made accessible to all. 
What Is There and What Is Not There 
At various times, inventories were made of the collection. One 
of the earliest, dated to 1951, lists 39 items, corresponding to 
what Kroeber annotated in 1958. Yet there was a lot more ar?
chival material on campus that was not considered by Kroeber. 
Generally, as in the case of both the ethnological documents 
and the archaeological manuscripts, these inventories are sim?
ple sequential lists with items in no apparent order. Because of 
their repeated use and reference by archivists and scholars, 
these lists and numbering systems have been maintained for 
both collections. 
Some fieldnotes that might be expected to have been depos?
ited in the Berkeley archives seem to have never made it. As 
linguist William Seaburg (1994:9) comments, "Anthropology 
has not been particularly solicitous of its intellectual heritage, 
especially its treatment of fieldnotes and other field-generated 
documentation." Dixon, for instance, is reported to have delib?
erately destroyed his Maidu field notebooks (Bernstein, 
1993:21). Du Bois' notes on the Wintu, which she produced on 
a Berkeley-sponsored field trip, cannot be located.13 
The notes of Goddard are a particularly instructive example 
of the fate of fieldnotes. Goddard taught in the anthropology 
department from 1901 until 1909, when he accepted a curato?
rial post at the American Museum of Natural History, where he 
remained until his death in 1928. In looking at his field materi?
als preserved at Berkeley, one first notices the virtual absence 
of ethnographic notes. A comment by Kroeber explains this 
gap: "Ethnographic information Goddard tended, on the whole, 
to record only in his memory, and that is no doubt why he pub?
lished so little, except on Hupa where he lived?for other 
tribes, the bits are likely to be marginal notes to his linguistic 
records. He did however observe a great deal of culture: I recall 
quizzing him with profit for a full hour on his return from his 
two Tolowa trips" (Kroeber, 1967:273). 
As a working scholar, Goddard seems to have taken all his 
unpublished field materials with him to New York. After his 
death, these notes traveled through the hands of several col?
leagues?Elsie Clews Parsons to Gladys Reichard (his literary 
executor), to Florence Voegelin (at the Indiana University Lin?
guistics Archive)?until arriving back in Berkeley, at which 
point Kroeber transferred some to the APS Library (Kroeber, 
1967; Valory, 1971:50).14 So, while some of these original field 
records never made it to the Berkeley archives, other, related, 
material ended up on the East Coast. This illustrates a common 
feature of archival research, that a given collection may be split 
between repositories (Parezo, 1996:145-147). Attempts can be 
made to avoid this, but to a large extent it is an inevitable result 
of the multiple paths through which field materials flow as they 
are created and used. 
The Goddard records also illustrate another common mode of 
transmission. Whether through the action of the creator or his/ 
her literary executors, parts of a scholar's work may be given to 
students or colleagues in order that they might "complete" or 
otherwise use the fieldnotes. A prime Berkeley example is the 
papers of Heizer, many of whose "works-in-progress" were 
given to various students (Clark, 1979:266-267). Most of these 
still have not made their way back into the collection. 
Quite a number of manuscripts that were once in the collec?
tion are no longer there, and their absence was noted in the in?
ventories. Valory, Elsasser, and others removed things that they 
deemed "of no interest or value" from an anthropological 
standpoint before making lists and handing over the material to 
the University Archives.'5 For example, several documents 
were removed in 1962, "as they are neither ethnological or 
original documents."16 Another manuscript, James Bennyhoff's 
working notes and drawings of fish spears and harpoons, was 
returned to him on the grounds that they had been "adequately 
published."17 "WPA typescripts of books unavailable to U.C. 
scholars during the Depression" were removed because they 
were merely copies,18 and Kroeber ([1958]:29) questioned the 
value of a carbon copy of something "probably printed." Com?
plaining about the retention of apparently useless maps, Kroe?
ber ([1958]:32) noted, "This is a classic illustration of the pain?
fully careful preservation of irrelevant information because no 
one on the staff who would know intervenes to say what is ir?
relevant." He did recommend, however, keeping an early ver?
sion of the Sparkman Luiseno grammar, which he subsequently 
published (Kroeber and Grace, 1960), for the "historical 
record," but not for "any fuller or new information" (Kroeber, 
[1958]:30). Key criteria for the retention or removal of records 
during this period were their uniqueness, ethnological signifi?
cance, and publication status. 
In addition to single or small groups of items, entire collec?
tions have left the campus. The best case in point is the Wash?
ington Matthews papers. Matthews (1843-1905), the founder 
of Navajo studies, was supported in his last years by Phoebe 
216 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Hearst in order to translate and edit his notes. According to the 
arrangement, Matthews's papers came to Berkeley following 
his death. Although Goddard, a fellow Athapaskanist, did 
some initial work with them, they were largely ignored after 
1909, when Goddard went to the American Museum. In 1951 
they were given to the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art, 
founded by Mary Cabot Wheelwright in Santa Fe, New Mex?
ico, in the belief that they would be more often consulted there 
(Wheelwright Museum, 1985). This inverse of the Goddard 
papers demonstrates that archival collections are deposited for 
contingent and historical reasons, not for reasons of sheer logic 
or appropriateness. 
This active form of deaccessioning prevailed during the time 
that the collection was controlled by Kroeber and the anthro?
pology department. With minor adjustments as series are pro?
cessed, the University Archives has tended to preserve collec?
tions as presented. These active changes in the status of 
archives are an indication of the exercise of control. Before 
1971 for the anthropological papers and still today for the Lan?
guages Survey, academic rather than narrowly "archival" stan?
dards of value have been applied. Papers came into and went 
out of the collection according to personal connections be?
tween the creators and the curators, in addition to whatever dis?
ciplinary values they may have held. During such a period, pa?
pers may have been removed or destroyed if the creator were 
living and deemed to have a say in their status. 
Absences, such as those noted here, are significant historical 
markers. To note only what is currently in an archives is to miss 
a vital part of its history, for it is presentist and retrospective, 
ignoring much that was once important. An understanding of 
these formation processes and their effect on the archival sam?
ple is necessary to reconstruct the entire picture, both ethno-
graphically, for the culture described, and historically, for the 
life and work of the anthropologist. 
Changing Uses and Users of the Collections 
For archival collections, issues of preservation, reproduction, 
publication, and access are intimately interwoven. The Depart?
ment of Conservation of the Bancroft and the university library 
has carried out a series of preservation efforts devoted to the 
Kroeber, Heizer, and Merriam papers and to the ethnological 
documents. These projects of ordering and describing, repair 
and rehousing, and microfilming serve as a means of preserva?
tion as well as reproduction. 
Archives have always borne a complex relationship to publi?
cation. Generally, archives have preserved what has not been 
published, although there is the understanding that some of the 
manuscripts are potentially publishable. One of the more im?
portant publications of a manuscript in the Berkeley archives is 
Kroeber's Yurok Myths (1976; see also Kroeber and Gifford, 
1980). Heizer was one of the most active editors/publishers of 
original archival material, including much in the Bancroft 
(e.g., 1970; Merriam, 1955). On occasion, publication has 
been problematic, for example, Isabel Kelly's notes on the 
Coast Miwok. During the 1970s, portions of her notes were 
copied?for research purposes only?from the Lowie Mu?
seum. Kelly was very upset when they were published without 
her permission and with errors (Kelly, 1978:424). Her full 
Coast Miwok fieldnotes were published after her death (Col?
lier and Thalman, 1991).'9 
Kroeber's ethnographic material has been the subject of two 
digitization projects. In 1998 his photographs, housed at the 
Hearst Museum, were digitized and incorporated into the Ban?
croft's Finding Aid series to complement his collection of pa?
pers. (In 2000 the museum and library started a larger project to 
digitize the museum's entire collection of ethnographic field 
photos of California Indians.) The Kroeber images will become 
part of a separate effort: a World Wide Web site, under con?
struction, that will be dedicated to Kroeber's representation of 
Yurok culture, which may form the basis for a future CD-ROM 
production. These various forms of photographic and digital re?
production are allowing the reintegration of field records that 
have been split up for practical and administrative reasons. A 
student will then be able to trace Kroeber's ethnography, while 
contextualizing it with alternative documents (letters, newspa?
pers, local histories, etc.), revealing what Kroeber left out and 
how he accomplished what he did. 
Archives, dedicated to the preservation of unique objects, are 
incomprehensible apart from their interplay with the changing 
technology and customs of reproduction. Almost all archival 
material can be copied in some form or another, and this capac?
ity has only accelerated in recent years as magnetic sound re?
cording, photocopying, microfilm, and now digitization allow 
ever easier and more precise forms of exact duplication. The 
Berkeley archives once included typed transcriptions and car?
bon copies, which archivists have generally decided to exclude, 
acting under the necessary assumption that they have to priori?
tize the limited storage space at hand. 
These contemporary technologies raise postmodern ques?
tions of authenticity. Publication, photography, and now the In?
ternet begin to blur the distinction between original and copy. 
These new forms of reproduction have transformed archives. 
During the time of Boas and Kroeber, field material in the 
hands of individuals or archives were of little use to the profes?
sion. Publication was the main means of making them accessi?
ble to scholars. This explains the feeling against Harrington, 
who was reluctant to publish, and Kroeber's compulsion to 
publish.20 Now with photocopying and changes in disciplinary 
values, publication can actually be less valuable, as it is so of?
ten selective, with a bias against description (Hinton, pers. 
comm., 28 Oct 1996). 
These photographic and digital surrogates make possible a 
new kind of archives, overcoming some of the inherent limita?
tions of collections of unique items. These alternate versions 
make possible the sharing and duplication of collections be?
tween distant repositories?as, for example, with the Goddard 
collection. They can also allow the simultaneous preservation 
NUMBER 44 217 
(by archives) and analysis (by students) of collections, as seen, 
for example, with the Heizer papers. In a sense, such technol?
ogy is a form of publication that moves archives away from the 
model of museums (unique items) and more to that of libraries 
(multiple copies). 
The greatest change in how the anthropological archives has 
been used came when it was transferred to the University Ar?
chives. Before going to the library, access was controlled by 
the anthropology department and museum, and thus permission 
tended to be given based on the personal relationship of the 
prospective researcher to the curator. While the creators were 
still alive and possibly interested in using unpublished material, 
there was a certain reticence to grant access. (Formal permis?
sion documents seem to have been lacking.) Part of Valory's 
job was to contact all living creators or the executors of de?
ceased researchers and ask them about their feelings on dona?
tion and access. Now, with these permissions secured, the col?
lection is generally accessible to all who can show a serious 
interest. The accumulated archival materials at UC Berkeley 
are used extensively by a wide range of patrons: anthropolo?
gists (Jacknis, 1995; Milliken, 1995), historians of anthropol?
ogy (Darnell, 1998; Golla, 1984), the popular press (Margolin, 
1981), and, most importantly, native peoples. 
One recent outreach effort was the California Indian Library 
Collections (CILC) project, administered by the Lowie Mu?
seum (1988-1994). The CILC made copies of various forms 
of archival material on the Berkeley campus, primarily photo?
graphs and sound recordings, and distributed them to county 
libraries, where they could be consulted by local Native 
American populations (Davis and Koue, 1989). Native peo?
ples have been especially interested in studying and obtaining 
copies of photographs of family relatives. A particularly excit?
ing program was "Breath of Life/Silent No More," a work?
shop on Native Califomian language preservation that Hinton 
has organized (Hinton, 1996). In 1996, 1997, 1998, and 2000, 
individuals whose native languages were extinct were exposed 
to the wide range of archival material on the campus, which 
they could use to help revive their traditions. 
Many, especially Native Californians, have criticized Kroe?
ber, both for his omissions as well as for many of his positive 
statements. Hupa scholar Jack Norton, for instance, took Kroe?
ber to task for his failure to treat the genocide of Native Ameri?
cans and the importance of the religious dimension of north?
west Califomian cultures (Norton, 1979:6-7, 18; see also 
Costo and Costo, 1995:12-13, 44). Boas, Kroeber, and other 
anthropologists of their generation proved to be mistaken in 
their belief that Native Americans would become extinct. Yet 
much of Native American culture has changed, and some has 
been lost. Boasian anthropologists strove to create an archive 
for future generations. Ironically, they were thinking of schol?
ars, not native peoples (Jacknis, 1996a:209). What is of value 
in the ethnographies of Kroeber and his colleagues is the intri?
cate descriptive detail, inevitably flawed though it may be. 
Anthropological archives will become only more important 
with the passage of time. The participants in the Silent No 
More workshop showed "who the most appreciative audience 
of our work is," as Hinton (1996:16) remarked. She continued, 
"There is no one in the world who has more at stake and is ulti?
mately more concerned with the quality of our work than the 
members of the speech communities themselves. The work of 
Harrington, Merriam, Kroeber, Barrett, and others has never 
been respected as thoroughly by linguists or treated with such 
passionate gratitude by them as it is today by Native Califor?
nians." An appreciation of how and why these archives have 
been created will allow us all to better mine the rich cultural 
documentation they preserve. 
Notes 
For help in the research and writing of this paper I thank Grace Buzaljko, Regna 
Darnell, Victor Golla, Leanne Hinton, James Kantor, Lauren Lassleben, Alex?
ander Long, William Merrill, Sheila O'Neill, Nancy Parezo, Lori Reyes 
Schmidt, and William Roberts. I am deeply indebted to Bill Sturtevant, who 
back in the summer of 1972 (when I had a undergraduate internship with him), 
inspired me to become an anthropologist and to specialize in so many of his 
own interests?Native American art and material culture, museums, visual 
forms of ethnographic representation, and the history of anthropology. 
1. Some of Sturtevant's correspondence is included in the anthropological ar?
chives at UC Berkeley, in the papers of Robert F. Heizer, editor of the Califor?
nia volume of the Handbook of North American Indians, of which Sturtevant is 
the general editor (Sturtevant, 1981; see also a small Sturtevant accession, 77/ 
60, in The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California). 
2. This essay cannot address all the many complex issues of anthropological 
archives, and given the great scope of this collection, it can only be a sketch. 
This task is made even more difficult by the lack of a comprehensive published 
review of the history of anthropology at UC Berkeley. Thoresen (1975) and 
Long (1998) are excellent for its founding and early years; see also Jacknis 
(1999, 2000). Grace Buzaljko is completing what promises to be an extremely 
valuable study, "The Berkeley Anthropologists, 1901-1991." 
3. Boas seems to have been much less self-conscious than Kroeber in his for?
mulation of a local ethnographic archives, with the exception of the Committee 
on Research in Native American Languages, 1927-1937. Even here, his inten?
tion was to publish the many manuscripts he accumulated. It was only the lack 
of available funding during the 1930s and his death in 1942 that led to their 
eventual donation to the American Philosophical Society (Leeds-Hurwitz, 
1985:150). 
4. A.L. Kroeber to R.B. Dixon, 5 Jan 1909, folder file 1909 D, carton 4, De?
partment of Anthropology correspondence, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 
Alex Long kindly shared this letter with me. Dixon did indeed deposit "Chima-
riko Culture and Language," a 166-page typed manuscript based on his 1906 
field work (funded by Phoebe Hearst for the university), which formed the ba?
sis for a publication (Dixon, 1910). 
5. Darnell (1998:205) reported that Kroeber and Roland Dixon consulted 
manuscripts in the BAE collection in Washington, D.C, while working on their 
reclassification of Native Califomian languages. 
6. The distinction between the University Archives and The Bancroft Library 
has been nicely spelled out by James Kantor, former university archivist: "Un?
til 1970, The Bancroft Library was primarily a depository for materials relating 
to the history of the American west, with some attempts, since the 1950s, to in?
clude California literary materials. The Bancroft did not seek collections of 
manuscripts relating to other fields; therefore it did not seek most faculty pa?
pers. The University Archives, which goes back to the beginning of the univer?
sity in 1875 [the university itself was founded in 1868], was a department of 
the university library until it was transferred to The Bancroft Library in 1962; it 
did collect faculty papers. I assumed the position of university archivist, as a 
218 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
staff member of The Bancroft Library, in 1964, and soon after transferred aU 
faculty papers (that is, manuscript collections) to the Manuscripts Division of 
The Bancroft Library, where they sit today. Thus, in 1964 such collections as 
Kroeber's papers were transferred. Meanwhile I did actively collect materials 
relating to the university, including its academic projects, so that it made emi?
nent sense to acquire the correspondence files of the Museum and Department 
of Anthropology, and the Ethnological Documents" (in litt., 20 Dec 1996). 
7. Like the general history of UC Berkeley anthropology, there is no compre?
hensive review of disciplinary archival resources at the university, although 
each repository has its own finding aids. Much relevant information on the his?
tory of the archival collection is contained in two binders in the Hearst Mu?
seum Archives, Berkeley, California. Both, however, contain much more than 
their cover titles indicate. In the notes, I have referred to them by their colors, 
since they were referred to that way at the time. 
Blue binder: "A.L. Kroeber and Dale Valory, A Guide to Ethnological Doc?
uments 1-39 of the Department of Anthropology in the R.H. Lowie Muse?
um of Anthropology." 
Brown binder: "Master List File Copy of Various Documents Stored in the 
R.H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology 'Archives.'" 
8. See "Manuscripts in the U of C Archaeological Survey Files," 1950, 
brown binder (see note 7); "California Archaeological Manuscripts," 1951, 
brown binder, noted as transferred from the museum to the Archaeological Re?
search Facility in 1965 (Shirley R. Gudmundsen to Edna Flood, 8 Sep 1965, 
brown and blue binders). 
9. Barton, an amateur but dedicated ethnologist, worked extensively in the 
Philippines between 1906 and his death, in 1947. While studying to be a dentist 
at the UC in the teens, he came into contact with Kroeber and the anthropology 
department. Garvan, an employee of the Ethnological Survey of the Philippines 
in Manila between 1900 and 1920, prepared his manuscripts in the two decades 
before his death, in 1940. 
10. Before obtaining his anthropology doctorate from Berkeley?on Eskimo 
mythology, in 1947?Essene spent much of the previous decade in ethno?
graphic research among California Indians. 
11. Kroeber's retrospective activity during the 1950s coincided with his prepa?
ration for publication of his California Indian linguistic and ethnologic re?
searches, which was supported by a grant he had obtained in 1951 (Hymes, 
1961:19). 
12. Dale Valory to Nelson Graburn, 11 Mar 1967, blue binder (see note 7); 
Memorandum from Dale Valory "To Whom It May Concern," 20 Oct 1968, 
blue binder. 
13. Du Bois's Wintu notes are neither at Berkeley nor in the Tozzer Anthropol?
ogy Library at Harvard with the rest of her papers (Seaburg, 1994:24). She may 
have given them to a student or to a colleague. 
14. A related case of traveling Goddard fieldnotes is reported by Seaburg 
(1994:9-10). "A frequent practice, though, has been the dispersal of notes to 
various colleagues and students or to Native collaborators or their descendants. 
Sometime after Pliny E. Goddard's death in 1928 his Lassik and Galice Creek 
Athapaskan notes were given to Gladys Reichard, who gave them to Melville 
Jacobs in the early 1940s. They are now part of the Melville Jacobs Collection 
at the University of Washington Libraries. Edward Sapir's Hupa fieldnotes 
were given to his student, Harry Hoijer, who in turn gave them to his student, 
Victor Golla, who eventually gave them to the American Philosophical Society 
Library. ...Such examples of the physical odyssey of field materials are by no 
means unusual. As a result of this practice notes have been lost or their where?
abouts remain obscure." 
15. Valory to W.R. Bascom, 15 Mar 1967, blue binder (see note 7); cf. Valory 
to N.H.H. Graburn, 11 Mar 1967, blue binder. 
16. Memorandum from Valory regarding Museum of Anthropology Archives, 
31 Jan 1967, blue binder (see note 7). 
17. James A. Bennyhoff to Valory, 28 Jan 1967, blue binder (see note 7). 
18. Memorandum from Valory "To Whom It May Concern," 20 Oct 1968, 
blue binder (see note 7). 
19. Kelly's original ethnographic notes are with many of her other papers in 
the Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, 
Texas, under the care of Robert V. Kemper (Collier and Thalman, 1991: 
xxiv-xxvii). 
20. As Kroeber once remarked: "I would rather publish as fast as 1 can feel 
reasonably sure of my material, even at the risk of errors and uncertainties, so 
that it will be out where others can shoot at it. Nothing is worth much in any 
profession until it is published" (Krieger, 1961:21). 
Literature Cited 
Bernstein, Bruce 
1993. Roland Dixon and the Maidu. Museum Anthropology, 17(2):20-26. 
Buckley, Thomas 
1996. "The Little History of Pitiful Events": The Epistemological and 
Moral Contexts of Kroeber's Califomian Ethnology. In George 
Stocking, editor, Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian 
Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition. History of 
Anthropology, 8:257-297. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 
Clark, J. Desmond 
1979. Memorial to Robert Fleming Heizer (1915-1979). Journal of Cali?
fornia and Great Basin Anthropology, 1(2):241?267. 
Clifford, James 
1987. Of Other Peoples: Beyond the "Salvage" Paradigm. In Hal Foster, 
editor, Discussions in Contemporary Culture, pages 121-130. Seat?
tle, Washington: Bay Press. 
Collier, Mary E.T., and Sylvia Barker Thalman, editors 
1991. Interviews with Tom Smith and Maria Copa: Isabel Kelly's Ethno?
graphic Notes on the Coast Miwok Indians of Marin and Southern 
Sonoma Counties, California, xl + 544 pages. San Rafael, California: 
Miwok Archeological Preserve of Marin. 
Costo, Rupert, and Jeannette Henry Costo 
1995. Natives of the Golden State: The California Indians, xxii + 369 
pages. San Francisco, California: The Indian Historian Press. 
Darnell, Regna D. 
1998. And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in Americanist 
Anthropology, xviii+331 pages. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 
Pennsylvania: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 
Dixon, Roland B. 
1910. The Chimariko Indians and Language. University of California 
Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 5(5): 
295-380. 
Davis, Lee, and Don Koue 
1989. Going Home: The California Indian Library Collections Manual. 
103 pages. [Berkeley]: California Indian Project, Lowie Museum of 
Anthropology, University of California. 
Fowler, Catherine S., and Don D. Fowler 
1996. Formation Processes of Ethnographic Collections: Examples from 
the Great Basin of Western North America. In W. David Kingery, 
editor, Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Cul?
ture Studies, pages 129-144. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Insti?
tution Press. 
NUMBER 44 219 
Golla, Victor 
1995. The Records of American Indian Linguistics. In Sydel Silverman 
and Nancy J. Parezo, editors, Preserving the Anthropological 
Record, second edition, pages 143-157. New York: Wenner-Gren 
Foundation for Anthropological Research. 
Golla, Victor, editor 
1984. The Sapir-Kroeber Correspondence: Letters between Edward Sapir 
and A.L. Kroeber, 1905-1925. Report, Survey of California and 
Other Indian Languages, 6: x+494 pages. Berkeley: University of 
California. 
Griset, Suzanne 
1993. C. Hart Merriam: The Naturalist as Ethnographer. Museum Anthro?
pology, 17(2):33-40. 
Hallowell, A. Irving 
1965. The History of Anthropology as an Anthropological Problem. Jour?
nal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1:24?38. 
Heizer, Robert F. 
1948. The California Archaeological Survey: Establishment, Aims, and 
Methods. Reports of the University of California Archaeological 
Survey, 1: 6 pages. 
1972. A Brief History of the UCAS and ARF, 1948-1972. In Check List 
and Index to Reports of the University of California Archaeological 
Survey, Nos. 32 (1955) to 74 (1968);...Other Information on Activi?
ties of me Survey and Facility, 1948-1972. Reports of the University 
of California Archaeological Survey, 75:37-41. Berkeley: Archaeo?
logical Research Facility, University of California. 
Heizer, Robert F., editor 
1970. An Anthropological Expedition of 1913: Or, Get It through Your 
Head: Or, Yours for the Revolution, Correspondence between A.L. 
Kroeber and L.L. Loud, July 12, 1913-October 31, 1913. ii leaves + 
39 pages. Berkeley: Archaeological Research Facility, University of 
California. 
Heizer, Robert F., with the assistance of Dennis Bailey, Marke Estis, and Karen 
Nissen 
1969. Catalogue of the C. Hart Merriam Collection of Data Concerning 
California Tribes and Other American Indians. 80 leaves. Berke?
ley: Archaeological Research Facility, University of California. 
Hinton, Leanne 
1996. Breath of Life/Silent No More: The Native Califomian Language 
Restoration Workshop. News from Native California, 10( 1): 13-16. 
Hinton, Leanne, editor 
1996. The Hokan, Penutian, and J.P. Harrington Conferences and The 
Mary R. Haas Memorial, June 28-29,1996, University of California 
at Berkeley. Report, Survey of California and Other Indian Lan?
guages, 10: v+138 pages. Berkeley: University of California. 
Hymes, Dell H. 
1961. Alfred Louis Kroeber. Language. 37(l) : l-28. 
Jacknis, Ira 
1993. Alfred Kroeber as Museum Anthropologist. Museum Anthropology, 
17(2):27-32. 
1995. Carving Traditions of Northwest California, with a Reprint ofThe 
Carver's Art of the Indians of Northwestern California, by Isabel T. 
Kelly, [i-v], vi-x, [xi-xii], 1-73, [74-75] pages; facsimile reprint: 
unnumbered verso, [343], 344-360 pages, 17 pages of plates, blank 
verso, 1 leaf. Berkeley: Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, 
University of California, Berkeley. 
1996a. The Ethnographic Object and the Object of Ethnology in the Early 
Career of Franz Boas. In George Stocking, editor, Volksgeist as 
Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German 
Anthropological Tradition. History of Anthropology, 8:185-214. 
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 
1996b. Alfred Kroeber and the Photographic Representation of Califomian 
Indians. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 20(3): 
15-32. 
1999. Patrons, Potters, and Painters: Phoebe Hearst's Collections from the 
American Southwest. In Shepard Krech III and Barbara A. Hail, ed?
itors, Collecting Native America, 1870-1960, pages 139-171. 
Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
2000. A Museum Prehistory: Phoebe Hearst and the Founding of the Mu?
seum of Anthropology, 1891-1901. Chronicle of the University of 
California, 4:47-77. 
In press. Yahi Culture in the Wax Museum: Ishi's Sound Recordings. In 
Karl and Clifton Kroeber, editors, Ishi in Three Centuries. Lincoln: 
University of Nebraska Press. 
Keeling, Richard 
1991. A Guide to Early Field Recordings (1900-1949) at the Lowie Mu?
seum of Anthropology, xxvii+487 pages. Berkeley: University of 
California Press. 
Kelly, Isabel 
1978. Coast Miwok. In William C Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of 
North American Indians, volume 8, Robert F. Heizer, editor, Cali?
fornia, pages 414?425. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
Kenworthy, Mary Anne, Eleanor M. King, Mary Elizabeth Ruwell, and Trudy 
Van Houten 
1985. Preserving Field Records: Archival Techniques for Archaeologists 
and Anthropologists, ix + 102 pages. Philadelphia: The University 
Museum, University of Pennsylvania. 
Kopytoff, Igor 
1986. The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process. In 
Arjun Appadurai, editor, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in 
Cultural Perspective, pages 64-91 . Cambridge, England: Cam?
bridge University Press. 
Krieger, Alex D. 
1961. On Being Critical. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, 25: 
19-23. 
Kroeber, Alfred L. 
1925. Handbook of the Indians of California. Bulletin, Bureau of Ameri?
can Ethnology, 78: xviii+995 pages. 
1939. Tribes Surveyed. Anthropological Records, l(7):435-440. [Cover ti?
tle. Cultural Element Distributions: XI.] 
[1958]. Re: Documents Nos. 1-39 of "Archives" stored by Anthropology in 
the University Library. 38 pages [Dictated and typed manuscript in 
the Kroeber Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, 
Berkeley, California.] 
1967. Goddard's California Athabascan Texts. Edited by Herbert J. Lan-
dar. International Journal of American Linguistics, 33(4):269-275. 
1976. Yurok Myths. Edited by Grace Buzaljko, xl+488 pages. Berkeley: 
University of California Press. 
Kroeber, A.L., and Edward W. Gifford, compilers 
1980. Karok Myths. Edited by Grace Buzaljko, foreword by Theodora 
Kroeber, folkloristic commentary by Alan Dundes, linguistic index 
by William Bright, index of parallel plot elements by Grace 
Buzaljko. xlix+380 pages. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of 
California Press. 
Kroeber, Alfred L., and George William Grace 
1960. The Sparkman Grammar of Luisefio. University of California Publi?
cations in Linguistics, 16: ix+257 pages. 
Kroeber, Alfred L., and Dale K. Valory 
1967. Ethnological Manuscripts in the Robert H. Lowie Museum of An?
thropology. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, 37:1-22. 
Leeds-Hurwtiz, Wendy 
1985. The Committee on Research in Native American Languages. Pro?
ceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 129(2): 129-160. 
Long, Frederick Alexander 
1998. "The Kingdom Must Come Soon": The Role of A.L. Kroeber and 
the Hearst Survey in Shaping California Anthropology, 1901-1920. 
xvi + 255 leaves. Masters's thesis, Department of History, Simon 
Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. 
Margolin, Malcolm, editor 
1981. The Way We Lived: California Indian Reminiscences, Stories, and 
220 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Songs. 209 pages. Berkeley, California: Heyday Books. 
Merriam, C. Hart 
1955. Studies of California Indians, xviii+233 pages. Berkeley: Univer?
sity of California Press. 
Milliken, Randall 
1995. A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the 
San Francisco Bay Area, 1769-1810. xvi+364 pages. Menlo Park, 
California: Ballena Press. 
Norton, Jack 
1979. Genocide in Northwestern California: When Our Worlds Cried. 
xviii+155 pages. San Francisco, California: Indian Historian Press. 
Parezo, Nancy J. 
1996. The Formation of Anthropological Archival Records. In W. David 
Kingery, editor, Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Mate?
rial Culture Studies, pages 145-172. Washington, D.C: Smithson?
ian Institution Press. 
Parks, Douglas R., editor 
1997. Mary R. Haas: A Memorial Issue. Anthropological Linguistics, 
39(4):503-713. 
Rodriquez-Nieto, Catherine 
1982. Sound Recordings in Native American Languages: A Catalogue. xi+ 
89 pages. Berkeley: Language Laboratory, University of California. 
Sanjek, Roger, editor 
1990. Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, xviii+429 pages. Ithaca, 
New York: Cornell University Press. 
Seaburg, William R. 
1994. Collecting Culture: The Practice and Ideology of Salvage Ethnogra?
phy in Western Oregon, 1877-1942. vi+313 leaves. Doctoral disser?
tation, Anthropology Department, University of Washington, 
Seattle, Washington. 
Silverman, Sydel, and Nancy J. Parezo, editors 
1995. Preserving the Anthropological Record. Second edition, vi+254 
pages. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological 
Research. 
Sparkman, Philip Stedman 
1908. The Culture of the Luiseno Indians. University of California Publi?
cations in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 8(4):[187]-234. 
Sturtevant, William C. 
1973. Museums as Anthropological Data Banks. In Alden Redfield, editor, 
Anthropology Beyond the University. Southern Anthropological So?
ciety Proceedings, 7:40-55. 
1981. R.F. Heizer and the Handbook of North American Indians. In Will?
iam S. Simmons and Polly McW. Bickel, editors, Contributions of 
Robert F. Heizer to California Ethnohistory, pages 1-5. Berkeley: 
Archaeological Research Facility, Department of Anthropology, 
University of California. 
Thoresen, Timothy H.H. 
1975. Paying the Piper and Calling the Tune: The Beginnings of Academic 
Anthropology in California. Journal of the History of the Behav?
ioral Sciences, 11(3):257?275. 
Valory, Dale K. 
1970. Yurok Doctors and Devils: A Study in Identity, Anxiety, and Devi?
ance. iv+275 leaves. Doctoral dissertation, Anthropology Depart?
ment, University of California, Berkeley, California. 
1971. Guide to Ethnological Documents (1-203) of the Department and 
Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, Now 
in the University Archives, iv+73 leaves. Berkeley: Department of 
Anthropology, Archaeological Research Facility, University of 
California. 
van Keuren, David K. 
1986. "The Proper Study of Mankind": An Annotated Bibliography of 
Manuscript Sources on Anthropology and Archeology in the Li?
brary of the American Philosophical Society. Publication (American 
Philosophical Society, Library), 10: 79 pages. Philadelphia, Penn?
sylvania: American Philosophical Society. 
Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian 
1985. Guide to the Microfilm Edition of the Washington Matthews Papers. 
xvii+109 pages. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Wheelwright Museum of 
the American Indian. 
Starring the Anthropologists in the American Men of Science 
David J. Meltzer 
Whatever the power of an "official myth of democratic equal?
ity" within the scientific community, practitioners know? 
deeply and viscerally?that not all scientists are created equal; 
some are more equal than others (Rudwick, 1985:419). They 
gain (and lose) status relative to their work, the work of their 
peers, and the changes and developments in their field. A mea?
sure of the relative status of individuals within a discipline or 
community of practitioners thus becomes a barometer for 
tracking changes?individual and institutional?within a disci?
pline itself. 
Gaining a measure of relative scientific status, particularly 
within a historic scientific community, is not always simple or 
straightforward. As a relative entity, scientific status is contin?
gency-bound and mutable and is one without fixed, supra-his?
torical standards (Rudwick, 1985:419). Moreover, perceived 
status resides largely in tacit and informal judgments?esti?
mates of worth that are arrayed along what has felicitously 
been termed a "gradient of attributed competence" (Rudwick, 
1985:419). That gradient runs from the few elite scientists who 
are regarded as arbiters of fundamental questions of theory, 
method, and substantive result, to the many non-elites whose 
roles are more sharply limited. Positions along such a gradient 
might coincide little with outward trappings of accomplish?
ment or formal hierarchies of status, including election to the 
National Academy of Sciences (Visher, 1947:4; Rossiter, 
1982:287; Rudwick, 1985:419). Instead, the gradient of com?
petence is usually ferreted out from less direct clues 
by noting the ways in which [the practitioners] treated and referred to each oth?
er and each other's work. Their correspondence is by far the richest source of 
evidence, because it was both informal and private; but published work is also 
revealing, at least if read between the lines. (Rudwick, 1985:419) 
James McKeen Cattell's efforts in compiling directories of 
American scientists have provided a more explicit and direct 
(but perhaps not unbiased) source for mapping the field of 
competence among select historic scientific communities, in?
cluding anthropology. In the spring of 1903, Cattell sent 10 of 
the most prominent anthropologists in America a list of some 
50 of their peers, with the request that they rank the names on 
the list according to their contributions to the field of anthro-
DavidJ. Meltzer, Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist 
University, Dallas, Texas 75275-0336, USA; e-mail: dmeltzer@mail. 
smu.edu. 
pology. All responded to his request, although more than one 
expressed misgivings about the venture. Cattell tabulated their 
responses, and the 20 top-ranked anthropologists each received 
a star next to their name in the 1906 (first) edition of the Amer?
ican Men of Science (hereafter, AMS). Cattell repeated this pro?
cess for subsequent editions of the AMS (the actual records of 
each judge's responses are available only for the first two edi?
tions, and the complete rankings are available only for the first 
three editions). 
Those records provide a window into scientific status and 
rank in early twentieth-century anthropology and how these 
changed over time. Indeed, gauging such matters on a long-
vanished intellectual landscape is often made even more com?
plicated by our own later perceptions of what was or what 
ought to have been the relative status of particular individuals 
(views that might well vary by one's own subdiscipline, theo?
retical persuasion, when the judgment is made, and so on). 
These historical records, of course, are not themselves free of 
bias, but they provide for the historicist (sensu Stocking, 1968) 
an opportunity to glimpse?warts and all?just how these indi?
viduals saw each others' merit at the time all were still alive, 
without the benefit (or burden) of a century of hindsight. Such 
records yield a fine-grained map of the field of competence and 
an uncommon perspective on the elite and non-elite in early 
American anthropology. 
Through these measures of individuals, we also gain insight 
into the process of disciplinary change and the development of 
early twentieth-century American anthropology. When the first 
of these directories was published (1906), American anthropol?
ogy stood poised on the threshold of major disciplinary change. 
Borne of a natural history tradition and having come of age 
when theories of social evolution dominated the intellectual 
landscape, the discipline was institutionally?and intellectu?
ally?firmly entrenched within the government research bu?
reaus and museums of Washington, D.C. Yet by the second de?
cade of the twentieth century, anthropology was moving fast 
toward a new center within the burgeoning university system, 
one dominated by Columbia University's Franz Boas and his 
students, who yearly were increasing in number and who pos?
sessed the formal training needed to meet the increasingly strict 
requirements of anthropology's newly created professional 
ranks. This group generally shared Boas's disdain for evolu?
tionary schemes that embraced all of humankind in a single de?
velopmental formula. They envisioned anthropology as a disci-
221 
222 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
pline where language, thought, customs, and ideas were 
paramount and where material objects?the focus of traditional 
museum anthropology?played a far less significant role 
(Stocking, 1974; Hinsley, 1981:251). 
That sea change in the discipline is marked in many ways 
and at many levels (from theoretical to institutional), and its 
consequences are especially evident in the changing status and 
rank of individuals within the anthropological community it?
self. All that is played out in the evolution of the stars over the 
successive editions of the AMS over the first several decades of 
the twentieth century. 
James McKeen Cattell and the American Men of Science 
Just after the turn of the century, James McKeen Cattell 
(1860-1944), a Columbia University psychologist and entre?
preneurial editor of scientific journals (including Science, Pop?
ular Science Monthly, and American Naturalist), began to com?
pile a list of American scientists for the Carnegie Institution of 
Washington, D.C. Intended to be a who's who of the American 
scientific community, the project quickly escalated beyond its 
original intent of providing a simple reference list. In Cattell's 
(editor, 1906:v) words, it became "a contribution to the organi?
zation of science in America," a way of making some 4100 sci?
entists?mostly working apart from each other across the na?
tion?acquainted with one another's work.1 
Cattell, however, wanted to do more than just publish a di?
rectory. He also wanted to sort these individuals, identifying 
those whose "work is supposed to be the most important" (Cat?
tell, editor, 1906:vi; see also Cattell, 1903:566). This was, after 
all, an age in which (for the first time in American society) 
there was a pronounced emphasis on using numerical measures 
as a means of sorting, segmenting, and imposing order on the 
increasing disorder of everyday life (Chudacoff, 1989:5; see 
also Weibe, 1967:77, 111-132, 156-159). 
To accomplish this task, Cattell approached "ten leading stu?
dents" from each of the 12 principal sciences in America and 
asked them to arrange the names of the workers in their field in 
"order of merit" (Cattell, editor, 1906:vi). In/IMS 1 (the first 
edition of AMS), 1000 scientists, representing approximately 
25% of all entries, were starred, and 20 of the stars (2%) be?
longed to anthropologists. Cattell allotted stars to each field 
based on the percentage of that field's practitioners to the total 
number (?=4131) of scientists in AMS I. For AMS 2 and AMS 
3, the selection process was repeated, and stars were added in 
each field. 
All individuals who had received a star in a prior edition of 
AMS retained their star until their death (Cattell and Brimhall, 
1921 :viii). They did so even if they no longer warranted star 
status, and such "gratuitous stars"?as they have been called 
(Rossiter, 1982: 289-290)?had a more insidious result than 
just causing "considerable confusion" about what a star really 
meant. In AMS 3 and subsequent editions, Cattell capped the 
number of stars at roughly 1000, despite the fact that the over?
all number of individuals included in the AMS volumes rose 
from 4131 in AMS 1 to about 34,000 by AMS 7, which was 
published in 1944 and was the last edition in which stars were 
assigned. New stars were added only in numbers that would 
preserve the percentages assigned that science in AMS I (2% in 
the case of anthropology), which effectively ignored the differ?
ential growth of each field (Cattell and Cattell, 1933:1261; 
Visher, 1947:5). This also capped the number of new stars that 
could be added to any discipline, and when there were many 
gratuitous stars (as there were by AMS 3, for example), fewer 
slots were left open for new ones, however much candidates 
were judged by their peers to be deserving of a star and how?
ever little the gratuitous stars were deserved. Earning a star was 
only half the battle: one sometimes had to wait for the death of 
an individual holding a gratuitous star to free up a slot. Under 
the circumstances "exclusion was not necessarily a dishonor" 
(Visher, 1947:23; Rossiter, 1982:290). 
The process of starring continued through AMS 7, but with 
Cattell's death, in 1944, the task of compiling and editing the 
AMS fell entirely to his son Jacques, who for a variety of rea?
sons and in the face of criticisms discontinued the practice of 
starring in AMS 8 (published in 1949). He held out the hope 
that later editions might include a measure of rank (Cattell, 
1949; Rossiter, 1982:290). 
While it is, of course, of interest to identify those who were 
the stars of a field, it is of even greater value to leam the rela?
tive ranking of individuals within the star category, how that 
ranking was determined, and by whom. In that way one could 
develop a finer-grained map of scientific status and a better un?
derstanding of the manner in which competence was graded 
and status was determined and awarded. One could leam how 
(and perhaps why) status changed, and even whether one's star 
was earned or?by virtue of a previous appearance in AMS? 
was gratuitous. The contemporary landscape, not to mention 
possible biases in the sorting process, is revealed by knowing 
who the judges were and how they voted. 
Cattell obviously possessed this information, but he pub?
lished almost nothing of it (even though he was keenly inter?
ested in measuring biases in judging (see "Finding the Stars," 
below; see also Cattell, 1906:662-663). In AMS I through AMS 
7 the stars of each science are identified, but no divisions of 
rank within that category are made. All stars are treated equally, 
the judges are unnamed, and their votes are unknown. This was 
deliberate on Cattell's part and was likely done at least in part 
to ensure cooperation, by assuring the judges that it was 
not intended that the lists [the rankings of anthropologists] shall be published, 
at all events not within ten years. No individual [judge's] list will be published. 
They will be destroyed when the averages have been calculated, and the ar?
rangements will be regarded as strictly confidential. (Cattell, 1910:539) 
Only in AMS 5 (published in 1933) is there a published rank?
ing of the stars, but that ranking is of the starred scientists in 
AMS I, published three decades earlier (Cattell and Cattell, 
1933:1268). 
NUMBER 44 223 
To see whether any of the raw ranking data for the anthropol?
ogists survived in unpublished form, I examined the Cattell pa?
pers at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. There I dis?
covered Cattell had not wholly erased the voting records as he 
had promised. Complete rankings of anthropologists exist for 
AMS 1 and AMS 2. Cattell had mostly kept his word, however, 
for what survives are not the individual judge's responses but, 
instead, Cattell's compilation of their rankings. On those lists, 
Cattell identified the judges by their initials, making them easily 
identifiable. The Cattell papers also contain fragments of 
judges' rankings for later editions of AMS, but the year or edi?
tion for which they were compiled could not be reliably deter?
mined. There are, however, listings of the stars for AMS 3 
through AMS 6, but only the AMS 3 listing had the names ar?
ranged in rank order (mean scores were beside each name, but 
the identity and rankings of the judges were not found). Thus, 
biter AMS 3 it is impossible to spot the gratuitous stars, although 
the newly elected stars in AMS 4 to AMS 6 are easily identified.2 
The AMS ranking data do more than provide a map of indi?
vidual status within the community. They can also illuminate 
the views and opinions of the judges (individually and collec?
tively) who made the rankings, mark changing intellectual 
trends in the field, and provide a means of examining the po?
tential influence of, say, institutional affiliation, gender, and 
subdisciplinary specialization on status and rank within a field, 
among other things (knowing the ranks is one matter; explain?
ing their meaning and significance is quite another). A compre?
hensive analysis of the AMS data along these many lines, how?
ever, is well beyond the scope of the present paper. Rather, it 
examines some general trends in the judging and the rankings. 
The list of judges and the actual ranking data are provided (Ta?
bles 1-4) so that others may explore the many angles and as?
pects of this record. 
Finding the Stars 
In AMS I a total of 113 individuals listed their "department of 
investigation" (Cattell, editor, 1906:vi) as anthropology or one 
of its related fields (e.g., ethnology, archeology, folklore). Of 
that total, 108 were men and five were women, making the title 
American Men of Science somewhat misleading (Rossiter, 
1982:25). In AMS 2 the number of anthropology entries was 
virtually the same: 112 individuals, 105 men and seven 
women. The number of women anthropologists would rise 
considerably in later editions of AMS, largely due to such men?
tors as Boas and Gladys Reichard at Columbia and Barnard, 
respectively (Rossiter, 1982:145). It is unclear whether the 
count of women in the first two edition of AMS accurately rep?
resents their number in turn of the century anthropology (quite 
possible, given the few opportunities for training, experience, 
or employment then available to women), or whether there 
were biases in the process which under-counted their numbers. 
In either case, they helped constitute the pool of anthropolo?
gists who were to be ranked. 
Ranking the anthropologists required judges, and the 10 in?
dividuals Cattell selected for that task for AMS I and for AMS 
2 (Table 1) well represented the several centers of American 
anthropology of the time?Cambridge (Harvard University 
and the Peabody Museum), New York (Columbia University 
and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)), and 
TABLE 1.?The judges for the American Men of Science, editions 1 and 2. Institutional affiliations of the judges 
are listed as of the year the rankings were made for each edition. 
Judge 
1903 (AMS I) 
Franz Boas 
Alexander Chamberlain 
Stewart Culin 
George Dorsey 
Livingston Farrand 
Alice Fletcher 
Frederick Hodge 
William Holmes 
WJ McGee 
Otis Mason 
1909 (/IMS 2) 
Franz Boas 
Alexander Chamberlain 
Roland Dixon 
George Dorsey 
Livingston Farrand 
Frederick Hodge 
William Holmes 
AleS Hrdlicka 
Alfred Kroeber 
WJ McGee 
Institutional affiliation 
Columbia University, AMNH 
Clark University 
Brooklyn Institute of Arts/Science 
Field Museum of Natural History 
Columbia University 
Peabody Museum, Harvard University 
Bureau of American Ethnology 
Bureau of American Ethnology 
Bureau of American Ethnology 
United States National Museum 
Columbia University 
Clark University 
Harvard University 
Field Museum of Natural History 
Columbia University 
Bureau of American Ethnology 
Bureau of American Ethnology 
United States National Museum 
University of California, Berkeley 
Inland Waterways Commission 
Advanced academic training 
Ph.D. Kiel, 1881 
Ph.D. Clark, 1892 
-
Ph.D. Harvard, 1894 
M.D.Columbia, 1891 
-
-
-
-
Ph.D. Columbian University, 1875 
Ph.D. Kiel, 1881 
Ph.D. Clark, 1892 
Ph.D. Harvard, 1900 
Ph.D. Harvard, 1894 
M.D.Columbia, 1891 
-
-
M.D. New York Homeopathic, 1894 
Ph.D. Columbia, 1901 
-
224 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Washington, D.C. (the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) 
and the United States National Museum (USNM), at the 
Smithsonian Institution) (Stocking, 1976:9). No center domi?
nates either list. The four Washington anthropologists (Freder?
ick W. Hodge, William Henry Holmes, WJ McGee, and Otis 
Mason) constituted the largest group among the AMS 1 judges, 
and given that a higher proportion of anthropologists were 
then employed or had ties to government research bureaus or 
museums, this arguably was a representative panel. By AMS 2 
the number of New York judges?those affiliated with Boas or 
Columbia University?were comparable to the number of 
Washington judges. The judges for subsequent volumes are 
unknown. 
The only noticeable omission from the panel of judges is 
Frederic Ward Putnam, whose administrative genius helped 
establish anthropology programs at Harvard, Columbia, and 
the University of California at Berkeley and in museums in 
Cambridge (Peabody), Chicago (Field Museum of Natural 
History), and New York (AMNH) (Mark, 1980:55). Putnam 
was highly ranked in both AMS I (fifth) and AMS 2 (second), 
and by 1903 he had long a member of the National Academy 
of Sciences. His absence may have been for insignificant rea?
sons (including being asked to judge but choosing not to do 
so). In any case, Alice Fletcher (AMS I) and Roland Dixon 
(AMS 2) represented the Boston node among the judges. 
Fletcher's case gave anthropology the distinction of having a 
women serve as a judge for AMS (as best can be determined 
from available evidence, this was unusual if not unprece?
dented among the sciences). Her serving as a judge is the more 
remarkable in that Cattell became a strong supporter of 
women's advancement in science only after the first two edi?
tions of A MS (and in apparent response to complaints about 
his lack of understanding of the problems facing women scien?
tists and how that might effect their chances for a star (Ros?
siter, 1982:108-109)). 
In 1903 and again in 1909 Cattell sent each judge a list of all 
the anthropologists in the United States.3 How Cattell, a psy?
chologist, derived the initial list of names is unspecified, but he 
likely relied heavily on his Columbia colleagues, Boas and Liv?
ingston Farrand. That initial list was considered incomplete by 
the judges, however, for at least two dozen individuals received 
write-in votes from several of the judges?including Boas, 
Holmes, and Mason.4 
Those additional names helped round out the representative?
ness of the pool, and indeed it seems most of those active in 
anthropology appeared on this and the subsequent list (there 
were 71 individuals on the ballot for AMS I, 55 for AMS 2). 
Those who were listed in the AMS volumes as anthropologists 
but were left off the ballots included, in the case of AMS I, a 
few who would later become stars but who were then still rel?
atively young and unknown (e.g., Pliny Earle Goddard, Clark 
Wissler) or who were stars in their primary field (e.g., zoolo?
gist C. Hart Merriam). The other approximately 40 anthropol?
ogists left off the AMS I ballot were mostly now-forgotten in?
dividuals whose contributions were not then (nor can they be 
now) accorded particular significance?with a few notable ex?
ceptions. Charles Abbott, Henry Haynes, Ernst Volk, and 
George Frederick Wright were all highly active in archaeol?
ogy, and all were listed in AMS I. None, however, was consid?
ered for star status. It may not be a coincidence that all four 
were active proponents of an American Paleolithic, a position 
vigorously opposed by Holmes (who freely wrote in other 
names on the list). 
An additional consequence of the write-in votes (beyond in?
creasing the representativeness of the pool) was that an indi?
vidual judge might rank anywhere from 39 to 66 names for 
AMS J and 41 to 48 names for AMS 2. This had unintended 
statistical effects in averaging the collective rankings, notably 
because Cattell did not set all the judges' rankings to the same 
numerical scale.5 
Given that Cattell solicited the rankings for AMS I in 1903, a 
full three years before that volume's publication (in 1906), the 
stars of AMS J are not as current as those in later editions, 
where normally only a year lapsed between ranking and publi?
cation (e.g., Visher, 1947:11). That is most clearly evident in 
the case of BAE ethnologist Washington Matthews, who was 
highly ranked in 1903 (in the top 10) but died prior to the pub?
lication oiAMS 1. He was nonetheless identified as a star when 
Cattell published the AMS 1 rankings in AMS 5 (Cattell and 
Cattell, 1933:1277). 
Cattell asked each of the judges to determine the "merit" of 
their peers, a term which he understood to mean their contri?
butions 
to the advancement of science, primarily by research, but teaching, administra?
tion, editing, the compilation of text-books, etc. should be considered. The dif?
ferent factors that make a man efficient in advancing science must be roughly 
balanced. (Cattell, 1906:660; see also Cattell, 1910:539) 
Not all of his requests for such rankings were favorably re?
ceived, either in anthropology or in other fields (Cattell, 
1906:661, 1910:540). Some thought the idea impractical, un?
fair, or inherently flawed.6 Many who participated had misgiv?
ings about the venture. As Frederick Hodge, who provided 
rank orders for AMS I and AMS 2, noted: 
I have made the "appraisal" as nearly as I know how, following your sugges?
tions strictly. My classification of course is not based on an individual's abili?
ty, but on productiveness and usefulness... .In other words, if all the individu?
als should die now?at once?in how far has each added to the sum of 
anthropologic knowledge through fieldwork, lectures, popular or text books, 
administration, teaching, or editing. ...I have weighed each case the best I 
could, and have, I believe, a good reason for placing each where it is. Person?
ality has of course been as completely eliminated as one who is very human 
knows how.7 
Holmes, on the other hand, was confident he could "arrange the 
list of anthropologists according to my estimate of the work 
done by each."8 The difference between them speaks more 
clearly to differences in their personalities than to the ease of 
making such judgments. 
NUMBER 44 225 
In fact, it was precisely because he was concerned about the 
"personal equation" in judging that Cattell used 10 judges, so 
as to mitigate individual effects by using mean rankings. He 
then ran a series of statistical tests?using as data the psychol?
ogy judges' rankings?to measure the "accuracy" (more cor?
rectly, the reliability) of the ranking process. He did so by de?
termining how far each judge 's rankings for a specific 
individual differed from the overall mean ranking for that indi?
vidual.9 Cattell found, generally, that those individual rankings 
varied about the mean following "the normal distribution of the 
probability curve" and observed that one could improve the 
precision of the rankings by weighting each judge's rankings 
according to their deviations from the mean (Cattell, 
1906:662-663). But he chose not to do so because the calcula?
tions would be "somewhat tedious" and the results would not 
"considerably alter the order" (Cattell, 1910:541). 
In Cattell's opinion these calculations were the first-ever 
measure of "accuracy or reliability of judgment" (Cattell, 
1906:663,1910:541), and he believed that what was true of the 
judges in psychology would be true of the judges from all the 
other disciplines?although he did not examine the ranking 
data from those other disciplines. In order to see whether he 
was right in regard to the anthropologists, and to probe the 
more interesting issue of whether (and in what direction) the 
rankings of individual judges may have varied from the mean 
rankings, I ran a series of statistical calculations using the AMS 
1 m&AMS 2 ranking data assembled by Cattell (Tables 2, 3, 
respectively). 
Generally speaking, Cattell was right. Spearman's rank order 
correlations were calculated between each judge's rankings for 
AMS 1 and AMS 2 and between a judge's rankings and the 
overall mean rankings. In both editions, each judge's rankings 
correlated significantly with the overall mean rankings, al?
though the rankings of some judges (notably Holmes) tended to 
correlate more closely with the mean rankings than did those of 
other judges (such as McGee).10 Those whose rankings tended 
to correlate least with those of their peers were, in the case of 
AMS I, Boas, Fletcher, and McGee and, in AMS 2, Boas, Ales 
Hrdlicka, and McGee. 
In order to get a more detailed picture of the nature of indi?
vidual differences, z scores were also calculated for each 
judge's rankings (this is not an entirely inappropriate statistic to 
use on ordinal level data because the ranks as viewed across the 
judges meet the distributional requirements of the test). The z 
scores provide a measure of the significance of the difference 
between the rank that a judge gave an individual and that indi?
vidual's mean rank from all the judges. Thus, they also provide 
a measure of the degree and the direction to which a judge's 
ranking of a certain individual differed from that of the other 
judges and indicate whether particular individuals prompted 
significant disagreement among the judges as to their relative 
merit. I shall refer to these unpublished results in the course of 
examining the several maps of the stars. 
The First Star Map: Anthropology in AMS 1 
There are few surprises among the anthropology stars of AMS I 
(Table 4). Included are representatives of each of the subfields 
of anthropology (roughly in proportion to their abundance in 
the field generally) and virtually all of the major figures of late 
nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropology. Each 
judge received a star," although Farrand's star was question?
able (see below). 
Just as the Washington anthropologists were the largest bloc 
of judges in AMS I, they also received more stars than any 
other institutional group within the discipline. Fully seven of 
the top 10 (and 10 of the top 20) stars were at the Smithson?
ian's BAE and USNM (McGee was at the BAE until his un?
ceremonious departure in 1903, soon after the ranking for 
AMS I was completed (Hinsley, 1981:253-256)). The z scores 
reveal that the Washington-based judges consistently, and of?
ten as a group (with the occasional exception of McGee), 
ranked their colleagues more highly than they ranked anthro?
pologists elsewhere or than the other judges ranked the Wash?
ington anthropologists. 
Even so, the individual fast atop the list of stars for AMS I 
was a non-Washington anthropologist: Boas. Having handily 
won that position in AMS I, he would maintain that ranking at 
least through AMS 3 (the last edition for which ranks are 
known). 
Boas was just 48 years old at the time AMS 1 appeared, 
which put him among the younger stars. Nearly half of the an?
thropologists who received stars were over 60 years of age, and 
their ages ranged upward, in the case of the venerable Cyrus 
Thomas, to the age of 81 (Table 5). Only two of the stars in 
AMS I were under 40: Hrdlicka and Alfred Kroeber. That this 
first group of stars was generally older is not unexpected; they 
were the established figures in the discipline. Their reputations 
had been earned and established years?sometimes decades? 
earlier. But already obvious in AMS 1 are the signs of what will 
later become a trend: the stars among the Washington anthro?
pologists were, as a group, slightly older than the stars outside 
the Washington arena. Through time, and as their numbers di?
minished, the cohort that remained aged considerably. 
Most of the stars in AMS I lacked academic training (Boas 
and his students, Kroeber and Alexander Chamberlain, were 
among the exceptions). Typically, they had earned their an?
thropological credentials in the field, often coming into an?
thropology from other disciplines (Hinsley, 1976:41-42; Melt?
zer, 1985). This was a by-product of the nineteenth century 
tradition of anthropology as natural history and of the very 
few opportunities then available for specialized training. Ad?
vanced degree programs in anthropology did not exist in 
American universities when most of the stars in AMS 1 were 
rising through the ranks. Indeed, over the seven editions of 
AMS in which stars were awarded, only 15 anthropologists 
earned a star while lacking either a baccalaureate or a doctoral 
degree (Visher, 1947:366, 369). Of those 15, fully 11 appeared 
226 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
TABLE 2.?Ranking of anthropologists for AMS 1; voting was conducted in 1903. Names in parentheses were 
handwritten on Cattell's tally sheets; the remainder were typed. Several of the names that were on the voting lists 
do not appear in AMS 1 (Carr, Gordon, Matthews, Mindeleff, Peabody, Phillips, Russell). (Data are from the 
James McKeen Cattell Papers, box 61, folder 3, Library of Congress, Washington., D.C.) 
Voting list1 
Baker, Frank 
(Bandelier, Adolph) 
Beauchamp, William 
Blackmar, Frank 
Boas, Franz 
(Bowditch, Charles) 
(Butler, Amos) 
(Carr, Lucien) 
Chamberlain, Alexander 
Culin, Stewart 
(Curtin, Jeremiah) 
(Dall, William) 
(Dellenbaugh, Frederick) 
Dixon, Roland 
Dorsey, George 
Farrand, Livingston 
Fewkes, Jesse 
Fletcher, Alice 
Fowke, Gerard 
Gatschet, Albert 
Giddings, Franklin 
(Gordon, George) 
(Grinnell, George) 
(Hagar, Stansbury) 
Hewitt, John 
Hodge, Frederick 
Holmes, William 
(Horsford, Cornelia) 
Hough, Walter 
Hrdlicka, Ale! 
Jenks, Albert 
Kroeber, Alfred 
Lamb, Daniel 
(Laufer, Berthold) 
(Lumholtz, Carl) 
MacCurdy, George 
Mason, Otis 
Matthews, Washington 
(McGee, WJ) 
(McGuire, Joseph) 
Mercer, Henry 
(Mills, William) 
(Mindeleff, Victor) 
Mooney, James 
(Moore, Clarence) 
Moorehead, Warren 
(Morse, Edward) 
(Murdoch, John) 
(Nelson, Edward) 
(Newell, William) 
Nuttall, Zelia 
(Peabody, Charles) 
Peet, Stephen 
Pepper, George 
(Perkins, George) 
(Phillips, William) 
Putnam, Frederic 
Ripley, William 
Judges 
Boas 
43 
19 
30 
-
? 
6 
64 
59 
17 
22 
44 
62 
-
21 
20 
10 
9 
8 
-
25 
13 
51 
41 
55 
31 
34 
2 
63 
11 
26 
49 
14 
32 
12 
40 
54 
1 
7 
4 
42 
61 
46 
48 
23 
24 
60 
38 
50 
58 
16 
27 
-
39 
53 
37 
-
3 
-
Chamberlain 
24 
18 
-
-
1 
-
-
-
? 
19 
-
-
-
30 
12 
31 
10 
6 
-
7 
32 
-
-
-
29 
17 
2 
-
33 
20 
35 
21 
36 
40 
13 
37 
4 
8 
3 
28 
-
-
-
9 
27 
-
-
-
-
11 
26 
-
-
34 
-
-
5 
-
Culin 
11 
6 
-
-
1 
-
-
-
20 
38 
-
-
-
27 
2 
26 
13 
18 
-
10 
37 
-
-
-
21 
12 
7 
-
15 
14 
39 
23 
41 
28 
29 
31 
4 
5 
3 
36 
-
-
-
9 
24 
-
-
-
33 
35 
-
-
34 
-
-
8 
-
Dorsey 
20 
40 
-
-
4 
-
-
-
19 
13 
-
-
-
17 
8 
18 
6 
7 
-
10 
41 
-
-
-
30 
11 
2 
-
15 
23 
32 
16 
21 
36 
35 
39 
3 
12 
5 
31 
-
-
-
9 
29 
-
-
-
-
24 
25 
-
-
37 
-
-
1 
Farrand 
23 
6 
-
-
1 
-
-
-
20 
29 
-
-
-
21 
31 
? 
10 
12 
-
3 
-
-
-
-
26 
25 
4 
-
33 
16 
35 
11 
39 
15 
17 
38 
2 
14 
7 
28 
-
-
-
5 
9 
-
-
-
-
18 
27 
-
-
37 
-
-
8 
-
Fletcher 
11 
-
15 
41 
3 
-
47 
-
9 
20 
-
-
-
16 
14 
30 
5 
? 
28 
4 
35 
-
-
46 
17 
22 
13 
49 
50 
8 
44 
25 
38 
-
31 
48 
-
2 
7 
51 
53 
-
-
12 
10 
26 
-
24 
23 
32 
19 
-
52 
45 
42 
-
1 
34 
Hodge 
30 
12 
-
-
1 
-
-
-
8 
18 
-
-
44 
28 
15 
25 
11 
14 
-
7 
13 
42 
-
-
37 
? 
2 
-
23 
16 
24 
21 
46 
35 
22 
40 
3 
10 
5 
19 
-
-
-
4 
17 
34 
-
-
-
20 
31 
45 
-
41 
-
-
9 
-
Holmes 
33 
10 
55 
47 
2 
-
63 
44 
23 
20 
59 
-
-
26 
14 
26 
6 
13 
-
7 
17 
39 
35 
65 
34 
15 
? 
66 
18 
22 
38 
27 
48 
61 
21 
54 
1 
12 
3 
45 
41 
58 
51 
5 
11 
46 
24 
52 
49 
19 
37 
-
64 
56 
60 
57 
4 
-
McGee 
13 
-
37 
41 
2 
40 
4 
-
26 
8 
-
-
-
22 
7 
20 
5 
11 
43 
25 
16 
-
-
35 
9 
6 
1 
-
24 
19 
21 
23 
14 
-
-
29 
3 
10 
7 
36 
33 
-
-
4 
-
32 
-
-
-
-
40 
-
44 
31 
-
-
18 
-
Mason 
28 
-
49 
45 
1 
-
52 
-
20 
23 
-
16 
-
26 
11 
25 
9 
10 
47 
6 
44 
-
-
48 
22 
16 
2 
51 
15 
31 
39 
37 
42 
40 
36 
29 
? 
5 
4 
24 
53 
-
-
8 
17 
43 
-
34 
13 
12 
14 
-
55 
38 
54 
_ 
3 
18 
NUMBER 44 227 
Voting list 
Russell, Frank 
Saville, Marshall 
Smith, Harlan 
Starr, Frederick 
Stevenson, Matilde 
Stevenson, Sara 
Swanton, John 
Thomas, Cyrus 
(Thruston, Gates) 
(Tooker, William) 
(Uhle, Max) 
(Ward, Lester) 
Willoughby, Charles 
TABLE 2.?Continued. 
Judges 
Boas 
18 
33 
36 
29 
35 
28 
15 
56 
57 
52 
5 
47 
45 
Chamberlain 
25 
22 
23 
14 
-
-
38 
15 
-
-
16 
-
39 
Culin 
25 
16 
30 
32 
-
-
40 
19 
-
-
17 
-
22 
Dorsey 
33 
26 
34 
14 
-
-
22 
38 
-
-
28 
-
27 
Farrand 
30 
32 
24 
34 
-
-
13 
22 
-
-
19 
-
36 
Fletcher 
43 
18 
27 
40 
29 
37 
39 
36 
33 
6 
21 
Hodge 
39 
27 
29 
25 
32 
-
36 
6 
-
-
38 
-
43 
Holmes 
30 
29 
31 
28 
36 
50 
53 
9 
62 
32 
43 
8 
42 
McGee 
15 
17 
27 
28 
38 
39 
30 
12 
-
-
-
-
34 
Mason 
35 
21 
33 
32 
27 
50 
41 
7 
-
46 
-
19 
30 
'The greater number of votes cast by Boas and Holmes likely reflects their write-in votes and, perhaps, their 
receiving their voting lists after they had already been expanded by write-in votes of others. 
2Washington Matthews was voted a star during the judging for AMS 1 (in 1903) but died in 1905, as AMS I was 
going to press. He died early enough to be dropped from the volume but too late for the judges to take another vote. 
in AMS 1. These were the last of the self-trained amateurs 
(Hinsley, 1981:264). 
In general, there was little disagreement in AMS I about who 
deserved a star, although with the broad criteria for judging 
merit and Cattell's "personal equation" coming into play, there 
were telling differences among the rankings. Boas, for exam?
ple, was top-ranked by many of his peers but not by all of them. 
Fletcher and George Dorsey put Boas third and fourth, respec?
tively, placing him significantly lower than did the other 
judges. Yet those lower rankings are not necessarily a reflec?
tion of their views of Boas, for Fletcher declared him to be "the 
best ethnologist we have" (Mark, 1980:74), and Dorsey like?
wise deeply respected Boas and constantly sought to ingratiate 
himself in his inner circle (it didn't work; see Boas's ranking of 
Dorsey (Table 2) and Hinsley, 1981:272). Those views not?
withstanding, Fletcher and Dorsey each put Putnam?under 
whom they had both trained?first on their lists. Filial loyalty 
obviously took precedence. 
Not for all of the judges, however. Boas himself hadn't been 
trained by Putnam, but Putnam had befriended him soon after 
he arrived in America and been instrumental in securing des?
perately needed employment for Boas at critical moments early 
in his career (Mark, 1980:32, 36-39). Still, Boas?who did not 
vote for himself?had to rank someone first, but instead of Put?
nam he selected Otis Mason, against whose ideas he had 
launched his critique of evolutionary theory and his advocacy 
of the importance of understanding history, context, and cul?
tures (e.g., Boas, 1887; Stocking, 1974:2-4). Clear-eyed critic 
that he was, Boas well appreciated the fact that Putnam's con?
tributions were more administrative and institutional than intel?
lectual (Mark, 1980:41, 4 5 ^ 6 ; Swanton, 1944:9) and that Ma?
son's contributions?although occasionally wrong-headed in 
his view?were nonetheless the more significant. 
There was possibly another factor involved as well: most of 
the other judges had ranked Holmes second behind Boas. For 
that matter, Holmes also put Mason first, and he ranked Boas 
second. The fact that Mason was top-ranked on Boas and 
Holmes's lists?and only their two lists?says more about the 
politics of compromise than about Mason's contributions to an?
thropology (for by then Mason's once-considerable influence 
was on the wane (Hinsley, 1981:100)). Although Boas and 
Holmes recognized each other's considerable contributions, 
their views and interests were utterly incompatible, and their 
personal and professional relations were often strained (Melt?
zer and Dunnell, 1992:xvii-xviii, xxiii-xxiv). It would appear 
they were unable to give the other the top rank and indepen?
dently selected Mason as a compromise candidate, ensuring 
that he finished second in the overall ranking and that Holmes 
finished third (this is not to suggest Holmes would have come 
in second had Boas only ranked him more highly; given the 
low rank (13) Holmes received from Fletcher, it is surprising 
he did not rank any lower). 
Just as Putnam seems to have been highly ranked for his ad?
ministrative contributions to the field, so too were others, such 
as McGee and William Newell (permanent secretary and long?
time editor of the American Folklore Society). Their presence 
among the stars reflects the wide latitude in Cattell's definition 
of what constituted a contribution to the field. McGee's case is 
particularly illuminating, for his intellectual contributions were 
remarkably slender and short-lived. He clambered into the top 
ranks of anthropology by virtue of ambition, position (as de 
facto director of the BAE during Powell's long-declining last 
years), organizational abilities, an extraordinary capacity for 
hard work, and an even greater capacity for self-promotion and 
"leg pulling"12 (Hinsley, 1981:238-244, 250; Swanton, 
1944:33-34). Yet, his heavy-handed role within the BAE and 
as self-appointed spokesperson for government science had 
bred resentment among anthropologists in and outside of the 
Washington arena (Hinsley, 1981:231-234; Meltzer, 1983), 
228 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
TABLE 3.?Ranking of anthropologists for AMS 2; voting was conducted in 1909. The names in parentheses 
were handwritten on Cattell's tally sheets, and it is presumed these were the write-in votes. As in AMS 1, sev?
eral of the names that were on the voting lists do not appear in AMS 2 (Bushnell, Gordon, Grinnell, Lewis, 
Owen, Thomas). (Data are from the James McKeen Cattell Papers, box 61, folder 4, Library of Congress, 
Washington, D.C.) 
Voting list 
Baker, Frank 
Bandelier, Adolph 
(Barrett, Samuel) 
Boas, Franz 
Bowditch, Charles 
(Bushnell, David) 
Chamberlain, Alexander 
Culin, Stewart 
Dixon, Roland 
Dorsey, George 
Farabee, William 
Farrand, Livingston 
Fewkes, Jesse 
Fletcher, Alice 
(Fowke, Gerrard) 
Goddard, Pliny 
(Gordon, George) 
(Grinnell, George) 
(Hewett, Edgar) 
Hewitt, John 
Hodge, Frederick 
Holmes, William 
Hough, Walter 
Hrdlicka, Ales' 
Jenks, Albert 
Kroeber, Alfred 
Lamb, Daniel 
Laufer, Berthold 
(Lewis, A.B.) 
(Lowie, Robert) 
Lumholtz, Carl 
MacCurdy, George 
McGee, WJ 
McGuire, Joseph 
Mooney, James 
Moore, Clarence 
(Moorehead, Warren) 
Nuttall, Zelia 
(Owen, CL.) 
(Peabody, Charles) 
Pepper, George 
Putnam, Frederic 
(Sapir, Edward) 
Saville, Marshall 
Smith, Harlan 
(Speck, Frank) 
(Spinden, Herbert) 
Starr, Frederick 
Stevenson, Matilde 
Swanton, John 
Thomas, Cyrus 
(Tooker, William) 
(Tozzer, Alfred) 
Willoughby, Charles 
(Wissler, Clark) 
Boas 
-
15 
-
7 
34 
-
24 
26 
9 
7 
35 
13 
5 
14 
-
22 
10 
-
27 
42 
23 
2 
11 
19 
31 
6 
-
4 
40 
17 
36 
37 
3 
43 
18 
25 
-
29 
-
-
39 
1 
20 
21 
28 
32 
-
30 
33 
8 
41 
-
12 
38 
16 
Chamberlain 
32 
15 
-
1 
41 
-
? 
13 
12 
11 
25 
20 
7 
9 
-
36 
26 
-
19 
8 
2 
24 
22 
35 
10 
39 
16 
-
-
23 
31 
5 
38 
4 
34 
-
40 
-
-
43 
3 
37 
17 
29 
42 
-
6 
33 
14 
18 
28 
27 
30 
21 
Dixon 
-
5 
32 
1 
23 
-
14 
33 
? 
11 
38 
40 
4 
17 
-
19 
26 
-
-
36 
22 
7 
13 
21 
31 
6 
-
12 
-
37 
25 
39 
28 
34 
16 
3 
34 
27 
-
-
41 
2 
24 
29 
10 
-
-
15 
18 
9 
8 
-
30 
35 
20 
Dorsey 
-
23 
-
1 
24 
-
33 
3 
6 
7 
35 
17 
10 
27 
-
30 
31 
-
-
40 
12 
11 
16 
13 
38 
4 
-
2 
29 
37 
28 
22 
7 
42 
14 
25 
-
34 
39 
-
41 
5 
21 
18 
19 
-
-
20 
26 
8 
32 
-
15 
36 
9 
Judg 
Farrand 
-
3 
-
1 
21 
-
12 
22 
10 
19 
40 
? 
8 
7 
-
25 
41 
-
33 
32 
6 
2 
20 
18 
28 
5 
-
15 
-
38 
31 
27 
9 
29 
11 
16 
-
30 
-
-
36 
4 
23 
26 
24 
37 
-
35 
34 
13 
17 
-
39 
42 
14 
es 
Holmes 
-
19 
40 
1 
39 
46 
16 
12 
13 
2 
41 
23 
6 
3 
35 
22 
25 
-
32 
15 
10 
7 
17 
11 
28 
5 
-
26 
47 
-
38 
29 
9 
43 
4 
18 
42 
37 
-
44 
45 
7 
36 
24 
30 
33 
-
27 
21 
8 
20 
-
34 
31 
14 
Hodge 
47 
19 
33 
1 
40 
39 
15 
12 
14 
6 
45 
21 
9 
7 
41 
17 
28 
-
27 
22 
? 
2 
32 
11 
16 
3 
48 
25 
-
-
36 
29 
10 
43 
4 
18 
42 
35 
-
44 
46 
5 
37 
24 
31 
38 
-
26 
23 
8 
20 
-
34 
30 
13 
Hrdlicka 
-
6 
-
3 
11 
-
16 
28 
20 
12 
38 
30 
5 
10 
-
31 
24 
-
25 
32 
9 
1 
15 
7 
37 
13 
-
34 
-
41 
33 
26 
14 
17 
8 
4 
-
35 
-
-
39 
2 
40 
18 
19 
-
-
29 
23 
21 
7 
-
36 
27 
22 
Kroeber 
-
12 
37 
1 
15 
-
24 
25 
9 
3 
39 
28 
11 
8 
-
18 
40 
-
16 
42 
6 
2 
26 
14 
30 
7 
-
17 
-
38 
27 
33 
21 
29 
13 
19 
-
31 
-
-
44 
4 
36 
20 
32 
35 
41 
5 
23 
7 
22 
-
34 
43 
10 
McGee 
-
27 
? 
1 
8 
-
14 
7 
9 
2 
28 
10 
6 
4 
43 
17 
19 
-
24 
38 
26 
11 
31 
29 
20 
5 
-
34 
40 
-
18 
25 
7 
42 
15 
32 
-
22 
-
-
30 
3 
35 
12 
33 
41 
-
23 
37 
16 
36 
-
21 
13 
39 
NUMBER 44 229 
. i s < ; cd 
N s / o 
so c /-s 'c 
x ? ?2 JJ 
?? ? x < 
JJ" Q u . <_ 
o o 
. o o : 
l o ? S ; 
-" ? g m 
NO w ^ II 
5 2 -a < ? 
o? o CD ? 
? - <d u 
fc? & * ? 
6 - S o 
co us "- ? . ? 
C . as o co 
= ? * ? ? 
a c E -
cBucgi; 
- C t - CO CO 
P ? ? z 
s
^ s i : 
co i - l cB 1? 
? - ? <? 
E - CO 3 
co r - e 5 
"V ?' o 
I I I | 
?s r.-g< 
- - ca II 
2 P 
(11 ? -
to- _ 
? 2 
? ca <*> ? x> 
E S 
C g iS J2 s s 
O o "O JD . 2 **" 
o 
ffi
ll 
? 
Ca
t 
J = 
-
e 
si 
da
ta
 
V 
r 
th
 
ca 
? n 
ki
n
 
I i 
<o u 
S c ?* c > 2 
s <- ? u 
ca ca <u si o 
til 
C O uo 
? JO 
o -^ 
- -2 -S 
O 4> ? 13 
7 oo ca u. o 
? ? -c E 5 
ocS 2 x> 
?
2
 I 
E TS 
J u 
o 
U D 
E 
3 
S 2 ca 
E I 
< u. m D < I 
^ I '5b X X S 
UJ Z ? QU P Z 2 ? 
< 6 2 < i i s ? ? 2 
fflD<CQUa.<<t;D 
-S.S w 
C JS < 
< O CQ l z 
3 Z U 
o 23 < 2 ? 
U D O n X H D 
D
 3 I ^ 
J 2 ? S U 
I 
un w 2 
< < D D f f l m < i i 
Q q q q q 
xi x i x i JS x i 
O. Cu Cu C Q_ 
-J 
< U 
Q Q Q Q Q 
x i x i x i *-" x i 
Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q f l Q 
x: JS x: x: I & . ( CL | Ou CL. | I I 0 . & , I L O L A i B . I B k O h C A I I I I P -
Z* 
CQ 
au
fe
r, 
-i 
ew
ke
s 
u. 
o
lm
es
 
I 
eC 
o
w
ie
, 
-J 
r* 
ix
on
, 
u 
_J 
w
an
to
 
00 
< 
1 
X 
X 
jin
de
 
t/3 
? 
[fa 
o
dg
e,
 
I 
q 
M
or
le
y 
2 
< 
a
zz
er
, 
t-
U 
<i 
el
so
n,
 
Z 
CL. 
o
dd
ar
d 
O 
co <-> 
'5 ni 2 * * G 2 J 
5 w < * d- fi 
Q U 
c oo
 <_- CB tt 
E ? 2 S ^ O o a o " = X 2 u 2 U 
x l ~P P 5 3 "> 
^ E C ? " us 
ca o ca cj 3 ca 
C u . = i i i 
ca 
f CO 
X 
PU 
< CQ 
f 1 
_i 
UJ 
< CQ 
U - W 
? 2 < 3 a. CQ 
UJ 
< CQ 
CO |> CO 
I 
w x l 2 
< o w 
1 J D 
2 "g ? 
^ 2 S 2 
CQ U D < CQ u , CJ 
CO 60 co 
.^ S 3 5 
1 E 2 ,, E 
2 .2 U UJ 2. 
&o o ? < o 
D U D CQ u 
X X 
2 z 
< < c? S < < CQ -r < s s i 
> ? ^ CQ 0 . CL. < 
Q Q Q Q Q 
c - i i CL. cu a . i i o . cu i 
^ X J ? ^ < 
u- E 
? - 1 
n O i~ f. 
? ~ 2 ?? 
C Q c Z X ^ i i Q E S 
2 a 
.2 o 
a S 
Q q 
H ' ^ . U 
M T3 3 ?s C 
" 2 C T3 . 2 = 
O CB l - f ^ 3 
X CQ X > CJ 
a Q 
I Cu Cu I CU I Cu I 
ca ~ 
?S i 
3 ca 
M X 
-J U 
?s 
Q q 
J a. 
Q Q Q Q 
i i i i i Cu cu i cu a . i 
.2 c 
c ? 
S Cu 
D ">, I 
?p s s I g = 
u a. 5 
CO 
X 3 D 
a ri ri 
xi x i x i 
I Cu | Cu Cu I 
03 
CJ 
I Sfs
 t - i Bs 
? io i3 
5 B M M 
CJ CQ 
x f O 
U 
ea 2 E o O 
_ ^ O 3 
9> 5 u ?," xj CJ 
? ? S ?? E a 
a j CL) 
? 7 ?*? ?) 
fC ? x i . 
. ?i N x : rS <S 
w 
o D 
1 2 ? 
- Z ? j 
O CO < u 
U D C D M 
Q Q 
??' a S S 
S S E cS | ? o ? pa S i S 
"g .3 ?? D 
ca x l E , _^ . 
> i u m w i u n 3 W t 
5 < < < < 2 " o < - 2 
X C Q C Q C a O Q C u D U C Q U 
r Z2 
3 CO 
S 2 
2 2 
00 
E . < 
2 ? 
2 3 W 
B D O f f l l U O S U f f l 
- r X ) X> 
5 E E 
fe 3 W 3 
- 2 ^ o < o S 
D D c u < U C Q U c u 
U CJ 
I I Cu | I 
tti - s ^ 
5 Si <" 
e S -^ 
s ? I 
a, 2 tt. 
I I c u I I 
< 
-5 . .E* ? 
? B; "S u
 r/ 
Q ri Q Q 
xi ?: x i x i Cu 2 Cu cu 
Q Q Q Q 
I | | Cu Cu I I | Cu CU I 
< U 
^ 2 
E t 
2 O 
? ? ca 
U . Q CO 
E - S 
X u 2 U X ^ 5S 
x : JU 
; ji . N 
tso s= ? -
oo 
..- co -S s 
U 
, 00 -
>r. 3 - 3 
a 3 l t f l i J o o D Z 7 ) O w J > 2 
< ri 
o d 
S r h 
?p o 
x> O S 
g ca g . 
-J 2 cu 
? r s i m ' t m s o ^ - c o c s s o ? r s i m - * i o s o r - o o o s O - - p j r n 
230 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
TABLE 5.?AMS stars and mean ages of Washington anthropologists compared with non-Washington anthropolo?
gists. Mean age is calculated as of the year of the edition. The table does not include gratuitous stars. (See also 
Visher, 1947:373, who gives tallies in median ages.) 
Ai\fS edition 
Stars 
1 (1906) 
2(1910) 
3(1921) 
4(1927) 
5(1933) 
New stars 
1 (1906) 
2(1910) 
3(1921) 
4(1927) 
5(1933) 
6(1938) 
7(1944) 
Washington 
Number 
10 
8 
5 
4 
4 
10 
2 
-
-
1 
-
-
Anthropologists 
Mean age 
57.4 
50.6 
60.6 
64.0 
57.2 
57.4 
44.0 
-
-
36.0 
-
-
Non-Washi 
Number 
10 
12 
15 
17 
18 
10 
3 
9 
5 
4 
5 
5 
tigton Anthropologists 
Mean age 
51.7 
49.7 
48.8 
51.0 
53.6 
51.7 
37.0 
44.2 
51.8 
44.5 
42.4 
49.8 
All Anthropologists 
Number 
20 
20 
20 
21 
22 
20 
5 
9 
5 
5 
5 
5 
Mean age 
54.8 
50.1 
51.8 
53.5 
54.3 
54.8 
39.8 
44.2 
51.8 
42.8 
42.4 
49.8 
and the strong feelings he engendered, coupled with an appar?
ent ambiguity over how to credit his contributions, were visible 
in his rankings. Despite an overall high rating, the z scores re?
veal that the majority of the judges thought highly of McGee or 
cared little for him: five of the nine (McGee did not vote for 
himself) rated him either significantly above or below his mean 
rank. Ultimately, he ranked fourth after Boas, Mason, and 
Holmes. It was a ranking he would not hold. 
Putnam followed McGee in the ranking and may have come 
ahead of him were it not for the fact that McGee lowballed Put?
nam (one of the worst instances of this in the AMS I rankings). 
They had battled for years over the American Paleolithic 
(Meltzer, 1983) and McGee?who had strong opinions and 
viewed the world in stark and dichotomous terms?could 
scarcely see Putnam beyond those differences. 
The remainder of the top 10 was rounded out by several of 
the Washington anthropologists, who as a group (and this in?
cludes all the BAE and USNM anthropologists) sparked among 
the judges some of the sharpest disagreements in the ranking 
process. The BAE's Thomas, for example, whose highly ac?
claimed Mound Survey of the 1880s and 1890s had broken the 
back of the moundbuilder myths, received a mean rank of 8.5 
from his four Smithsonian colleagues but a mean rank of only 
31 from the non-Washington judges. 
Viewed from another angle, the AMS I rankings reveal that a 
couple of the judges?notably Boas and Fletcher?were con?
sistently out of step with their peers. Boas's differences were 
most directly expressed in his rankings of the Washington an?
thropologists, though there is an unevenness to the pattern. 
Those with whom he had the most pronounced and (often) pub?
lic differences over theoretical and institutional matters, as well 
as those who fundamentally opposed his ideas about the future 
of anthropology?Holmes, Mason, and, in certain particulars, 
McGee?he nonetheless ranked highly (on their differences, 
see Stocking, 1960:11-12, 1974:1-8; Hinsley, 1981: 98-100, 
223-224). The rest of the Washington anthropologists he low-
balled. Thus, among the 10 who were starred in AMS I, Boas 
ranked seven of them below their mean rank (five of them sig?
nificantly so; see Table 2 and the comparatively low ranks he 
gave Albert Gatschet, Hodge, Hrdlicka, James Mooney, and 
Thomas).13 The following year he would do as much publicly 
in his "History of Anthropology," which pointedly ignored vir?
tually the entire Washington group (Boas, 1904). Of course, all 
this was necessarily colored by the very public dispute Boas 
had in 1903 with the Smithsonian over the leadership and di?
rection of the BAE following the death of its founder, John 
Wesley Powell (see "Rising and Falling Stars," below; Hinsley, 
1981:250-253,269-277). 
Fletcher had an equally low opinion of some of the other 
Washington anthropologists. Most noticeably, she had a signif?
icantly lower opinion of Holmes and McGee and gave no rank 
at all to Mason. Fletcher's rankings also tended to support the 
observation that "the few women consulted put more women 
on their lists and ranked them higher than did the men in the 
same fields" (Rossiter, 1982:107). Including Fletcher and Zelia 
Nuttall, there were five women in the pool of anthropologists 
being ranked in 1903. The others were Cornelia Horsford, Mat-
ilde C. Stevenson, and Sara Yorke Stevenson, whom Cattell 
listed in AMS I by her husband's name, "Mrs. Cornelius 
Stevenson." In voting, Fletcher consistently gave this group 
higher ranks than they received from the other judges?with 
the exception of Mason, who gave higher ranks to Nuttall and 
Stevenson, and Boas, who did likewise in the case of Sara 
Stevenson.14 Fletcher herself was ranked tenth; she was one of 
only 19 women awarded a star in AMS I. That is more than 
would be expected from a discipline with as few practitioners 
as anthropology. Women anthropologists (5) constituted just 
3.3% of the total number of women scientists in AMS I yet net?
ted 5.2% of the stars awarded women in that edition. 
Rounding out the AMS I stars are two individuals?Farrand 
and Kroeber?who failed to make the top 20 on at least half the 
ballots but were nonetheless awarded stars. Their cases are not 
NUMBER 44 231 
alike, however. Farrand, in fact, failed to make the top 20 alto?
gether (he was twenty-second), but he still received a star (over 
the unstarred but higher-ranked Dixon). His AMS 1 entry im?
plies his star was for anthropology (and he was so identified in 
Cattell's unpublished lists), but it was clearly unearned there, 
and it may partly reflect his status in psychology, where he is 
cross-listed. Hodge deemed Farrand quite capable but not a le?
gitimate star, since "he has not produced so much thus far."15 
Cattell, however, Farrand's Columbia colleague, nonetheless 
ensured that he received one. This is the only case I found in 
which Cattell deliberately manipulated the data to change the 
outcome of the rankings (a manipulation that, in the absence of 
publishing the ranking data, he was able to carry out). 
In contrast, Kroeber was still in his 20s at the time of the 
voting for AMS I and had just received his doctorate from Co?
lumbia two years earlier. He was at best an unknown quantity 
to most of the judges, which likely explains why he was not in 
the top 20 on seven of the ballots. Still, high ranks from Boas, 
Dorsey, and Farrand were enough to ensure he was starred. By 
the next edition of the AMS there would no longer be ambigu?
ity about his star status, and, indeed, he was asked to serve as 
a judge. There would continue to be doubts about Farrand's 
status. 
Rising and Falling Stars: Anthropology in AMS 2 
Because of the relatively brief period separating the first and 
second editions of the AMS I, there is considerable carry-over 
in the stars: 15 of those from AMS I made it into the top 20 of 
AMS 2 (Table 4). As before, Boas is first, this time with near 
unanimity among the judges?including Holmes. And as be?
fore, Boas grappled with the problem of whom he should rank 
first?Mason having died in the intervening years. He ulti?
mately selected Putnam, a choice that was defensible enough, 
even if he didn't really mean it. Boas's vote (the highest Put?
nam received) was enough to vault Putnam into second place. 
That put him ahead of Holmes, the perennial also-ran, who was 
again second on Boas's list and third overall (Holmes may have 
passed Putnam were it not for low rankings from Dorsey and 
McGee; see below). 
But if the stars oiAMS 2 are a familiar group overall, with a 
few exceptions their rank orders changed, partly as a necessary 
consequence of the appearance of new stars in this edition. 
These were, in rank order, John Swanton, Dixon (now himself 
a judge), Wissler, Berthold Laufer, and Walter Hough. The 
number of new stars (five), was restricted by the number of 
stars of AMS I who had since died (and thereby freed slots un?
der the star cap imposed on anthropology). 
Those changes in rank orders were also a result of the aging 
and altered status of older stars and the changing intellectual 
fashions within the discipline, all of which made such perturba?
tions the norm rather than the exception. This was particularly 
the case when rankings were determined at multi-year and 
sometimes decadal intervals (were these rankings done more 
frequently, one would see more constancy in the rankings un?
less, of course, the scientific community was on the cusp of 
major change). In the face of this, the fact that Boas' rank re?
mained unchanged over the course of at least three decades is 
striking testimony to his status within the field. 
Given that relative rank is expected to change, it is important 
to distinguish a significant from an insignificant change in 
rank. Such a determination can be made statistically using ad?
justed residuals (Everitt, 1977:47), and that analysis identifies 
four individuals whose ranks rose iromAMS I to AMS 2 signif?
icantly more than expected: Dixon, Kroeber (who had been 
starred in AMS I and was now fifth overall), Laufer, and Swan?
ton. Wissler should probably be added to this group. He went 
from no mention in AMS I to a rank of fifteenth in AMS 2, al?
though his absence from AMS I makes the actual statistical cal?
culation impossible. Kroeber and Swanton were ethnologists, 
held doctorates from Columbia, and were students of Boas. 
Dixon was an archaeologist with a doctoral degree from Har?
vard (and was a contemporary of Swanton); Laufer, a Sinolo?
gist with a doctorate from Leipzig, had not been trained by 
Boas but during these years worked with him at the AMNH, 
Columbia University, and on the Jesup Expedition to Siberia 
(Freedetal., 1988:12-15; Swanton, 1944:22). 
What is characteristic of these rising stars, aside from their 
relatively young age, is that each possessed an advanced degree 
(raising the total in this edition to 11), all were in a direct or in?
direct sense "Boasians" (Stocking, 1976:29), and with one ex?
ception (Hrdlicka), the judges were nearly in agreement as to 
their merits. There was little question that these were the rising 
stars of the field. In 1903 Boas was already describing Laufer 
as "one of the best among the younger anthropologists," rank?
ing him ahead of Kroeber, Swanton, and Dixon.16 This view ev?
idently was shared by Farrand as well, for in AMS I Boas and 
Farrand gave significantly higher marks to this group than did 
any of the other judges (Table 2). By the time the rankings were 
made for AMS 2, the reputations of these four had spread, 
hence their significant rise in relative rank among almost all the 
judges except Hrdlicka (Table 3). 
That Hrdlicka ranked these individuals significantly lower 
than the mean is not altogether surprising, nor is it a coinci?
dence that he significantly underrated Boas's contributions (Ta?
ble 3 and unpublished z scores). Hrdlicka's loyalties were to 
Holmes and Putnam, both of whom had nurtured his career, 
and then to his fellow physical anthropologists and archaeolo?
gists with shared interests. He thought less of the contributions 
of ethnologists and linguists, and his relationship with Boas 
(and with some of Boas's students) was always a cool one (e.g., 
Stocking, 1976:24-25; Spencer, 1979:633, 693, 702). Hrdlicka 
had his prejudices, and Swanton (1944:36) observed that these 
"were so much a part of him that he did not realize he had any." 
All of this is reflected in Hrdlicka's rankings. 
There is only one individual whose star fell significantly be?
tween AMS 1 and AMS 2: WJ McGee. His plunge from the 
heights of the discipline began in late 1902 with Powell's death 
232 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
and McGee's subsequent aggressive effort to be named the 
next director of the BAE (Hinsley, 1981.249-250).17 For a vari?
ety of reasons, McGee was passed over and Holmes was ap?
pointed instead, sparking a bitter dispute among anthropolo?
gists and scientists. At issue was not administrative succession 
but the struggle between museum and research-oriented an?
thropology and the relationship of the federal government to 
the anthropological community. The latter was spearheaded by 
Boas, who, disliking Holmes's sympathies toward an object-
and museum-oriented anthropology, aided McGee (Boas to Ja-
cobi, 2 Sep 1909, in Stocking, 1974:303-306; Hinsley, 1981: 
249-253; Meltzer and Dunnell, 1992:xx-xxi). 
It was to no avail. A bitter McGee attacked the secretary of 
the Smithsonian but that only served to provoke a more force?
ful reprisal. In the summer of 1903 a minor BAE official was 
charged with embezzlement, and as the ranking administrator 
from the Powell era, McGee became the prime target of the in?
vestigation (Hinsley, 1981:253; Meltzer and Dunnell, 1992: 
xxi). McGee was finished in Washington, and in the late sum?
mer of 1903 resigned from the BAE. As his professional and 
personal life disintegrated, he moved off to the periphery of the 
discipline and began to work (quite capably) in the fledgling 
conservation movement (Stocking, 1960:15; Lacey, 1979; Hin?
sley, 1981:255). By AMS 2 he was making few contributions to 
anthropology, though Boas, who had vigorously promoted and 
defended McGee in the months after Powell's death (for not 
entirely altruistic reasons), still ranked him significantly higher 
than did the other judges. 
McGee served as a judge for AMS 2, and it is symptomatic of 
his distance from Washington and the center of the discipline 
that his rankings for 25 of the 43 names differed significantly 
from the mean scores of those individuals. No other judge's 
rankings were so divergent. A comparison of his AMS 1 and 
AMS 2 rankings (using adjusted residuals), indicates that by 
AMS 2 his former BAE colleagues received from him signifi?
cantly lower marks than he had given them previously (com?
pare, for example, his rankings for Hewitt, Hodge, Holmes, 
Mooney, and Thomas, Tables 2, 3). And, in an utterly transpar?
ent reversal, he gave Boas's students and even Putnam signifi?
cantly higher marks than he had given them in AMS I. 
Boas's rankings had the next highest variance among all the 
judges. This was in keeping with the independence he had es?
tablished in AMS I and perhaps reflected the fact that "he was 
not always right nor always just in his estimate of men" 
(Swanton, 1944:34). But unlike McGee, Boas at least was con?
sistent from one edition to the next. In only one case?that of 
George Dorsey?did Boas significantly change his ranking. In 
1909 he thought much more highly of Dorsey than he had ear?
lier. But it wasn't just Dorsey's obvious efforts to ingratiate 
himself with Boas that had met with some small success. His 
status rose in the opinion of most of the other judges as well, 
likely in response to a steady stream of publications through 
the first decade of the century. 
There were changes visible in AMS 2 aside from dramatic 
changes in rank. The number of starred Washington anthropol?
ogists slipped from 10 in AMS I to seven in AMS 2, with 
Thomas joining Farrand among the ranks of the gratuitous stars 
(Tables 4, 6). That said, a few of them rose slightly in the ranks, 
including Jesse W. Fewkes, whose contributions historians 
have judged poorly (Hinsley, 1981:281) but which obviously 
were better thought of by contemporaries. Only one of the 
nominally Washington group rose significantly in rank, and 
that was Swanton. Of course, Swanton must be counted among 
the Boasians, as was clearly the perception of the time: "as a 
'Boas man* I shared the opposition to Boas entertained by 
many, if not most, of the Washington anthropologists at that 
time" (Swanton, 1944:34). 
Swanton excluded, in AMS 2 the Washington anthropologists 
as a group once again triggered considerable disagreement 
among the judges as to the merits of their contributions. By this 
edition, however, fewer of the Washington group were among 
the judges (just three this time), and although they continued to 
vote mostly as a bloc, their influence was proportionately less. 
The Washington anthropologists may not have realized their 
AMS stars were falling, but they were acutely aware of the un?
derlying institutional limits they were increasingly facing. The 
BAE and USNM anthropologists did not and could not perpet?
uate themselves by training and producing students (Stocking, 
1976:9). The best they could do was accept the trained students 
of others, and the opportunity for that was rare enough because, 
as Holmes joked, in the museums and research bureaus of the 
government "few die and none resign" (Holmes to G. Stanley 
Hall, 25 Apr 1905, in Noelke, 1974:313). Their inability to add 
to their numbers was, however, only a symptom. The deeper 
cause was their lack of ties to the expanding university system, 
the effects of which would become much more visible with the 
rankings of the stars in AMS 3. 
The Stars after a Decade of Change: Anthropology in AMS 3 
Only six years separated the voting for AMS I and AMS 2, but 
the subsequent intervention of World War I and other delays 
caused AMS 3 to appear in 1921, over 10 years after AMS 2 
(the rankings for AMS 3 were apparently submitted sometime 
in 1920). In that time, there had been some substantial changes 
within the discipline (indeed, within all the sciences). The 
modern graduate school?the means of professional self-con?
sciousness, legitimization, and inculcation?had appeared 
(Weibe, 1967:121). In the first decades of the twentieth cen?
tury, many of the major university programs in anthropology 
were established and began producing trained anthropologists 
and archaeologists (de Laguna, 1960:102-103; Darnell, 1969; 
Stocking, 1976:11). The university was rapidly becoming the 
central institutional venue of American anthropology (as it was 
for many other fields), and as Boas saw particularly clearly, 
that was where the future of the discipline lay, not in museums 
(Weibe, 1967:121; Stocking, 1974:284). He anticipated?as, 
NUMBER 44 233 
TABLE 6.?Rising and falling stars in anthropology by rank order in A MS 1 to AMS 3. Names in bold are individ?
uals whose ranks significantly rose (+) or fell (-). No rank = individual was present in a prior edition of AMS but 
was unranked. No entry = individual was absent from prior editions of AMS. (Data are from Cattell ratings in Ta?
ble 4 and sources therein). 
Rank 
1 
2 
3 
4 
5 
6 
7 
8 
9 
10 
11 
12 
13 
14 
15 
16 
17 
18 
19 
20 
21 
22 
23 
24 
25 
26 
27 
28 
29 
30 
31 
32 
33 
34 
35 
36 
37 
38 
39 
40 
41 
42 
43 
AMS 7(1906) 
Boas, F. 
Mason, O. 
Holmes, W.H. 
McGee, WJ 
Putnam, F.W. 
Mooney, J. 
Fewkes, J.W. 
Matthews, W. 
Gatschet, A. 
Fletcher, A. 
Dorsey, G. 
Bandolier. A. 
Hodge, F.W. 
Chamberlain, A. 
Moore, C.B. 
Culin, S. 
Hrdlicka, A. 
Newell, W. 
Kroeber, A.L. 
Thomas, C. 
Dixon, R. 
Farrand, L. 
Baker, F. 
Hough, W. 
Saville, M. 
Hewitt, J.N. 
Lumholtz, C. 
Starr, F. 
Uhle, M. 
Nuttall, Z. 
Smith, H.I. 
Giddings, F. 
Swanton, J. 
Laufer, B. 
Willoughby, C. 
McGuire, J. 
Jenks, A. 
Lamb, D. 
MacCurdy, G.G. 
Pepper, G. 
_ 
-
-
AMS 2 (\9\0) 
Boas, F. 
Putnam, F.W. 
Holmes, W.H. 
Kroeber, A.L. 
Fewkes, J. 
Dorsey, G. 
Fletcher, A. 
Mooney, J. 
Swanton, J. 
Dixon, R. 
McGee, WJ 
Hodge, F.W. 
Bandelier, A. 
Hrdlicka, A. 
Wissler, C. 
Culin, S. 
Laufer, B. 
Chamberlain, A. 
Moore, C.B. 
Hough, W. 
Saville, M. 
Starr, F. 
Thomas, C. 
Farrand, L. 
Goddard, P.E. 
Smith, H.I. 
Bowditch, C. 
Gordon, G.B. 
Hewett, E.L. 
Stevenson, M.C. 
Tozzer, A.M. 
Jenks, A. 
Lumholtz, C. 
MacCurdy, G.G. 
Sapir, E. 
Hewitt, J.N. 
Nuttall, Z. 
Willoughby, C. 
Lowie, R. 
McGuire, J. 
Farabee, W. 
Speck, F. 
Pepper, G. 
Rise or fall 
0 
+ 3 
0 
+ 15 
+ 2 
+ 5 
+3 
- 2 
+ 24 
+ 11 
-1 
+ 1 
- 1 
+ 3 
no rank 
0 
+ 17 
- 4 
- 4 
+4 
+4 
+6 
- 3 
- 2 
no rank 
+5 
no rank 
no rank 
no entry 
no rank 
no entry 
+5 
- 6 
+ 5 
no entry 
- 1 0 
- 7 
- 3 
no entry 
- 4 
no rank 
no entry 
- 3 
AMS 3 (1921) 
Boas, F. 
Kroeber, A.L. 
Wissler, C. 
Laufer, B. 
Fewkes, J. 
Holmes, W.H. 
Lowie, R. 
Dixon, R. 
Swanton, J. 
Hrdlicka, A. 
Spinden, H.J. 
Hodge, F.W. 
Morley, S.G. 
Tozzer, A.M. 
Nelson, N.C. 
Goddard, P.E. 
Fletcher, A. 
Speck, F. 
Kidder, A.V. 
Mills, W.C. 
Mooney, J. 
Moore, C.B. 
Goldenweiser, A. 
Parson, E.C. 
Saville, M. 
Hough, W. 
Michelson, T. 
Cole, F.-C. 
MacCurdy, G.G. 
Culin, S. 
Jenks, A. 
Radin, P. 
Gordon, G.B. 
Harington, J.P 
Hewitt, J.N. 
Sullivan, L.R. 
Bassett, D.S. 
Dorsey, G. 
Farrand, L. 
Hooton, E. 
? 
-
Rise or fall 
0 
+2 
+ 12 
+ 13 
0 
- 3 
+32 
+ 2 
0 
+4 
no rank 
0 
no entry 
+ 17 
no entry 
+9 
-10 
+24 
no entry 
no rank 
-13 
- 3 
no entry 
no entry 
- 4 
- 6 
no entry 
no rank 
+5 
-14 
+ 1 
no entry 
- 5 
no entry 
+ 1 
no entry 
no entry 
- 3 2 
-15 
no entry 
? 
presumably, did those in Washington?that such a program 
would concentrate in his own hands a considerable amount of 
the anthropological work done in the country, and he was right. 
He sought to link his future to the universities, disassociate 
them from museums, and establish a well-organized machine 
for specialized academic training in the field. Without such a 
foundation, he felt that "we can never hope to thoroughly in?
vestigate and explore all the numerous problems of American 
anthropology" (Boas to Nuttall, 16 May 1901, in Stocking, 
1974:286-287). 
By the second decade of the twentieth century, questions 
about the academic format of training in anthropology had 
reached a critical mass, and Boas organized a meeting at Co?
lumbia University to plan the "objects and methods" of teach?
ing anthropology. Perhaps out of courtesy more than sincerity 
(given that they did not teach anthropology), representatives 
from the BAE and USNM were invited to participate. None, 
however, was subsequently appointed to the permanent com?
mittee on the subject, symptomatic of the fact that they made 
little effort to seek links with the university programs (Boas, 
1919, MacCurdy, 1919; see also Darnell, 1969; Meltzer, 
1985:256). None of that particularly mattered to Boas, who 
did not think museum-oriented anthropology was the way the 
field was or ought to be headed. Academic anthropology re-
234 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
quired "men of quite different training and bent of mind" than 
those in museums.18 
As a result of all this, the intellectual character of university 
training was indelibly shaped by Boas, who was able to train a 
generation of students committed to his general anthropologi?
cal orientation. But beyond the sheer force of his own ambition 
and drive, changing demographics, expanding employment op?
portunities within the university for trained professionals, and a 
"sharp decline" in the proportion of anthropologists employed 
"in government work" or private research institutions (Visher, 
1947:79, 481-482) enabled Boas and his students by the early 
to mid-1920s to head every major department of anthropology 
in American universities, occupy most of the offices of the 
American Anthropological Association, and dominate the in?
tellectual landscape (Stocking, 1960:13, 1968:296, 1976:9; 
Hinsley, 1981:273). 
Whether those changes were felt among the judges of A MS 3 
is unclear, since their identities remain unknown. It is evident, 
however, that because of these changes there was considerably 
less carry-over from AMS 2 to AMS 3 than there had been be?
tween AMS I and AMS 2 (Tables 4, 6). Only 11 of the top 20 
stars in AMS 2 maintained their place in that group in AMS 3. 
The loss of the other nine was not due solely to death (which 
accounted for all the attrition between AMS I and AMS 2) but 
also to five stars falling out of the top 20 ranking. 
Continuing their downward spiral were the Washington an?
thropologists, of whom only five, one of them Swanton, now 
had legitimate stars. Indeed, of all the Washington anthropolo?
gists who had been in AMS 2, only four managed to maintain or 
improve their rank in AMS 3, while the remaining seven 
dropped in rank or died. Those who survived weren't getting 
any younger: the average age of the starred Washington anthro?
pologists, of whom Swanton was still the youngest, increased 
by 10 years from AMS 2; their non-Washington counterparts 
were, on average, nearly 12 years younger (Table 5). Most tell?
ing of all, however, is that there were no new Washington stars 
in AMS 3 among the nine added in that edition. 
The new stars that were added (Table 4) were Boas's stu?
dents?Goddard, Robert Lowie, and Frank Speck?along with 
several Harvard and (partly) Boas trained and influenced ar?
chaeologists: Alfred V. Kidder, Sylvanus G. Morley, Herbert 
Spinden, and Alfred M. Tozzer (Stocking, 1976:29). Of that 
group, the rise in the ranks of Lowie, Speck, and Tozzer proved 
to be significantly rapid (Lowie especially so: his rank went 
from 39 in AMS 2 to seven in AMS 3) (Tables 4, 6). With the 
exception of Morley, all possessed doctorates. With their inclu?
sion among the stars, for the first time in the several editions of 
the AMS a significant majority (14) of the top 20 stars pos?
sessed advanced degrees. 
The other rising stars of this edition were two of Boas's col?
leagues: Laufer, whose meteoric rise in the rankings of AMS 2 
went unchecked in AMS 3, and Wissler (Table 4). Wissler held 
a doctorate from Columbia (1901) and "should have been one 
of the Boas circle, but was not" (Freed and Freed, 1983:802). 
Instead, his degree was in psychology, under Cattell, but for a 
number of reasons he wandered into anthropology and never 
left. Since it has been reported that Wissler's "students and col?
leagues either ignored his influence or took it for granted" 
(Freed and Freed, 1983:807), it is noteworthy that his rank rose 
significantly between AMS 2 and AMS 3 to where in AMS 3 he 
ranked third behind Boas and Kroeber. Not coincidentally, be?
tween 1910 and 1920 Wissler published a suite of substantial 
and well-regarded monographs and papers on the Blackfoot, as 
well as his classic The American Indian (Wissler, 1917), with 
its widely hailed articulation of the culture-area concept and its 
effort to elevate Boasian historical ethnology to a more general 
level (Kroeber, 1918; see also Stocking, 1976:14; Freed and 
Freed, 1983:813-814). 
One student of Boas's, Edward Sapir, was noticeably absent 
from AMS 3. By 1920 Sapir had already burst on the intellec?
tual scene (Darnell, 1990), perhaps even more brilliantly than 
Lowie or Speck. That he did not receive any notice in the bal?
loting that year may merely reflect a technicality. Stars were 
only awarded to residents of the United States (Cattell and Cat?
tell, 1933:1261), and Sapir was then living in Canada. He 
would be the highest ranked of the new stars in AMS 4, when 
he again returned to the United States. 
The strong emergence of Boas's students and colleagues, and 
Boas's own top ranking among the stars, takes on considerable 
significance in the light of a set of events that occurred in the 
years leading up to the AMS 3 rankings. Over that time there 
had been increasing tension between the Washington and New 
York groups. Tempers flared over the control of the American 
Anthropologist (which in 1914 was transferred from Washing?
ton to New York and put in the editorial hands of a Boasian: 
Goddard); the composition of the National Research Council 
Committee on Anthropology, formed during World War I to 
mobilize American anthropologists as part of a program for na?
tional preparedness; and the nominations of Kroeber and 
Hrdlicka to the National Academy of Sciences (Stocking, 
1968:284-292). Matters exploded with the publication by 
Boas, in late 1919, of a letter to The Nation denouncing un?
named anthropologists whom he believed had worked as spies 
(Stocking, 1968: Chapter 11, 1976:1-2; Spencer, 1979; Meltzer 
and Dunnell, 1992:xxiv). 
The accumulated resentment of the Washington anthropolo?
gists toward Boas and his students' increasing control of the 
field exploded in a rage of patriotic indignation. In December 
1919, at the American Anthropological Association meetings 
in Cambridge, Boas was publicly censured, stripped of his 
membership in the Association's governing council, threat?
ened with expulsion from the very organization he had helped 
found, pressured into resigning from the National Research 
Council, then denied even the courtesy of a public explana?
tion?ostensibly because to do so would have allowed the 
identification of and thus endangered the spies (Stocking, 
1968:292-293; 1976:1-2). 
NUMBER 44 235 
Holmes was delighted with the outcome, though not with 
those of his colleagues who refused to support the censure. As 
he wrote to one of them: 
I have your recent favor and am surprised that you should wish the continuance 
of the Prussian regime, the vicious, scheming, minority of the association has 
ruled long enough, and if it is to continue I shall close my connection with an?
thropology for good. (Holmes to Hodge, Dec 1919, in Sturtevant, 1975:6) 
The heady drama at Cambridge represented the swan song of 
nineteenth century anthropology: a desperate effort on the part 
of the Washington anthropologists to assert their political dom?
inance over the profession. But that dominance was then on the 
wane both politically and theoretically, as the change in the 
rankings from AMS 2 to AMS 3 attest.19 The fact that they chose 
to flex their political muscles is indication that they hadn't any 
intellectual muscle to flex, and the shrillness of their political 
stand at Cambridge could hardly disguise the ultimate weak?
ness of their position within the profession. 
Just how weak their position was is evident in who was de?
nied a star in this edition of AMS, for the number of new stars 
added in AMS 3 would have been much higher had there not 
been an overload of gratuitous stars monopolizing the allotted 
slots. Six of the 26 stars awarded in this edition went to indi?
viduals whose stars had fallen "below the horizon," as Cattell 
put it, though he continued to show them as starred. The gratu?
itous stars in AMS 3 included Stewart Culin, Dorsey, Farrand, 
Hough, Mooney, and Clarence Moore (of that group, the rank?
ings of all but Hough and Moore had plunged significantly 
since AMS 2). 
What makes this group noteworthy is that it includes none of 
the Boas students, and in fact the group's presence effectively 
blocked many of his students from obtaining stars. Had these 
gratuitous stars been dropped, the new stars for AMS 3 would 
have included Alexander Goldenweiser, Elsie Clews Parsons, 
Marshall Saville, Truman Michelson, Fay-Cooper Cole, and 
George Grant MacCurdy (Table 4). With the exception of Mac?
Curdy, all had connections to Boas and Columbia. All of them 
would have to wait for a subsequent edition to be starred 
(Saville had just missed in AMS 2 as well; instead of receiving 
a star at age 43, he received one at age 60). 
A few of those who missed the list in AMS 3 were angry 
about it, for the stars by then conveyed considerable status and 
were highly coveted (Visher, 1947:4-7; Rossiter, 1982: 
289-290). An incensed MacCurdy complained to Hrdlicka, 
"Don't you think that a list [of names] which includes Culin, 
Dorsey, Kidder, and Nelson should also include mine?"20 Hrdli?
cka duly wrote to Cattell to champion MacCurdy's cause.21 
Goldenweiser didn't bother sending his complaint through a 
third party but snarled directly at Cattell about the injustice of 
including those such as Dorsey and Farrand, who had long 
since ceased to contribute to the field, or (worse in his eyes) 
Culin and Hough, who "cannot be taken seriously as anthropol?
ogists."22 Their pleas went unanswered, at least until the next 
edition of AMS. 
Later Rankings and Final Thoughts 
The trends set in motion in the earlier editions continued 
through several later editions, although except for the ranks of 
the new stars (Table 7), data is limited from those later editions 
on judging or on overall rankings. By then, death had removed 
the gratuitous stars Cattell would not, and five new stars were 
added in each of the three subsequent editions (AMS 4 through 
AMS 6). Several of them were holdovers from earlier rankings: 
MacCurdy, Parsons, and Saville each earned a star in AMS 4 
(after coming close in AMS 3), and Cole was starred in AMS 5 
(12 years after coming close in AMS 3). With the exception of 
some of those holdovers (e.g., MacCurdy and Saville), all of 
them were relatively young and mostly were Columbia-trained 
ethnologists. 
Parsons represented the first additional woman among the 
stars of anthropology since AMS 1, when Fletcher received a 
star. Fletcher had maintained her presence among the top 20 
(and her star) through AMS 3, but by then she had begun to slip 
significantly in the rankings (Table 4). Her death, in 1923, re?
moved her from the list of stars in AMS 4, although Parson's 
star in that edition meant there was no net loss in the number of 
women stars in anthropology. But there was no net gain, either. 
Only with Ruth Benedict's award in AMS 5 would there be an 
additional star among women anthropologists. Parsons and 
Benedict would remain the only women stars in anthropology 
through AMS 7 (the last edition in which stars were awarded). 
Even so, women were starred in anthropology at a relatively 
greater percentage than in all the other fields of science (Ros?
siter, 1982:291). Although there is ample evidence to indicate 
women were "understarred," especially in the early editions of 
AMS (Rossiter, 1982:106-109, 289-294), their chances of re?
ceiving a star in anthropology were at least better than they 
were elsewhere in the sciences. 
There would be no new stars among the Washington anthro?
pologists in AMS 4 and only one in AMS 5, that awarded to 
Frank Roberts, who held a doctoral degree from Harvard in ar?
chaeology. Although an employee of the BAE, he was not in 
any sense a product of the intellectual tradition that had domi?
nated Washington anthropology at the turn of the century, for 
by then the principals of that tradition had nearly all died. And 
with that, the changes in the intellectual and institutional land?
scape of American anthropology were complete. 
TABLE 7.?Rank orders of the newly starred anthropologists for AMS 4 
through AMS 6. Dates are the year voting was done for that edition. (Data 
are from the James McKeen Cattell Papers, box 63, Library of Congress, 
Washington, D.C). 
Rank AMS 4 (1926) AMS 5 (1932) AMS 6 (1937) 
Sapir, E. 
Hooton, E. 
MacCurdy, G. 
Parsons, E. 
Saville, M. 
Spier, L. 
Roberts, F. 
Benedict, R. 
Cole, F.-C. 
Linton, R. 
Strong, W.D. 
Valliant, G. 
Herskovitz, M. 
Schultz, A. 
Lothrop, S. 
236 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Charting the stars of the AMS shows the progressive deterio?
ration of the once-dominant Washington anthropologists and 
their inability to maintain their preeminence and rank in a rap?
idly changing field. It also shows the steady rise of Boas and 
his students. By the end of the second decade of the twentieth 
century, the net result of the expanding university programs, 
the ascendancy of Boas's vision for anthropology as the intel?
lectual underpinning of those university programs, and the shift 
of power from Washington to New York produced a nearly 
complete reversal of the star pattern from what it had been in 
AMS I. Then, seven of the top 10 and 10 of the top 20 anthro?
pologists had been centered in government museums and re?
search bureaus. By AMS 3, five of the top 10 and over 10 of the 
top 20 stars were relatively young, highly educated anthropolo?
gists who for the most part had academic appointments and af?
filiations with Boas himself. 
The starring procedure of AMS was, as Cattell insisted, a 
generally reliable device for measuring status, but it never was 
a valid one. Quirks in his procedures and questions about the 
representativeness of his samples ensured that it was not?and 
ultimately ensured the demise of the star system (Rossiter, 
1982:290). But as a blunt instrument for measuring what select 
judges thought of their peers, for mapping the field of compe?
tence, and for tracking changes in status and rank among the 
practitioners of the field, the AMS rankings provide a unique 
window into the workings of early twentieth century American 
anthropology and anthropologists. 
Notes 
This paper benefited from the help and comments of Ives Goddard, Donald K. 
Grayson, Michael Harris, Bill Merrill, Margaret Rossiter, Michael Sokal, and 
George Stocking. I am grateful to all of them. The research for this paper was 
supported by a Research Fellowship Leave from Southern Methodist Univer?
sity and by the Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution. 
It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge Bill Sturtevant's long-standing in?
terest and support of my research efforts in the history of archaeology, some of 
which I've much enjoyed doing in collaboration with him. Knowing Bill's 
fondness for the little ironies of history, I close with the observation that he 
himself is a scion of Cattell's star system: his father, geneticist Alfred Sturte?
vant, first appeared in AMS 3 and was accompanied by a star?precociously so, 
for he was then only 30. 
In the notes, frequently cited archival materials are identified by the follow?
ing acronyms: 
AH/NAA AleS Hrdlicka Papers, National Anthropological Archives, 
National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institu?
tion, Washington, D.C. 
FB/APS Franz Boas Papers, American Philosophical Society, Phil?
adelphia, Pennsylvania. 
JMC/LC James McKeen Cattell Papers, Library of Congress, 
Washington, D.C. 
WHHRR/NMAA William Henry Holmes, Random Records, National Mu?
seum of American Art, Washington, D.C. 
1. Today, nearly a century and 20 editions later, Cattell's American Men of 
Science survives as the more inclusively named American Men and Women of 
Science, having also spawned specialized directories of physical and social 
scientists. 
2. The archival material that serves as the basis for the subsequent discussion 
is housed in boxes 61-63 and 169-171 of the James McKeen Cattell Papers, 
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Few letters between Cattell and the 
AMS judges regarding their voting survive in the Cattell papers; however, I 
have found letters pertaining to the AMS rankings among the papers of the 
judges themselves. 
3. For example, Cattell to Holmes, 28 Feb 1903; McGee to Cattell, 18 and 30 
Nov 1909, JMC/LC. 
4. For example, Mason to Cattell, 11 Mar 1903, JMC/LC. 
5. More specifically, despite the variation in the numbers of individuals being 
ranked by particular judges, when Cattell tallied the votes he did not standard?
ize all the judges' rankings to a constant numerical scale, which effectively 
raised or lowered an individual's mean score, depending on how they were 
ranked by a particular judge and by what scale. Also complicating matters was 
that Cattell made no distinction by the number of judges ranking an individual. 
Thus, the mean score of a person ranked by, say, three judges, was given equal 
weight to the mean score of a person ranked by all 10 judges. One could rectify 
these biases by transforming all of the ranking data to a constant scale and dif?
ferentially weighting the number of rankings received, but doing so produces a 
far different rank-order list than Cattell's?even to the point of producing a dif?
ferent set of stars. Given that Cattell's lists were, ultimately, the ones that mat?
tered and the ones that were used in those decades, I have also used them?at 
the risk of losing a certain degree of statistical integrity. It was also necessary, 
before analysis, to clean Cattell's data, which mostly involved rectifying his er?
rors in transcribing a judges' rankings on the master tally sheet. The details of 
this data-cleaning are not of great significance and are available on request. 
6. Delabarre to Cattell, 23 Oct 1909; Woodbury to Cattell, 5 Feb 1932, JMC/ 
LC. 
7. Hodge to Cattell, 15 Nov 1903; see also Mason to Cattell, 11 Mar 1903, 
JMC/LC. 
8. Holmes to Cattell, 3 Mar 1903, JMC/LC. 
9. More precisely, he classed the 50 psychologists into five groups of 10 
each and then determined the mean rank each judge gave that group of 10. He 
likely proceeded in this manner to reduce the number of required computa?
tions. In effect, he calculated a rudimentary z score, although because he 
merely summed the deviation from the mean and took no account of the vari?
ance, the figures he provided (e.g., Cattell, 1910: table IV) cannot be read as 
standardized normal deviates. 
10. Curiously enough, Holmes and McGee were the outliers in this analysis 
for both AMS I and AMS 2. In each case theirs were the rankings most and least 
correlated (respectively) with the overall mean rankings. 
11. As a psychological exercise, Cattell deliberately said nothing about 
whether a judge should vote for himself or herself (Cattell, 1906:663, 1910: 
542), and most did not. The rankings of those who did?Culin and Dorsey? 
say a great deal about their respective perceptions of self. Culin was obviously 
either very modest or very insecure. Dorsey was neither (see Table 2). 
12. Branner to White, 2 Jan 1903, WHHRR/NMAA. 
13. It is odd?to me at least?that given the lasting quality of Mooney's work 
(Hinsley, 1981:210, 219), his deep interest in history, his divergence from the 
BAE's party line, his deep sense of political reform, and his politics (Swanton, 
1944:43^44) Boas would have ranked him so low. 
14. A corresponding observation of Rossiter's (1982:107), that men who in?
cluded women in their rankings tended to cluster them together at or near the 
bottom of their lists, is more difficult to test, but it seems at least partly true, at 
least as measured by the overall results of the ranking. Among the 71 individu?
als who appeared on the judges' ballots for anthropology (and were thus poten?
tially eligible for stars), nearly 30% of the men (19/66) were selected as stars, 
versus just 20% of the women (1/5). Further testing of this issue will require a 
more detailed look at voting patterns among the individual judges (as presum?
ably not all acted alike in this regard, as Boas and Mason's rankings suggest). 
15. Hodge to Cattell, 15 Nov 1903, JMC/LC. 
16. Boas to Walcott, 7 Dec 1903, FB/APS. 
17. See also the FB/APS, Dec 1902. 
18. Boas to Carl Schurz, 12 Aug 1903, FB/APS. 
19. Although the anti-Boas faction won the battle at Cambridge, they lost the 
war. Goddard (a Boasian and star since AMS 3) still controlled the American 
NUMBER 44 237 
Anthropologist for another year, and through some shrewd maneuvering Boa-
sians retained at least indirect control of it when Swanton was appointed editor 
in 1920. Within a few years they resumed their overwhelming influence on the 
direction of American anthropology (Stocking, 1976:10). 
20. MacCurdy to Hrdlicka, 5 Nov 1926, AH/NAA. 
21. Hrdlicka to Cattell, 9 Nov 1926; Hrdlicka to MacCurdy, 10 Nov 1926, AH/ 
NAA. 
22. Goldenweiser to Cattell, 7 Jan 1920, JMC/LC. 
Literature Cited 
Boas, Franz 
1887. The Occurrence of Similar Inventions in Areas Widely Apart. Sci?
ence, 9:485-486. 
1904. The History of Anthropology. Science, 20:513-524. 
1919. Report on the Academic Teaching of Anthropology. American An?
thropologist, 21:41-48. 
Cattell, Jacques, editor 
1949. American Men of Science: A Biographical Directory. Eighth edition, 
vii+2836 pages. Lancaster, Pennsylvania: The Science Press. 
Cattell, James M. 
1903. The American Society of Naturalists; Homo scientificus america?
nus. Science, 17:561-570. 
1906. A Statistical Study of American Men of Science: The Selection of a 
Group of One Thousand Scientific Men. Science, 24:658-665, 
699-707, 732-742. 
Cattell, James M., editor 
1906. American Men of Science: A Biographical Directory, vii+364 
pages. New York: The Science Press. 
1910. American Men of Science: A Biographical Directory. Second edi?
tion, vii + 596 pages. New York: The Science Press. 
Cattell, James M., and Dean R. Brimhall, editors 
1921. American Men of Science: A Biographical Directory. Third edition, 
viii+808 pages. Garrison, New York: The Science Press. 
Cattell, James M., and Jacques Cattell, editors 
1933. American Men of Science: A Biographical Directory. Fifth edition, 
viii+1278 pages. New York: The Science Press. 
Chudacoff, Howard P. 
1989. How Old Are You?: Age Consciousness in American Culture, x+232 
pages. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 
Darnell, Regna 
1969. The Development of American Anthropology, 1879-1920: From the 
Bureau of American Ethnology to Franz Boas. 527 pages. Doctoral 
dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylva?
nia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 
1990. Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist, xix+480 pages. 
Berkeley: University of California Press. 
de Laguna, Frederica 
1960. The Development of Anthropology. In Frederica de Laguna, editor, 
Selected Papers from the American Anthropologist. 1888-1920, 
pages 91-104. Washington, D.C: American Anthropological Asso?
ciation. 
Everitt, Brian S. 
1977. The Analysis of Contingency Tables. 128 pages London: Chapman 
and Hall. 
Freed, Stanley, and Ruth Freed 
1983. Clark Wissler and the Development of Anthropology in the United 
States. American Anthropologist, 85:800-826. 
Freed, Stanley, Ruth Freed, and Laila Williamson 
1988. Capitalist Philanthropy and Russian Revolutionaries: The Jesup 
North Pacific Expedition. American Anthropologist, 90:7-24. 
Hinsley, Curtis M. 
1976. Amateurs and Professionals in Washington Anthropology, 1879 to 
1903. In J. Murra, editor, American Anthropology: The Early Years, 
pages 36-68. St. Paul, Minnesota: West Publishing Company. 
1981. Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Devel?
opment of American Anthropology. 1846-1910. 319 pages. Wash?
ington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Kroeber, Alfred L. 
1918. Review of The American Indian: An Introduction to the Anthropol?
ogy of the New World, by Clark Wissler. American Anthropologist, 
20:203-209. 
Lacey, Michael 
1979. The Mysteries of Earth Making Dissolve: A Study of Washington's 
Intellectual Community and the Origins of American Environmen-
talism in the Late Nineteenth Century. 488 pages. Doctoral disserta?
tion, Department of History, George Washington University, 
Washington, D.C. 
MacCurdy, George G. 
1919. Academic Teaching of Anthropology in Connection with Other De?
partments. American Anthropologist, 21:49-60. 
Mark, Joan 
1980. Four Anthropologists: An American Science in Its Early Years. 209 
pages. New York: Science History Publications. 
Meltzer, David J. 
1983. The Antiquity of Man and the Development of American Archaeol?
ogy. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, 6:1-51. 
1985. North American Archaeology and Archaeologists, 1879-1934. 
American Antiquity, 50:249-260. 
Meltzer, David J., and Robert C. Dunnell 
1992. The Archaeology of William Henry Holmes. In David J. Meltzer 
and Robert C. Dunnell, editors, William Henry Holmes and the Ori?
gins of American Archaeology, pages vii-1. Washington, D . C : 
Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Noelke, Virginia 
1974. The Origin and Early History of the BAE, 1879-1910. 353 pages. 
Doctoral dissertation, Department of History, University of Texas, 
Austin, Texas. 
Rossiter, Margaret W. 
1982. Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. 
xviii+439 pages. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University 
Press. 
Rudwick, Martin J.S. 
1985. The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowl?
edge among Gentlemanly Specialists, xxxiii+494 pages. Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press. 
Spencer, Frank 
1979. Ale5 Hrdlicka, M.D., 1869-1943: A Chronicle of the Life and Work 
of an American Physical Anthropologist. 887 pages. Doctoral dis?
sertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, 
Ann Arbor, Michigan. 
Stocking, George W. 
1960. Franz Boas and the Founding of the American Anthropological As?
sociation. American Anthropologist, 62:1-17. 
1968. Race, Culture, and Evolution; Essays in the History of Anthropol?
ogy. xvii+380 pages. New York: Free Press. 
1974. A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 
1883-1911. xi+354 pages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 
1976. Ideas and Institutions in American Anthropology: Thoughts toward 
238 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
a History of the Interwar Years. In George W. Stocking, editor, Se?
lected Papers from the American Anthropologist, 1921-1945, pages 
1-53. Washington, D.C: American Anthropological Association. 
Sturtevant, William C. 
1975. Huns, Free-thinking Americans, and the AAA. History of Anthro?
pology Newsletter, 2(l):4-6. 
Swanton, John 
1944. Notes Regarding My Adventures in Anthropology and with Anthro?
pologists. 47 pages. [Unpublished manuscript, record no. 4651, in 
the National Anthropological Archives, National Museum of Natu?
ral History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C] 
Visher, Stephen S. 
1947. Scientists Starred, 1903-1943, in "American Men of Science"; A 
Study of Collegiate and Doctoral Training, Birthplace, Distribution, 
Backgrounds, and Developmental Influences, xxiii+556 pages. Bal?
timore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins Press. 
Weibe, Robert H. 
1967. The Search for Order, 1877-1920. xiv+333 pages. New York: Hill 
and Wang. 
Wissler, Clark 
1917. The American Indian: An Introduction to the Anthropology of the 
New World, xiii+435 pages. New York: McMurtie Press. 
V. Collections in Anthropological Research 

At the Cutting Edge: Patchwork and the Process of Artistic Innovation 
Sally Price 
In the context of Westerners' interest in the arts of the Suri-
name Maroons, textiles have received relatively little attention, 
and as an art form marketable outside the home territory of Ma?
roons, they are nearly nonexistent. But in the context of the cul?
ture they are made for, these same textiles have played an im?
portant aesthetic and social role since the late nineteenth 
century. During the 1960s and 1970s, Maroon women and men 
helped me piece together the history of their textile arts, and 
later I was able to complement the information and insights 
they provided by working in museums, libraries, and archives 
elsewhere?principally in Suriname and Holland, but also in 
France, Germany, and the United States. That research forms 
the core of the present paper. 
Flow Charts and the Steps of Production 
In 1967 the Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society 
included an analysis of Seminole men's clothing by Bill Sturte?
vant that begins with a plea for treating costume as a bona fide 
domain of art (Sturtevant, 1967). The text of that article, and 
even more strikingly the figures, reflect attention not only to 
visual detail but also to two diachronic dimensions of clothing 
fashion. First is the process by which, in a matter of hours or 
days, raw materials pass through the steps of production. Sec?
ond is the more gradual process, strung out over years and de?
cades, by which old styles are replaced by new ones. The arti?
cle's conclusion proposes that the most privileged indicator of 
chronological changes in Seminole men's and women's cloth?
ing is to be found in patchwork. 
When Bill became my dissertation adviser, he shared with 
me a paper he had presented orally in 1969 that further ex?
plored the potential of patchwork textiles for elucidating Semi?
nole artistic techniques and aesthetic principles (Sturtevant, 
1969). That was in the mid-1970s, when even our children 
were not yet playing with computers, and the text was rendered 
in that now-obsolete form known as handwriting. The heart of 
the argument appeared as a flow-chart, which Bill and his re?
search assistant Donna Kathleen Abbas had constructed on the 
basis of his field notes and a large collection of Seminole 
patchwork (Figure 1). As they worked, they tried out their 
ideas on a sewing machine, limiting the variables being tested 
Sally Price, Department of Anthropology, College of William and 
Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia 23187-8795, USA. 
by using black and white pieces of cloth rather than colors. 
Flow charts (which in this case grew out of structural linguis?
tics via ethnographic semantics) were in a sense the early an?
cestors of voice-mail menus or Microsoft Windows drop-down 
lists. They provided an ordered sequence in which an initial de?
cision opens the next level of options, which lead to a third 
level, and so on. (Anyone old enough to have accessed data by 
jabbing long metal skewers into the perforations of file cards 
will also remember this as the era of "edge sort cards" or 
"punch card sorting.") In the case of Seminole patchwork, Bill 
argued, the seamstress's decision to rip a single stripe (for ex?
ample) annulled the need for decisions about insertions and 
joinings that would have followed upon a decision to rip multi?
ple stripes. The next step would be cutting, which led to a fur?
ther sequence of choices about slashes, inversions, and ar?
rangements before any actual sewing was done. The whole 
chain of decisions could then be reinitiated (something along 
the lines of a da capo form in music), treating the composite 
product of the first run-through as a single element. Although 
Bill's primordial drop-down list took the form of pen-on-paper, 
the underlying principles of sequential, embedded decision?
making that people like Bill Gates began marketing some years 
later were already solidly in place. 
My own subsequent investigation of African-American 
patchwork took off, in an important sense, from ideas like that 
flow chart. There was, for example, the suggestion of using a 
Polaroid camera to document the patchwork layouts that 
women tried out and then interviewing the women about why 
they rejected the ones that never got to the stage of being sewn 
up. In a similar way, the unpublished manuscripts, scribbled 
bibliography slips, and one-line research suggestions that Bill 
fed into my project from time to time tended to be esoteric ref?
erences to highly particularistic ethnographic materials, but 
when they were all put together, they constituted a powerful ar?
gument for the importance, in studying art and material culture, 
of paying close attention to the production process?the or?
dered sequence of options that a given cultural setting allows 
for a given artistic form and the culturally conditioned influ?
ences that shape decision-making at each stage. The idea was 
to back up from an analysis of finished forms in order to un?
cover the logic of the steps by which those forms are created. 
And this would have the effect, in turn, of shedding light on the 
mechanics of creative innovation and hence the longer-term 
phenomenon of stylistic change. 
241 
242 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
c Start 
v > t \ 
*?s 
\" 
u . r t ' y " 
JNo 
Arrange 
1 
fi 
Invert 
1 
StQTfC. 
Hold {Koiutt, 
QO wv, to. i . 
Complex s\isV\. 
GohoIA,*nA 
we this unit 
FIGURE 1.?Flow chart constructed by Donna Kathleen Abbas and William C 
Sturtevant for Sturtevant, 1969. 
In this paper, which focuses primarily on the colorful patch?
work clothing made by Saramaka Maroons in the Suriname 
rain forest, I try to show how attention to the production pro?
cess can help us understand the nature of artistic change. The 
essence of my argument is that in Saramaka, individual textiles 
are composed from the center out, that experimentation with 
new ideas or techniques generally happens only at the end of 
this process, and that stylistic change consists of a gradual mi?
gration of those new ideas from compositional edges to compo?
sitional centers. We can also see this principle operating, with 
slight variation, in the history of Maroon calabash carving, 
which is the second main form of artistic expression for 
women. If we follow styles as they come and go through time, 
we see innovations cropping up in margins, borders, leftover 
spaces, and even what we tend to refer to as the "wrong side" of 
decorated objects, and moving center stage only over the years, 
as they become mainstream, standard fare. (It is as if, in West?
ern art history, new movements got started not in the paintings 
themselves but in the frames around them, not in the sculptural 
forms but in the pedestals that held them.) But before getting 
into the main argument, it is necessary to clear up some mis?
conceptions about the origins of Maroon patchwork and to look 
briefly at the social environment in which it is produced. 
The Origin of Maroon Textile Arts 
The earliest mentions of Suriname Maroon clothing and tex?
tiles are frustratingly sparse in their descriptive detail. Mission?
aries who lived for many years among the Saramaka during the 
second half of the eighteenth century, for example, wrote that 
their hosts had "no clothing except a small covering over the 
abdomen" (Staehelin, 1913-1919, 3.2:141) and the drawings 
made by one of them corroborate this description (see Price, 
1990:161). John Gabriel Stedman (1988:390-392,405, frontis?
piece, pi. 53) described the clothing and accessories of two Ma?
roons he encountered in eastern Suriname in the 1770s, but he 
neither mentioned nor illustrated any kind of patchwork or dec?
orative sewing. Although other historical accounts go into 
some detail about costume, including both ritual accessories 
and coastal imports such as shirts and trousers (see Price, 
1984:125-129), the only suggestion that Maroon patchwork or 
decorative sewing may have existed in any form before the late 
nineteenth century comes not from Suriname but from Cay?
enne, French Guiana. There, a recaptured 15-year-old runaway 
slave declared under interrogation in 1748 that in the enclave 
where he had been living over an 18-month period, three of the 
men "make cloths from cotton, which provide tanga for the 
women and loincloths for the men, and that this cotton material 
is woven piece by piece which they assemble and which is 
marked with Siamese cotton" (Price, 1973:317'). 
The art historian Robert Farris Thompson has made a valiant 
effort to unearth historical evidence showing that Suriname 
Maroons had developed decorative patchwork art before the 
late nineteenth century. "There must have been," Thompson 
(1983:215) argued after citing the 1748 testimony from Cay?
enne, "similar memories of West African multi-strip cloth 
among black runaways of neighboring Suriname, for in 1823 
Ferdinand Denis describes and illustrates an article of dress, 
given as Carib." Thompson reproduced Denis's illustration and 
went on to reason that the garment, by virtue of its "two pat?
terned narrow strips... separated by a single band of continu?
ously unpatterned cloth," embodies an aesthetic that "points 
back to early Asante cloths of the nineteenth century, when 
weavers were working under Mande influences radiating from 
Kong and from Bonduku, northwest of the Akan and north of 
Cap Lahou, whence sailed to Suriname 50 percent of a sample 
of Dutch slaving ships" (Thompson, 1983:215). 
Although the object in Denis's sketch is captioned as an In?
dian loincloth ("Camiza Indieri"), Thompson dismissed this at?
tribution on the grounds that Suriname Indians "in general 
make and prefer solid red loincloths" (no reference given), and 
that therefore the garment must have been made by Ndyuka 
Maroons, who must then have sold it to the Indians from whom 
NUMBER 44 243 
it was collected. In any case, he asserted (with no reference 
given), "the word camiza is not Amerindian" (Thompson, 
1983:296). In fact, however, this word is (and was even in the 
eighteenth century) Amerindian, and the garment it referred to 
was not necessarily red, as any number of sources make clear.2 
Stedman (1988:306), writing of the 1770s, noted: "The only 
dress Wore by these Indians consists in a Strip of black, or blew 
Cotton, worn by the Men to cover their Nakedness, and cal'd 
Camisa [while the equivalent for women is] a Girdle made of 
human Hair around their Waste, through which before, and be?
hind, they fasten a Square broad Piece of black Cotton." Benoit 
(1839:42) described Suriname Indian loincloths in the 1830s as 
being "red or blue," and the venerable Encyclopaedic van Ned-
erlandsch West-Indie reported that "the Caribs of both sexes 
wear a loincloth, or kamiesa (Sp. camisa) of dark blue cotton" 
(Benjamins and Snelleman, 1914-1917:102). Given all this, 
one might be tempted to suspect that Thompson's dismissal of 
the original observer's Amerindian attribution because the 
cloth is not red reflects nothing more than an unharnessed ea?
gerness to find Africanisms in the Americas.3 
Returning credit for the 1823 loincloth, then, to Amerindi?
ans, we are left with no picture of Maroon decorative sewing 
that predates the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, 
despite clear evidence that earlier Maroons had women's wrap-
skirts, two styles of men's loincloths (wider and narrower), an 
impressive range of jewelry and accessories (much of it in?
tended for ritual protection), and Western-style clothing pur?
chased in coastal Suriname (see Price and Price, 1999:53-129), 
we do not even have reason to believe that Maroon dress in?
cluded shoulder capes of any sort before the second half of the 
century. Schumann's (1778) eighteenth-century Saramaka dic?
tionary gives no word for cape. Coster (1866) reported that 
among the Maroons of eastern Suriname both men and women 
wore multiple "cloths" over the shoulders, but his detailed 
frontispiece?which shows eight men in loincloths, chest 
sashes, neckerchiefs, hats, leg bands, jewelry, and more?does 
not depict capes. Crevaux's (1879) description and numerous 
illustrations of Aluku Maroons 10 years later confirmed this 
picture; and Bonaparte's (1884) book on the Ndyukas and Sa-
ramakas brought to Amsterdam for the Colonial Exposition of 
1883, who were systematically photographed in native garb, 
shows all of them bare-chested. 
It seems likely that men's capes and decorative sewing made 
their first appearance in Maroon costume at roughly the same 
time, in the late nineteenth century. That is, in any case, the 
point at which both of them first appear in museum collections 
and written documentation. And current Maroon ideas about 
dress might well reflect their simultaneous introduction, since 
men's shoulder capes are by far the most consistently and most 
elaborately decorated of any type of garment. This paper, 
which considers clothing styles through the 1970s, therefore 
covers roughly 100 years of Maroon textile history.4 
The Social Context of Maroon Textile Arts 
Because most textile art is fashioned by women as gifts for 
men, I begin my exploration of the dynamics of creativity and 
the history of textile fashions by sketching in the main lines of 
the gendered division of labor and cultural notions about the 
material interdependence of men and women. Women assume 
primary responsibility for supplying and processing food from 
gardens (rice, tubers, bananas, peanuts, okra, etc.) and the for?
est (most importantly, the palm nuts used to make cooking oil). 
Men hunt and fish, purchase imported goods (including pots 
and pans, cloth and soap, sugar and salt, guns and machetes, ra?
dios and tape recorders) with their earnings from wage labor, 
and fashion wooden objects, such as houses, canoes, paddles, 
stools, combs, and cooking utensils. With marriage serving as 
the main institution through which these foods and goods pass 
from male to female hands, a woman without a husband is at a 
significant disadvantage in terms of material comfort. For vari?
ous demographic reasons, including earlier first marriages for 
women and, since the 1870s, heavy outmigration by men, there 
are many more women of marriageable age than men. Both be?
cause of and in spite of the fact that most men have more than 
one wife, there is vigorous competition among women for the 
available pool of husbands. These (and a number of other) de?
mographic and economic factors come together to produce a 
cultural environment in which women spend a great deal of en?
ergy trying to please men. In this setting, their artistic produc?
tion plays an important role. (Further detail on these aspects of 
Saramaka life is provided in Price, 1984.) 
In terms of textile arts, the great bulk of patchwork and deco?
rative sewing appears on the vibrantly designed shoulder capes, 
which represent the most prominent item of men's formal 
dress; second in importance are men's breechcloths.5 Even 
when women decorate their own skirts and capes, there is a 
general understanding that it would be inappropriate to devote 
as much aesthetic attention to this kind of sewing as to that on a 
man's garment.6 In the 1970s, for example, when narrow-strip 
patchwork capes were declining in popularity but women still 
had large accumulations of strips (edge pieces trimmed from 
the cloths they had hemmed to make their own wrap-skirts), 
they sometimes used the strips to make patchwork skirts for 
themselves. They were quick to explain, however, that they 
simply threw together, with an explicit avoidance of pre-plan?
ning, whatever strips they had on hand. 
Similarly, although the handsomely carved calabash bowls 
that women produce belong to them and not to the men, the 
most important use of these bowls is at men's meals, a highly 
charged site for competition among each man's several wives. 
The calabash forms destined for men's meals (water-drinking 
and hand-washing bowls) are embellished with more elaborate 
and carefully executed designs than are those destined for use 
by women (spoons, spatulas, ladles, and rice-rinsing bowls), 
where the carvings are sparse and simple. (Calabashes intended 
for use in rituals are completely undecorated.) 
244 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Stylistic Developments, 1880-1980 
The oldest type of textile art that present-day Maroons remem?
ber, and that photographs and museum collections document, 
consists of embroidered figures on a monochrome or subtly 
striped cotton backing. Figure 2 (left) shows a representative 
example from 1908. The shapes tend to be curvilinear, their 
placement is roughly symmetrical around a vertical axis, and 
they are executed as linear outlines, often filled in with dense 
stitching in a contrastive color (see Figure 3). 
The absence of vibrantly colorful patchwork textiles during 
this early period does not mean, however, that Maroons would 
not already have developed both the aesthetic principles and 
the cutting-and-piecing technique that were to go into its cre?
ation. Not only is color contrast already present in the nine?
teenth-century embroidery designs, but many other domains of 
daily life attest to its importance as a central feature of Maroon 
aesthetics. Gardens are laid out in patchwork-like alternations 
of red and white rice varieties, even though the different kinds 
FIGURE 2.?A Dutch explorer with his Saramaka guides, 1908 (Eilerts de Haan, 1910, fig. 24). 
NUMBER 44 245 
*
mSmSKBmp^m?-^;;: 
^^ssmm^ immaafrm ?**? 
FIGURE 3.?Detail of cloth collected in the 1890s. Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam (cat. no. H2475). Photograph by 
Antonia Graeber. 
look and taste the same once they get to the cooking pot. Dress 
reflects an explicit preference for wearing colors that contrast 
rather than blend with each other (for example, a red waistker-
chief on top of a yellow and green wrap-skirt). Ideals of physi?
cal beauty include admiration for bright white teeth against jet 
black skin and dark ("green") cicatrizations on an albino 
woman. And the inlays of men's woodcarving introduce tonal 
contrast into an otherwise monochrome art. 
In terms of the technical dimension, there exist Maroon gar?
ments that are made by cutting cloth into pieces, repositioning 
them, and seaming them back together without incorporating 
any of the vibrant color contrasts that later came to dominate the 
art of patchwork. In a cape construction popular in the 1920s, 
for example, a length of striped cloth was cut into five pieces 
that were then repositioned and sewn back together in three ver?
tical panels (see Price and Price, 1999: fig. 4.34, and, for a sim?
ilarly pieced breechcloth construction, Price, 1984: fig. 46). 
Here, no pattern of contrastive colors or cross-cutting stripes re?
sults; both the initial cloth and its pieced-together follow-up are 
characterized by uniform stripes running in a single direction. 
But while a cape made from the uncut cloth either would have 
displayed horizontal stripes (which Saramakas say they don't 
like on capes) or would have been too long and narrow, the cut-
and-pieced version forms a cape of the preferred orientation and 
appropriate proportions. Similarly, the cape in Figure 4 has been 
246 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
discreetly pieced together simply because the seamstress did not 
have a single piece of cloth that was large enough.7 
Lingering a bit longer with this same cape, we can discern 
other aspects of Maroon textile arts as well. First, the design 
spread over its center is an excellent illustration of a very com?
mon color scheme in which the basic threesome of red, white, 
and navy or black predominates but is complemented by yel?
low, blue, and orange. Second, it displays the imperfectly real?
ized bilateral symmetry that characterizes the bulk of women's 
art?calabashes as much as textiles. Saramakas explicitly es?
teem symmetry more than off-balance visual effects, but they 
are quite unanimous in the belief that women are less skilled at 
producing it than are men. A layout of motifs such as the one 
on this cape seems almost designed to prove their point as it is 
clearly conceptualized in terms of a vertical axis but has been 
executed with its elements a bit off-center. Third?and this is 
the heart of my argument in this paper?the composition is 
framed on the sides and bottom with patchwork strips in red, 
white, and black, appliqued onto the edges of the white cape. 
The steps of production lend us help as we try to read the im?
plications of such a textile's aesthetic features. Having had the 
opportunity of watching Saramaka women plan out many doz?
ens of textile compositions, I have been struck that each time 
they begin at the center and then work out to the edges. This or?
der governs every other kind of decorative sewing as well. Fur?
thermore, when adjustments are made on a cape that has al?
ready been worn, they are introduced at the edges, which 
means that a cape's borders sometimes postdate its center by 
many years. It is not unusual, for example, for a cape to be en?
larged in response to changing fashion by extra strips sewn 
onto the sides and bottom (see Price and Price, 1999: fig. 4.32). 
So, whether or not the patchwork strips in the embroidered 
cape in Figure 4 were present the first time the cape was worn, 
they would not in any case have been sewn on until after the 
embroidery design was completed. This means that the master?
ful realization of an established embroidery art filling the cen?
ter of the cape was complemented, somewhere lower down on 
the flow chart, by a three-sided frame in which the seamstress 
was experimenting with something new. Over the years, as 
both the makers and the wearers of capes began to get tired of 
the same old thing, the once fashionable embroidery style 
faded out and the technique and aesthetic represented in its 
edge strips moved center stage. 
Although the new style, which made its debut in the early 
years of the twentieth century, first appeared on garments with 
the earlier curvilinear embroidery, it was constructed by a com?
pletely different process, used different raw materials, and pro?
duced a different aesthetic effect. Small strips, squares, and tri-
FlGURE 4.?Saramaka cape, sewn between 1900 and 1910. For more on this cape's life history, see Price and 
Price, 1991 :iv. Photograph by Richard Price. 
NUMBER 44 247 
angles were cut with a knife from monochrome red, white, and 
black/navy cloth and were sewn together to produce a patch?
work strip, which was then appliqued onto the backing cloth. 
This technique/style eventually became known variably as be-
ku-badka (red-and-black), pende koosu (striped/patterned 
cloth), ovpispisi (pieced-together, or bits and pieces) sewing. 
Over time, the new bits-and-pieces strips began to upstage 
the older curvilinear embroidery as women became more profi?
cient at designing and producing them and as men acquired a 
taste for clothes that featured them. With embroidery's fall in 
popularity in Maroon fashion, bits-and-pieces patchwork liter?
ally took the center. On breechcloths (see Price and Price, 1999: 
figs. 4.37, 4.39) this meant a patchwork composition covering 
the broad rear flap?the most noticeable portion, since the front 
flap is small in comparison, and the rest of the garment simply 
passes between the wearer's legs. This rear panel received spe?
cial attention because of the swinging motion it makes when its 
wearer walks. As Saramakas explained to me, the design itself 
is colorfully spread out, wangaa!, on the breechcloth, and it 
swings jauntily, lioliolid, as the man moves?hence their term 
for a breechcloth sewn in this style: awangalio. For shoulder 
capes (which, unlike breechcloths have no nonvisible parts), 
the construction in which a solid piece of cloth served as a 
backing for decorative patchwork dropped out, and the entire 
garment came to be formed exclusively of bits and pieces, the 
seams of which were tucked under with a needle and meticu?
lously hemmed to hide the raw cut edges. At the same time, the 
standard red, white, and navy color scheme of earlier textiles 
was embellished with accents of yellow. 
Figure 5 illustrates this development (see also Figure 2 
(right)). Here, the production process begins with the con?
struction of composite strips, much in the fashion of Seminole 
patchwork. One of these strips (often of a unique pattern?in 
this cape, for example, the central patchwork strip is black and 
white, while all the others are black, white, and red) is chosen 
for the garment's "spine" (bdka mindi), thus defining its verti?
cal center. The spine is then flanked by a pair of matching 
strips, one to the right and one to the left, followed by another 
and another until the center of the composition achieves the 
proper size. The strips are laid out on the ground without being 
sewn so that changes can be made at any point. In this cape, 
once the patchwork strips were in place, the seamstress contin-
FIGURE 5.?Bits-and-pieces cape, sewn between 1920 and 1940 by Peepina, village of Totikampu. Collection of 
Richard and Sally Price (cat. no. T78.4). Photograph by Antonia Graeber. 
248 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
ued the process with strips of the multi-colored cotton that was 
being sold in coastal stores, beginning with a pattern she had 
in duplicate (a red and yellow striped cloth), attempting to 
continue the symmetry (with white and then black cloth), and 
then finishing with a more random sequence of three strips in 
which only the middle one produces a left-right match. The 
next steps would be to select one or two warp strips (strips 
running in the same direction as the cloth's selvage) for the 
lower edge, and to attach a final warp strip, to be tied at the 
man's shoulder, on the top. A single stitch or two would fix the 
chosen order of strips, and the time-consuming process of 
seaming and hemming could begin. 
We now follow these multicolor strips as they migrate from 
the edges to the center of fashion (see Figure 6). Capes com?
posed exclusively of narrow strips cut from multicolored 
striped cotton had completely driven out the bits-and-pieces 
style well before I first arrived in Saramaka in the mid-1960s. 
Despite their visual resemblance, if viewed by non-Maroon 
eyes, to West African traditions of edge-sewn textiles, this style 
of narrow-strip composition emerged directly from experimen?
tation by Maroon seamstresses, who were tiring of the older 
form of sewing, discovering the properties of raw materials re?
cently made available in coastal stores, and elaborating in 
novel ways an aesthetic preference of contrasts and interruptive 
patterning that already ran through many dimensions of their 
daily lives.8 
Note that in this new textile art, the raw materials them?
selves are marginal in the most literal sense, since the strips 
are the leftover trimmings from women's wrap skirts, which 
were made by cutting the ends and sides off two-ell lengths of 
trade cotton, and even the sewing thread was sometimes sal?
vaged from such scraps when store-bought thread was in short 
supply. The earlier bits-and-pieces had by this time dropped 
out completely, and the entire composition consisted of multi-
chrome narrow strips, although the procedure of establishing a 
vertical spine and flanking it, from the center out, with match?
ing strips remained constant. (For examples of narrow-strip 
capes, see Price, 1984: figs. 48, 55.) 
FIGURE 6.?Saramaka cape, probably sewn in the 1960s or early 1970s. Collection of Richard and Sally Price 
(cat. no. T78.32). Photograph by the Photographic and Illustrations Department, Johns Hopkins University. 
NUMBER 44 249 
While the narrow-strip capes were dominating men's fashion 
in the villages of the Suriname interior, young Maroon women 
in the villages closest to the city, where Moravian missionaries 
had set up churches, medical clinics, and schools, were learn?
ing the refined art of cross-stitch embroidery, conscientiously 
following diagrams in women's magazines provided by the 
missionaries. Saramaka men from upstream villages, who trav?
eled the river frequently on wage-labor trips and developed ro?
mantic ties with downstream women, were often presented 
with gifts of capes and breechcloths decorated in this cross-
stitch embroidery. They wore these garments with pride at 
community events in their home villages upriver, where their 
wives were not insensitive to the admiration they inspired. And 
although the upriver women, who had never had an opportunity 
to go to school, were at first profoundly intimidated by this 
competition from their more formally educated rivals, they re?
alized they would have to learn to embroider cross-stitch if 
that's what their men wanted. 
So they did. For the first several years women worked on 
thin trade cotton like that their mothers and grandmothers had 
used for embroidery, first setting up a grid of horizontal and 
vertical guidelines for the crosses by pulling threads out of the 
cloth with a pin. The designs on these early "pull-the-thread" 
capes were linear motifs, and they were executed at the very 
edges of the cape (Figure 7). Both because the thread pulling 
was labor intensive and because the women didn't yet feel con?
fident in the medium, these early cross-stitch designs were 
rather minimal. Later on women discovered that a heavier 
weave of commercial cotton, which they called lapu, allowed 
them to skip the time-consuming preparation, because its knob-
bier texture supplied a ready-made grid. And with time, they 
mastered the new embroidery technique at least as well as the 
downstream women had. By the mid-1970s, when men had 
packed almost all of their narrow-strip capes away in trunks or 
started using them for rags, the cross-stitch art had broken out 
of the edges and taken over the centers of capes, and some?
times breechcloths (see Figure 8). 
That, in a very small nutshell, is the art history of Saramaka 
Maroon textiles and a summary demonstration of the idea that 
particular styles?defined in terms of materials, techniques, 
and design principles?take root in the margins, migrate to the 
centers as they evolve into mature arts, and eventually cede 
their privileged place when the next style begins moving along 
the exact same route.9 
Calabash Carving 
Does this progression characterize the road from experimenta?
tion to established styles in other media as well? The second 
major medium exploited by Maroon women is calabash carv?
ing, an art form that has neither warp nor weft, neither selvages 
nor raw edges. Where, then, are the marginal areas and what do 
we see happening in them? 
The earliest Maroon calabashes?as represented in historical 
documents, museum collections, and the memories of late 
twentieth-century Maroons?were decorated in a technique 
and style that followed the general model of carvings done by 
their ancestors in many parts of Africa. In spite of the fact that 
the fruits utilized in Suriname came from the American cala?
bash tree and the fruits known as "calabashes" in Africa were 
picked from vines in the botanical family of pumpkins and 
squashes, the bowls made out of the two fruits looked a lot 
alike.10 That is, the raw materials were totally unrelated, but the 
objects made from them, and the artistic style of their decora?
tion, were at first strikingly similar. Early Maroon calabash 
carvings were, like many of their African precedents, com?
posed entirely of intricate designs carved on the exterior sur?
faces of bowls and covered containers. In early Maroon com?
munities, it was the men who made these carvings, using 
manufactured metal tools imported from the coast. 
FIGURE 7.?Cape with cross-stitch embroidery, sewn between 
1960 and 1965. Collection of Richard and Sally Price (cat. no. 
T68.2). Photograph by David Porter. 
250 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 8.?Cape (left) and breechcloth (right) with cross-stitch embroidery, sewn in the 1970s. Photographs by 
Richard Price. 
The history of women's calabash carving begins with a dis?
creet takeover of this traditionally male artistic domain. Al?
though the innovative styles that young women developed in 
textile arts eventually replaced those of their mothers and 
grandmothers, the artistic territory that their calabash experi?
mentation invaded was that of their fathers and grandfathers. If, 
in examining early examples of Maroon calabash carving in 
museum collections, we look beyond the published photo?
graphs, pick the bowls up off the shelf, and turn them over, we 
notice markings in their leftover spaces. These crude incisions 
were clearly not made by a knife or chisel or gouge, were 
clearly not designed with rigorous attention to symmetry or ge?
ometry, were clearly not products of a coherent artistic style, 
were clearly not executed with full manual control, and were 
clearly not carved by the same artist who worked the bowl's 
exterior (see Figure 9 and, for seven nineteenth-century exam?
ples, Price, 1984: figs. 15-18). The authorship of these irregu?
lar, off-center, bas-relief markings is not identified in publica?
tions or museum records, but by following them through time, 
we can see them evolving into a highly refined carving style. 
NUMBER 44 251 
FIGURE 9.?Top of two-piece calabash container, carved on the outside (left) with woodcarving tools and on 
the inside (right) with a piece of broken glass. Collected in Aluku at an unknown date; acquired by the Musee 
de l'Homme in 1935 (cat. no. 35.72.74). Courtesy of the Musee de THomme, Paris (neg. nos. D-82-727-493, 
D-82-728-493). Photographs by D. Ponsard. 
As the women gradually redefined their artistic terrain, aban?
doning bowls that had already been carved by men and taking 
over artistic control of the entire object, their designs spread 
over the bowl's whole interior surface, and their art became a 
pervasive presence in the material culture of the Maroons. In 
short, both the carvings themselves and the role of the art in 
daily life moved from the wings to center stage (Figure 10), 
like each of the styles and techniques in the series of textile arts 
discussed above. 
The tools for the calabash carvings also emerged from the 
margins of Maroon material culture in much the same sense as 
the edge trimmings that women used to make narrow-strip 
textiles. Maroon men had long been working on calabashes 
with manufactured instruments they bought in the city. But 
women (who had no personal access to money or city stores) 
discovered that by setting a bottle on the ground and breaking 
it with a rock, they could produce small, very sharply pointed 
pieces of glass, some of which, with a little experimentation 
and a lot of practice, served as effective tools for the carving 
of their bowls. 
Elsewhere (Price, 1999:219-221) I have proposed a relation?
ship between Saramaka gender ideology (which prescribes, for 
example, that women eat their meals out of cooking pots with 
the children while men are served carefully molded rice in a 
handsome bowl covered with an embroidered cloth) and the 
FIGURE 10.?Saramaka calabash bowl carved with a piece of broken glass by 
Keekete, village of Asindoopo, 1970s. Collection of Richard and Sally Price 
(cat. no. K78.12). Photograph by Antonia Graeber. 
252 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
fact that women develop their arts in marginal spaces and on 
the backs of male-carved objects, or that the materials they em?
ploy are scraps and pieces of broken glass. Here, however, I 
end on a more methodological note, with some reflections on 
the kinds of questions that need to be asked if we are to arrive 
at a full understanding of art in cultural context. 
The Ethnography of Art and the Art of Ethnography 
The increasing dialogue between anthropologists who study art 
and art historians who study what might, by extrapolation from 
the conventional terminology, be called the not-so-fme arts 
(this is, after all, a world that distinguishes its "insiders" from 
its "outsiders") puts all the participants in a position to arrive at 
more enlightened understandings of art in its cultural settings. 
And as that dialogue includes more and more voices from the 
communities whose arts are in question it takes on greater nu?
ance, texture, and authority. 
But whatever our formal training, and whether we use one, 
two, or three slide projectors to illustrate our findings, it's im?
portant to make sure that the ethnography of art takes maximal 
advantage of the art of ethnography. This means sometimes set?
ting aside the contemplation of finished forms, the spotlight on 
masterpieces, the authentication of signatures, the celebration 
of star-status artists, and the promotion of master narratives, 
such as intercontinental continuities, in order to devote consci?
entious attention to the humbler dimensions of art. In the spirit 
of those innumerable references to esoteric archival documents 
and auction catalogues and travel journals and unpublished dis?
sertations that Bill scribbled onto 3 x 5 inch slips of paper and 
passed on to me while I was undertaking research on Maroon 
textile arts, it means following up on every lead. 
It also means asking all the little questions. With textiles, for 
example, where do Maroons get their thread, what do they use 
to tuck under the raw edges in preparation for hemming, and 
how close are their stitches? What words do they use to label 
these cloths as they pass from men's coastal purchases to con?
jugal presents to women's skirts to sacks of edge trimmings to 
unsewn patterns on the ground, then back to conjugal presents, 
men's formal wear, pieces of laundry, and finally threadbare 
rags? What roles do textiles play in marriages, in worship, in 
political investitures, in popular songs, in legal disputes, in fu?
nerals? Do people talk among themselves about aesthetic prin?
ciples? What, if anything, do they have to say about symbol?
ism? Why do they always fold clothes, wrong side out, into 
little wallet-size packets? Why do seamstresses sometimes 
lather up a newly-sewn textile with bar soap and leave it in the 
sun before rinsing out the suds? Why, after carefully conceal?
ing the tiny stitches used to make a seam, do they lead the 
thread onto a part of the cloth where it shows clearly before 
cutting it off? How do they deal with slips, errors, and botched 
designs? What features of a textile inspire praise (from men, 
from women) and what features are disparaged? Are clothes 
mended when they tear, and if so how? What tone do people 
adopt when they critique a six-year-old's first attempt to sew a 
patchwork apron? How do they talk about the obsolete arts of 
their grandmothers? What parts of a garment do women use to 
test out new ideas and how do their experiments affect fashion 
trends? Do they cut the cloth with scissors, knife, or razor? Or 
is it ripped? 
Whether focusing on patchwork or on the less-kind art of 
scalping (Axtell and Sturtevant, 1980), Bill Sturtevant has 
demonstrated the importance of trying to understand, in as 
much close detail as we can muster, the historical, cultural, and 
material environment in which each cut is made. His scholar?
ship stands as a reminder that solid ethnography, like a fine 
patchwork textile, reflects an overall vision but is executed 
through hundreds and thousands of tiny, meticulous stitches. 
Notes 
My argument about "the centrality of margins" was first developed for an April 
1996 conference entitled "The African Diaspora: African Origins and New 
World Self-Fashioning" at Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York 
(see Price, 1999). I am grateful to Isidore Okpewho for inviting me to partici?
pate in that conference and for permitting portions of that argument to be used 
in the present paper. 
1. I have reworded the translation of this passage very slightly, rendering the 
verb marquer, for example, as "mark" rather than "decorate." 
2. The adoption, by Maroons and Amerindians, of the Portuguese word cam?
isa to designate "loincloth" parallels the adoption in English of the French 
word entree. In each case a word (camisa, entree) and its general context (an 
article of men's clothing, a category in restaurant menus) have been retained, 
but the specific meaning (shirt, appetizer) has been shifted (loincloth, main 
course). Stedman's documentation of its standard use among Amerindians in 
the 1770s is complemented by another observer's documentation of its stan?
dard use among Saramaka Maroons by 1778 (Schumann, 1914, s.v. kamissa). 
3. In addition to the errors in Thompson's Amerindian ethnography, there are 
troubling sleights of hand in his representation of Ndyuka history and in his use 
of demographic figures on the slave trade to Suriname. The sequence of events 
he proposes is the transfer of influence from Mande to Asante weavers of the 
early nineteenth century; the capture, trans-Atlantic voyage, and selling into 
slavery of some of these Asantes; their escape into the interior of Suriname; 
their acceptance by the Ndyuka Maroons; the production by them (or under 
their influence) of the loincloth in question; its sale to Carib Indians; and its 
collection from those Indians by a French explorer, who then sailed back to Eu?
rope, wrote up his travel account, and published it in Paris in 1823. He capped 
this scenario with a claim that the African area that influenced me hypothetical 
Asante weavers was one "whence sailed to Suriname 50 percent of a sample of 
Dutch slaving ships" (Thompson, 1983:215), giving as his source pages 14-15 
of The Guiana Maroons (Price, 1976). 
Note, however, that (1) the Ndyuka Maroons had been virtually closed off to 
new runaways since their treaty with the Dutch Crown in 1760, and (2) the sta?
tistical sample he alludes to does not refer simply to "a sample of Dutch slaving 
ships," but rather to a (56-ship) sample of those Dutch slaving ships that trans?
ported Africans from the Windward Coast?an area that, as those pages make 
clear, supplied between 0% and 49% of Suriname slaves (depending on the 
particular moment) during the course of the eighteenth century. 
4. A word of explanation about the 1980 end date. In 1986 Richard Price and 
I went to Suriname after a six-year absence. The evening before our trip up-
river, we were placed under house arrest in our Paramaribo hotel and then, at 
midnight, brusquely put in the back seat of a Volkswagen and escorted to the 
border by two military policemen. Although we did not know it at the time, the 
Maroon-led Jungle Commando had just had its first skirmishes with the Suri?
name military, and a civil war, which eventually lasted six years, was in the 
NUMBER 44 253 
making. In the wake of that experience, compounded by encounters that 
Richard Price had after testifying on behalf of the Saramaka people in a 1992 
Human Rights trial against the Suriname government (see Price, 1995), our 
Maroon fieldwork has been conducted in neighboring French Guiana. 
5. This may be the appropriate place to note that the decision to translate the 
Saramaccan word kamisa as "breechcloth" was made on the basis of discus?
sions in which Bill Sturtevant helped Richard Price and me weigh the alterna?
tives. Rejecting "loincloth" on the grounds that the Saramaka garment can ei?
ther be held up by sewn-on ties or draped over a separate waist string, and 
"breech clout," on the grounds that it carried a connotation of aesthetic crude-
ness inappropriate for the Saramaka garments, "breechcloth" eventually 
emerged as the favored term. 
6. This observation applies specifically to Upper River Saramakas. Eastern 
Maroons and Saramakas living in the villages closest to Paramaribo have 
sometimes decorated skirts. 
7. In like manner, if the 1823 evidence for assembling pieces of cloth in 
French Guiana (see above) was referring to patchwork, it could easily have 
been made without producing color contrasts, given that nothing is said in that 
testimony about dyes. 
8. This view of discontinuous textile arts emerging from continuous aesthetic 
principles and sewing techniques, which reflects a perspective first elaborated 
in terms of Afro-Caribbean culture in general (Mintz and Price, 1992), explic?
itly contests the more narrowly medium-specific continuity proposed by 
Thompson (1983:214?219, pi. 141). Thompson's preferred scenario would link 
Saramaka narrow-strip cloths "of the twentieth century," Ndyuka equivalents 
"of the late nineteenth century," and coastal black patchwork "of even earlier 
facture" in order to explain Afro-American continuities without recourse to "a 
mysterious black consciousness." The "earlier facture" of coastal patchwork 
rests on a single verbal statement by a man Thompson met in Paramaribo in the 
1980s and is unsupported by illustrations, examples, or written documentation. 
The basis for the Ndyuka dating is not indicated. Plate 141, Thompson's illus?
tration of the "culmination [of this progression] in Djuka and Saamaka multi-
strip expressions of the early twentieth century," is a patchwork hammock 
sheet that was made by Apiimba, wife of Saramaka Tribal Chief Agbago, as a 
gift to her sister-in-law Naai, who gave it to Richard Price and me in 1968 
when we left Saramaka after having been her close neighbors for two years. 
Photographed hanging from a rod in our living room, it is presented by Thomp?
son without acknowledgment or attribution of any kind, perhaps because our 
published documentation of the textile (Price and Price, 1980:77) made clear 
that it may have been sewn as late as the 1950s. 
9. Like any nutshell history, this one has left out numerous details. I cite just 
three. Even after the early curvilinear embroidery style gave way to bits-and-
pieces patchwork, a more linear, less textured version of it continued as a sec?
ondary kind of decoration for many kinds of clothing (see, for example, Price, 
1984: figs. 49-50; Price and Price, 1999: figs. 4.46-4.48). During a transitional 
period between bits-and-pieces and narrow-strip patchwork, some textiles dis?
played bits-and-pieces composition executed with the multicolored cloth more 
typical of the narrow-strip art (see, for example, Price and Price, 1999: figs. 
4.73, 4.74). And in the 1980s, women were already focusing their efforts on a 
new patchwork art that displayed striking visual similarities to the textiles of 
the early twentieth century but employed a distinctive range of colors and made 
significantly heavier use of applique (see, for example, Price and Price, 1999: 
figs. 4.52^1.54). 
10. For further discussion of the these two botanical species (Crescentia cujete 
L. and Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standley), and the implications of differ?
ences between them for Maroon art history, see Price, 1982. 
Literature Cited 
Axtell, James, and William C. Sturtevant 
1980. The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping? William and Mary 
Quarterly, series 3, 37:451-472. 
Benjamins, H.D., and Joh. F. Snelleman, editors 
1914-1917. Encyclopcedie van Nederlandsch West-Indie, x, 3 leaves+782 
pages. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 
Benoit, P.J. 
1839. Voyage a Surinam: description des possessions neerlandaises dans 
la Guyane. 3 leaves+76 pages. Bruxelles: Societe des Beaux-Arts. 
Bonaparte, Prince Roland 
1884. Les habitants de Suriname: notes recueillies a I 'exposition coloniale 
d'Amsterdam en 1883. viii+226 pages. Paris: A. Quantin. 
Coster, A.M. 
1866. De Boschnegers in de kolonie Suriname, hun leven, zeden, en ge-
woonten. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 13:1-36. 
Crevaux, Jules 
1879. Voyage d'exploration dans l'interieur des Guyanes, 1876-77. Le 
Tour du Monde, 20:337-116. 
EilertsdeHaan,J.G.WJ. 
1910. Verslag van de expeditie naar de Suriname-Rivier. Tijdschrift van 
het Koninklijk Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, series 
2,27:403-468,641-701. 
Mintz, Sidney W., and Richard Price 
1992. The Birth of African American Culture, xv+121 pages. Boston: 
Beacon. [Originally published in 1976 by the Institute for the Study 
of Human Issues, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as An Anthropologi?
cal Approach to the Afro-American Past.] 
Price, Richard, editor 
1973. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. vii+ 
429 pages. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press. 
Price, Richard 
1976. The Guiana Maroons: A Historical and Bibliographical Introduc?
tion, ix +184 pages. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University 
Press. 
1990. Alabi's World, xx+444 pages. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins 
University Press. 
1995. Executing Ethnicity: The Killings in Suriname. Cultural Anthropol?
ogy, 10:437^*71. 
Price, Richard, and Sally Price 
1991. Two Evenings in Saramaka. xvi+417 pages. Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press. 
Price, Sally 
1982. When Is a Calabash Not a Calabash? New West Indian Guide, 
56:69-82. 
1984, Co-Wives and Calabashes, xiii+224 pages. Ann Arbor: University 
of Michigan Press. 
1999. The Centrality of Margins: Art, Gender, and African American 
Creativity. In Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali 
Mazrui, editors, The African Diaspora: African Origins and New 
World Self-Fashioning, pages 204-226. Bloomington: Indiana 
University Press. 
Price, Sally, and Richard Price 
1980. Afro-American Arts of the Suriname Rain Forest. 237 pages. Berke?
ley: University of California Press. 
1999. Maroon Arts: Cultural Vitality in the African Diaspora. 369 pages. 
Boston: Beacon Press. 
Schumann, CL. 
1914. Saramaccanisch Deutsches Worter-Buch. In Hugo Schuchardt, edi-
254 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
tor, Die Sprache der Saramakkaneger in Surinam, pages 46-116. 
Amsterdam: Johannes Miiller. 
Staehelin, F. 
1913-1919. Die Mission der Brudergemeine in Suriname und Berbice im 
achtzehnten Jahrhundert. 8 volumes. Herrnhut: Vereins fur Brii-
dergeschichte in Kommission der Unitatsbuchhandlung in Gnadau. 
Stedman, John Gabriel 
1988. Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes 
of Surinam: Transcribed for the First Time from the Original 1790 
Manuscript, xcvii + 708 pages. Edited and with an introduction and 
notes by Richard Price and Sally Price. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns 
Hopkins University Press. 
Sturtevant, William C. 
1967. Seminole Men's Clothing. In June Helm, editor, Essays on the Ver?
bal and Visual Arts, pages 160-174. Seattle: University of Washing?
ton Press. [Proceedings of the of the American Ethnological Society 
Annual Spring Meeting, 1966.] 
1969. Seminole Patchwork. [Paper read at the Annual Meeting of the 
American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, Louisiana.] 
Thompson, Robert Farris 
1983. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. 
xvii+317 pages. New York: Random House. 
European Motifs in Protohistoric Iroquois Art 
Edmund Carpenter 
If, in a protohistoric Iroquois grave, someone found a six?
teenth-century French spoon, its handle shaped like a modest 
nude, we would say, "Of course: obviously the model." But no 
such find has ever been reported. To date, we can only guess 
what inspired sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iroquois to 
carve figurines of modest nudes, wear them as pendants, and 
bury them with their dead (Figure 1). 
Thirty years ago I worked in a remote part of the Western 
District, Papua New Guinea. Trade objects were rare: isolated 
villages treasured a steel knife or scrap of mirror. Few men 
and no women had ever before seen a European, yet for at 
least 60 years they had heard stories about strangers beyond 
their borders, and a few men, visiting distant villages, had ac?
tually seen them. Decades before the first government patrol 
entered those villages, their inhabitants began to change, per?
haps partly because of trade objects, which reached them 
through intertribal routes. I thought of sixteenth-century Iro?
quois villages. 
"September Morn" Figures 
As early as 1529, European maps included accurate details of 
the Atlantic Coast (Anonymous, 1981, maps 27-29). These 
maps were drawn, their authors acknowledge, with the help of 
native pilots and cartographers. Once ashore, European trade 
objects moved rapidly inland, carried over vast distances via 
ancient networks of trade and alliance. Indians served as mid?
dle men. 
European goods reached the Iroquois well ahead of Europe?
ans, as did ideas. Long before missionaries arrived, graves 
were reoriented, and burial offerings multiplied. Mortuary 
changes began with the first appearance of trade goods. Behind 
these changes lay, I suspect, fear of death. 
Traditionally, the Iroquois believed in reincarnation. Life, 
they asserted, was an unending trail of rebirths. Their first en?
counter with the concept of death, that is, death as full stop, 
must have been traumatic. Those who take reincarnation for 
granted seem to be especially vulnerable. Resurrection offers 
the possibility of a single, spiritual reawakening in another 
world?hardly reassuring to anyone expecting endless rebirths 
Edmund Carpenter, retired, 222 Central Park South, New York, New 
York 10019-1408, USA. 
in this world. The shift from belief in reincarnation to belief in 
resurrection produced profound changes for many, including 
the Iroquois. 
Paleolithic peoples across Eurasia, as well as later peoples in 
the Arctic and Oceania, wore pendants of inverted female fig?
ures, the notion being, presumably, that the World Beyond is an 
inverted world where ancestors await rebirth (Schuster and 
Carpenter, 1996:268-277). The Iroquois, like many North 
American Indian tribes, shared this view, although they never 
wore inverted figurines. They did, however, sometimes depict 
the dead as inverted (O'Callaghan, 1849:7). 
Iroquoian figurines were suspended through or around the 
figurine's neck; thus, they hung feet down. This appears natural 
to us, but it may not have appeared that way to those who de?
picted their dead as inverted. 
All Iroquoian figurines are post-Contact. No prehistoric ex?
ample is known. Many look so Hellenistic, so non-Indian, that 
a European model seems required. Except for a rare headdress 
and a possible mask, they seem completely alien to Iroquois 
iconography, even to North American Indian art generally. 
Such figures occurred in prehistoric Arizona, possibly under 
Mexican influence (Gumerman and Haury, 1980:79), but noth?
ing even remotely like them occurred in the Northeast until af?
ter European contact. 
Two Iroquoian examples come from the Adams site, Living?
ston County, New York, the Adams site is the earliest known 
Seneca village with trade goods (ca. 1570-1590), yet no Euro?
pean is known to have reached the Seneca before 1616 (Wray 
et al., 1987; Noble, 1994:27). The Jesuits arrived 60 to 80 
years after the Adams figurines were carved, and by then this 
tradition was fading. 
How popular were Iroquoian figurines? In 1938 I circulated 
a questionnaire to museums and avocational archeologists in 
the northeastern United States, requesting information and pho?
tographs of examples in their possession or known to them. I 
located nearly 100 (Carpenter, 1942). Iroquois tribes were 
widely represented, although most examples came from Ca?
yuga and Seneca sites. Genoa Fort, a Cayuga site (ca. 
1600-1620), Geneva County, New York, produced an excep?
tionally large number of fine examples. 
My survey missed many specimens, especially Susquehan-
nock ones. Among those in private hands, some have disap?
peared, at least for the moment. Others were mislabeled. (I saw 
255 
256 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 1.?Two antler figurines from the Genoa Fort site (Gna 002), Cayuga 
Iroquois, ca. 1600-1620, Geneva County, New York. Rochester Museum and 
Science Center (cat. nos. 6515/205 (left) and 6065/205 (right)). Courtesy of the 
Rochester Museum and Science Center, Rochester, New York. Graphite draw?
ings by Gene Mackay. Photographs by James Osen. 
one in a Near Eastern museum labeled "Cycladic") Fakes en?
tered the market, principally through Paul Mann, a forger ac?
tive in the 1930s. His creations, mistakenly identified as au?
thentic, grace several recent publications. Unfortunately, I 
recorded no discoveries after 1938. Still, many documented ex?
amples survive. 
Not all enjoy Hellenistic posture, but enough do that local ar?
cheologists call all of them "September Morn" figures. This re?
fers to Paul Chabas's coy bather, whose Venus-like portrait? 
one hand over breasts, the other over gentials?appeared in the 
1930s as a White Rock beverage advertisement. 
NUDITY IN SEPTEMBER MORN FIGURES 
None of the figurines exhibits clothing. Gender reveals itself by 
a vulva or phallus, breasts, enlarged abdomen, or perhaps a 
tress or braids, but these are by no means always present. Sev?
eral figurines in classic Venus posture exhibit headgear unsuit?
able for Iroquois women. One figurine covers its face with its 
hands. Others have hands at their sides. This variety, this lack 
of uniformity, suggests to me an alien motif, newly introduced. 
I miss the conformity I associate with traditional iconography. 
Were the figurines carved by men, women, or both? Who 
wore them? Most documented examples come from the graves 
of women and children. Some bear evidence of use; others may 
have been made for the dead. Whatever role they played, their 
nudity sets them apart from aboriginal Iroquois art. 
The Vatican Library contains sixteenth-century engravings of 
Adam and Eve modestly posed. Some were intended for over?
seas proselytizing. Nudity became a theological issue when Co?
lumbus discovered America. Had he come upon humans not of 
Adam's seed? Such a discovery would challenge biblical au?
thority. It would also deny American Indians human redemp?
tion. The Vatican supported monogenism, noting that St. Au?
gustine had scornfully dismissed antipodal humans as 
"exceedingly absurd" (Carpenter, 1950:5). The Indians of the 
New World, it declared, were naked innocents, created in God's 
image. And that is exactly the way they were first represented, 
beginning with the announcement of Columbus's discovery. 
Adam and Eve images served as models for American Indian 
images. The frontispiece in the 1590 edition of Theodore de 
Bry's America shows Adam and Eve as New World representa?
tives. So does the frontispiece of Champlain's Les Voyages 
(1613).1 
THE PRINT MODEL 
Were September Morn figurines print-inspired? Prints served 
as trade goods in the sixteenth century. During the winter of 
1596-1597, the Dutch explorer Willem Barentz, seeking a 
northern route to Asia, laid over on Novaya Zemlya, off the 
northern coast of present-day Russia (Braat et al., 1980), and 
abandoned his cargo there. Recovered centuries later, it in?
cluded bales of prints, some depicting Adam and Eve, both 
nude (Braat et al., 1980, figs. 21, 22). 
Barentz's cargo survived thanks to arctic conditions. Prints in 
Iroquoia were far more vulnerable, although a copper kettle in 
a grave on the Dann site (ca. 1655-1675), Livingston County, 
New York, preserved a baptismal certificate2 signed by Father 
Julien Gamier, who is believed to have served this Seneca vil?
lage between 1668-1674. 
A brass frame, recovered from the Hamilton site, a Neutral 
village (1635-1651) in southwestern Ontario, has the scalloped 
interior common to seventeenth-century religious picture 
frames (Lennox, 1981:328-329,401 ).3 
Frames appear in seventeenth-century mission sites in Flor?
ida and elsewhere in the Southeast. In my imagination, I envis?
age framed biblical scenes gracing the walls of rustic chapels. 
This was certainly true of Southwest missions and elsewhere in 
the Spanish empire. There, we know, prints served as models 
for local artisans (Lange, 1974, 1991). 
Prints nearly everywhere inspired local copies. In West Af?
rica, sixteenth-century Benin craftsmen used them as models 
for Sapi-Portuguese ivories (Bassini and Fagg, 1988). This 
seems to have been widely true, no less so in Iroquoia. 
NUMBER 44 257 
Although we have no actual prints?no smoking gun?cir?
cumstantial evidence exists, much of it assembled by George 
Hamell, New York State Museum, Albany (Hamell, pers. 
comm., 1980-1990). The most remarkable document he 
found, dated 1712, describes the intended distribution of 12 
framed and 192 unframed prints of four Iroquois who visited 
England in 1710 and became widely known as the "Four In?
dian Kings" or "Four Kings of Canada." One framed print was 
assigned "to the 5 Nations to be placed in ye Onondagas Castle 
where the 5 nations meet." Unframed prints were assigned to 
"Each of ye 5 nations & ye River Indians" and "to ye 4 Indians 
who went to England."4 
Noble Hunter Figures 
One of those four prints shows Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, 
"King of the Maquas" (also known as Brant), in classic Euro?
pean pose as lord of the manor, gentleman hunter, Indian chief 
(Figure 2). Ideally, this posture shows the right foot forward, 
the right hand raised and grasping the barrel of a grounded 
FIGURE 2.?Mezzotint Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, King of the Maquas (Mohawks), London, 1710. Based on a 
painting from life, made in London by John Verelst in 1710. 
258 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
musket, the left hand pointed down, and a dog opposite the 
musket. Here a bear substitutes for the dog. 
It is a noble pose. It is the one that Emperor Charles V 
(1500-1558) chose to represent himself to posterity. So did 
other nobles. It derives from the classic posture of divine nobil?
ity: right foot forward, right hand pointing toward the upper 
world, left hand pointing to the lower world, body aligned with 
the axis mundi. When seated, the figure holds a scepter, sym?
bolizing the axis mundi as climbing pole, in the right hand. 
Whirling Dervishes are even more explicit: right hand up, 
left hand down, body as axis mundi, with cap and gown sym?
bolizing the sky dome in planetary rotation. In the European 
Renaissance this symbolism became less explicit yet basically 
survived. Each of the Four Kings of Canada was painted in this 
Western posture reserved for divine royalty, although one por?
trait reverses left and right. 
Mezzotints of the Four Kings, dated 1710, were distributed to 
the Iroquois in 1712, as noted, yet a figure in Dutch dress as?
sumes this posture on an effigy comb from Ganondagan, a large 
Seneca village that burned in 1687 (Figure 3). His outstretched 
(left) arm holds a grounded musket, his right hand touches his 
hat, and his dog, opposite the musket, jumps up beside him. 
The Dutch established at Albany, New York, first a trading 
post (1614-1617), then Fort Orange (1624). I searched for a 
print of one of the Princes of Orange in that pose, imagining 
such a print posted in Albany or in Iroquois villages, but I 
failed to find one. Still, I think some such print?Dutch, 
French, English?inspired seventeenth-century Iroquois artists. 
By 1712 that posture may already have been old hat to the 
western Iroquois. 
European visitors to America, after returning home, loved to 
strike this pose bedecked in Indian garb, when standing for 
their portraits. This is how we remember several prominent vis?
itors, and it is also how we remember Meriwether Lewis, from 
a 1807 watercolor.5 
This pose served as a model for Indians themselves. An ex?
ample, wearing a horned headdress, was cut into rock at Eso-
pus Landing, on the west bank of the Hudson River, New York. 
True, both hands are raised and it lacks a dog, but otherwise it 
conforms to the European format (Figure 4). 
George Catlin painted his 1838 portrait of Osceola, the Sem?
inole chief, from life. It shows Osceola, who was left-handed, 
grasping his grounded musket in his outstretched left hand.6 An 
Ottawa mission-school artist later embroidered that portrait on 
leather, presumably from a Catlin lithograph.7 Full circle is 
achieved in A Pictorial History of Costume (Bruhn and Tilke, 
1973:199), which offers Osceola's pose as typically American 
Indian. 
Horse and Rider Figures 
I also see European images as likely models for Seneca and Ca?
yuga "horse" combs. In 1677, Wentworth Greenhalgh, sent by 
Colonial New York Governor Edmund Andros to assess Iro-
FlGURE 3.?Effigy comb of antler, Ganondagan State Historic Site (Can-2-1), 
Canandaigua County, New York. New York State Museum (cat. no. 13-4B). 
Courtesy of the New York State Museum, Albany, New York, and the Roches?
ter Museum and Science Center, Rochester, New York. Graphite drawing by 
Gene Mackay. 
quois military strength, rode a horse into their villages (Brod-
head, 1853:250-252). He said the Seneca at "Canagorah," 
probably Ganondagan,8 "were very desirous to see us ride our 
horses, wch wee did" (Brodhead, 1853:251). He also visited 
what is now the Kirkwood site (ca. 1675-1687), Livingston 
County, New York. That site produced at least one comb de?
picting a horse and rider.9 
Yet such combs existed prior to Greenhalgh's visit. The 
Dann site (ca. 1655-1675), Monroe County, New York, pro?
duced one of a mounted man brandishing a sword overhead 
NUMBER 44 259 
FIGURE 5.?Effigy comb of antler, horse, and rider, Dann site, Monroe 
County, New York. Rochester Museum and Science Center (cat. no. 794.28). 
Courtesy of the Rochester Museum and Science Center, Rochester, New 
York. 
FIGURE 4.?Petroglyph (from Schoolcraft, 1853, pi. 18) at Esopus Landing, on 
die west bank of the Hudson River, New York. Undated, perhaps undatable, but 
conceivably late seventeenth century. 
(Figure 5). Its counterpart (and possible model) appears on a 
white-clay trade pipe from a Seneca village (ca. 1619-1636), 
now the Warren site, Ontario County, New York, (Figure 6). 
The Mohawk used horses to haul timber. Seneca who trav?
eled east may have these animals, but I think they saw images 
of horses before they saw actual horses. Seneca horse and rider 
images look more noble than realistic. I doubt that Europeans 
rode around Seneca villages brandishing swords overhead. 
In 1684 the English placed an escutcheon, or placard of pro?
tection, in each of the three Upper Iroquois Nations in anticipa?
tion of de la Barre's punitive expedition. That escutcheon fea?
tured a man on horseback. 
Figures in the Round 
Recently a cast-iron handle for a spoon or (less likely) a dag?
ger, with pewter shaft, was recovered from the Fox site, a Sen?
eca village (ca. 1658-1672), Ontario County, New York. It de?
picts a hunter grasping the muzzle of a grounded musket, with 
FIGURE 6.?European white clay pipe, Warren site, Ontario County, New 
York. Rochester Museum and Science Center (cat. no. 10,038.89). Courtesy 
of the Rochester Museum and Science Center, Rochester, New York. Draw?
ing by Patricia Miller. Photograph by Brian Fox. 
260 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
a dog on the opposite side (Figure 7). The musket presses 
against the hunter's body, and the dog presses against his leg. 
This tightly rendered sculpture bears little artistic similarity 
to silhouette examples. More than any other specimen, it makes 
me suspect that the model for September Morn figures was 
sculptural. Iroquoian figurines are three dimensional, a form 
that is not easily derived from flat art. We do not know what 
Jacques Cartier left behind in Canada (1534-1543), but we do 
know that spoons with modest maiden handles were then popu?
lar in France. 
The outstretched arm of the gentleman hunter, rendered flat, 
provides a noble gesture that vanishes when hunter, musket, 
and dog squeeze together to form a functional handle. Septem-
fc**A 
fr . 
FIGURE 7.?Cast-iron handle with pewter shaft, Fox-Voorhees site, Ontario 
County, New York. Rochester Museum and Science Center (cat. no. 12058/ 
161). Courtesy of the Rochester Museum and Science Center, Rochester, New 
York. Photograph by Paul Porell. 
ber Morn figures don't walk freely through Eden, as they do in 
prints, but hug themselves. I think spoons, not prints, provided 
the model for Iroquoian figurines. 
Northeastern tribes, including Iroquoian, had flat art, such as 
quill work. But that art lacked three-dimensional perspective 
with its mysterious vanishing point. That perspective, which 
arrived with European prints, must have come like a revelation 
to the Iroquois. I've watched tribespeople elsewhere stand be?
fore such renderings, totally absorbed. Mary McCarthy, de?
scribing the Renaissance invention of perspective, wrote: 
The vanishing point, toward which all the lines of a painting race to converge, 
as if bent on their own annihilation, exercised a spell like that of the ever-dis?
appearing horizon toward which Columbus sailed, with his mutinous crew? 
the brink of the world, as it was then thought to be. The vanishing point, if 
contemplated steadily, can induce a feeling of metaphysical giddiness, for this 
point is precisely the center at which the picture ought to disappear, a zero ex?
erting on the "solid" realities of the canvas a potent attraction, as though it 
would suck the whole?old, young, maidens, women, small dogs, sheep, 
buildings, provinces down the funnel of its own nothingness. That is, the very 
fulcrum on which the picture rests, the organizing principle of its apparent sta?
bility, is at the same time the site at which the picture dissolves. (McCarthy, 
1959:49) 
Prints of the Four Kings of Canada employed perspective. 
Earlier prints may have done so as well. Iroquois artists did not 
immediately imitate this technique, but my guess is it fasci?
nated them when they first saw it. It may have conferred a spe?
cial quality on the figures portrayed. 
Conclusions 
Protohistoric Iroquois saw a wide variety of European images 
on coins, medallions, banners, escutcheons, perhaps porcelains, 
and even embroideries, and recycled some of them. Not all 
came through friendly trade. One Seneca grave contained a 
guidon. Back from battle, Europeans and Indians alike exhib?
ited trophies and copied one another's clothing. 
Recently an archaeologist, scanning a seventeenth-century 
Seneca site with an improved metal detector, recovered 29 lead 
seals used to safeguard and identify shipments.10 These bear the 
markings of Dutch, French, English, and possibly other depots. 
Clearly trade goods arrived from many sources. Piracy, on sea 
and land, surely contributed to this complexity. 
I think the Iroquois recycled many European images. Hamell 
found successive prototypes for the Bundle of Arrows motif, a 
very ancient symbol of union (strength of union). Seventeenth-
century Iroquois borrowed this symbol from the Dutch, just as 
the Dutch borrowed it from earlier times (Hamell, pers. comm., 
25 Mar 1996). 
Few artists, even great artists, view the world with pristine 
eyes. Most recycle. In the Marquesan Islands, Paul Gauguin 
visited the Taipi Valley, set up his easel before a massive, an?
cient sculpture, then copied a sketch of that sculpture printed in 
a travel book he had taken along. He improved on that sketch 
but retained several of its errors. 
NUMBER 44 261 
We may never know what inspired the Iroquois to carve im?
ages of a modest maid. One study concluded that Seneca exam?
ples symbolized witchcraft, not modesty, and power, not chas?
tity (Mathews, 1980). I prefer to imagine that somehow, by 
means unknown to me, Eve, perhaps even the Virgin herself, 
appeared among the Iroquois, bringing solace and comfort to 
mothers in days of sorrow and anxiety. 
Notes 
1. I am indebted to Francois-Marc Gagnon, Montreal, pers. comm., 21 Jul 
1996, for both examples. See Gagnon (1975, 1984) and Martin (1989). 
2. Catalog no. 3962/28, Rochester Museum and Science Center, Rochester, 
New York (hereafter RMSC). 
3. "In all probability," wrote Noble (1994:32), "a few Jesuit artifacts (nine to 
date) from historic Neutralia represent items distributed by proselytizing Huron 
converts in 1642 or shortly afterwards." The brass frame measures about 8 x 8 
cm. Its design resembles those used for religious pictures or icons. 
4. New York Colonial Manuscripts 58:4, New York State Archives and 
Records Administration, Albany, New York. 
5. Watercolor portrait of Meriwether Lewis by C.B.J. Fevret de Saint-Memin, 
1807. Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri. 
6. The Black Drink, oil portrait of Osceola, Seminole chief, by George Catlin, 
1838. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. See 
Wickman, 1991:100-120. 
7. Feest, 1968: cover. 
8. Hamell and John (1987:23) identify that Seneca village as probably Ga?
nondagan (1677-1687). On 5 Sep 1687, Robert Livingston wrote to Governor 
Dongan: "The french of Canida seem to be much incensed at a picture which 
they found in the Sinnekes country made by us as they say, viz: one a horse?
back the horse has an ax in his mouth and under his belly abundance of Ropes, 
two Indians smoaking together and an Eagle between them. The man on horse?
back is Arneut [Arneut Cornelisse Viele], bidding the Sinnekes to kill the 
french, the ropes is to tye the french prisoners. The two Indians are the Sin?
nekes and Cayouges united to war with he french, the Eagle is the Onnondages 
flyeing to and again and is not fixed with whom to joyn" (Brodhead, 
1853:481). Here, and in a dozen other ways throughout the text, I am indebted 
to George Hamell. 
9. Catalog no. 156/27, RMSC. 
10. Beale site, a small Seneca village (ca. 1670-1687), Ontario County, New 
York, catalog nos. 12368-12383/98, 15331-15345/98, RMSC. 
Literature Cited 
Anonymous 
1981. Manoscritti cartografici e strumenti scientifici nella Biblioteca vati-
cana, secc. XIV-XVII. 64 pages, 18 leaves of plates. [Vatican City]: 
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. 
Bassani, Ezio, and William B. Fagg 
1988. Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory. 255 pages. New York: 
Center for African Art. 
Braat, J , J.P. Filedt Kok, J.H. Hofenk de Graaff, and P. Poldervaart 
1980. Restauratie, conservatie en onderzoek van de op Nova Zembla ge-
vonden zestiende-eeuwse prenten. Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 
2:43-95. The Hague. 
Brodhead, John Romeyn 
1853. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-
York. Volume 3: xxxv+863 pages. Albany, New York: Weed, Par?
sons and Co. 
Bruhn, Wolfgang, and Max Tilke 
1973. A Pictorial History of Costume; a Survey of Costume of all Periods 
and Peoples from Antiquity to Modern Times Including National Cos?
tume in Europe and Non-European Countries. New York: Praeger. 
Bry, Theodor de 
1590. America, pars 1: Merveilleux et estrange rapport, toutesfois fidele, 
des commoditez qui se trouvent en Virginia, des faeons des naturels 
habitans d'icelle...par Thomas Hariot....33 pages, 28 plates. Frank?
furt am Main: I. Wechel. 
Carpenter, Edmund S. 
1942. Iroquoian Figurines. American Antiquity, 8:105-113. 
1950. The Role of Archeology in the 19th Century Controversy between 
Developmentalism and Degeneration. Pennsylvania Archaeologist, 
20(l-2):5-18. 
Champlain, Samuel de 
1613. Les Voyages de sieur de Champlain Xaintongeois, capitaine ordi?
naire pour le Roy, en la marine.... 10 pages of leaves, +325, [5] 
pages, 1 leaf. Paris: Jean Berjou. 
Feest, Christian F. 
1968. Indianer Nordamerikas: Museum fur Volkerkunde, Wien. 164 pages, 
xvi pages of illustrations, 3 leaves, vi pages of colored illustrations, 
38 pages of illustrations. Vienna: Museum fur Volkerkunde. 
Gagnon, Francois-Marc 
1975. La conversion par I 'image: un aspect de la mission des jesuites au-
pres des Indiens du Canada au XVIf siecle. 141 pages, [16] leaves 
of plates. Montreal: Les Editions Bellarmin. 
1984. Ces hommes dits sauvages: I'histoire fascinante d'un prejuge qui 
remonte aux premiers decouvreurs du Canada. 190 pages. Mon?
treal: Libre Expression. 
Gumerman, George J., and Emil W. Haury 
1980 ("1979"). Prehistory: Hohokam. In William C. Sturtevant, general 
editor, Handbook of North American Indians, volume 9, Alfonso Or?
tiz, editor, Southwest, pages 75-90. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian 
Institution. [Date on title page is 1979; actually published in 1980.] 
Hamell, George, and Hazel Dean John 
1987. Ethnology, Archeology, History and "Seneca Origins." Proceedings, 
Conference on Iroquois Research, 1987:1-33. 
Lange, Yvonne 
1974. Lithography, an Agent of Technological Change in Religious Folk 
Art: A Thesis. Western Folklore, 33:51-64. 
1991. The Impact of European Prints on the Devotional Tin Paintings of 
Mexico: A Transferral Hypothesis. In Gloria Fraser, editor, The Art 
of Private Devotion: Retablo Painting of Mexico, pages 64-71. Fort 
Worth, Texas: InterCultura; Dallas, Texas: The Meadows Museum. 
Lennox, Paul A. 
1981. The Hamilton Site: A Late Historic Neutral Town. Archaeological 
Survey of Canada, Paper, 103: xviii-xxvii, 211-423. Ottawa: Na?
tional Museums of Canada. 
Martin, Denis 
1989. L'estampe importee en Nouvelle-France. Doctoral thesis, Laval 
University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 
Mathews, Zena P. 
1980. Seneca Figurines: A Case of Misplaced Modesty. In Nancy Bonvil-
lain, editor, Studies on Iroquoian Culture. Occasional Publications 
in Northeastern Anthropology, 6:71-90. 
McCarthy, Mary 
1959. The Stones of Florence. 130 pages. New York: Harcourt Brace. 
262 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Noble, William C. 
1994. Frenchmen in Neutralia. In Charles F. Hayes, general editor, Proceed?
ings of the 1992 People to People Conference: Selected Papers. Re?
search Records, 23:25-36. Rochester Museum and Science Center. 
O'Callaghan, E.B., editor 
1849. The Documentary History of the State of New York. Volume 1, oc?
tavo edition, viii+ 787 pages. Albany, New York: Weed, Parsons and 
Co. 
Schoolcraft, Henry R. 
1853. Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the 
Indian Tribes of the United States. Volume 3: [i]-xviii, 19-635. 
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J.B. Lippincott and Co. 
Schuster, Carl, and Edmund Carpenter 
1996. Patterns that Connect: Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art. 
317 pages. New York: Abrams. 
Wickman, Patricia R. 
1991. Osceola's Legacy, xxvi+255 pages. Tuscaloosa: University of Ala?
bama Press. 
Wray, Charles F., Martha L. Sempowski, Lorraine P. Saunders, and Gian Carlo 
Cervone 
1987. The Adams and Culbertson Sites. Research Records, 19(1): 1-344. 
Rochester Museum and Science Center. 
Quilled Knife Cases from Northeastern North America 
Christian F Feest 
Ethnographic museums as places of educational displays often 
struggle with the interpretation of the artifacts they preserve, 
since although ethnographic museums are primarily archives of 
cultural documents, their role as places for material culture re?
search is all too often sadly neglected. One of the recurrent 
problems in working with historically collected material is the 
fact that the forms, functions, and meanings of artifacts from 
periods significantly predating modem ethnographic fieldwork 
often cannot be interpreted in terms of the standard ethno?
graphic accounts. 
Knife cases, for example, suspended from the neck or at?
tached to the belt to hold hunting or scalping knives, were no 
longer used by the Iroquois when Lewis Henry Morgan (1851) 
published his classic account of Iroquois culture. Scalping had 
ceased with the end of armed conflicts, hunting had lost much 
of its former importance for the reservation communities, and 
clothing styles had changed to an extent that made neck-worn 
knife cases an unlikely dress item. Nonetheless, Morgan was 
able to collect two "scalping" knives for the New York State 
Cabinet of Natural History (now the New York State Museum, 
Albany, New York), which were listed among the museum's 
acquisitions but were not dealt with in Morgan's accompanying 
report (Tooker, 1994:102, 279), but he did not collect or de?
scribe any knife cases. Even quillwork, which is found on vir?
tually all knife cases from northeastern North America, is noted 
only in passing as having given way to beadwork (Morgan, 
1851:384, cp. 360). 
The present essay reviews the written and pictorial sources 
as well as the material evidence for quilled knife cases in the 
Northeast in order to illustrate the importance of artifacts for 
our knowledge of the historical ethnography of this region. 
Construction and Terminology 
Knife cases are pouches with a specific function, which deter?
mines their basic shape. They are usually made of one or two 
pieces of leather or rawhide folded and/or sewn to produce a 
long, flat sheath that encases the knife blade. Folded knife 
cases (often made of rawhide) are asymmetrical, with a straight 
Christian F. Feest, Institut fur His to rise he Ethnologic Johann Wolf?
gang Goethe-Universitdt, Gruneburgplatz 1, D-60323 Frankfurt, 
Germany. 
edge produced by the fold and a curved side sewn to accommo?
date the knife's cutting edge. Leather cases are usually made of 
two pieces (panels) sewn together along both edges and at the 
bottom, which may be pointed, rounded, or squarely cut off. 
Often the back panel projects beyond the front wall of the knife 
case to form a protective layer between the knife handle and 
the body of the wearer. These projecting back panels come in a 
variety of distinctive shapes, ranging from square to rounded 
and from straight to flaring; many have "ears" (i.e., two 
rounded or pointed projections). The ears commonly serve as 
points of attachment for carrying strings or straps. The upper 
edge of the front panel is sometimes reinforced by a strip 
(cuff), either a folded-down flap of the wall itself or a separate 
piece of leather. 
The reverse of knife cases (whether suspended from the neck 
or attached to a belt) always faced the wearer's body, so deco?
ration was limited to the obverse and the edges. Discrete deco?
rative areas are formed by the front panel, the cuff (which is 
sometimes treated as a decorative unit even in the absence of a 
structural reinforcement), and the projecting back panel. 
Fringes may be attached to the edges or to the lower edge of the 
cuff. A wide variety of quillwork techniques (including appli?
que, embroidery, plaiting, weaving, and wrapping) was used to 
decorate knife cases from northeastern North America, but 
none of them is limited to this artifact type (e.g., Orchard, 
1971; Feest, 1980:118-119, 138-141, 154-155). 
Written and Pictorial Evidence 
The earliest unequivocal written reference to Native American 
knife cases so far located appears in Peter Kalm's Travels, 
where the traveler described a group of Mohawks(?) encoun?
tered on 23 June 1749 north of Albany, New York: "Round 
their necks were ribbons from which bags hung down to their 
breast, containing a knife" (Kalm, 1987:354). A few years 
later, a French observer reported from Canada that the local na?
tive people when going to war usually carried three knife cases, 
"one hanging on a chain from the neck, one stuck into the belt 
and the third along the leg on the outside of the garter"1 (J.-
C.B., 1978:181). In his History of the American Indians, writ?
ten in the 1760s, James Adair, an English trader among the 
Cherokee, Catawba, and Chickasaw since 1735, included a 
generalized discussion of the practice of scalping in which he 
noted that "the barbarous artists speedily draw their long sharp-
263 
264 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
pointed scalping knife out of a sheath from their breast" (Adair, 
1930:415-416). 
In 1757 the Jesuit missionary to the St. Francis Abenaki wit?
nessed an intertribal war dance of the allies of the French in 
which the warriors were wearing "a large knife suspended over 
the breast"2 (Thwaites, 1900:96). At about the same time, Major 
Robert Rogers (1765:228) reported that "that horrid weapon, 
the scalping-knife hangs by a string which goes around their 
necks," but like the Jesuit father he did not explicitly mention a 
knife case. Thomas Anburey, a British officer stationed in the 
St. Lawrence Valley at the time of the American Revolution, 
also omitted specific reference to the knife case in his descrip?
tion of scalping, reporting that "they... twist their left hand in 
the hair,...and with the other hand draw their scalping knife 
from their breast, which is always in good order, for this cruel 
purpose" (Anburey, 1789:399). A Brunswick mercenary sta?
tioned in the same region at the same time more specifically re?
ported the use of pouches made of the "fur of wildcats" worn on 
the breast and used as knife cases (Schlozer, 1779:300). 
To this can be added for the late eighteenth century some de?
scriptions supplied by field collectors of knives and knife 
cases. In 1778 for example, Major August Wilhelm Du Roi, an?
other Brunswick mercenary stationed at St. Charles, on the 
Chambly River, collected from a local Indian (presumably ei?
ther Mohawk, Huron, or Abenaki) "a knife with a sheath, 
which hangs from the neck and is worn in front of the breast."3 
And an undated Latin label from about the same period, on a 
knife case now in a German museum, describes the object as a 
"sheath, which the Iroquois Indians have suspended from their 
neck, containing a knife with which they cut and tear away the 
scalps of the vanquished as a trophy of war, made from porcu?
pine quills."4 
Neck-worn knife cases may have appeared exotic enough to 
have been noted at least occasionally. Belt-worn knives or knife 
cases, on the other hand, are hardly considered at all, although 
they do appear in illustrations. A report from the eastern Great 
Lakes region (Weld, 1807: letter 35) appears to be one of the 
earliest written accounts of belt-worn knives; Frederick 
Baraga's (1837:61) description of belt-worn knife cases proba?
bly referred to the Ottawa and/or Chippewa, and about the same 
time their use was observed among the southwestern Chippewa 
(Nicollet, 1970:162). Much later, Penobscot knife cases were 
described as plain and attached to the belt (Speck, 1940:129). 
Pictures of native people wearing knives or knife cases also 
began to appear shortly before the middle of the eighteenth 
century. The earliest known European illustration of a Native 
American knife case is seen in an anonymous French drawing 
(ca. 1730) of a Fox warrior wearing a small, simple knife case 
on his chest (Peyser, 1989:82). An early and rather isolated de?
piction of a South American asymmetrical neck-worn knife 
case appears in an illustration in Andre Thevet's Singularitez 
de la France Antarctique (Thevet, 1558:101 recto). Based on 
the appearance of the blade and of the handle, the knife could 
have been a European metal knife, which suggests the possibil?
ity of an independent case of parallel adaptation or diffusion to 
South and North America from a European (most likely 
French) source. Nothing, however, appears to be known about 
early modern European neck-worn knife cases. In 1759 George 
Townshend, General Wolfe's successor as commander of the 
British army in Canada, made several drawings of an Indian 
(once identified as "of ye Outewas Tribe" (Honour, 1975:128)) 
with a knife case hanging from his neck. On the monument 
erected in Westminster Abbey in 1761 for Townshend's brother 
Roger, two Indians are wearing clearly defined neck-worn 
knife cases, which are perhaps based on artifacts in George 
Townshend's collection (Figure 1; see also Honour, 1975: 
128-129, figs. 119-120).5 
The oil painting Savage Warrior Taking Leave of His Family 
(ca. 1760), by Benjamin West, includes the image of a rather 
small knife case suspended from the warrior's neck by means 
of a narrow band with beaded edges; the sheath itself lacks a 
projecting back panel and is bordered with tufts of deer hair. A 
laterally reversed engraving after this painting was published in 
Italy in 1763 (Erffa and Staley, 1986:57, 420-421, no. 452). 
The same knife case reappears in West's General Johnson Sav?
ing a Wounded French Officer from the Tomahawk of a North 
American Indian (ca. 1764-1768) (Erffa and Staley, 
1986:210-211, no. 92). Another sheath, again rather small and 
simple, is more hidden than shown by West both in The Death 
of General Wolfe (1770) and in the slightly earlier portrait (ca. 
1767-1770) now thought to depict Sir William Johnson, Bt., 
rather than Guy Johnson; it is at least possible that this is the 
knife case once belonging to West and now in the Museum of 
Mankind in London (Erffa and Staley, 1986:58-59, 211-216, 
nos. 93-100, 523-525, no. 647; King, 1991:39, fig. 8). 
A quilled knife case with tin cones, red-dyed deer hair below 
the top of the front panel, and a rounded extension of the back 
panel is depicted as being worn by "Sir John Caldwell as an 
Ojibwa Chief (ca. 1782) (Honour, 1975:134, fig. 127; another 
version in Brasser, 1976: cover, 180). Caldwell's ethnographic 
collection was dispersed in the 1970s; if the knife case shown 
survives, its present whereabouts are unknown. What may be a 
neck-worn knife case appears in the engraving Indian Warrior 
Entering his Wigwam with a Scalp, representing an unspecified 
Indian as seen by Thomas Anburey (1789: facing 291), whose 
description of scalping has already been noted. Like the one il?
lustrated by West, the sheath is small and has lateral tufts of 
hair, but the knife looks almost like a clay pipe. 
Jonathan Carver's drawing (ca. 1770) of a Fox man wearing 
a triangular knife case with lateral fringes or tin cones was re?
used in Carver's depiction of a Dakota warrior (or vice versa). 
The drawings of the knife cases were probably done from 
memory as the earliest versions by Carver show only a double-
edged dagger with a triangular blade (Carver, 1976:85, 96-97). 
Belt-worn knives with or without cases are depicted in the 
eighteenth and early nineteenth century both from the South?
east (e.g., Fundaburk, 1958:110, figs. 113, 115) and from the 
Northeast. Some knives are shown stuck behind the belt (e.g., 
Phillips, 1984:87, 92, figs. II, 2, 3); otherwise, knife sheaths are 
suspended from it (e.g. Phillips, 1984:90, 92, figs. I, 2, II, 6). 
NUMBER 44 265 
FIGURE 1.?"An Indian dress'd for war with a scalp." Drawing 
presumably illustrating an Ottawa wearing a knife case, by 
George Townshend, 1759. Picture Library, National Portrait 
Gallery, London (reg. no. 4855(69)). Courtesy of the National 
Portrait Gallery, London. 
Few details of the construction or decoration of belt-worn knife 
cases are discernible in these depictions. The best illustration is 
supplied by late eighteenth-century dolls mostly made by 
French-Canadian nuns to represent Hurons of Lorette or 
Abenakis, which show simple, asymmetrical knife cases sus?
pended from the belt (e.g., Benndorf and Speyer, 1968:62, 74, 
nos. 69 and 106, pis. 29, 41; Phillips, 1984:80, nos. 85-87; cp. 
Phillips and Idiens, 1994:24-26, 33: notes 19-20, fig. I).6 
In addition to contextual ized depictions, visual representa?
tions of knife cases also include pictures of actual specimens in 
collections. In view of the widespread use by artists of props 
from their own collections (as in the case of Benjamin West), 
this distinction between contextualized depictions and repre?
sentations of artifacts from collections is not a sharp one. The 
earliest such images are among the drawings produced in the 
1780s by the amateur artist Sarah Stone of artifacts in the col?
lection of Sir Ashton Lever (King, 1993:33, fig.l), where two 
types of knife cases are represented. A different type of case 
figures both among the 1816-1817 drawings of Charles Hamil?
ton Smith, a British spy (King, 1994:59, fig. 1), and in the 
lithographs illustrating the English edition of Giacomo Costan-
tino Beltrami's travel account, where it is identified as of "Cy-
powais" (Chippewa) origin (Beltrami, 1828, pi. 1: fig. 3; cp. 
Feest and Kasprycki, 2001). Yet another type of quilled knife 
case is found in Seth Eastman's illustrations for Henry Rowe 
Schoolcraft's monumental History, Conditions and Prospects 
of the Indian Tribes. In general, these drawings not only adhere 
rather closely to the actual objects they were made to represent, 
but they share with them the lack of information on use and 
provenance. Of three quite different specimens illustrated, all 
that Schoolcraft (1852:515, pi. 77) said was, "His knife 
sheath.. .is ingeniously ornamented." 
Meager as the results of this survey are, they are interesting 
because they suggest that the origin of knife cases in northeast?
ern North America may have occurred during the first half of 
the eighteenth century as a result of the increased use of metal 
knives. Since neck-worn tobacco pouches or pipe bags are de?
scribed and illustrated as early as the seventeenth century (e.g., 
Swan, 1973:243-244, figs. 115-116; Williams, 1973:187), 
there is no good reason why knife cases should not similarly 
have been reported had they been part of the Native American 
accouterment at that time. Additional support for this view may 
266 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
be found in the linguistic evidence. David Zeisberger*s (1887) 
manuscript Indian Dictionary; English, German, Iroquois?the 
Onondaga, and Algonquin?the Delaware, compiled in the sec?
ond half of the eighteenth century, is the earliest source citing a 
Native American term for "knife case." He supplied an Onon?
daga term for this artifact but gave no Delaware term (Zeis?
berger, 1887:171). Algonquian words for "knife case" recorded 
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide no indication 
of an ancient, common origin, and some are obviously newly 
coined words (e.g., Baraga, 1878-1880( 1): 151, (2):357; Lem-
oine, 1901:135; Trumbull, 1903:121; Skinner, 1921:141; 
Uhlenbeck and van Gulik, 1930:119; Speck, 1940:129; North?
ern Cheyenne Language and Culture Center, 1976:60; Bloom?
field, 1984:222; Goddard, 1994:251). 
Although the written and pictorial evidence for northeastern 
neck-worn knife cases in the period between 1750 and 1800 fo?
cuses on the Iroquois, Ottawa, and Fox, most of the information 
for the nineteenth century relates to the Menominee. The only 
author of this period actually describing neck-worn knife cases 
was the Swiss Capuchin missionary Antoine-Marie Gachet, 
who at one point noted that the men wore on their breasts both 
beaded or quilled tobacco pouches and "a case ornamented in 
the same manner, into which he slips his large knife or scalpel" 
(Gachet, 1890:270). On another occasion, Gachet spoke of 
Chief Iometah, who "wore his great knife in a sheath suspended 
from his neck" (Gachet, 1890:149).7 This fleeting reference is 
appropriate inasmuch as Iometah was one of several Menomi-
nees portrayed with a neck-worn knife case. Thus were painted 
Machekakat and Makometa by James Otto Lewis in 1827, 
Iometah by George Catlin in 1831, and Kitcheogimaw by Paul 
Kane in 1845, and there is a daguerreotype from before 1856 
showing Chief Oshkosh, as well as a wood engraving appar?
ently based upon another take from the same session (Figure 2; 
Kasprycki, 1990:67-71, 79-80, 94, 103-104, figs. 1-7, 21, 50, 
64, 65). Of these artists, only Kane provided a realistic and de?
tailed image of a knife case. The daguerreotype is lacking in 
clarity and resolution, and the engraving based upon it used a 
great deal of artistic license in interpreting the photograph. 
Thus, the documentary evidence from the first half of the 
nineteenth century is clearly sufficient to prove that Menomi?
nee men wore different types of knife cases suspended from 
their necks. In contrast, the striking absence of pictorial and 
written evidence for knife cases among other tribes in the west?
ern Great Lakes region during the same period is highly sur?
prising. Yet it remains a remarkable fact that among all the na?
tive peoples from the Great Lakes region and the adjoining 
eastern Prairies shown on the lithographs published by Lewis 
(1835-1836) and by McKenney and Hall (1838-1844), as well 
as on the paintings by Catlin (Truettner, 1979), Kane (Kane, 
1971), and the other artists depicting American Indians in the 
nineteenth century, only Menominees are seen wearing knife 
cases suspended from their necks?with one exception dis?
cussed below. Similarly, knife cases are discussed in Alanson 
Skinner's (1921:127-128) monograph, Material Culture of the 
Menomini, but they are not even mentioned in the accounts by 
Skinner and others of the Prairie Potawatomi, Sauk, Fox, Win?
nebago, or Chippewa. This may be an indication that most Na?
tive American groups in the Great Lakes region had abandoned 
the use of neck-worn knife cases significantly earlier than the 
Menominee had. 
The exception to the apparent Menominee monopoly on 
neck-worn knife cases in nineteenth-century illustrations is 
provided by a recently discovered drawing by the German art?
ist Adolf Hoeffler, which shows a double knife case worn by 
the Dakota chief Bad Hail, a headman of Wabasha's Village, 
drawn near Fort Snelling in 1852 (Figure 3; see also Andreas, 
1981:145, fig. 32). The double knife sheath clearly carries a 
stylized floral decoration, which would not instantly be recog?
nized as typical for the Dakota. It is likely that even this knife 
case had ultimately been obtained from some of the Dakota's 
eastern neighbors, such as the Menominee. 
Material Evidence 
A survey of Native North American artifacts documented in 
European collections before 1750 has disclosed no convincing 
evidence for the presence of knife cases. A knife (apparently 
without a sheath) was obtained by Ralph Thoresby of Leeds 
from the three Mohawks among the "Four Kings of Canada" 
visiting London in 1710, and there is no record of knife cases 
in collection catalogs of that period (Feest, 1992:82). A knife 
with a quilled sheath is said to have been collected in 1697 by 
Pierre le Moyne, sieur d'lberville, the founder of French Loui?
siana, for his cousin Le Moyne de Martigny (Vitart, 1980:131), 
but neither an illustration nor any supportive documentation 
has ever been published. More recently, an unusual type of 
quilled knife case has surfaced in Besancon in association with 
eighteenth-century Iroquois and Mississippi Valley material, 
which so far can be traced back only to 1853 (Lagrange and 
Dubois, 1992:111, no. 241). 
Quilled knife cases from northeastern North America pre?
served in European and American collections would thus ap?
pear to date from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of 
the nineteenth century. In preparing this report, almost 100 
knife cases, published and unpublished, from this region and 
period were studied (references for these are provided largely 
in the end notes). Less than one-third of these have a docu?
mented history before 1850, and less than 10% of them have 
reasonably well-documented provenances, including the Iro?
quois, Huron of Lorette, Ottawa, Menominee, and Winnebago. 
It is estimated that this sample exceeds well over 50% of the 
knife cases from northeastern North America that have been 
preserved in collections. This leaves some hope that additional 
material yet to be studied will further our understanding by 
adding more dated and/or provenanced examples. 
Various types of quilled knife cases occur all over an area 
ranging from the northeastern United States to the western Ca?
nadian Subarctic. Like other pouches of this region, knife 
cases were either suspended from the neck or attached to a 
belt. Unlike other pouches, no examples worn with bandoleer-
NUMBER 44 267 
FIGURE 2.?Chief Oshkosh wearing a double knife case. Daguerreotype by James F. Harrison, before 1856. Oshkosh 
Public Museum, Oshkosh, Wisconsin (cat. no. 141.11). Courtesy of the Oshkosh Public Museum (neg. no. 1455). 
type shoulder straps are known, and an eighteenth-century 
French source is unique in reporting knives stuck behind the 
garters (J.-C.B., 1978:181). The distinction between symmet?
rical and asymmetrical shapes of knife cases in part corre?
sponds to the manner in which they were worn.8 All asymmet?
rical cases were belt-worn, whereas all neck-worn cases were 
symmetrical; symmetrical, belt-worn knife cases are known to 
have existed and could possibly be distinguished from neck-
worn examples by their shorter straps. Symmetry thus pro?
vides a useful primary distinction, but decorative techniques 
and patterns, rather than outline shapes, generally produce bet?
ter results on lower taxonomic levels and are therefore used in 
the following typological survey. Due to the small size and 
random nature of the sample, some of the proposed types are 
highly tentative; types are summarized in Table 1, which fol?
lows the typological survey. At present, it is not known 
whether these types represent regional, ethnic, local, family, or 
personal styles or fashions. 
268 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 3.?"Bad Hail, Chief of the Sioux nation Minnesota Territory October 
1852." Part of a pencil and watercolor drawing by Adolph Hoeffler. Privately 
owned. Courtesy of Kunsthandel J.P. Schneider Jr., Frankfurt. 
Typology 
SYMMETRICAL KNIFE CASES 
Woven-Quillwork Group 
Because woven quillwork has a wide distribution in the central 
and western Subarctic, sheaths decorated in this technique are 
sometimes misattributed to the western Subarctic. Thus, for ex?
ample, all Northeast knife cases with woven quillwork are mis?
identified as Chipewyan in the catalog of the Smithsonian In?
stitution's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), 
New York. Truly Subarctic examples with woven quillwork in?
clude a type thought to be of Red River Ojibwa or Plains Cree 
origin. These are much larger than the Northeast type; have 
more complex designs, cuffs with woven quillwork, and 
fringes at the top of the front panel; and lack the lateral quill 
applique typical for the Northeast.9 
No CUFF.?Like the Subarctic types, the Northeast examples 
are almost parallel-sided to slightly tapering in shape and have 
a projecting back panel. Their front is decorated with a strip of 
woven quillwork flanked by quill applique, but they lack a 
cuff. One type is made of black-dyed buckskin and has a bi-
lobed top on which outcurving double curves in moosehair em?
broidery are framed by moosehair lines. Quill colors are or?
ange, blue, and white, and the woven pattern consists of linked 
diamonds. The average length of this type is 21 cm. None of 
the pieces has a documented provenance.10 A specimen in the 
Museum fur Volkerkunde, Basel (Figure 4), was acquired by 
Lukas Vischer in 1825 from a dealer in Quebec. On purely sty?
listic grounds, a Lorette Huron origin of the type is likely. An?
other example, more distantly related and equally undocu?
mented, is made of brown buckskin and has moosehair and 
quill applique on the projecting back panel. It features a woven 
design of single and double diamonds as well as a pair of fac?
ing triangles, and the quillwork (black, orange, blue, yellow, 
white) includes triangle bands in overlay." 
CUFF WITH QUILL APPLIQUE.?A second type is almost par?
allel-sided, with a square lower end and a slightly bilobed top. 
As in the first type, the woven design consists of linked dia?
monds and is flanked by line and overlay band-quill applique. 
A cuff above the woven strip is also decorated with quill appli?
que. In addition to the black, red, yellow, and white quillwork, 
white glass beads edge the knife case. Carrying straps are made 
of multiple quill-wrapped leather thongs. Associated knives 
have handles wrapped with quill-plaited strings. Lengths are 
within the range of the first type.12 
Transitional forms with stylistic links to this second type are 
represented among drawings of knife cases from the no longer 
extant Leverian Museum (King, 1993:33, fig. 1) and among the 
specimens in the NMAI (e.g., cat. no. 19/6340). None of these 
sheaths is documented, but the second type is obviously related 
to the first one and may have the same or a similar provenance. 
The combination of woven quillwork and delicate overlay quill 
applique suggests an Algonquin origin (cp. Feest, 1968:42-43, 
fig. hi/18, pi. 1). 
CUFF WITH WOVEN QUILLWORK.?A third type of similar 
size tapers to a rounded lower end and has a pointed, bilobed 
top. As on the Subarctic examples, the cuff is decorated with 
woven quillwork. Designs are made up of single diamonds and/ 
or chevrons on the front panel and of triangles on the cuff. The 
woven panel is flanked by (wavy) line quill applique; edging is 
also in quillwork. Quill colors are red, blue, yellow, and white. 
Neither of the two known examples of this type is documented, 
and both have been attributed to the Subarctic, although they 
are closer to the previously described Northeast types.13 Dis?
tantly related may be an otherwise rather unique item in the 
Museum fur Volkerkunde, Berlin. Said to be from an "old col-
NUMBER 44 269 
lection," it was probably obtained at the 1819 sale of Bullock's 
Museum in London. The cuff features woven quillwork with 
the initials TM and the figure 1811. It has no documented prov?
enance, but it has been attributed to "Algonquians north of the 
Great Lakes" (Krickeberg, 1954:130, table 30c). 
Another unique knife case with woven quillwork, from the 
Arthur Speyer collection in the Canadian Museum of Civiliza?
tion, Quebec,14 has a trapezoidal top and tapers to a squarely 
cut-off lower end. Its cuff is decorated with applique quillwork, 
and the woven design consists of pairs of triangles facing a ver?
tical line. It has a neck strap of the netted-fringe type. Quill col?
ors are green, blue, yellow, and white. It has been attributed to 
either the "Ojibwa, c. 1800" or the "Eastern Great Lakes, be?
fore 1800." In view of the similarities with central Subarctic 
woven quillwork and the more westerly distribution of netted 
fringes, the Ojibwa attribution is a little more likely. 
Netted-Fringe Group 
This group is represented by only two undocumented exam?
ples, both of which are of tapering shape with a rounded lower 
end, a projecting back panel, and a cuff at the top of the front 
panel. The front itself is covered with a netted fringe consisting 
of quills wrapped around alternate pairs of threads to form a 
pattern. The designs are composed of triangles.15 Quill colors 
and overall length, as well as other features, differ consider?
ably. Attributions include "Red River Ojibwa, before 1840," 
"Northern Ojibwa type, c. 1800," and "Western Great Lakes, 
before 1880." Netted fringes have a wide distribution, espe?
cially in the western Great Lakes region and further to the west 
and north; they also occur as decorations on cuffs in the quill-
applique group, described below. 
Quill-Embroidered Group 
The only known example of this group tapers in outline and has 
a rounded lower end, a projecting back panel, and a cuff at the 
top of the front panel (Figure 5). Both front and cuff are rein?
forced with birch bark embroidered with porcupine quills in the 
manner of bark boxes (Feest, 1968:43-44, no. 19, table 2b). It 
probably was collected by Johann Georg Schwarz, an Austrian 
fur trader and diplomat, in 1820-1821 among the "Alegonk" 
(Algonquin). It has a short, commercially woven carrying 
strap.16 
Two-Lane Quill-Wrapped Group 
This group is represented by 17 specimens and one early draw?
ing of an actual specimen, all of them of tapering shape with a 
pointed, rounded, or squarely cut-off lower end. The front is 
decorated with two narrow, quill-wrapped slats of wood, bark, 
rawhide(?), or cardboard(l), with additional quills interwoven 
to form plaited geometric designs. The three to five colors of 
the quills always include red (used only for wrapping); white is 
used primarily for plaiting (but also for wrapping), black is em?
ployed mostly for wrapping, yellow is the major fourth color, 
and green occurs rarely (and only in wrapping). Designs in?
clude diamonds, chevrons, X-shapes, and hourglasses. Since 
more than one color is used for wrapping, all specimens feature 
horizontal stripes arranged in various patterns (Figure 6). 
A common feature of this group is the use of pairs of tin 
cones with (mostly red) deer hair symmetrically attached to the 
sides of the knife cases; sometimes the pairs are replaced by 
single cones. Carrying straps are generally made of a pair of 
strings of quills plaited over two threads. Knives have often 
been preserved, most of them with quill-decorated handles 
(mostly wrapped, some also plaited). Lengths of two-lane 
quill-wrapped knife cases range from 18 to 30 cm, with an av?
erage length of 21 cm (see also Feest, 1987:292-296). Despite 
the rather large number of specimens, no clear types are dis?
cernible: outline shapes and specific decorative details, which 
include white glass bead edging of two styles, appear to com?
bine freely.17 Two of the specimens of this group stand some?
what apart. One of them has only one wide rather than two nar?
row quill-wrapped splints (Phillips and Idiens, 1994:28-29, fig. 
6), and in the other one (identified as the most recent example 
of this group by the violet bead applique on the cuff), the quills 
are wrapped but are not plaited (Feder, 1965, no. 27e). 
This group has commonly been attributed to the Iroquois in 
general or to the Mohawk in particular. Evidence for this attri?
bution is poor and is ultimately based on an old, undated label 
on one of the specimens, whose German inscription reads: 
"Scalper knife of the Iroquois...?Scalping knife of the Chiro-
quois"18 (Drager et al., 1992:64). The history of the dubious 
Mohawk or Iroquois attribution has been discussed by Feest 
(1987:296), yet the label continues to be used without new or 
convincing proof (see Phillips in Harrison, 1987:50, no. W62; 
Phillips and Idiens, 1994:29, fig. 6; cp. Zender and Dale, 
1995:109-110). Attributions to the Ojibwa (National Museum 
of Scotland), Delaware (NMAI), or the Upper Missouri (Na?
tional Museum of Natural History (NMNH), Smithsonian Insti?
tution) are not based upon documentary or comparative evi?
dence. 
The use of birch-bark slats in most of the known examples 
should be regarded as a strong indication of an Algonquian ori?
gin. Quill-plaiting, the principal technique employed in this 
group, has a wide distribution from the Canadian Maritimes to 
the western Subarctic and cannot be regarded as especially 
characteristic of Iroquois work, although it may have occurred 
there as well (Feest, 1987:295-296, including note 62)." 
Information on collection dates provides a clue as to where 
the collecting took place: the earlier the recorded dates, the 
more likely would be an eastern Great Lakes provenance. Un?
fortunately, few of the pieces can be dated reliably. The Town-
shend Monument of 1761 in Westminster Abbey and Sarah 
Stone's drawing of a two-lane quill-wrapped knife made during 
the 1780s provide the earliest secure dates (Honour, 
1975:128-129, figs. 119-120; King, 1993:33, fig. 1). Published 
270 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 4.?Knife case with decoration of woven 
and applique quillwork and moosehair purchased 
in 1825 in Quebec by Lukas Vischer. Museum fur 
Volkerkunde, Basel (cat. no. IVa39). Length 22.5 
cm. Photograph by Christian F. Feest. 
FIGURE 5.?Knife case with porcupine quill 
embroidery on birch-bark reinforcement. Proba?
bly collected by Johann Georg Schwarz in 
1820-1821 and identified as "Alegonk" (Algon?
quin). Museum fur Volkerkunde, Vienna (cat. no. 
11965). Length 18 cm. Photograph by Christian 
F. Feest. 
FIGURE 6.?Knife case with two-lane quill-
wrapped panel and "zipper" edging in white glass 
beads. Undocumented (eastern or northern Great 
Lakes region, ca. 1800). National Museum of 
Scotland, Edinburgh (cat. no. 1956.664; ex 
National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland). 
Photograph by Christian F. Feest. 
earlier dates are speculative and are at best suggestive, while 
stylistic considerations do not preclude an early nineteenth-
century date of manufacture. The fact that almost all of the 
knife cases in this group were once or are still in European re?
positories is, however, indicative of a relatively early collection 
date. Less than half of the double knife cases referred to below 
have a European collection history; documented collection 
dates begin around 1820, or 60 years after the earliest pictorial 
evidence (Feest and Kasprycki, 2001). 
Quill-Applique Group 
Among Northeast knife sheaths decorated with applique quill?
work, those made to hold two knives rather than one clearly 
stand apart from the rest. Both single and double knife cases 
can further be distinguished according to the symmetry or 
asymmetry of their basic design. 
SINGLE KNIFE CASES.?The sample includes about 40 knife 
cases with applique quillwork from the Northeast (including 
one nineteenth-century drawing based on an actual specimen), 
NUMBER 44 271 
of which nine have documented collection dates before 1850. 
Almost all of their provenances (Iroquois, Huron, "Huron or 
Cherokee," Delaware, Menominee, Ottawa, Chippewa/Ojibwa, 
Cree, Dakota) are based on secondary attribution, but at least 
one Ottawa, one Menominee, and one Winnebago sheath are 
rather reliably documented. 
Available measurements range from 20 to 28 cm in length 
(with an average length of 24.5 cm). Outline shapes are gener?
ally similar to those described above, but there are also several 
cases with a concave upper edge, and an additional bilobed 
type may also be distinguished. Bilobed specimens slightly 
outnumber the rest. There is only a partial correlation between 
the shapes of the knife cases and their mostly symmetric deco?
rative patterns. The main designs are usually made up of one, 
three, or five patterned triangle bands of quillwork running the 
length of the knife case and forming compact blocks, often in 
combination with straight or wavy linework; netted fringes oc?
cur on the cuff of some of the specimens. Most of the proposed 
subtypes are represented by just a few examples, and several of 
the knife cases studied may be considered unique. 
One Triangle Band: The most common design (with varia?
tions) consists of one patterned triangle band flanked by wavy 
lines, with either a piece of netted fringe or horizontal triangle 
bands on the cuff.20 Variants lack the wavy line (Ewing, 
1982:151, no. 124) or have more than one of them (Phillips, 
1984:44, 82, no. 30). 
Multiple Triangle Bands: One subtype has two or three 
vertical triangle bands flanked by wavy lines (Figure 7).21 None 
of these specimens has a reliable ethnic attribution, but several 
of them have documented eighteenth-century collection histo?
ries; the Du Roi knife case (see "Written and Pictorial Evi?
dence," above) collected in 1778 within easy reach of Mo?
hawks, Hurons, and Abenakis, would appear to place the 
subtype in the upper Saint Lawrence River region.22 Wavy lines 
framing the main design do, of course, also occur on sheaths in 
the woven-quillwork group and on the slats of the two-lane 
quill-wrapped group. The general pattern may be compared to 
a common style of Iroquois moccasins, in which the toe seam 
is covered by a triangle band of quillwork flanked by wavy 
lines (see Ewing, 1982:259-260). 
Another subtype is decorated with three to seven triangle 
bands forming distinctive patterns. One subtype with five 
bands features a central line with pairs of facing lateral trian?
gles (cp. the similar pattern in a unique, no-cuff woven-quill 
type, described above); both known examples have a cuff of 
netted-fringe quillwork and a neck strap in the same tech?
nique.23 Other three- or five-band sheaths display the central 
line without the triangles or show crosses or horizontal lines.24 
Another subtype is characterized by a pattern of diagonal, in?
dented black lines on orange, blue, and yellow backgrounds 
(Figure 8).25 None of these pieces is reasonably well docu?
mented, and attributions have ranged widely, from Huron to 
Northern Ojibwa. 
Shaped Triangle Bands: Other single knife cases have 
more or less complex patterns made up of shaped triangle 
bands; more than one style and provenance is represented in 
this subtype. Based on the similarity of its unusual lower end 
with an identical form illustrated for the Menominee,26 a west?
ern Great Lakes origin may be suggested for a knife case in the 
Museo Nazionale di Antropologia ed Etnologia in Florence, 
collected before 1828 (Bushnell, 1906:249, pi. XXa). Affinities 
with designs on sheaths with woven quillwork and the use of 
moosehair in combination with porcupine quills suggest a pos?
sible Huron or upper Saint Lawrence River Valley origin for a 
knife case from the John Painter collection, Cincinnati, Ohio.27 
Asymmetrical Design: Only three of the known single 
knife cases with quill applique have asymmetrical designs, but 
they are too different from one another to be regarded as a sep?
arate subtype. All are from the western Great Lakes and Prai?
ries region (Figure 9),28 adjoining the distributions of asymmet?
r ical ly shaped sheaths and double knife cases with 
asymmetrical designs. 
DOUBLE KNIFE CASES.?The 16 presently known double 
knife cases have been discussed in detail by Feest and Kaspry?
cki (2001) (cp. Figures 2, 3). These knife cases are unusual not 
only in shape, but also in that a substantial number of them can 
be shown to have been collected among the Menominee and 
their neighbors in Wisconsin between ca. 1820 and 1850. Sty?
listic relationships exist between double knife cases with sym?
metrical and asymmetrical designs, but they also exist between 
double knife cases and single knife cases. A closer analysis of 
both single and double knife cases may in the long run help to 
clarify the distribution of styles and thus provide a safer ground 
for attributions. 
ASYMMETRICAL KNIFE CASES 
Belt-worn knife cases are best known from the Prairies and 
Plains. Most of them are asymmetrical, such as a distinctive 
Santee(?) Dakota type with a bird-quill decorated sheath and 
porcupine applique-quilled cuff,29 related Dakota types with an 
undecorated or applique-quilled sheath and applique-quilled 
cuff,30 or an Upper Missouri type with a quilled sheath and 
cuff.31 But there are also symmetrical types, such as a northern 
Plains group of sheaths that are sometimes referred to as East?
ern Sioux,32 and transitional types with a symmetrical or asym?
metrical sheath and asymmetrical fringes.33 The distribution of 
Plains and Northeast asymmetrical belt-worn types may not be 
contiguous; similarities in overall construction appear to be 
based on shared Euroamerican models. 
Floral Moosehair-Embroidery Type 
One type of belt-worn knife cases from the Northeast has an 
asymmetrical sheath of black-dyed buckskin with a rectangu?
lar loop of leather sewn to its top, which allows attachment to 
the belt. Floral-design moosehair embroidery extends the 
272 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 7.?Knife and knife case with applique quillwork. Undocumented. 
Merseyside County Museum, Liverpool (cat. no. M 12885; Joseph Mayer 
coll.). Length 20 cm. Photograph by Christian F. Feest. 
FIGURE 8.?Single knife case with applique quillwork. Undocumented. 
NMNH, Department of Anthropology (cat. no. 8654; A.J. Comfort collection). 
Length 27 cm. Photograph by Christian F. Feest. 
length of the front and is flanked by quilled triangle bands; on 
the curved side of the sheath, metal cones with dyed hair are 
attached. The upper border of the front panel is edged with red 
ribbon. Quill and moosehair colors are orange, blue, yellow, 
and white. Lengths (without loop) range from 20 to 22 cm 
(Figure 10).34 None of the specimens is reasonably well docu?
mented, but based on comparison with related pouches and 
moccasins the common attribution to "Huron [of Lorette] 
type" is certainly correct. 
One example of a slightly variant type features moosehair-
embroidered borders instead of the quill applique and red wool 
tassels instead of dyed hair.35 It is not clear whether the in?
scription "Loretto Inds. Quebec, Can." on the birch-bark lin?
ing of this specimen represents a note by the collector or a 
later attribution. 
Caribou-Skin Type 
A second type of belt-worn knife case is made of a piece of car?
ibou skin to which a moosehair-embroidered buckskin cuff has 
been added; below this cuff and along the curved edge of the 
knife case are tassels of beads, metal cones, and hair. The Aver?
age length is about 28 cm.36 A Huron origin is generally as?
sumed and is likely (but apparently is not documented). If the 
NUMBER 44 273 
FIGURE 9.?Single knife case with asymmetrical applique quillwork. Probably 
collected by Bishop Rese of Detroit, ca. 1830, among the Ottawa of Harbor 
Springs, Michigan. Museum fur Volkerkunde, Vienna (cat. no. 11966; J.G. 
Schwarz collection). Length (without appendage) 26.5 cm. Photograph by 
Christian F. Feest. 
FIGURE 10.?Belt-worn knife case with moosehair embroidery and porcupine 
quill applique. Undocumented (Huron of Lorette style, first half of nineteenth 
century). NMNH, Department of Anthropology (cat. no. T-7373). Length 21.8 
cm. Photograph by Christian F. Feest. 
attribution is correct, this type is probably later than the floral-
design moosehair-embroidery type. A subtype, represented by 
two examples, both in the Museo Nazionale di Antropologia ed 
Etnologia in Florence (Bushnell, 1906:249, pi. 21b), is smaller 
in size and is made of a scaly beaver tail instead of caribou skin. 
Reptile-Skin Type 
A unique, asymmetrical sheath of reptile skin with a quilled 
buckskin cuff and quill-wrapped leather fringes along the 
curved edge of the case was collected by R.B. Hough at Oka, 
Quebec, and accessioned by the Smithsonian Institution in 
1878.37 
Conclusions 
The present survey has attempted to demonstrate the impor?
tance of artifacts preserved in public and private collections 
for a historical ethnography of northeastern North America. 
Descriptions and depictions alone indicate hardly more than 
274 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
TABLE 1.?Major types of Northeast knife cases and some of their relatives: distinctive features of outline shape 
and decoration. Unevenness of taxonomic levels reflects limitations of sources and need for further research. 
A. Symmetrical 
A. 1 Woven quillwork flanked by quill applique 
A. 1.1 No cuff (Lorette Huron) 
A. 1.2 Cuff with quill applique (Algonquin?) 
A. 1.3 Cuff with woven quillwork (Northern Great Lakes Algonquians?) 
(Various types of symmetrical knife cases with woven quillwork (Sub?
arctic (neck-worn) and Northern Plains (belt-worn)) 
A.2 Netted-fringe quillwork 
Cuff with woven quillwork or quill applique 
A.3 Quill embroidery on bark backing (Algonquin) 
Cuff with quill embroidery 
A.4 Quill-wrapped slats (Northern Great Lakes?) 
Lateral metal cones 
A.5 Quill applique 
A.5.1 Single case 
A.5.1.1 Triangle band flanked by wavy line(s) (Iroquois?) 
A.5.1.2 Patterned multiple triangle bands 
A.5.1.3 Shaped triangle bands 
A.5.1.4 Asymmetrical design (Western Great Lakes) 
A.5.2 Double case (Menominee and neighbors) 
A.5.2.1 Symmetrical design 
A.5.2.2 Asymmetrical design 
B. Asymmetrical 
B.I.I Moosehair embroidery, no cuff (Lorette Huron) 
B.l.la Flanked by quill applique 
B. 1.1 b Flanked by moosehair embroidery 
B. 1.2 Caribou skin (Lorette Huron?) 
Cuff with moosehair embroidery 
B.1.3 Reptile skin (Oka) 
Cuff with quill applique 
(Various types of asymmetrical knife cases with quill applique (Dakota 
to Upper Missouri)) 
that knife cases were used. Although inspection of the mate?
rial documents vastly increases our appreciation of the techni?
cal and stylistic diversity of knife cases, it is primarily the 
poor documentation of most early collections that accounts 
for the problems of tribal attribution (and thus cultural contex-
tualization) of specific forms. It is fairly characteristic for his?
toric collections of Native American material culture that a 
substantial portion of the knife cases that have been preserved 
were specifically made for sale. This is certainly true of the 
symmetrical knife cases with woven quillwork attributed to 
the Huron of Lorette and the belt-worn sheaths which presum?
ably were also made there. It is equally characteristic that 
provenances of such items are more easily identifiable than 
are those made for actual use. Further research into the collec?
tion histories of artifacts and comparisons of undocumented 
with documented objects should help to approach a solution 
of the jigsaw puzzle representing the distribution of ethnic, lo?
cal, and temporal styles.38 
The tentative conclusion regarding a post-European origin 
of knife cases in northeastern North America, on the other 
hand, calls for an investigation of the possible European mod?
els and their adaptation by native peoples of North America in 
the process of the cultural exchange known as acculturation. 
Notes 
I thank Sylvia Kasprycki for allowing me to draw upon results of her unpub?
lished work on Menominee historical ethnography and material culture. The 
help extended to me over the years by the staff of the various museums whose 
objects are discussed herein is herewith likewise acknowledged with gratitude. 
Part of the present essay was itself part of a paper entitled "Material Evi?
dence, Critical Reasoning, and the Identification of Styles: A (Knife) Case in 
Point," coauthored with Sylvia S. Kasprycki and read at the symposium on 
American Indian Art at the Fenimore House Museum, Cooperstown, New 
York, 12 Jul 1995 (cp. Feest and Kasprycki, 2001). 
1. "un pendu au col en sautoir, un passe a la ceinture et le troisieme le long de 
la jambe en dehors dans la jarretiere " 
2. "un grand couteau suspendu sur la poitrine...." 
3. "Ein Messer mit der Scheide, welches an dem Hals gehangt und vor der 
Brust getragen wird." A copy of the original collection list, now lost, is in the 
catalog of the Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum, Brunswick. 
4. "Vagina, quam collo suspensam habent Indi Iroquaeenses, continendo pu-
gione quo secant & avellant capillitum derrotorum, belli trophaeum, ex pennis 
hystricis confecta." This label is attached to catalog number 3 of the ethno?
graphic collection of the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, which is on 
permanent loan to the Deutsches Ledermuseum, Offenbach. 
5. The Indians on this monument served in part as models for an artist's re?
construction of a "Mohawk Warrior, 1750" in Taylor and Sturtevant 
(1991:230). The knife case is correctly interpreted as a two-lane quill-wrapped 
type (see under "Woven Quillwork Group"), but the colors do not match those 
found in the actual specimens preserved. In the accompanying text, the artifacts 
(including the knife case) are implicitly identified as of Mohawk origin, al?
though it is equally possible that they were collected from other groups, such as 
the Ottawa (cp. Figure 1). 
6. On some of these dolls, the knife case is suspended from the shoulder or 
neck by means of a rather long string. This may represent a mistake on the part 
of the nuns or it may represent a later repair. 
7. The nineteenth-century Menominee practice is confirmed by Skinner's 
(1921:127-128) early twentieth-century ethnography. 
8. Another factor is, of course, the shape of the knife, but asymmetrical 
knives and symmetrical daggers were carried in symmetrical knife cases. 
9. See, for example, Orchard, 1971, pi. 14; King, 1982:19, fig. 7c; same, 
Brasser in Harrison, 1987:82, no. P51, and Acevedo et al., 1983:29, fig. 27; 
Vincent, 1995:43. 
NUMBER 44 275 
10. Examples are in the Museum fur Volkerkunde, Basel, cat. no. IVa39 (L. 
Vischer coll.); National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), New York, 
G. Heye coll., cat. no. 10/9716; and in the British Museum, London (King, 
1982:82, fig. 87). 
11. NMAI, cat. no. 19/6339. 
12. Orchard, 1971, pi. 29; Ewing, 1982:152, no. 125. 
13. Boden, 1995:199, no. 701; NMAI, cat. no. 18/9432. 
14. Benndorf and Speyer, 1968:92, no. 159, fig. 62; same, Brasser, 1976:100, 
no. 66. 
15. Benndorf and Speyer, 1968:48, no. 35, fig. 15; same, Brasser, 1976:144, 
no. 142; Phillips, 1984:75, no. 57. 
16. Two knife cases made completely of birch bark and ornamented with 
moosehair, now in the Stadtisches Museum, Brunswick, were obviously in?
tended for the late eighteenth-century tourist trade. They were collected by J.L. 
Unger, a Brunswick mercenary in the American Revolution. Although of a 
style usually associated with the Huron of Lorette, they were probably made by 
French-Canadian nuns (Phillips, 1991:20, fig. 2). 
17. National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, cat. no. 1956.664; University 
of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver; NMAI, cat. no. 
19/6356; Krickeberg, 1954:129, table 30a; Benndorf and Speyer, 1968:66, no. 
83, fig. 31; same, Lyford, 1989:51; Volger, 1976: no. 4.50.20; Brasser, 
1976:102; same, Lyford, 1989:50; Sotheby's, 1982: no. 286; same, Acevedo et 
al, 1983:28, fig. 25; Sotheby's, 1982: no. 288; Feest, 1987:292-296; Phillips 
in Harrison, 1987:50, no. W62; Sotheby's, 1988: no. 68; same, Zender and 
Dale, 1995, pi. 5; Drager et al., 1992:30, 31, 64; Turner, 1992, fig. 22; King, 
1993:33, fig. 1. 
18. "Scalper-Messerder Irokesen...?Skalpeer-Mes. der Chirokeesen." 
19. Phillips and Idiens (1994:29, 31, figs. 6, 9) identify a knife case of this 
type in a Scottish collection as "Iroquois" but have no problem attributing a 
technically and stylistically very similar headdress as "possibly Ojibwa." 
20. Orchard, 1971, pi. 29e; King, 1982:18, fig. 7a (left); Acevedo et al., 
1983:28, fig. 24; same, Batkin, 1995:54-55; Sotheby's, 1986, no. 125; Mu?
seum voor Volkenkunde, Rotterdam, cat. no. 35049. 
21. Two bands: Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum, cat. no. VM 7249 (W.A. 
Du Roi collection). Three bands: Hotz, 1975:43, 154, fig. 16 (cp. Orchard, 
1971, pi. 29a; Figure 7); King, 1991:39, fig. 8; Sanchez Garrido, 1992:22, figs. 
3,27; Merseyside County Museum, Liverpool, cat. no. M 12885. 
22. The problem with using the Du Roi knife case to anchor the whole group 
in time and space is the singularity of the two-band decoration, which structur?
ally resembles the two-lane quill-wrapped type. 
23. Krickeberg, 1954:129-130, pi. 30; Benndorf and Speyer, 1968:91-92, 
no. 158, fig. 62, where the sheath is identified as Ojibwa; cp. the knife case 
shown on the portrait of Sir John Caldwell (see under "Written and Pictorial 
Evidence"). 
24. Orchard, 1971, pi. 29d; Benndorf and Speyer, 1968:78, no. 116, fig. 43; 
same, Ewing, 1982:150, no. 123; Vitart, 1980:133; same, Phillips in Harrison, 
1987:41, no. W19; King, 1982:18, fig. 7a (right); Drager et al., 1992:30; 
Painter, 1992:41, fig. 21a; Karl May Museum, Radebeul, uncataloged. 
25. Feder, 1965, fig. 27d; Thompson, 1977:188-189, fig. 145; King, 1982:18, 
fig. 7b; see also Peabody Museum, Harvard University, cat. no. 99-12-10, 
shown as a reproduction in Zender and Dale, 1995:110. 
26. The painting, by Paul Kane, is reproduced in Brasser (1976:190), King 
(1982:83, fig. 88), Kasprycki (1990:94, fig. 50), and elsewhere. Compare 
Bushnell, 1906:241, pi. 21a, and Schoolcraft, 1851-1857, pi. 77: fig. 4. 
27. Painter, 1992:37-38, no. 18; Zender and Dale, 1995, pi. 6 (right). Other 
more or less isolated forms of single knife cases are found in Orchard, 1971, pi. 
5; Volger, 1976(4): case 20, item 34; Feest, 1987:290-292 and color plate; 
Lagrange and Dubois, 1992:111, no. 241; and Zender and Dale, 1995, pi. 6 
(bottom). 
28. Feest, 1968:44, table 2a (Ottawa); Acevedo, et al, 1983:29, fig. 26; same, 
Batkin, 1995:68-69 (attributed to Eastern Sioux); Zender and Dale, 1995:124 
(Winnebago). 
29. See, for example, Feder, 1965, fig. 27a, 1987:50-51, 53, figs. 6, 7; Hart-
mann, 1973:344, fig. 100; Flint Institute of Arts, 1973:5, no. 9; Thompson, 
1977:185, fig. 127; Tippecanoe County Historical Association, Lafayette, Indi?
ana, Wetherill collection. 
30. Feder, 1964:53, figs. 37, 39; Casagrande and Ringheim, 1980:80, fig. 77 
and color plate; Painter, 1992:35, 37, no. 17; Naprstek Museum, Prague, cat. 
no. 21328; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, cat. no. E 53445. 
31. Schulze-Thulin, 1976:69, no. 54 (Mandan); see also Painter, 1992:41, fig. 
21 (collected at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, but attributed to the Hidatsa). 
32. Feder, 1965, fig. 27f; same, Maurer, 1977:164, and Brasser in Harrison, 
1987:82, no. P50; Museo Luigi Pigorini, Rome, cat. no. 3654; the British Mu?
seum, London, cat. no. 1944.Am2.241. 
33. Bushnell, 1906:249, pi. 21c; Brasser, 1976:174, no. 188 and color plate; 
Best and McClelland, 1977:10, no. 7; Laurencich-Minelli, 1990:246-247, figs. 
11-12 (cp. Beltrami, 1828, pi. 2: fig. 5); Painter, 1992:35-37, no. 16; Batkin, 
1995:70-71; Folkens Museum-etnografiska, Stockholm, cat. no. 1854.2.14. 
34. NMNH, Department of Anthropology, collections housed at the Museum 
Support Center, Suitland, Maryland, cat. no. T-7373; Feder, 1965, fig. 27c; 
Maurer, 1977:109, no. 98; same, Vincent, 1995:24. 
35. NMNH, Department of Anthropology, collections housed at the Museum 
Support Center, Suitland, Maryland, cat. no. T-10721. 
36. Benndorf and Speyer, 1968:63, no. 73, fig. 27; Ewing, 1982:153, no. 126; 
King, 1982:92, fig. 98a,b; Acevedo et al, 1983:47, fig. 75. 
37. NMNH, Department of Anthropology, collections housed at the Museum 
Support Center, Suitland, Maryland, cat. no. 18814. 
38. While comparisons on the level of specific artifact types should be under?
taken first, comparisons between such types can be very elucidating. Thus, the 
further study of quilled knife cases will greatly profit from a better understand?
ing of quilled pouches and moccasins. As long as provenances for these other 
types of artifacts are themselves mostly based on dubious attributions, how?
ever, comparisons will only lead to equally dubious results. 
Literature Cited 
Acevedo, Alexander, Patrick T. Houlihan, Morman F. Sprague, Jr., and Peter H. 
Welsh 
1983. Akicita: Early Plains and Woodlands Indian Art from the Collection 
of Alexander Acevedo. 50 pages. Los Angeles, California: The 
Southwest Museum. 
Adair, James 
1930. Adair's History of the American Indians, Edited under the Auspices 
of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, in Ten?
nessee, by Samuel Cole Williams, LL.D. xxxviii + 508 pages. 
Johnson City, Tennessee: The Watauga Press. 
Anburey, Thomas 
1789. Travels through the Interior Parts of America; In a Series of Letters; 
By an Officer. Volume 1, vii + [21] + 467 pages. London: William 
Lane. 
Andreas, Christoph 
1981. Adolf Hoeffler (1825-1898): Ein Frankfurter Zeichner und Maler. 
vi + 357 pages. Doctoral dissertation, University of Mainz. 
Baraga, Frederick 
1837. Geschichte, Character, Sitten und Gebrauche der nord-amerika-
nischen Indier. 193 pages. Laibach: Joseph Blasnik. 
276 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
1878-1880. A Dictionary of the Otchipwe Language, Explained in En?
glish. 2 volumes [Reprinted in 1973 by Ross and Haines, Minneapo?
lis, Minnesota.] 
Batkin, Jonathan, editor 
1995. Splendid Heritage: Masterpieces of Native American Art from the 
Masco Collection. 92 pages. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Wheelwright 
Museum of the American Indian. 
Beltrami, Giacomo Costantino 
1828. A Pilgrimage in Europe and America. Volume 2, 545 pages. Lon?
don: Hunt and Clarke. [Reprinted in 1962 by Quadrangle Books, 
Chicago, as A Pilgrimage in America.] 
Benndorf, Helga, and Arthur Speyer 
1968. Indianer Nordamerikas 1760-1860. 141 pages. Offenbach am 
Main: Deutsches Ledermuseum. 
Best, Alexander, and Alan McClelland 
1977. Quillwork by Native Peoples in Canada. 20 pages. Toronto: Royal 
Ontario Museum. 
Bloomfield, Leonard 
1984. Cree-English Lexicon. 2 volumes. [i]-iv+319 pages. New Haven, 
Connecticut: Human Relations Area Files. 
Boden, Gertrud 
1995. Nordamerika: die Sammlung des Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museums. 
Ethnologica, new series, 20: 287 pages. Cologne: Rautenstrauch-
Joest-Museum fur Volkerkunde. 
Brasser, Ted J. 
1976. "Bo'jou Neejeel": Profiles of Canadian Indian Art. 204 pages. Ot?
tawa: National Museum of Man. 
Bushnell, David I , Jr. 
1906. North American Ethnographical Material in Italian Collections. 
American Anthropologist, new series, 8:243-255. 
Carver, Jonathan 
1976. The Journals of Jonathan Carver and Related Documents, 
1766-1770. Edited by John Parker, x+244 pages. [St. Paul, Minne?
sota]: Minnesota Historical Society Press. 
Casagrande, Louis B , and Melissa M. Ringheim 
1980. Straight Tongue: Minnesota Indian Art from the Bishop Whipple 
Collections. 91 pages. St. Paul, Minnesota: The Science Museum of 
Minnesota. 
Drager, Lothar, Rolf Krusche, and Klaus Hoffmann 
1992. Indianer Nordamerikas: Ausstellung im Blockhaus "Villa Baren-
fett" des Karl-May-Museums. 120 pages. Munich: Karl M. Lipp 
Verlag. 
Erffa, Helmut von, and Allen Staley 
1986. The Paintings of Benjamin West, xii+606 pages. New Haven, Con?
necticut: Yale University Press. 
Ewing, Douglas C. 
1982. Pleasing The Spirits: A Catalogue of a Collection of American In?
dian Art. 401 pages New York: Ghylen Press. 
Feder, Norman 
1964. Art of the Eastern Plains Indians; the Nathan Sturges Jarvis Collec?
tion. 67 pages. Brooklyn, New York: The Brooklyn Museum. 
1965. American Indian Art Before 1850. 43 pages. Denver, Colorado: 
Denver Art Museum. 
1987. Bird Quillwork. American Indian Art Magazine, 12(3):46?57. 
Feest, Christian F. 
1968. Indianer Nordamerikas: Museum fur Volkerkunde, Wien. 164 pages, 
xvi pages of illustrations, 3 leaves, vi pages of colored illustrations, 
38 pages of illustrations. Vienna: Museum fur Volkerkunde. 
1980. Native Arts of North America. 216 pages. London: Thames and 
Hudson. 
1987. Some 18th Century Specimens from Eastern North America in Col?
lections in the German Democratic Republic. Jahrbuch des Muse?
ums fiir Volkerkundezu Leipzig, 37:281-301. 
1992. North America in the European Wunderkammer before 1750. Ar-
chivfur Volkerkunde, 46:61-109. 
Feest, Christian F , and Sylvia S. Kasprycki 
2001. Material Evidence, Critical Reasoning, and the Identification of 
Styles: A (Knife) Case in Point. In C F . Feest, editor, Studies in 
American Indian Art: A Memorial Tribute to Norman Feder. ERNAS 
Monographs, 2:189-204. Altenstadt: ERNAS. 
Flint Institute of Arts 
1973. Art of the Great Lakes Indians. xxxviii+114 pages. Flint, Michigan: 
Flint Institute of Arts. 
Fundaburk, Emma Lila 
1958. Southeastern Indians: Life Portraits; a Catalogue of Pictures, 
1564-1860. 135 pages. Luverne, Alabama: Privately printed. 
Gachet, Antoine-Marie 
1890. Cinque ans en Amerique: Journal d 'un missionaire. Fribourg: Im-
primerie Suisse Catholique. 
Goddard, Ives 
1994. Leonard Bloomfield's Fox Lexicon; Critical Edition. Memoir (Al?
gonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics), 12: 296 pages. Winnipeg, 
Manitoba: Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics. 
Harrison, Julia, editor 
1987. The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada's First Peoples. 264 
pages. Toronto, Ontario: McClelland and Stewart. 
Hartmann. Horst 
1973. Die Plains- und Prarieindianer Nordamerikas. Verqffentlichungen 
des Museums fiir Volkerkunde Berlin, new series, 22: 422 pages [96] 
pages of plates. Berlin. 
Honour, Hugh 
1975. The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Dis?
coveries to the Present Time. 299 pages. New York: Pantheon 
Books. 
Hotz, Gottfried 
1975. Indianer Nordamerikas: Katalog zur Sammlung Hotz der Stadt 
Zurich. 214 pages. Zurich: Schulamt der Stadt Zurich. 
J.-C.B. 
1978. Voyage au Canada: dans le nord de I'Amerique septentrionale fait 
depuis I'an 1751. 190 pages, edited by C. Manceron. Paris: Aubier 
Montaigne. 
Kalm, Peter 
1987. Travels in North America: The English Version of 1770. Revised 
from the original Swedish and edited by A.B. Benson, xviii+797 
pages. New York: Dover Publications. 
Kane, Paul 
1971. Paul Kane s Frontier; Including Wanderings of an Artist among the 
Indians of North America, by Paul Kane. Edited with a biographical 
introduction and a catalogue raisonne by J. Russell Harper, xviii + 
350 pages. Austin: University of Texas Press. 
Kasprycki, Sylvia S. 
1990. Image and Imagination: Menominee Portraits, 1825-1860. Archiv 
fiir Volkerkunde, 44:65-131. 
King, J.C.H. 
1982. Thunderbird and Lightning: Indian Life in Northeastern North 
America 1600-1900. 96 pages. London: British Museum Publica?
tions. 
1991. Woodlands Artifacts from the Studio of Benjamin West, 1738-
1820. American Indian Art Magazine, 17(l):34-47. 
1993. Woodlands Art as Depicted by Sarah Stone in the Collection of Sir 
Ashton Lever. American Indian Art Magazine, 18(2):32-45. 
1994. Native Art as Depicted by Charles Hamilton Smith, a British Intelli?
gence Officer in the United States, 1816-1817. American Indian Art 
Magazine, 19(2):58-67. 
Krickeberg, Walter 
1954. Altere Ethnographica aus Nordamerika im Berliner Museum fur 
Volkerkunde. Baessler-Archiv, new series, 2:1-280. 
NUMBER 44 277 
Lagrange, Philippe, and Jacques-Marie Dubois 
1992. "Nos petites Ameriques ': Collections amerindiennes des musees de 
Franche-Comte. 184 pages. Besancon: Musee des Beaux-Arts et 
d'Archeologie de Besancon. 
Laurencich-Minelli, Laura 
1990. G.C. Beltrami (1779-1855) and his Filottrano North American In?
dian Collection (Filottrano, Ancona). Museologia Scientifica, 6: 
237-254. 
Lemoine, George 
1901. Dictionnaire Francais-Montagnais. 281 + 63 pages. Boston: W.B. 
Cabot and P. Cabot. 
Lewis, James Otto 
1835-1836. The Aboriginal Port-Folio: A Collection of Portraits of the 
Most Celebrated Chiefs of the North American Indians. 1 portfolio, 
16 leaves of colored plates. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Lehman 
and Duval. 
Lyford, Carrie A. 
1989. Iroquois, Their Art and Crafts. 128 pages. Surrey, British Columbia: 
Hancock House. 
McKenney, Thomas L , and James Hall 
1838-1844. History of the Indian Tribes of North America, with Biograph?
ical Sketches and Anecdotes of the Principal Chiefs. 3 volumes. 
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 
Maurer, Evan M. 
1977. The Native American Heritage: A Survey of North American Indian 
Art. 351 pages. Chicago, Illinois: The Art Institute of Chicago. 
Morgan, Lewis H. 
1851. League of the Ho-de '-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois, xviii+2 leaves, [3] + 
477 pages. Rochester: Sage and Brother. [Reprinted in 1972 by Cit?
adel Press, Secaucus, New Jersey.) 
Nicollet, Joseph N. 
1970. The Journals of Joseph N. Nicollet: A Scientist on the Mississippi 
Headwaters, with Notes on Indian Life, 1836-37. Edited by Martha 
Coleman Bray, xviii+288 pages. St. Paul, Minnesota: Minnesota 
Historical Society. 
Northern Cheyenne Language and Culture Center 
1976. English-Cheyenne Student Dictionary. xviii+163 pages. Lame Deer, 
Montana: Language Research Department. 
Orchard, William C. 
1971. The Technique of Porcupine-Quill Decoration among the North 
American Indians. Second edition. Contributions from the Museum 
of the American Indian Heye Foundation, 4(1): 82 pages. New 
York: Museum of the American Indian-Heye Foundation. 
Painter, John W. 
1992. American Indian Artifacts: The John Painter Collection. 218 pages. 
Cincinnati, Ohio: George Tassian. 
Peyser, Joseph L. 
1989. The Fate of the Fox Survivors: A Dark Chapter in the History of the 
French in the Upper Country, 1726-1737. Wisconsin Magazine of 
History, 73(2):[82]-110. 
Phillips, Ruth B. 
1984. Patterns of Power: The Jasper Grant Collection and Great Lakes 
Indian Art of the Early Nineteenth Century. 151 pages. Kleinburg, 
Ontario: McMichael Canadian Collection. 
1991. Glimpses of Eden: Iconographic Themes in Huron Pictorial Tourist 
Art. European Review of Native American Studies, 5(2): 19-28. 
Phillips, Ruth B , and Dale Idiens 
1994. "A Casket of Savage Curiosities": Eighteenth-Century Objects from 
North-eastern North America in the Farquharson Collection. Jour?
nal of the History of Collections, 6( 1): 21 - 3 3. 
Rogers, Robert 
1765. A Concise Account of North America. ...vii [l] + 264 pages. London: 
J. Millan. 
Sanchez Garrido, Araceli 
1992. Plains Indian Collections of the Museo de America. European Re?
view of Native American Studies, 6(2):21-29. 
Schlozer, August Ludwig 
1779. Briefwechsel meist historischen undpolitischen Inhalts. Volume 4. 
Gdttingen: Vandenhoek. 
Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe 
1852. Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the 
Indian Tribes of the United States. Volume 2, [i]-xxiv, [l]+17-608 
pages. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J.B. Lippincott and Co. 
Schulze-Thulin, Axel 
1976. Prarie-Indianer. Bildhefie des Linden-Museums Stuttgart, Abteilung 
Amerika, 2: 104 pages. Stuttgart. 
Skinner, Alanson B. 
1921. Material Culture of the Menomini. Indian Notes and Monographs, 
20: 478 pages. New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye 
Foundation. 
Sotheby's 
1982. Fine American Indian Art: Property of Various Owners Including 
M.L. Messiter, Esq. ...New York: Sotheby Parke Bemet. [Sale num?
ber 4842Y] 
1986. Fine American Indian Art: Property of Various Owners Includ?
ing...the Connecticut Historical Society.... 128 pages. New York: 
Sotheby's. [Sale number 5522.] 
1988. Important American Indian Art Including Property from the Collec?
tion of Mr. and Mrs. Fred Boschan. [158] pages. New York: 
Sotheby's. [Sale number 5785.] 
Speck, Frank G. 
1940. Penobscot Man; the Life History of a Forest Tribe in Maine. xx+ 
325 pages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 
Swan, Bradford W. 
1973. Prints of the American Indian, 1670-1775. In W.W. Whitehill, edi?
tor, Boston Prints and Printmakers. 1670-1775, pages 241-282. 
Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts. 
Taylor, Colin, and William C. Sturtevant 
1991. The Native Americans: The Indigenous People of North America. 
256 pages. London: Salamander Books. 
Thevet, Andre 
1558. Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, avtrement nommee 
Amerique. viii+166+[2] folios. Paris: Maurice de la Porte. 
Thompson, Judy 
1977. The North American Indian Collection: A Catalogue. Berne: Beme 
Historical Museum. 
Thwaites, Reuben Gold, editor 
1900. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Volume 70, 318 pages. 
Cleveland, Ohio: Burrows Brothers. 
Tooker, Elisabeth 
1994. Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture, xxii+325 pages. 
Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. 
Truettner, William H. 
1979. The Natural Man Observed: A Study of George Catlin s Indian Gal?
lery. 323 pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Trumbull, James Hammond 
1903. Natick Dictionary. Bulletin, Bureau of American Ethnology, 25: 
xxvii + 349 pages. 
Turner, Geoffrey 
1992. Indians of North America, viii+ 261 pages. New York: Sterling Pub?
lishing Co. [Originally published in 1979 by Blanford Books, Great 
Britain.] 
Uhlenbeck, C.C, and R.H. van Gulik 
1930. An English-Blackfoot Vocabulary Based on Material from the 
Southern Peigans. Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van 
Welenschappen te Amsterdam, Afdeeling Letterkunde, new series, 
29(4):261 pages. Amsterdam. 
278 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Vincent, Gilbert 
1995. Masterpieces of American Indian Art: From the Eugene and Clare 
Thaw Collection. 96 pages. New York: Harry N. Abrams. 
Vitart, Anne 
1980. "Un Sauvage du Canada"... [and] Les objets indiens des collections 
royales. In Mme J. Palardy and C. Montel-Glenisson, editors, Can?
ada de Louis XIV, pages 17-24, 128-139. Saint-Germain-en-Laye: 
Musee des Antiquites Nationales. 
Volger, Gisela 
1976. Indianer Nordamerikas, Zirkumpolare Vdlker. Katalog (Deutsches 
Ledermuseum), 4: 150 pages. Offenbach am Main: Deutsches Led-
ermuseum. 
Weld, Isaac 
1807. Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of 
Upper and Lower Canada, during the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797. 
Fourth edition, 2 volumes. London: J. Stockdale. 
Williams, Roger 
1973. A Key into the Language of America. Edited with a critical introduc?
tion, notes, and commentary by J.J. Teunissen and E.J. Hinz, 322 
pages. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press. 
Zeisberger, David 
1887. Indian Dictionary; English, German, Iroquois?the Onondaga, and 
Algonquin?the Delaware. 236 pages. Cambridge, Massachusetts: 
John Wilson and Son. 
Zender, Jan, and Rochelle Dale 
1995. Great Lakes & Eastern Woodlands Knife Sheaths. The Book of 
Buckskinning, 1:106-133. 
Pabookowaih Unmasked 
William N. Fenton and Donald B. Smith 
Ethnographic specimens in older museum collections seldom 
are accompanied by documentation of the time and place they 
were acquired or manufactured and who made or collected 
them. Even when such documentation is available, it often is 
inaccurate. Identifying such specimens thus presents intriguing 
opportunities for combining research in museums, libraries, 
and the field. Here we describe this identification process in re?
lation to a mask found in the collections of a Scottish museum. 
Once attributed to Africa, the mask was later suspected to be of 
American Indian origin. On examination and comparison with 
other known masks, it proved to fall within the genre of North?
east Indian masks and is most likely of Delaware origin. 
The Search Begins 
At the 1987 meetings of the American Anthropological Associ?
ation in Chicago, Professor Thomas Abler of the University of 
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, showed several Iroquoianists pho?
tographs of an old mask housed in the David Livingstone Cen?
tre at Blantyre, Scotland (Figure 1). He then gave the photo?
graphs to Fenton, who was keenly interested in older examples 
of such masks, his book on Iroquois masks having just ap?
peared (Fenton, 1987). The Blantyre mask has a figure-eight 
design circling the mouth and eyes, which makes it somewhat 
unique. Otherwise the general form of the mask is not unlike 
that found on Iroquois masks in collections dating from the 
mid-nineteenth century. 
Abler had been given the photographs by Dale Idiens of the 
Royal Museum of Scotland, in Edinburgh. Idiens regarded the 
mask of great importance and hoped that experts in North 
America might be able to provide some information on an item 
seldom encountered in Scottish collections. She told Abler that 
there was no information at all relating to the mask, noting that 
local people often donated such items to the museum at the Liv?
ingstone Centre because they perceived it to hold non-European 
collections (Dale Idiens, pers. comm. to Fenton, 16 Dec 1987). 
The mask came to the museum during the early 1950s "as an 
African Witch Doctor's mask," and it was exhibited as such un?
til Idiens began to suspect it was of Native American origin. 
William N Fenton, Department of Anthropology, emeritus, University 
at Albany-State University of New York; 44 Lakeview Drive, Cooper-
stown, New York 13326-3001, USA. Donald B. Smith, Department of 
History, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta T2N1N4, Canada. 
She informed the warden of the collection, Bill Cunningham, 
of her suspicions, and Cunningham had the mask taken off ex?
hibit and placed in storage (Bill Cunningham, pers. comm. to 
Roland Force, 24 Jan 1989). 
In 1988 Fenton, eager to study the mask, recommended that 
it be acquired by the Museum of the American Indian-Heye 
Foundation in New York, where he was a trustee. The director 
of the Museum of the American Indian at the time, Roland W. 
Force, contacted Cunningham, who was advised to price the 
mask at not more than 1200 ? (approximately $1850). The sale 
was never completed because other, more pressing matters in?
tervened. The ultimate affiliation of the Museum of the Ameri?
can Indian and the destiny of its collections just then preoccu?
pied the director and the trustees. 
Not until 1994 was Fenton able to examine the mask first?
hand. In May of that year, he travelled to Glasgow and then ar?
ranged to visit the Livingstone Centre in nearby Blantyre, 
where he had the opportunity to handle the specimen and pho?
tograph it from several angles.1 The following October he 
showed his photographs and described the mask at the Confer?
ence on Iroquois Research, held in Rensselaerville, New York. 
One of the Iroquois people present, Nora Carrier of the Onon?
daga Longhouse at Six Nations Reserve, volunteered to Dr. 
Hanni Woodbury, who was sitting with her: "My grandmother 
had a mask like that. It was Delaware." Later, Carrier repeated 
this remark to both Fenton and Woodbury, which set all the 
conference participants wondering. 
Peter Jones, Father and Son 
These events inspired William C. Sturtevant to dig up his notes 
on the objects and illustrations of objects collected by the Rev?
erend Peter Jones (William C. Sturtevant, pers. comm. to Fen?
ton, 5 Oct 1994). Jones was a Mississauga (eastern Ojibwa) In?
dian who served as a Methodist missionary among the Ojibwas 
and Munsee Delawares of Southwestern Ontario from 1823 un?
til his death in 1856 (Smith, 1985). In his book History of the 
Ojebway Indians, which appeared posthumously in 1861, 
Jones illustrated three masks, or carved faces. Two of these are 
on a single plate with the heading "Me-Zeengk is the name of 
this God;" the left one is labeled "A Muncey Idol," and the 
right one is labeled "A Muncey Devil Idol" (Jones, 1861, oppo?
site p. 83, left and right) (Figure 2). The third mask is on a sec?
ond plate labeled "Pabookowaih" (Figure 3), explained in a 
279 
280 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 1.?Full-face (a), profile (b), and back (c, opposite) views of the mask at Blantyre, Scotland: a, note the 
square chin, the fringe of dew-claw rattles, the handle resembling a dance wand, and especially how the lower of 
five supra-orbital wrinkles incised on the forehead is extended to frame the eyes and mouth in a figure-eight 
motif; b, note the remains of feather tufts at the crown and handle and the skin cover at the back; c, the skin cover 
is lashed to 11 holes drilled in die rim, which is thicker than it is on Iroquois false faces. Photographs by Angus 
Mills, Glasgow. 
note as "the God that crushes or breaks down diseases" (Jones, 
1861, opposite pp. 85, 87, note). 
Nearly 50 years later, M.R. Harrington purchased a mask 
backed by a turtle-shell rattle (Harrington, 1908, pi. 26, oppo?
site p. 417) from Rev. Peter Jones's son, the physician Peter E. 
Jones of the New Credit Reserve of the Mississaugas, which 
borders on the Six Nations Reserve of the Iroquois on Grand 
River, Ontario. Peter Edmund Jones (1843-1909) was born at 
his father's Muncey Mission near London, Ontario, and spent 
the first eight years of his life there and in nearby London. The 
family then moved to Brantford, a largely non-Indian town ad?
jacent to Six Nations Reserve, where the elder Jones died in 
1856. A governess prepared the younger Jones for Brantford 
Grammar School, and after completing his studies, he entered 
NUMBER 44 281 
the University of Toronto medical school. There and at Queen's 
College, Kingston, he completed his medical studies, and in 
1866 he became the first Canadian Indian to attain a doctor of 
medicine degree (Smith, 1994). 
Following his father's example, Dr. Jones opted to practice 
in an Indian community. He settled at Hagersville, adjacent to 
New Credit Reserve and just west of Six Nations Reserve. Al?
though but one-quarter Indian by birth and married to an En?
glish woman, he apparently identified himself as Mississauga. 
During the 1880s he served two terms as head chief of the Mis?
sissaugas, and he worked to improve their legal status with the 
Province of Ontario, where they resided, and with the Indian 
Department in Ottawa. He later served as agent for the Missis?
sauga Band of Eastern Ojibwa. He also edited and published a 
newspaper, The Indian, and collected both books on Indians 
and Native American artifacts, which he occasionally traded or 
sold to museums (Smith, 1994).2 
When Harrington bought the mask from Dr. Jones, Jones told 
him that his father had collected the mask. Harrington consid?
ered the mask to be very old and of Mississauga derivation, a 
conclusion reinforced by Jones's claim that it was the Pa?
bookowaih illustrated in his father's book (Jones, 1861, oppo?
site p. 85).3 Jones attributed differences between the mask he 
sold Harrington and the illustration in his father's book to liber?
ties taken by the artist (Harrington, 1908:417). 
The mask that Harrington purchased and reported on (Har?
rington, 1908:416-417, pi. 26; American Museum of Natural 
History (AMNH), New York, cat. no. 50.1/1447) derives from 
the same genre as the Blantyre mask, but it is not the mask il?
lustrated in Rev. Peter Jones's book (1861). Although it has the 
same square chin, elliptical mouth, straight nose, eye sconces, 
and supraorbital wrinkles, it lacks the distinctive figure-eight 
motif surrounding the eyes and mouth. No traces of feathers, 
hair, or fringe of dew-claw rattles, if ever present, remain, al?
though Dr. Jones told Harrington that he remembered when the 
mask he sold had its crown of feathers, deer hair, and fringe of 
rattling deer hoofs, all of which appear on the Blantyre mask. 
Moreover, the Harrington piece is backed by a turtle-shell rat?
tle, the handle protruding beneath the chin, whereas the handle 
to the Blantyre mask resembles a dance wand. And the Blan?
tyre piece retains the now-disintegrating remains of feather 
tufts at the crown and the remains of a deer-hair fringe with 
dew-claw rattles attached, features amply illustrated in the 
drawing in Rev. Peter Jones's book. 
The statement by Jones's son initially led Sturtevant to be?
lieve that the Muncey Idol mask illustrated in the elder Jones's 
book might be the one that M.R. Harrington bought from 
Jones's son, which is now in the AMNH (see Jones, 1861, op?
posite 83, left; Fenton, 1987, pi. 18-1B).4 A close comparison 
of the two revealed, however, that they are different. Upon 
learning about the Blantyre mask from Fenton, Sturtevant iden?
tified it as the Pabookowaih mask illustrated in Rev. Peter 
Jones's book. Thus the mask sold by Dr. Jones to Harrington is 
not among the three in the elder Jones's book. 
The Transatlantic Journey 
Our establishing a definite association of the Blantyre mask 
with the Reverend Peter Jones resolves only one of three puz?
zles surrounding this mask. The second puzzle is how the mask 
got from Ontario to Scotland. 
After the 1994 Conference on Iroquois Research, Donald 
Smith of Calgary University, biographer of both Rev. Peter 
Jones and his son, supplied Fenton with documentation on 
Ojibwa-Mississauga travelers abroad (Smith, 1976, 1987, 
1994). He noted that Rev. Peter Jones made three extended trips 
to Britain?in 1831-1832, 1837-1838, and 1844-1846?to 
282 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 2.?Two comparable Munsee (Delaware) masks, the Me-Zeenk of Rev. Peter Jones (1861): left, "A 
Muncey Idol;" right, "A Muncey Devil Idol." The Edward E. Ayer Collection, Newberry Library. Courtesy of the 
Newberry Library. 
promote and raise funds for his mission among the Mississauga 
and the Munsee Delaware. Jones visited Glasgow, among other 
cities in Great Britain, and sat for his photograph wearing In?
dian dress (King, 1982:65). He also brought with him an array 
of native artifacts, including masks, to illustrate his lectures on 
Native Americans.5 These performances evidently attracted 
large audiences. 
It thus is conceivable that Jones left the mask in Scotland on 
one of his trips there. It also is possible that the mask was 
taken there by Jones's half-brother Maungwudaus, or George 
Henry. Maungwudaus carried a collection of Indian artifacts 
with him when he led an Ojibwa troupe to Paris in 1845, and 
two years later he visited Scotland (Maungwudaus, 1848). The 
American painter George Catlin produced a series of sketches 
of this Ojibwa troupe. There is a further illustration in a 
sketchbook, attributed to George Catlin and now in the 
Gilcrease Institute in Tulsa, Oklahoma, labeled '"PA-BO-KO-
WAIGH, the Crushing God'?Indian Idol," that bears a cer?
tain resemblance to the mask at Blantyre (Hamilton, 1972, op?
posite p. 44). The mouth is different, but the crown of feath?
ers, dew-claw fringe, square chin, suggestion of a protruding 
and lashed handle beneath the chin, and hint of a figure-eight 
motif on the left cheek all point to the same genre (Hamilton, 
1972, opposite p. 44). 
Other evidence suggests, however, that the Blantyre mask 
reached Scotland after 1861. There is no doubt that this mask is 
the same as the Pabookowaih illustrated in Jones's 1861 book, 
which was published 11 years after he concluded his Scottish 
tour. It is possible, of course, that Jones's wife, Eliza, a trained 
artist, made sketches of the mask many years prior to the publi?
cation of the book that could have served as the basis for the 
published illustration. 
There were several people in the area of the New Credit Re?
serve who had connections to Scotland and specifically Blan?
tyre. N.H. Livingston (1835-1926), "a nephew of the cele?
brated explorer Dr. Livingston [sic],"6 lived in Hagersville, 
Ontario, near Six Nations Reserve, where he was manager of a 
branch of the Bank of Hamilton. In 1886 Livingston was 
listed among the guests at a tea held at the council house on 
Credit Reserve to honor a visiting Mississauga chief, John 
NUMBER 44 
0X^\ 
FIGURE 3.?Pabookowaih of Rev. Peter Jones, after the original (Jones, 1861). 
The Edward E. Ayer Collection, Newberry Library. Courtesy of the Newberry 
Library. 
Tecumseh Henry, the son of Maungwudaus (The Indian, 3 Feb 
1886). 
N.H. Livingston's father, John (1811-1899), elder brother of 
the African explorer, emigrated to Canada around 1856, set?
tling at Listowel, northwest of Waterloo, Ontario, where he 
died in 1889 (Martin and Simpson, 1989:103; Stratford-Perth 
Archives, Ontario, pers. comm. to Donald Smith, 17 Aug 
1995). Several other Livingston kindred from Blantyre also 
emigrated to Canada and the United States, and, like other 
283 
loyal Scots, revisited Scotland, some of them to stay (J.C. Cun?
ningham (Keeper of Manuscripts, National Library of Scot?
land), interview with Fenton, 1995). 
Any one of these people who had contact with either Dr. 
Jones or N.H. Livingston could have brought the mask to Scot?
land, and one of their descendants, supposing the mask was of 
African origin, could have donated it to the Livingstone Centre. 
There are, however, no records at the Livingstone Centre or 
among the Livingstone Papers at the National Museum of Scot?
land, Edinburgh, of donations from either N.H. Livingston or 
Dr. Peter E. Jones. It is unlikely that documentation will ever 
be found that would reveal how the mask reached Scotland. 
Establishing A Cultural Affiliation 
The third puzzle is the cultural origins of this mask. Because 
the elder Jones labelled the mask he illustrated in his book? 
the mask we now know is the Blantyre mask?with the Missis?
sauga term "Pabookowaih," the implication is that it is of Mis?
sissauga origin. It is likely, however, that all of the masks defi?
nitely associated with Rev. Peter Jones were created by the 
Munsee Delaware. 
Jones certainly would have had the opportunity to collect 
such masks among the Munsee Delaware. When he served as a 
missionary among them, from 1841 to 1849, the Munsee Dela?
ware were abandoning their native religion and converting to 
Christianity. We know that Christian zealots obtained such 
masks when the Delaware Big House at Six Nations was dis?
mantled, about the same time. Nora Carrier's instant recogni?
tion of the Blantyre mask as Delaware lends further credence to 
this hypothesis. 
It is likely that the Munsee Delaware used the Blantyre mask 
for curing purposes and that Jones converted the Delaware con?
cept of the spirit face, "Me-Zeengk" (Jones, 1861, opposite p. 
83), into his native Mississauga concept of Pabookowaih, pos?
sibly because the power to "crush" disease was attributed to 
such masks or spirits in both contexts.7 The conclusion that it 
was associated with curing is supported in M.R. Harrington's 
1908 report of field collecting among the Canadian Delaware 
the previous year. Harrington (1908:416, pi. 25, opposite p. 
414) collected only one mask ("mizink") among the Delaware, 
and it had been used for healing the sick. Although the hair is 
attached in the Iroquois manner, the lines are burned in instead 
of painted or carved, and Harrington noted that it was much 
cruder than Iroquois masks. 
Unlike Iroquois False Face masks used to treat disease, the 
Blantyre mask was designed to be held in the hand and not to 
be worn as a face mask. Harrington quoted other Mississauga 
informants as saying that such masks were rarely worn but 
were carried by the handle while curing the sick. The handle 
to the Blantyre face is permanently lashed and protrudes be?
neath the chin to enable carrying it, and the hide cover at the 
back appears to be lashed in place so that it could not be worn. 
Shamans sometimes used such masks for divination and kept 
284 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
them hanging in little bark houses when not in use (Har?
rington, 1908:417). 
Conclusions 
Following Harrington's lead, Rolf Krusche of Leipzig com?
pleted a thorough canvas of the literature and reported the re?
sults of his research in a critical monograph in which he argued 
for the existence of an ancient mask tradition in the Eastern 
Woodlands (Krusche, 1986). He proposed a genetic connection 
between masks carved on trees in the Iroquois manner and por?
table masks hung on posts and carved on posts in the Delaware 
Big House. Noting that portable masks sometimes became sta?
tionary icons, he concluded "that the wooden masks of the 
Woodland Indians evolved out of tree and post faces" 
(Krusche, 1986:24). He found confirmation of this metamor?
phosis in contemporary Iroquois mask carving. Iroquois carv?
ers regularly fully develop the face before hollowing out the 
back to the depth required for its intended use. Delaware 
masks, which may be carried and, as in the case of the Blantyre 
specimen, even fitted with a handle, are not finished to the 
depth of Iroquois False Faces, which are invariably worn. They 
may thus be seen as continuing an earlier stage in the develop?
ment of masks from carved posts. 
Notes 
Sheila Watt, Education Officer, and her staff welcomed Fenton at the Living?
ston Centre and could not have been more cooperative in affording him free?
dom to examine the mask and photograph it without interruption. 
1. The catalog entry for the Blantyre mask reads "Wooden Mask, # 871. 31 
cm. x 18 cm.; overall: 70 cm." 
2. In 1898 the United States National Museum acquired pieces from the col?
lection of Peter E. Jones (William C. Sturtevant, pers. comm. to Fenton, 5 Oct 
1994). Also, M.R. Harrington (1908) collected a mask from Peter E. Jones, 
now in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, which is illus?
trated and discussed in Fenton, 1987:466-467, pi. 18.2. 
3. Harrington (1908:417) recorded Jones's term "Pabookowaih" from a Mis?
sissauga Ojibwa as "Pabokowaf." 
4. The mask with the turtleshell-rattle backing illustrated at the right of the 
same plate ("A Muncey Devil Idol," Jones, 1861, opposite p. 83, left) is in the 
Karl May Museum at Radebeul, Germany, where Sturtevant studied it 
(Krusche, 1986:38). The rattle is present but is separated. 
5. Handbills and press cuttings, National Library of Scotland, Dep. 360/146/ 
273, no. 4/360. Edinburgh Advertiser, 5 Aug 1845; Aberdeen Journal, 13 Aug 
1845. 
6. The Indian, 3 Feb 1886. Later generations of Livingstones in Canada 
dropped the final "e." 
7. We have no other information on Mississauga masking or on beliefs re?
garding masks except what was recorded by Harrington (1908:417); see text 
below. "Me-Zeengk" is Munsee masinkw "spirit face," literally "all face;" "Pa?
bookowaih" appears to be Ojibwa rather than Munsee but cannot be definitely 
analyzed (Ives Goddard, pers. comm. to Fenton, 1997). 
Literature Cited 
Fenton, William N. 
1987. The False Faces of the Iroquois, xxi+522 pages. Norman: Univer?
sity of Oklahoma Press. 
Hamilton, Charles, editor 
1972. Cry of the Thunderbird: The American Indian's Own Story. xviii + 
283 pages. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 
Harrington, M.R. 
1908. Vestiges of Material Culture among the Canadian Delawares. Amer?
ican Anthropologist, 10:408-418. 
Jones, Rev. Peter 
1861. History of the Ojebway Indians; with Especial Reference to Their 
Conversion to Christianity, vi+1 leaf, 278 pages. London: A.W. 
Bennett. 
King, Jonathan CH. 
1982. Thunderbird and Lightning: Indian Life in Northeastern North 
America, 1600-1900. 96 pages. London: British Museum Publica?
tions. 
Krusche, Rolf 
1986. The Origin of the Mask Concept in the Eastern Woodlands of North 
America. Annemarie Shimony and William C. Sturtevant, transla?
tors, Man in the Northeast, 31:1?47. [The original German version 
is Zur Genese des Maskenwesens in ostlichen Waldland Nordameri?
kas, Jahrbuch des Museums fiir Volkerkinde zu Leipzig, 30:137-190 
(Berlin, 1975).] 
Martin, Ged, and Jeffrey Simpson, editors 
1989. Canada's Heritage in Scotland. 245 pages. Toronto and Oxford: 
Dundurn Press. 
Maungwudaus [George Henry] 
1848. An Account of the Ojibway Indians. 16 pages. Boston: self pub?
lished. 
Smith, Donald B. 
1976. Maungwudaus Goes Abroad. The Beaver, autumn, outfit 307:4-9. 
[Published by the Hudson's Bay Company.] 
1985. Jones, Peter. Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 8:439-442. Tor?
onto: University of Torornto Press. 
1987. Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and 
the Mississauga Indians, xix+372 pages. Toronto: University of 
Toronto Press. 
1994. Jones, Peter Edward. Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 13: 
530-531. 
The Linguistic Writings of Alfred Kiyana on Fox (Meskwaki) 
Ives Goddard 
The Meskwaki writer Alfred Kiyana, who lived from 1877 to 
1918, produced a large number of manuscripts in the last seven 
years of his life. These manuscripts were written for Truman 
Michelson of the Bureau of American Ethnology between July 
1911, when Michelson first visited the Meskwaki Settlement in 
Tama, Iowa, and November 1918, when Kiyana died in the 
Spanish Influenza pandemic. They are now in the Smithsonian 
Institution's National Anthropological Archives (NAA) at the 
Museum Support Center (MSC), Suitland, Maryland. As to 
content, they are mostly traditional narratives and ceremonial 
texts, but they include some ethnographic descriptions and 
other miscellaneous compositions. 
One category of Kiyana's literary output that seems of 
broader significance is his linguistic writings. These are 
mostly collections of or commentaries on words, but there are 
also occasional passages that reflect an awareness of and inter?
est in grammatical and derivational patterns. Like the rest of 
his writings, they are all written entirely in Meskwaki (Fox), in 
the Meskwaki version of the Great Lakes Algonquian Sylla?
bary (Kinkade and Martina, 1996:250; Walker, 1996:168-172; 
Goddard, 1997).1 An inventory of Kiyana's linguistic writings 
in the NAA follows; they are referred to in the text by their 
identifying letter. 
A [Commentary on "The Story of the One That Was Blessed by the 
White Buffalo" (NAA ms. 2062).] NAA ms. 2819: 85 pages 
[ca. 1912]. 
B [Commentary on "What Green Buffalo Did When he Bestowed a 
Blessing" (NAA ms. 1786).] NAA mss. 2763:1^19, and 2952 
[part, at the end, separately paginated]:50-54, 54 pages [ca. 
1912]. 
C Kinship Terminology and Archaic Vocabulary (cinawetiweni, 
eyiki-meko asawayezkanawini). NAA mss. 2232:1^10 and 
2277:41-72, 72 pages [1916]. 
D [(Lists and Ethnographic Notes:) Medicines, Tohkan and Kishko, 
Names of Dogs Belonging to the Different Clans, Insects, Fish 
and Other Water Creatures, People Who Had Spiritual Power 
Long Ago, Early Indian Foods, Words.] NAA mss. 2841:[ 1-58] 
and 2778: [1-48], 106 pages [1917]. 
The Meskwakis became literate in their language in the 
nineteenth century. In 1880 the Indian agent for the 
Ives Goddard, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of 
Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560-
0100, USA. 
Meskwakis, the sympathetic George L. Davenport, reported 
that they "prefer to teach one another to read and write in their 
own language, and great progress has been made in their edu?
cation in that way. They understand well the use of postal 
cards and post-office money-orders, and carry on a large corre?
spondence with themselves and the Indians of Kansas and In?
dian Territory" (ARCIA, 1880:97). The earliest examples of 
Meskwaki writing that I have seen are the month and day 
names in dates carved on a hole-and-slot heddle in the MSC, 
which indicate the years [18]87 and [18]88 (Sturtevant, 
1977:335). Historical manuscripts are extant that bear dates 
earlier than 1880, but the existence of a manuscript actually 
written before this date has not been confirmed. Thus when 
Alfred Kiyana learned to write, he was in one of the first few 
generations of his people to be literate. His English was rudi?
mentary and apparently not fluent,2 and most Meskwakis in his 
day probably knew even less. A few of his near age-mates 
were the first Meskwakis to attend school. Not surprisingly, 
then, Meskwaki writing in Kiyana's day consisted essentially 
of varieties of traditional oral discourse transferred directly to 
paper. Yet, in the context of the very inception of literacy, Ki?
yana's linguistic writings show secondary considerations of 
language as an object of study in itself already taking hold and 
finding expression in the written medium. 
Archaic Vocabulary 
The most polished of Kiyana's writings, apparently written in 
1916, is a manuscript he called "Kinship Terminology and Ar?
chaic Vocabulary" (C). This is in two school notebooks that 
have been separately cataloged but that clearly form a unit. It 
begins with a long section in which kinship terms are defined 
and explained, and the rest of it is a list of unusual or archaic 
words and their definitions. There is also a collection of vari?
ous lists, in two notebooks, some with ethnographic commen?
tary (D). Most of what is in the first of the two notebooks of 
manuscript D is ethnographic rather than linguistic in nature, 
though the lists of items in certain semantic fields, such as 
plants used for medicine, have some linguistic significance as 
lexical collections. More intriguing is Kiyana's wordlist, a 
stream-of-consciousness listing with no definitions or explana?
tions, which begins at the end of the first notebook and contin?
ues through the whole of the second notebook. Although Ki?
yana indicated no page numbers, and there are separate 
285 
286 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
archival paginations of the two notebooks, the second appears 
to be a continuation of the first. Despite the fact that the listing 
in manuscript D contains words that appear with explanations 
in manuscript C, it appears that D was written after C, in 1917.3 
Finally there are two commentaries, of a type that may be 
called scholiastic, which Kiyana wrote on two of his ceremo?
nial texts, those referred to for short as White Buffalo and 
Green Buffalo (A and B, respectively). These explain passages 
in the text and especially songs, often adding ethnographic and 
exegetical commentary. The White Buffalo text was probably 
written in 1912, and in any event the commentary on it must 
have been written before Horace Poweshiek, one of Michel-
son's Meskwaki assistants, wrote out his English translation of 
the main text in September and October of 1915. The Green 
Buffalo text and commentary were probably written about the 
same time as the White Buffalo text and commentry, but later.4 
Kiyana's presentation of the kinship terminology in manu?
script C does not cover all kinship terms and lacks an overall 
framework, but the individual entries reflect careful thought in 
their selection and organization. They also neatly put to rest 
any notion that the abstract structure of a kinship terminology 
is inaccessible to its native-speaking users without referring to 
actual genealogies. This source was used extensively in my 
paper on Fox kinship terminology (Goddard, 1992). An exam?
ple will make clear the general style of Kiyana's explanations 
(C: 1B-G):5 
(1) neniwa otehkwemani onicanesani, onekwahani. 
man 3(')s+sister 3(')s+child 3(')s+nephew 
'A man's sister's child is his nephew.' 
onekwahani okwisani neniwa eh=osisemici. 
3(')s+nephew 3(')s+son man have.grandchild+3s(-3')/AOR 
'And his nephew's son is the man's grandchild.' 
osisemani eh=onicanesinici, 
3(')s+grandchild have.child+37AOR 
'And when his grandchild has a child, 
nisonameki osisemani. 
for.the.second.time 3(')s+grandchild 
it's his grandchild of a second kind.' 
neniwa okwisani onicanesani, opehki;osisemani. 
man 3(')s+son 3(')s+child 3(')s+real-3(')s+grandchild 
'A man's son's child is his real grandchild.' 
neniwa opehki-osisemani onicanesani, seski=meko 
man 3(')s+real-3(')s+grandchild 3(')s+child only=EMPH 
osisemani. 
3(')s+grandchild 
'And a man's real grandchild's child is just plain his grand?
child.' 
Here, having introduced extensional uses of 'grandchild', Ki?
yana then explains how 'real grandchild' (literally) can be dif?
ferentiated from these. Characteristically, however, he does not 
give a complete account of the terminology for all kin-types re?
ferred to as 'grandchild'. 
Another example attests additional features of Kiyana's style 
(C: 4F): 
(2) neniwa osisehani (nekya otawemawani) 
man 3(')s+maternal.uncle (ls+mother 3(')s+brother) 
owiwani, okakaci-osekwisani. 
3(')s+wife 3(')s+joking-3 (')s+patemal.aunt 
'A man's maternal uncle's wife is his teasing aunt.' 
The phrase nekya otawemawani 'my mother's brother', given 
in parentheses in the edition excerpted in example 2, is written 
in the manuscript above the word osisehani 'his maternal un?
cle' as an interlinear gloss. The casting of this phrase in the 
first person attests a perhaps ad hoc metalinguistic style and 
shows that its intended function is as a gloss, a comment stand?
ing outside the sentence as an explanation of a word, and not as 
an expansion added in apposition within the sentence. 
In another entry, Kiyana defines a kinship term scantily at?
tested in Fox but with cognates in Cree and Ojibwa. The form 
used is a reciprocal verb based on a derived transitive verb of 
possession, which gives the meaning 'to have each other as... ' 
(C: 10A, B): 
(3) owiwetihaki okwiswawani owiwetihaki otaneswawani 
married.couple 3p+son married.couple 3p+daughter 
owiwetinite, onicaneswawahi, 
get.married+37sUBJ 3p+children 
fotatawatiwa-ci. 
have.each.other.as.co-parents-in-law+3p/CONJ 
'If their children get married, one couple's son and one couple's 
daughter, they would be co-parents-in-law to each other.'6 
In his notes on this manuscript, Michelson recorded the under?
lying kinship term as netatawawa 'my son-in-law's or daugh?
ter-in-law's parent', and a Meskwaki speaker interviewed in 
1998 pronounced this as netatawa-wa (compare Cree 
nitihtawa-w 'my fellow-parent-in-law' (Bloomfield, 1984:6) 
and Ojibwa (indindawaa) (Nichols and Nyholm, 1995:66)).7 
Fox shows assimilation in the quality of the second vowel; the 
length of the third vowel varies. Kiyana's entry is a third wit?
ness that supports the recognition of a kin term not previously 
recognized for Algonquian, which can be reconstructed as 
Proto-Algonquian (PA) *netenta()wawa 'my fellow-parent-
in-law, one whose child is married to my child'. 
After the section on kinship terminology, manuscript C 
has a section headed "Archaic Vocabulary" (nasawaye^ 
eyoteki ^kanawini 'words used long ago'). Each word is 
typically given at the end of a separate entry after an often dis?
cursive explanation, sometimes with a plural or other addi?
tional inflectional form. A survey of several examples will 
make clear the nature of this material and its value, as well as 
Kiyana's method and presentational style. 
The briefer entries in this section typically state the equiva?
lence of an archaic word with a current synonym (C: 13H): 
NUMBER 44 287 
(4) aye esitehkasowaci macihkiwesaki,| 
earlier be.called.(so)+3p/PPL(OBL) eldest.brother+ANpl 
kehkiwesa. 
eldest.brother+ANsg 
'In earlier times what eldest brothers were called was 
kehkiwesa.' 
The words equated in example 4 are used interchangeably in 
some traditional texts, but Kiyana's definition makes clear for 
us which was the ordinary word and which was the synonym 
used for variety. 
Some entries have longer explanations (C: 35A-D): 
(5) neniwa ne-hi-si-sa-ta newate| 
man know.how-hunt+3s/PPL(ANsg) see+3s-3'/SUBJ 
pesekesiwani, nekotahi kahkisoci, 
deer+OBVsg somewhere hide.self+3s/CONJ 
enowenici pesekesiwahi inoweci, 
utter.(so)+37pPL(obl) deer+OBVpl utter.(so)+3s/CONJ 
memekimewa. 
call.(animal)+3s-37lND 
'If a man who is a skilled hunter sees a deer, he would hide 
somewhere and would give a call the way deer sound: He 
calls it.' 
The word defined here, memekimewa 'he calls him (an ani?
mal)', was not generally known in the 1990s, but on the basis 
of this entry, it was possible to elicit it from a single elderly 
speaker in 1997. 
This entry is notable for attesting two plain conjunct forms 
(another was in example 3). The modes of the conjunct order in 
Algonquian languages are used in various kinds of subordinate 
clauses, differentiated by suffixes and other morphological pro?
cesses, and the aorist conjunct in Fox, marked by the aorist pro?
clitic preverb (eh-), is also the usual mode in narrative. Plain 
conjuncts have the pronominal inflection of the conjunct order 
with no modal preverb or suffix. They are exceedingly rare in 
narrative texts; the apparent examples seem to function as 
aorist conjuncts and most likely are to be considered recent or 
colloquial forms of the aorist with the aorist proclitic preverb 
dropped (Voorhis, 1971:75; Goddard, 1988:197, 205- 206). 
The true plain conjunct shows up in expository prose, as in ex?
amples 3 and 5, with the meaning 'would' in consequential 
clauses. The use of this form in Kiyana's definitions provides a 
good demonstration of the need to examine a variety of genres 
of discourse in order to document the use of the full grammati?
cal resources of the language. 
Definitions are a genre of discourse that brings out the use of 
precise, carefully monitored language and that ideally requires 
indefinite, non-specific phrasing that lacks the specificity of 
reference characteristic of ordinary narratives. As a result of 
these unusual demands on the expressive resources of a lan?
guage, definitions may exhibit constructions that are otherwise 
observed rarely, and then only in the highest stylistic registers 
(C: 30H-J): 
(6) ihkwewa esite-he-ki neniwiweni 
woman+ANsg think.(so)+X/ppL(OBL) being.a.man+lNsg 
eh=inekihkwihkwewici, 
be.woman.(so).big+3s/AOR 
eh=makihkwewehici, mesawinakosiwa. 
be.big.woman/DlM+3s/AOR appear.desirable+3s/lND 
'When a woman is the size men like, a larger woman, she looks 
desirable.' 
Here esiteheki 'what one (indefinite) thinks, the way one 
likes' is a verb inflected for an indefinite subject. An indefi?
nite-subject form cannot occur with an ordinary, overt subject 
noun phrase, but this one has as a nominal adjunct the abstract 
inanimate noun neniwiweni 'maleness; men (collective)'. This 
noun is derived from a verb of being, neniwi- 'be a man', 
which is in turn derived from the animate noun neniwa 'man' 
(plural neniwaki). This construction, with an abstract noun in 
effect agreeing with the indefinite subject of the verb, permits 
the subject to remain appropriately indefinite while also being 
specified as male. 
This entry is also notable for giving insight into the meaning 
and use of a word that goes beyond the usual dictionary defini?
tion.8 
Examples 7-30 summarize the entries rather than giving 
them in full. Single quotes mark my generic glosses of the pre?
ceding word or phrase, single quotes in parentheses indicate a 
direct gloss of Kiyana's Meskwaki definition or explanation 
(the equivalent of ordinary double quotation marks except for 
the difference of language), and parentheses without single 
quotes are used where what Kiyana wrote is summarized. 
(7) nepekwitehe 'I'm thirsty"; also nepekwinawe, nekahkinawe. 
These are three synonyms for 'thirsty', the ordinary one and 
two others. The third word probably meant 'I'm parched', like 
the matching Sauk form (Gordon Whittaker, pers. comm., 
1996). The second word seems to blend the elements of the 
other two. 
In example 8 an ordinary word is given together with a rarer, 
high-register synonym: 
(8) manesenohi 'war' 
('A big fight, when they have a great battle with their enemies, 
when they fight dangerously.') 
mesihkatwi, imi-meko-'ni-'ni kanawini. '"Hostilities": that's 
the same word.' 
This attests a more explicit way of stating that one word is syn?
onymous with another. 
Example 9 gives the synopsis of an entry that contains per?
fectly ordinary words but reflects Kiyana's insight into the 
structure of the lexicon of his language: 
(9) anenwiwa 'he bathes, takes a dip, washes himself 
kokenikewa 'he washes things, does the wash' 
The first word is explained as 'when anyone goes and washes 
himself, using the compound verb mawi-kokenowa 'he goes 
288 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
and washes himself. The second is explained as 'when anyone 
washes anything', using the phrase kekohi kokenamwa 'he 
washes something'. Kiyana had noticed that among the ordi?
nary words referring to washing, the verb meaning 'to bathe, to 
wash oneself is not part of the derivational set based on the 
stem koken-, which covers most kinds of washing and can, in 
fact, be used to define it. In noticing that this verb belongs in 
this semantic set, he perceived and formulated a semantic link?
age lying beneath the overtly divergent forms of the lexical 
items. 
In some cases he recorded an idiomatic meaning for an ordi?
nary word: 
(10) ahkawapiwa 'he guards, acts as a guard, is on guard' 
('When a man's wife looks somewhere and he right away looks 
there, and he also goes around with her all the time.') 
The examination of a series of Kiyana's various entries illus?
trates the topical areas that drew his interest and the kinds of 
lexical items that he thought merited comment. For conve?
nience in this survey, the words Kiyana defined can be classi?
fied according to their degree of obsolescence in the language. 
Some are words that are known today by some speakers but are 
unusual, either rare synonyms or words for items or practices 
that have fallen out of use (11-15). 
(11) mehtasayewa ('A man is naked.') 
This is an unusual word, with a stem consisting of an initial 
meht- 'bare' and a medial -asay- not found elsewhere.9 Perhaps 
the medial is derived from owasayi 'his foreskin', a word that, 
like a lot of sexual vocabulary, is attested only in William 
Jones's manuscript notes.10 
(12) pehkwapisohaki 'green-corn dumplings' 
papakenawaki ['comcakes (fried green-corn dumplings)'] 
This entry describes a traditional way of preparing corn. The 
second word is not explained by Kiyana but is listed as if it 
were a synonym, hence my added gloss is in brackets. 
(13) opehkwinanaki 'skewered pieces of meat roasted next to the 
fire' 
This is another traditional food. 
(14) netoma-wasihawa 'I give him my kill' ('If a man goes hunting 
and kills a deer, and after killing it he skins it, and another 
man who is hunting comes, and he gives it to him.') 
This refers to a traditional food-sharing practice. 
(15) awanwi 'there's a thick fog; thick fog' 
This is a now obsolete word that has cognates elsewhere; cf. 
Ojibwa awan 'there's a fog', Munsee awdn 'there is fog, mist'. 
It preserves a cognate that is otherwise found only in two 
places in Kiyana's texts, once as a noun and once as a verb, and 
it makes the meaning precise. 
Some words Kiyana listed are known passively by some 
speakers today but without a clear idea of their meaning 
(16-21): 
(16) nanawa-tesiwa ('If a man never kills animals for food when he 
hunts, if he fails every time, coming back empty-handed.') 
This word was glossed in the 1990s as 'he lives for nothing', 
which literally translates the component elements; Kiyana's 
gloss makes the idiomatic use of this expression precise. 
(17) anawiwaki ('When people go on an easy hunt, when they go and 
try to kill animals for their food for a short time, just a few 
campers.') 
This obsolete word for 'hunt' (cf. Munsee aldwiw 'he hunts', 
Unami aldi) was recalled by one man in the 1990s as an old 
word for 'go on the warpath'. It seems to apply to small-scale 
hunting trips, between a day's hunt and a major seasonal hunt. 
(18) ana-hpawewa 'he recounts his dream of spiritual blessing for 
power' ('Any person who was blessed by a manitou [a god or 
spirit] when fasting while growing up, who had a significant 
dream about something, if he is in dire straits in any way?for 
example, hard pressed by his enemies?and he recounts that 
dream he had long before.') 
This word was recognized in the 1990s as having to do with a 
dream that was helping a person by being "stuck on to his life," 
but the details about recitation in times of peril were not 
known. 
(19) apanowa (A murderer whose relatives expiate the crime by a 
payment of wergild to the relatives of the victim.) 
This word was explained in the 1990s as applying to someone 
who was relied on or relied on others, but the specific reference 
to the practice of the payment of wergild was unfamiliar. 
(20) nenawihtowa 'marshal' ('one who gives orders to a war party 
and gives the signal to attack') 
This word is found in texts (Michelson, 1925b:588-589, 
594-595); Kiyana's definition gives a clear picture of the eth-
nographically significant meaning, which is confirmed by its 
translation in Sauk as 'camp or hunt policeman' (Skinner, 
1923:140) and by cognates in other languages: Menominee 
nenawehtaw 'great warrior, hero' (Bloomfield, 1975:154) or, 
more likely, 'camp policeman' (Skinner, 1921:143); Narragan?
sett (nanouwetea) 'an overseer and orderer of their worship' 
(Williams, 1936:128). 
(21) wahkwi 'sky' 
Kiyana's definition of this word as 'sky' corresponds to the 
way it is used in songs, though one man in the 1990s thought it 
was 'clouds'. Both meanings are found in other Algonquian 
languages, reflecting PA *waskwi: Cree wasko-w 'cloud', Sev?
ern Ojibwa wahkwi 'cloud', and Munsee wdhkonk 'in heaven'. 
(22) nahkatesimapi 'he is left behind in flight' 
nahkatahonapi 'he is left behind by a canoe party' 
The two stems in example 22 are found in texts but were gener?
ally unknown in the 1990s, and the transitive inanimate corre?
sponding to the first stem was incorrectly analyzed and phone-
micized in Goddard (1994:112). Subsequently, one speaker 
was found who knew both words. 
NUMBER 44 289 
For words of a third set, the phonemic shape is recoverable 
from Fox sources, but even if the word is familiar, the mean?
ing is completely unknown except for Kiyana's explanation 
(23, 24). 
(23) ^sisepeha('warrior') 
This word was glossed by James Geary, working with Harry 
Lincoln, as 'person with prophetic vision'." 
(24) -fnawaciwaki ('If campers are moving and stop to cook, and af?
ter they eat they would break camp.') 
In his discussion of this word, Kiyana glosses eh-nawaciki 
'when one stops-to-cook' explicitly as ehmawacizwacahoki 
'when one stops to cook' (preverb nawaci 'stop and' + stem 
wacaho-'cook'). Clearly the verb in example 24 is formed 
with the initial that appears in the preverb nawaci 'stop and, 
first', and Kiyana recognized this connection. The Fox word 
appears to be the exact cognate of the Cree word nawaciw 'he 
roasts food' and suggests an etymology for it. Roasting would 
be the most convenient and hence the preferred method of 
cooking for a traveling party. 
The words of a fourth set are recoverable with some confi?
dence on the basis of comparative evidence, with the usual ca?
veat that cognates do not always behave as we would like them 
to (25-29): 
(25) "\osiwa ('When a divorced woman marries a man.') 
This is a word that dates back to the Proto-Algonquian kinship 
terminology, reflecting PA *we?siwa 'she marries' (a verb of 
possession derived from *ne?6a 'my husband'). In Fox it has a 
much narrower meaning, basically 'she marries without wed?
ding ceremonies'. 
(26) -\oko(jwa 'doe' ('female deer') 
There is a single textual occurrence of this word. It is the cog?
nate of Menominee okow 'female animal' (Bloomfield, 
1975:173), 'doe' (Skinner, 1921:196), and Shawnee hokowa, 
'doe'. 
(27) "fatekoskweh ('crow') 
This is the match of Ottawa (aandegshkwenh) 'crow' (Rhodes, 
1985:8). 
(28) \wawahtehkohikewa ('if anyone is signaling with the 
hand(s)') 
For this word we have Harry Lincoln's pronunciation as re?
corded by Michelson; the proposed phonemicization is a com?
promise between this and what the cognates point to: Eastern 
Ojibwa (waawaatkohged) 'beckons' (Rhodes, 1985:354), 
Southwestern Ojibwa wattikkwa?ike- 'nod, beckon, wink (as a 
signal)' (Baraga, 1880:404, phonemicized). 
(29) \kenahocikani ('What they use when they tie up their enemies 
when they capture them.') 
No cognates are known for this ethnographically precious word 
for prisoner tie, but the etymological analysis is transparent; it 
is an instrumental noun derived from a stem combining PA 
*ke6- 'restrain' and Fox -ahot 'drag (it)'. 
One word looks like a restructured or misremembered archa?
ism: 
(30) (ninopwa) ('I shall smoke') 
This is clearly related in some way to PA *wespwe-wa 'he 
smokes' (stem *wespwa-). Descriptively, the form in example 
30 appears to consist of the first person future preverb nih- and 
a Fox stem \nohpwa- (word-final shape \nohpwa). Fox 
\nohpwa would be precisely the expected reflex of the first-
person singular form PA *nospwa T smoke' (PA *ne- first per?
son + *wespwa--), with fossilized preservation of the old mor?
phophonemics of prefix contraction otherwise eliminated in 
Fox. Whether the apparent reanalysis of the contracted prefix 
as part of the stem and concomitant restructuring of the form is 
an old feature or results from its having been slightly misre?
membered is an open question. 
Finally, Kiyana defined some archaic words that are simply 
unknown: 
(31) (kanimewa) ('when an old man smokes') 
(mekwatetiha) ('young of buffalo') 
(anepitesia) 'male mink' 
(ketikesaki) 'rabbits' 
(aponewa) (he gives things to his bride) 
(atomepyani) (carved-out container for maple sap) 
(tokesenwi) (the wind is calm) 
(masinepwewa) (he doesn't share his food) 
(ayasekote) (one after another, time after time) 
(akwawewa) (he has a lot of prepared meat hanging up) 
(tetewa) (big fire-log) 
(nekotwenene) ahtowa ('he or she has many children') 
(kecinekotwenenawe) kih-ponipena (we'll pass a potential 
camping place and camp further on) 
(senewiwa) (he or she has a venereal disease) 
(tetakoa) (ceremonial attendant). 
Information on any cognates of the words in example 31 would 
be welcome.12 
Kiyana also has a separate section labeled wawaneskahi-
kanawinani 'naughty words' (32-39). These are terms for sex?
ual behavior but are usually not in themselves indecent. In the 
explanation given in full in example 32, however, information 
on the propriety of words is given (C: 63B-E): 
(32) neniwa owiwani ahpeneci kotakani neniwani 
man 3s+wife all.the.time other+OBVsg man+OBVsg 
manamananite. ' kekohi='pi 
R?D.copulate.with+3'-3'7suBJ something=HRSY 
totatotamawapi owi-wani.[2] 
RED.do.(so).to.(SEC.OBJ).of+X-3/lND 3(')s+wife. 
'''myaneteki kanawini. 
be.bad+0/PPL(lNsg) word 
'
2,wewenehkL kanawini 
be.good+0/ppL(iNsg) word 
'If another man always keeps fornicating1 with a man's wife: 
Something is being done2 to his wife.' 
'improper word 
P^roper word. 
290 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
In this entry there are notes in balloons, attached to the words 
with lines (here rendered as numbered notes), that distinguish 
proper and improper expressions for 'to copulate'. 
(33) nenanocihawa ('I'm bundling with her (sleeping with her se?
cretly without having sex).') 
This is really just an ethnographic explanation of the practice 
of courtship by bundling (to adopt the early American English 
term). A young man sneaks into a wickiup at night and lies 
with a young woman on her sleeping platform, anything further 
being subject to negotiation. 
(34) mehch'pipakinewa 'he raped her' ('When any man "does 
something" to a woman, and she is unwilling but the man 
goes ahead and attacks her.') 
This is an ordinary expression, literally meaning 'it is said he 
threw her to the ground'. 
(35) wapasihapi, menipopi 'she is gang-raped' ('When a woman 
drinks whisky and is very drunk, and many men repeatedly 
"do something" to her.') 
These are also common expressions, the first meaning literally 
'she is disparaged, treated as of no worth'. Both are proper. 
(36) ~\pihtawa-hkwisecikewa 'she has lovers on the side' ('A mar?
ried woman who lets any men fornicate with her.') 
(37) fpiszawi-kocini 'the one who first had sex with her' 
The third person indicative form would bepisi-awiwewa. 
(38) "faski-pasiskicinwa 'he has sex for the first time' 
The literal meaning is 'he gets peeled back for the first time' 
(39) ^ki-mahikewa 'he copulates with a sleeping woman' 
The literal meaning of this is 'he strikes secretly'. Examples 36 
through 39 have not yet been confirmed by field work, but their 
analysis seems clear. 
Wordlist 
Kiyana 's apparently later unglossed wordlist (D, ms. 
2841:49-58, ms. 2778:1-48) gives words at times in semanti-
cally related sets, in some cases in formally related sets, and 
sometimes without discernible order. There are pairs and sets 
of similar words and expressions: the list begins with two ques?
tions with kasi 'what?' followed by two derivationally related 
negative forms (T didn't find it' and 'he doesn't remember it'), 
and two semantically similar phrases with the emphatic pro?
noun wina 'himself ('he kept instructing him or them him?
self and 'he conversed with someone else himself) . Two 
words illustrate the suppletive stem and final for 'sing'. A set 
of four verbs all have the initial pin- 'clean'. A set of eight il?
lustrates aniw- 'fast, intense, etc.'; perhaps Kiyana's interest 
was caught by the different meanings it has depending on the 
following final: 'he walks fast'; 'he has big, bright eyes'; 'he 
has a loud voice'; 'she has children one right after another'. 
There are some words for cooking and some for riding horses 
and some for types of dogs. A page of verbs relates to court?
ship, including different inflected forms of the important verb 
for 'to snow someone' (literally 'hit with a missile'), and a set 
of verbs with the medial for 'wife' or 'girlfriend'. There is a set 
of aorist forms for seasons and types of weather. A list of body-
part terms beginning with the third person or indefinite prefix 
o- is followed by a list with the indefinite prefix me- (Goddard, 
1995:126). Another short list is of articles of clothing. And so 
forth, page after page. 
Some special topics are treated. There is one page each list?
ing standard pick-up lines used by young men, conventional 
responses to these used by young women, and common or 
culturally normative remarks made by jealous husbands to 
their wives. There is a list of characters in winter stories, in?
cluding some for which stories have not yet been found in the 
corpus. There are a few sets of forms with certain preverbs 
and sentences with certain idiomatic particles, though why 
these were selected is not evident. There is one page of rela?
tional forms of the verb, a subtle, obsolescent, and paradig-
matically defective verbal inflectional category (Goddard, 
1995:141-146). 
Some examples of the pick-up lines (40-43) and responses 
(44-46) attest to Kiyana's interest in this semantic field: 
(40) tani-cah amiz "sikeki nisiyakwe. | 'How would it be if we went 
together?' 
(41) tatepi-cah eyayani. 'Where are you going?' 
(42) keposi-kiwakiwacikapa. 'You're always standing around all 
by your lonesome.' 
(43) anikemeh-pe-takawi 'sisineno. 'Could you slide in a little?' 
(44) nesakwenemo=c'ah wih=kihkisinani. 'I don't want to move 
over.' 
(45) mese, 'nakwano,'' inenane, kih-nakwa? 'When I tell you to 
go, will you go?' 
(46) hwi-'',pehki-''skwe-'', memenesimiwaneni.\ 'Gee, you're really 
embarrassing me.' 
Example 43 is a line used to initiate bundling (the practice re?
ferred to in example 33), and examples 44 and 45 are presum?
ably listed as two possible responses (although not arranged by 
Kiyana to make the connection explicit). 
A set of expressions illustrates the idiomatic use of the pre?
verb nana hi, derived from an initial that usually means 'ar?
range, order, position suitably': 
(47) nenanahi-owihkani T shouldn't have made him my friend.' 
There is a full page each of examples illustrating the particles 
napi 'better' and pehki 'really': 
(48) napi-wina natawi-mawizkyawamenakwe. 'Why don't we try 
to go and get someone jealous at us?' 
(49) o-',?pehki=meko nenanocimekwa. 'Oh, he really maligned me 
unjustly' 
The subject matter reflects a continuing interest in matters re?
volving around courtship, jealousy, and their consequences. 
NUMBER 44 291 
The Commentary on the White Buffalo Text 
Kiyana's two scholiastic commentaries provide explanations 
and exegesis for two of his ceremonial texts. These are written 
in sections that are marked with the numbers of the pages 
where the words or passage being commented on appear in the 
original manuscripts. As the designation chosen for them here 
implies, they may be compared to the scholia that provide ex?
planations and commentary in manuscripts of classical texts, 
though Kiyana's commentaries perform this function for texts 
he wrote himself. 
The examples below are from the commentary written on the 
White Buffalo text (A). Some of the explanations are for words 
that are fairly ordinary: 
(50) P. 11 [of the text]: 
eh-kimaheci 'he is approached unobserved' 
[Explanation:] 
kimoci eh-newoci. ...wina eh-pwawiznewoweci 
'He was secretly seen... .He himself saw no one.' 
This is a straightforward gloss of an ordinary but semantically 
complex word. It is part of an explanation that expands on the 
text. 
Many of Kiyana's explanations are glosses of songs. There 
exist three sets of interpretations of the songs given in the ac?
count of the White Buffalo ceremony and its origin. Horace 
Poweshiek included translations of the songs in the translation 
he wrote of the entire text. After this translation was typed up, 
Michelson reviewed the meaning of the songs with Kiyana di?
rectly, using Willie Poweshiek, Horace's younger brother, as an 
interpreter. (Michelson dated this interview to 1917.) Kiyana's 
written commentary seems to be independent of both of these. 
He must have written it with the text he was commenting on in 
front of him, and yet it would be reasonable to think that its 
composition was a reaction to inquiries about the meaning of 
the text and its songs. And curiously, in his edition of the White 
Buffalo text (Michelson, 1925a), Michelson uses the informa?
tion he obtained in the 1917 interview but makes no reference 
to Kiyana's written commentary. 
A simple example from a song is the following: 
(51) P. 120 [of the text; from a song]: 
mehtekwineniwaki, ? neniwaki. 
tree-men men 
[Explanation:] 
caki='si- mehtekoni,... 
all (such)- trees (='all kinds of trees') 
Here Kiyana had apparently noticed that the noun final -in-
eniw- in the ceremonial term mehtekwineniwaki 'tree spirits, 
trees' does not mean specifically 'man, male', like the corre?
sponding noun neniwa, whose plural echoes it in the song. He 
explained that 'all kinds of trees' was meant. 
Somewhat more obscure is the following: 
(52) P. 125 [of the text; from a song]: 
ahkwici?nenosoki (yo) owanatakanwaki. 
on.top buffalos VCBL 3p+mound(s)+LOC 
[Explanation:] 
ahkwitahkamiki tasi-kohpici^nenosoki ahki 
on.top.of.earth (there)-buffalos earth 
e-h=wanehkwa-wakeskamowa-ci. 
hollow.out.as.earth.byfoot+3p-0/AOR 
Taking these words at face value, the word-for-word translation 
of this song line is 'on top' / 'buffalos' / (vocable) / 'on 
their mounds'. The reference would appear to be to the under?
ground buffalos worshipped in the ceremony, whose represen?
tations are placed on an earthen mound having an indented top. 
Kiyana's written explanation, however, is 'above-ground buf?
falos hollow out the earth with their hooves' "Above-ground 
buffalos" would presumably be ordinary buffalos, as opposed 
to manitou buffalos, who live underground. 
Kiyana's interpretation in example 52 differs from the one 
that Michelson obtained from him orally and published in his 
edition: "The buffaloes are standing so much there, in their 
holes" (Michelson, 1925a: 100). In this reading, manuscript 
(akwici) was taken not as ahkwici 'on top' but as a song variant 
of the ordinary word Michelson perceived as [a-yahkwi-ci] (his 
narrow phonetics are here normalized), presumably ayakwici 
'more and more, to excess'. The last word in the line was 
taken as referring to 'holes' rather than to 'mounds', hence 'in 
their holes', and was explained as "the place which the buffa?
loes have dug up with their horns." 
On the face of it, however, the first and last words of the 
song line must be taken as a discontinuous constituent meaning 
'on top of their mounds' The concave top of the mound, and 
its iconic association with the wallows of the manitou buffalos, 
may account for why it was described to Michelson as a hole, 
but the oral explanation that horns were the instrument for dig?
ging is inconsistent with the stem-final element in the verb in 
Kiyana's written explanation, which must mean 'by foot'. The 
literal meaning of the whole line is presumably 'buffalos on top 
of their mounds'. Kiyana's explanations seem like exegetical 
commentary, inspired by expansive folk-linguistic analyses of 
the words that make up the syntactically unusual discontinuous 
locative phrase. 
Divergent analyses are also found in the case of example 53: 
(53) P. 130 [of the text; from a song]: 
kiwihkanawewa inenoswa 
make.trail.about+3s/lND buffalo (archaic form) 
[Explanation:] 
omahomyemiwa_ wapeski|-kohpici-nenos;okimawa. 
RED.have.a.trail+3s/lND white-upland-bovine-chief 
This line means, literally, 'The buffalo makes his trails about.' 
The word for 'make trail(s) about' is glossed with the ordinary 
verb of possession derived from the word for trail, reduplicated 
(hence, 'have trails'). The word for buffalo in the song, 
inenoswa, is an archaic form of nenoswa. The form nenoswa 
can still be used to mean 'buffalo' in ceremonial contexts or 
with reference to buffalo manitous and the ceremonies for 
292 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
them, but today it ordinarily means 'cow, ox' Kiyana ex?
plained this as 'buffalo chief. 
Kiyana's written explanation of the verb in the song is obvi?
ously preferable to the one he gave Michelson orally (Michel?
son, 1925 a: 102-103). In the oral explanation the medial+final 
-ihkanawe-, meaning 'make or have a trail', was interpreted as 
the equivalent of the ordinary word kanawiwa 'he speaks', 
hence 'goes about speaking'. Kiyana explained inenoswa to 
Michelson as manetowi-nenoswa 'spirit buffalo', which has the 
same reference as the 'buffalo chief of the written explanation. 
Conclusion 
Alfred Kiyana's linguistic writings are significant in several 
ways. They, of course, provide a great deal of information on 
the Fox language, especially on archaic and unusual vocabu?
lary. But they also give us insight into how Kiyana thought 
about the work he was doing for Michelson. The general impe?
tus for this work came from Michelson, who was paying Fox 
writers to write texts. The specific selection of material, 
though, seems clearly to be due to Kiyana. The evidence is that 
Kiyana wrote his lexical lists in 1916-1917, after working with 
Michelson for several years, and although the commentaries 
must have been written earlier, when he still had access to the 
manuscripts, he evidently did not discuss them with Michelson. 
Within a few decades of the inception of literacy in the 
Meskwaki community, here was a writer compiling lexical ma?
terials, developing a metalinguistic style for defining words, 
commenting on difficult passages of texts, and assembling sets 
of related forms and expressions that illustrated systematic pat?
terns of derivation and inflection. Kiyana was thinking like a 
linguist. His work goes beyond that of an informant or consult?
ant. It belongs in the corpus of linguistic writings on Algon?
quian that form the basis for the understanding of these lan?
guages. We should recognize him not just as a source of 
marvelous data, but as one of our intellectual grandfathers. 
Notes 
1. "Kiyana" is the spelling he used as an English rendition of his Meskwaki 
name, kyanawa, in the materials he wrote for Michelson. This is a name of the 
War Chief lineage, the highest ranking division of the Fox Clan. His descen?
dants spell the family name "Keahna." 
The people of the Meskwaki Settlement and the language they speak (which is 
shared with the Sauk) have generally been referred to as Fox. The name 
Meskwaki (the now-preferred spelling) is especially appropriate for the mod?
ern community and its residents. 
2. Early in his fieldwork Michelson elicited a vocabulary from Kiyana in En?
glish (NAA ms. 2647), but the manuscript shows that Michelson misunder?
stood Kiyana's pronunciation of English "silver fox" as "son of Fox," and 
"God" as "card." The word kehcipihi 'belt; belt-line, waist' is glossed "back?
side," and okotakani '(his) throat, gullet' is glossed "Adam's apple," indicat?
ing that at least some body-part terms were elicited by pointing. 
3. Michelson wrote "1916 Consanguinity 1916" on the cover of the note?
book containing the translation of NAA ms. 2232 (the first half of manuscript 
C) that he recorded from Harry Lincoln, a Meskwaki of part Potawatomi de?
scent who was his chief interpreter and go-between. NAA ms. 2778, contain?
ing the second part of manuscript D, has annotations by Kiyana on the inside 
of the front cover that apparently calculate the number of hours worked each 
day. (Perhaps this was intended as a basis for payment, but for the most part, 
at least, Michelson paid Meskwaki writers by the page.) Kiyana listed the 
days of the week by their Meskwaki names, beginning with Friday, and Mich?
elson added the month and the date, beginning with September 7. During the 
years that Kiyana was working with Michelson, September 7 fell on a Friday 
only in 1917. 
4. The White Buffalo text, one of the first texts edited and published by 
Michelson, presents the origin myth and songs of the buffalo ceremony of the 
Fox Clan, Kiyana's clan (Michelson, 1925a). The somewhat shorter Green 
Buffalo text, published in English only, similarly treats the buffalo ceremony of 
the Wolf Clan (Michelson, 1937). It seems likely that Kiyana described the cer?
emony of his own clan first. The unique similarity of the two commentaries 
supports the conclusion that they were written at very nearly the same time, 
and the fact that they must necessarily have been written while Kiyana still had 
the original texts also narrows the possible time span for these writings. 
5. References to manuscript C are by original page numbers and by line (in?
dicated by capital letters), as edited. 
In the interlinear glosses the following abbreviations are used: AN=animate; 
AOR=aorist conjunct; CONJ=plain conjunct; DIM=diminutive; EMPH=em-
phatic; HRSY=hearsay; lN=inanimate; IND= independent indicative; OBL=ob-
lique; OBV=obviative; pl=plural; PPL=participle; RED=reduplication; SEC.OBJ 
^secondary object; sg=singular; SUBJ=subjunctive; VCBL=vocable. (The obvi-
ative is the secondary or thematically subordinate third-person category of Al?
gonquian. Nouns with third-person possessors are always obviative, and "OBV" 
is omitted from the interlinears for these.) 
3=third person animate; 0=third person inanimate; 3'=third person animate 
obviative; 3(')=third person animate obviative or non-obviative; 3"=third per?
son animate further obviative; p=plural; s=singular; X=indefinite person. 
Certain editorial conventions are used in the textual material cited. A space or a 
hyphen in the edited text corresponds to a word divider in the manuscript. A 
bar (|) indicates an absent word divider at line end. A link (_) or linked hyphen 
( : ) indicates an absent word-divider line-medially. A double hyphen (-) sets 
off proclitics and enclitics (and cliticized words), which are always written as 
one word with their hosts. A hyphen or linked hyphen sets off or earmarks the 
parts of a compound stem, one consisting of more than one phonological word. 
(The preposed elements in compound verbs are called preverbs in Algonquian 
grammar, and those in compound nouns are prenouns.) The linked hyphen is 
also used to join the elements of a compound fused by elision, where no word 
divider would ever be used. 
The asterisk (*) marks reconstructed words, assumed to have existed but not at?
tested. 
6. The dagger (t) marks obsolete forms whose exact phonemic shape is in?
ferred. 
7. Shallow-pointed brackets ((...)) mark words that are simply transcribed 
literatim from the source rather than being given in a standardized translitera?
tion or phonemicization. Words in this transcription lack some phonemic dis?
tinctions and may be ambiguous. 
8. Fox mesawinakosiwa reflects Proto-Algonquian *mwe?9awina-kwesiwa; 
related words are Cree mostawinawew, mostawinam 'he sees and desires him, 
it', Menominee mo?nawenawew, mo?nawenam 'he admires him, it', and 
Ojibwa nimissawenima; nimissawentan T desire, want him, it'. 
9. The formative elements of primary Algonquian stems are initials, medials, 
and finals. 
10. William Jones was a one-quarter Meskwaki who grew up among the Sauks 
(Oklahoma Sac and Fox). He learned to speak Meskwaki from his father's 
mother, though it is clear that he did not have native fluency as an adult. As a 
student of Franz Boas he worked on the language with his father, Henry Clay 
Jones, and his father's relatives in Tama, whom he never named. Kiyana told 
Michelson that his grandmother was Jones's father's mother, keti-hkwewa 
(NAA ms. 2647); she was not the mother of either of Kiyana's parents, however, 
and her exact relationship to Kiyana (among the various kin types called 'grand?
mother' in Meskwaki) is not known. Jones's Fox manuscripts are in the NAA. 
11. For a decade after Michelson's death, in 1938, James A. Geary, a professor 
of Celtic Languages at Catholic University, worked with Harry Lincoln to edit 
NUMBER 44 293 
Kiyana's 1110-page text of the story of the culture hero Wisahkeha. Geary's 
manuscripts are in the NAA. 
12. For example, (tetewa) 'big fire-log' could be the cognate of the Delaware 
words for 'fire', Munsee ta'ntew and Unami tantay, which otherwise have no 
etymology. The Fox word would then be ftetewa, from PA *tentewi (assum?
ing original inanimate gender). This would make sense as *tem- 'truncated' + 
-(e)te- '(inanimate) affected by heat or burning', i.e.'one that has or gets its 
end burned off 
Literature Cited 
Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (ARCIA) 
1880. Report of Agent in Iowa. In Annual Report of the Commissioner of 
Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1880, 
pages 97-98. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. 
Baraga, Friderik 
1880. A Dictionary of the Otchipwe Language, Explained in English; Part 
2: Otchipwe-English. Second edition, viii+422 pages. Montreal, 
Quebec: Beauchemin and Valois. 
Bloomfield, Leonard 
1975. Menomini Lexicon. CF. Hockett, editor, Milwaukee Public Museum 
Publications in Anthropology and History, 3: xviii+289 pages. Mil?
waukee, Wisconsin: Milwaukee Public Museum Press. 
1984. Cree-English Lexicon. 2 volumes. New Haven, Connecticut: Human 
Relations Area Files. 
Goddard, Ives 
1988. Stylistic Dialects in Fox Linguistic Change. In Jacek Fisiak, editor, 
Historical Dialectology, pages 193-209. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 
1992. Fox (Mesquakie) Kinship Terminology. In William Cowan, editor, 
Papers of the Twenty-Third Algonquian Conference, pages 244?262. 
Ottawa, Ontario: Carleton University. 
1994. Leonard Bloomfield's Fox Lexicon: Critical Edition. Memoir (Al?
gonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics), 12: v+296 pages. Winnipeg, 
Manitoba: Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics. 
1995. Notes on Fox (Mesquakie) Inflection: Minor Modes and Incom?
pletely Described Morphemes. In David H. Pentland, editor, Pa?
pers of the Twenty-Sixth Algonquian Conference, pages 124-150. 
Winnipeg: University of Manitoba. 
1997. Writing and Reading Mesquakie (Fox). In David H. Pentland, edi?
tor, Papers of the Twenty-Seventh Algonquian Conference, pages 
109-126. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba. 
Kinkade, M. Dale, and Anthony Martina 
1996. Discourse. In William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook 
of North American Indians, volume 17, Ives Goddard, editor, 
Languages, pages 244-274. Washington, D . C : Smithsonian 
Institution. 
Michelson, Truman 
1925a. The Mythical Origin of the White Buffalo Dance of the Fox Indians, 
together with Texts on Four Minor Sacred Packs Appertaining to This 
Ceremony. Fortieth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Eth?
nology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1918-1919, 
pages 23-289. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. 
1925b. The Traditional Origin of the Fox Society Known as "The Singing 
Around Rite." Fortieth Annual Report of the Bureau of American 
Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 
1918-1919, pages 541-615. Washington, D C : Government Print?
ing Office. 
1937. The Wolf Gens: How the Green Buffalo Bestowed a Blessing, and 
What Happened to the One Whom He Blessed, from Childhood Up?
ward. In Truman Michelson, Fox Miscellany. Bulletin, Bureau of 
American Ethnology, 114:18-62. Washington, D .C: Government 
Printing Office. 
Nichols, John D., and Earl Nyholm 
1995. A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe. xxviii+288 pages. Min?
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 
Rhodes, Richard A. 
1985. Eastern Ojibwa-Chippewa-Ottawa Dictionary. Trends in Linguistics, 
Documentation, 3: liii+623 + [2] pages. Berlin: Mouton Publishers. 
Skinner, Alanson 
1921. Material Culture of the Menomini. Indian Notes and Monographs, 
20: 478 pages. New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye 
Foundation. 
1923. Observations on the Ethnology of the Sauk Indians. Bulletin of the 
Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee, 5(1): 1-58, (2):59-118, 
(3): 119-180. Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 
Sturtevant, William C. 
1977. The Hole-and-Slot Heddle. In Irene Emery and Patricia Fiske, edi?
tors, Ethnographic Textiles of the Western Hemisphere: 1976 Pro?
ceedings; Irene Emery Roundtable on Museum Textiles, pages 
325-355. Washington, D.C: The Textile Museum. 
Voorhis, Paul H. 
1971. New Notes on the Mesquakie (Fox) Language. International Jour?
nal of American Linguistics, 37:63-75. 
Walker, Willard B. 
1996. Native Writing Systems. In William C Sturtevant, general editor, 
Handbook of North American Indians, volume 17, Ives Goddard, 
editor, Languages, pages 158-184. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian 
Institution. 
Williams, Roger 
1936. A Key into the Language of America. Fifth edition, [28] + 205+[3] 
pages. Providence: The Rhode Island and Providence Plantations 
Tercentenary Committee, Inc. 

The Munich Chukchi Collection 
Jean-Loup Rousselot 
The Staatliches Museum fiir Volkerkunde (SMV), Miinchen 
(the Munich State Museum of Anthropology), is one of Eu?
rope's major anthropological museums, with collections com?
prising about 350,000 specimens from all parts of the world. 
About 500 items are from Siberia; a few of these date from the 
eighteenth century, and the remainder date from the nineteenth 
and twentieth centuries. Acquired over the years from several 
different donors, the museum's Siberian collection includes ob?
jects from various regions of Siberia, but the majority are from 
the Chukchi and the Yuit Eskimos of the Chukotka Peninsula in 
northeastern Siberia. 
The Chukchi collection, apparently assembled in the late 
nineteenth century, was officially received by the museum on 
14 January 1899 (SMV Archives, 1899), as a single donation 
from Eugen Wolf, a German philanthropist and journalist. Al?
though the precise origins of the collection are unknown (it is 
doubtful that Wolf made the collection himself), it is of con?
siderable significance both because it attempts to document 
systematically all aspects of the life of these reindeer herders 
of the tundra and because very little material from the Chuk?
chi of that period has been preserved in museums (for infor?
mation on the few other extant collections, see Stein, 1881; 
Krause and Krause, 1882; Nordenskiold, 1882; Bogoras, 
1901, 1904-1909; and Abel, 1969:76). Like the remainder of 
the museum's Siberian collection, however, a description of 
the Wolf collection has never been published, and only a 
small portion of it has appeared on public exhibition, dis?
played in a single exhibit case in the museum's permanent ex?
hibits during the early decades of the twentieth century 
(Scherman, 1922:11). 
The Donor 
Eugen Wolf was born 24 January 1850 in Kirchheimbolan-
den, a small city in the Palatinate region of southwestern Ger?
many,1 and died in Munich six decades later, on 10 May 1912, 
of typhus (Muth, 1912; Dreyer, 1915). Independently 
wealthy, he devoted most of his life to traveling, first within 
Jean-Loup Rousselot, Staatliches Museum fiir Volkerkunde, Maximil-
ianstrasse 42, D-80538 Miinchen, Germany. 
Europe and then to the New World, Africa, and the Far East. 
In 1873 he journeyed to South America, followed by trips to 
central Africa (1884-1885), the United States (1887), East 
Africa (1889- 1890), South Africa (1891-1892), and Mada?
gascar (1895) (Wolf, 1905). Between August, 1896, and June, 
1898, he traveled extensively in China, Japan, and Siberia. In 
1909, three years before his death, he visited Oceania (Wolf, 
1915). 
Both in Germany and abroad, Wolf, a polyglot, met with 
politicians, businessmen, and diplomats to promote an ex?
panded role in world affairs for the newly founded German 
Empire. He envisioned international trade as a key element in 
Germany's development as a world power and lobbied for in?
creased exchange of German manufactured goods for raw ma?
terials from other countries, particularly China. An ardent na?
tionalist, he feared that the growing presence of Russians, 
Americans, and Japanese in China would limit the possibili?
ties for German expansion there. He expressed his concerns to 
former Chancellor Otto von Bismarck during a series of meet?
ings before departing for China in 1896 and repeated them in 
his account of his travels, Meine Wanderungen, I: Im Innern 
Chinas ("My Travels, I: In Inner China"),2 published in 1901. 
While in China he visited many foreign concessions, and, 
based on this firsthand experience, he developed a plan for 
German expansion there, which he proposed to the Ministry 
of Foreign Affairs in Berlin upon his return (Wolf, 1904). 
Wolf was a prolific writer, publishing narratives of these 
and other travels in several books and in a number of newspa?
per articles, which appeared primarily in the Berliner Tage-
blatt. He used his writings to promote the approach to interna?
tional relations, both political and economic, that he believed 
Germany should follow.3 He also linked his extensive collect?
ing activities to his international agenda, commenting that he 
"donated ethnographic collections to Bavarian and Prussian 
museums to instruct young Germans about foreign cultures" 
(Wolf, 1901: 288).4 It is known that he made collections in 
both the New World and Africa and that his ethnographic col?
lection from Madagascar included around 600 items (Wolf, 
1901, 1904:189-191). He did not, however, mention in any of 
his publications the Chukchi collection donated to the SMV in 
1899.5 
295 
296 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
History of the Collection 
When Wolf delivered his Siberian collection to the SMV, he 
provided an inventory of the collection that included brief com?
ments on each item and on various aspects of Chukchi life; I re?
fer to this inventory as the "Collector's List" (SMV Archives, 
1899). It is likely that Wolf personally prepared this inventory 
because it is signed by him and is handwritten in German using 
Roman characters. It is known that Wolf wrote German with 
Roman characters rather than employing the German alphabet 
current at the time and also that he completed the inventory of 
his ethnographic collection from Madagascar, in which he dis?
played a rare sensibility for its value (Wolf, 1904:25-26, 189). 
Nonetheless, based on my review of Wolf's travel accounts, I 
have concluded that he could not have personally assembled 
the Chukchi collection. 
In 1897 Wolf visited Vladivostok, where the construction of 
the eastern section of the Trans-Siberian Railway had just be?
gun, and also Kamchatka, but he did not indicate that he trav?
eled north of Kamchatka or Sakhalin Island or otherwise had 
direct contact with the Chukchi (Wolf, 1901, folded map, 
1904: 212-214). It is therefore very unlikely that Wolf ac?
quired his Chukchi collection directly from the Chukchi, al?
though he may have gathered or purchased some of the zoo?
logical specimens that appear on the list?those from the 
Anadyr region, Indian Point (Mys Chaplino), and East Cape 
(Mys Dezhneva), collected between 1894 and 1897?during 
this trip to the Russian Far East. 
If Wolf had no direct contact with the Chukchi, he must 
have acquired the collection from someone else. Given the 
choice of objects included in the collection, as well the quality 
of information that appears in the Collector's List, the original 
collector (and also the source of information on the collection, 
if this was a different person) must have known the culture 
and customs of the native population well. I have found no in?
formation, however, either in the museum's records or else?
where, that would reveal the identity of this person or these 
persons. 
I originally suspected that the Russian ethnographer Walde-
mar Bogoras had assembled the SMV Chukchi collection. 
Bogoras was exiled to Yakutia between 1890 and 1898 and 
during the last three years of that period conducted research on 
the Kolyma River and in northern Chukotka as a member of an 
expedition financed by the merchant Innokenty Sibiryakov 
(Bogoras, 1904-1909:1). Also, the information that appears in 
the Collector's List corresponds closely to that included in 
Bogoras's (1904-1909) monograph on the Chukchi, and the 
collection that he made for the American Museum of Natural 
History in New York, although larger than the SMV's, includes 
specimens that are of the same type and manufacture. The Col?
lector's List was, however, prepared no later than 1899, and the 
objects in the collection are all from southern Chukotka 
(Anadyrsk and the Pacific Coast), a region that Bogoras did not 
visit before 1900-1901. Bogoras also did not mention the Mu?
nich collection in his publications. 
Another possible source of the SMV collection was Nikolai 
Sliunin, who spent 1892-1893 on an official mission studying 
the fauna of Kamchatka and the northern Pacific Coast. As Sli?
unin's (1895, 1900) publications reveal, he was also interested 
in ethnography, but it appears that all his collections were de?
posited in Moscow. 
A more likely possibility, which needs further investigation, 
is that the collection was made by the Russian civil servant Ni?
kolai Lvovich Gondatti, governor of the Anadyr District from 
1893 to 1897 (Bogoras, 1901:1; Stephan, 1994:318). The 
Anadyrsk ostrog, a military post dating back to 1649, had been 
abandoned in 1764 or 1770 because of violent Chukchi resis?
tance to the Russian conquest of Chukotka. Cossack efforts to 
subject the adult male population to the fur tribute, or yasak, 
was a failure, and the post was not reopened until 1889, when 
the Anadyrsk District was created (Stephan, 1994:88). By that 
time, peaceful trading relations had been established with the 
Chukchi, and Anadyr had become a trading post of consider?
able importance, visited primarily by American fur traders and 
New England whalers (Dittmar, 1856:37; Knox, 1870:84, 91; 
Kennan, 1871:286-287, 328-330; Bogoras, 1904-1909:697). 
Gondatti, an able and energetic administrator "partly moved by 
scientific interests" (Bogoras, 1904-1909:710), made exten?
sive natural history collections during his time in Siberia, and 
ethnographic material that he collected was deposited in 1898 
at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg (Bogo?
ras, 1901). Before moving to his next assignment, on the Us-
suri, in 1899, Gondatti probably traveled to western Europe, 
where he sold specimens collected in Anadyr to a gentleman of 
Paris. These specimens were acquired in 1911 by the Musee 
d'Ethnographie du Trocadero in Paris (Falck and Falck, 1963: 
51;Bucher, 1994:119). 
If Wolf did not acquire the Chukchi collection from Gon?
datti, he may have purchased it in Europe from an unknown 
collector. In 1890 a large and well-documented Chukchi and 
Koryak collection was displayed in Leipzig and was sold the 
same year to a collector from southern Germany (Schmeltz, 
1890a, 1890b, 1891). Wolf was in Germany in the summer of 
that year and could have been the buyer (Wolf, 1904:42-60). 
At the Museum 
The Royal Museum of Ethnography, the predecessor of the 
SMV, received nine crates containing the Wolf collection in 
January of 1899. At the time, the museum was located in the 
Hofgartenarkaden, a very narrow building situated north of the 
King's Palace, whose small rooms were already filled with per?
manent exhibitions. Probably due to lack of space, the crates 
were soon moved to another government building, the Ober-
landesgericht, or Upper State Court, where, in March of the 
same year, the crates were opened and the accessioning of the 
collection begun (SMV Archives, 1894-1902:95). 
NUMBER 44 297 
The original collection consisted of about 600 specimens. 
During the long journey to Munich, vermin destroyed some or?
ganic material, especially some skins and skin clothing, which 
were discarded, and one crate (crate 10 on the Collector's List), 
with more than 145 ethnographic specimens, did not arrive. 
The vast majority of the objects came from the Chukchi, but a 
few items were collected among Siberian Eskimos of Indian 
Point and East Cape (a dog-sled harness, a sling to catch 
aquatic fowl, and some fishing rods). Other objects?jewelry 
from the "Kereks" (Koryaks), a large saddlebag from the "La-
muts" (Evens), and a box imported from China?appear to 
have been trade goods. Also present were eight human skulls 
(two from the Coastal Chukchi, four from Reindeer Chukchi, 
and one each from the Eskimo of Indian Point and East Cape) 
and some zoological and botanical specimens. 
Dr. Max Buchner, the director of the museum,6 served as the 
registrar for this collection. He returned some duplicates to 
Wolf (SMV Archives, 1899:16,18) and, in 1902, transferred the 
nonethnographic materials to Munich's museums of physical 
anthropology, zoology, and botany. Other items (inventory no. 
99-226) were exchanged with the ReiB-Museum of Mannheim. 
Four decades later, soon after the first bombing of Munich in 
1942, the museum hastily moved its collections, including the 
Wolf collection, to two castles south of the city, where they 
were safely stored for years (Harrer, 1993:67). Reaccessioning 
and re-storage started in the late 1940s but was not completed 
until several decades later. The Wolf collection, which reap?
peared in 1981, showed almost no signs of damage. Proper 
storage in large crates throughout this period and the fact that it 
has never been used extensively in public exhibits contributed 
to the preservation of the collection. 
Description of the Collection 
The Chukchi ethnographic collection housed in the museum to?
day includes almost all of the items accessioned 100 years ago. 
Totaling around 330 items (frequently, the same inventory 
number is used to label several different objects), most aspects 
of Chukchi life and material culture in the late nineteenth cen?
tury are represented. 
The rich variety of Chukchi clothing is documented in sets of 
garments for adults and for children of all ages as well as cloth?
ing used for special purposes, such as spring sealing. Recre?
ational items include children's toys (a leather ball, a drum, a 
stuffed mouse, buzzers, toy reindeer (Figure 1)), a chess set 
(wooden board and figures), two musical instruments (a home?
made violin and a balalaika), and a pipe and tobacco bag (the 
tobacco is mixed with wood dust). Important ceremonial items 
also form part of the collection: fire lighters and fire boards 
(Figure 2), an offering plate, a ritual drum, and different kinds 
of gloves used in the summer and winter to perform the dissec?
tion of the dead. 
Weapons and tools for hunting, fishing (Figure 3), and trap?
ping are well represented in the collection. These include armor 
made of iron plates sewn to a hide, bows, arrows, various kinds 
of spears (including a buoyant bird spear used to hunt water 
fowl and a leister for small fish), a spear thrower, harpoons and 
harpoon floats (which were also used as fenders), fishnets made 
from hair and sinew, fishing lines, hooks for large fish, and a se?
ries of traps or snares for ermine, fox, and mice. A full-size 
kayak made of reindeer skins?a rare item in museum collec?
tions?is equipped with a combined paddle-spear used to hunt 
wild reindeer as they crossed the Anadyr River. Tools used by 
FIGURE I.?Two reindeer toys that pulled a child's sled. According to the Collector's List (SMV Archives, 
1899:12), "both antlers or at least the one on the inner side, were sawn off to avoid entangling." The bodies of the 
reindeer are carved from wood and are covered with the fur of unborn reindeer. Reindeer fur, wood; height, 12.5 
and 13.5 cm. Staatliches Museum fur Volkerkunde Munchen (inventory nos. 99-269 and 99-273). Photograph by 
Veronika J. Grahammer. 
298 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 2.?Fire board. The Collector's List (SMV Archives, 1899:23) 
describes this as a "complete sacred Giirgur, shaped like a human body with 
head, on which an Okkamak is hanging, bow, drill and mouth piece. This 
Giirgur is used on holidays to light the sacred fire. The Okkamak is a little 
spirit protecting a lake, a creek, etc." This apparatus is made mainly by the 
Chukchi themselves and is carried under the belt. Wood, leather; length 55 cm. 
Staatliches Museum fur Volkerkunde Munchen (inventory no. 99-210). Photo?
graph by Veronika J. Grahammer. 
men include snowshoes, snow beaters, drills for iron and wood, 
crooked knives, a bodkin, a chisel for woodworking, an adze, a 
hoe, reindeer harnesses, a lasso, a whip, and a bucket for col?
lecting urine (Figure 4). Women's tools and domestic items 
used in the completion of household chores include spoons of 
wood, bone, and antler, wooden plates, a goblet fashioned from 
the horn of a mountain sheep, mauls made from walrus bacula, 
a work bench, skin scrapers, and a needle case (Figure 5). Also 
present is a stone kettle with wooden stand and a leather pouch 
containing a stone anvil and two stone hammers used to break 
open reindeer bones to extract the marrow (Figure 6). 
Sets of samples of different kinds of materials are included 
for didactic purposes, for example, to demonstrate the stages of 
preparation of sinew for thread, or to document the tree fungus 
from which the ashes to mix with tobacco are prepared. Also, 
samples of hides and skins (from seals, walrus, wild and do?
mesticated reindeer, mountain rams, otters, ermine, blue and 
white foxes, and mice) document both variation between spe?
cies and seasonal variation within species that make them ap?
propriate for different applications. These variations can been 
seen in the evaluation of alternative sources of leather thongs. 
Thongs made from the hides of young walrus were the stron?
gest and were particularly appropriate for use in making fish?
nets and harpoon lines for hunting walrus and whale, while 
hides of adult walrus were converted into thongs for lashing 
boats and sleds. Thongs prepared from a reindeer hide just after 
skinning were regarded as stronger than the white thongs made 
from the hides of young bearded seals, which were nonetheless 
used to drag boats upstream. Similarly, sealskins were made 
into shoes and mittens, seal and walrus intestines and walrus 
bladders were used for waterproof clothing, wild reindeer skins 
served as boat skins, and smoked reindeer hides provided tent 
covers. Skins of young domesticated reindeer killed in August 
were used as windows. 
An interesting feature of the collection is its inclusion of 
models of artifacts, only some of which are present in full 
scale. For example, there is a model of a tent (known in Chuk?
chi as yaranga), complete with a cooking pot and tripod, vari?
ous containers, plates, spoons, knives, axes, shovels, a lamp, 
skin scrapers with work boards, snow scrapers, tobacco boxes, 
a urine vessel, mosquito nets, a leather bag with stone anvil and 
hammer, and a scaffold for drying fish. The residents are repre?
sented by dolls. Also present are models of at least eight differ?
ent kinds of sleds, umiaks for whaling and transportation, hunt?
ing and fishing equipment (a bow and four arrows, a sling, a 
fox trap, harpoons for sealing and walrus hunting, snowshoes, 
and fishnets), and some ceremonial paraphernalia (a drum, a 
fire drill bow, two offering cups with spoons, two reindeer 
shoulder blades used in divination, and paddles associated with 
the baidara festival). 
Although the importance of this collection is beyond debate, 
one cannot help but regret the loss of crate 10, which never ar?
rived at the museum. According to the Collector's List, this 
crate contained five wooden and 50 bone toys, five dolls, a cra?
dle, four parkas, four spoons, a crooked knife, a woman's knife, 
NUMBER 44 
299 
FIGURE 3.?Fish lure with rod to attract fish; 
used for ice fishing in combination with a 
fish leister. Bone (baculum), sinew, fish 
skin, wood; length of fish, 22 cm. Staatli?
ches Museum fur Volkerkunde Munchen 
(inventory no. 99-125). Photograph by 
Veronika J. Grahammer. 
FIGURE 4.?Leather pouch to carry human urine. The herder uses urine, which 
reindeer like to drink, to attract reindeer to be harnessed (Bogoras, 
1904-1909:85-86). The Collector's List (SMV Archives, 1899:17) describes it 
as a "little leather bucket for urine, from which reindeer will be drinking on the 
road. Essential to reindeer herders." Leather, wood; height 15 cm. Staatliches 
Museum fiir Volkerkunde Munchen (inventory no. 99-175). Photograph by 
Veronika J. Grahammer. 
FIGURE 5 (right).?Needle case with thimble holder; this apparatus was 
attached to a woman's belt. The Collector's List (SMV Archives, 1899:5) 
mentions only a "needle case" belonging to a woman's coat. Bogoras 
(1904-1909:225) represented slightly different types of needle cases. Metal, 
leather; length of tube 14.5 cm; total length 47 cm. Staatliches Museum fiir 
Volkerkunde Munchen (inventory no. 99-112). Photograph by Veronika J. 
Grahammer. 
300 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
FIGURE 6.?A cook at work at a Chukchi camp. A similar leather pouch with 
stone anvil is part of the collection of the Staatliches Museum fur Volkerkunde 
Munchen (inventory no. 99-197). The Collector's List (SMV Archives, 1899:23) 
gives the following information: "Leather bag with stone and two stone ham?
mers; used to break reindeer bones before their marrow was cooked." It also is 
used to crush all kinds of frozen meat (Bogoras, 1904-1909: 188). Laguna Get-
lyangen, Chukotka, September 1995. Photograph by Jean-Loup Rousselot. 
a stone hammer, an adze, a work bench, a tobacco box, a mos?
quito net, a sling, resin for chewing and for caulking boats, a 
ceremonial fire drill, a drum, four paddles used in the spring 
baidara festival, and a set of eight amulets which were hidden 
in the owner's tent and only occasionally displayed, during pri?
vate rituals. It is especially unfortunate that all examples of 
Chukchi art in the collection (more than 50 whale, reindeer, 
and cod carvings) were packed in this crate.7 
Conclusion 
The Chukchi collection of the SMV is an important resource 
for Arctic ethnography. It provides an incomparable record of 
the Chukchi's sophisticated adaptation to their Arctic environ?
ment as well as information on the social and religious dimen?
sions of their society. Despite the loss of the carved works of 
art, the beauty of the skin garments reveals the importance they 
placed on aesthetics, and the presence of foreign goods sub?
stantiates reports that the Chukchi were passionate traders 
(Dittmar, 1856:36). 
As is the case with museum collections in general, the value 
of the Chukchi collection is enhanced by the fact that it is both 
systematic and well documented. The person who made the 
collection and prepared the original description of it undoubt?
edly was an intelligent and informed observer of Chukchi cul?
ture, with a scientist's concern for detail and a naturalist's un?
derstanding of the complexities of the relationships between 
humans and their natural world. The collector also had a clear 
vision both of what should be collected and of the purpose of 
natural history museums as these were conceived at the time. 
The approach to collecting was global in that an attempt was 
made to document all facets of life and also in that items col?
lected included not only artifacts but raw materials and speci?
mens of the plants and animals from which they derived. The 
collector also appears to have been aware of the problem of 
creating a distorted view of a culture that can emerge if only 
goods produced for outsiders are collected: except for some 
skin garments, all items were used before they were acquired. 
The SMV never organized a scientific expedition to the 
Chukchi region of Siberia, and it is doubtful that it would have 
ever acquired a major Chukchi collection if Eugen Wolf had 
not donated his. Because of Wolf's generosity, the museum is 
in a position to contribute to a more profound understanding of 
the native people of Siberia. This contribution has been delayed 
in part because the collection was unavailable to researchers 
and the general public for decades; however, a detailed, accu?
rate catalog and public exhibition of the collection are now be?
ing prepared, both of which will include all items from the 
original collection except those lost or destroyed. 
Notes 
I am grateful to Kathrin Franzluebbers, Veronika J. Grahammer, and Ronald K. 
lnouye for their suggestions for revising an earlier version of the manuscript. I 
also would like to thank R. Kraft (Zoologische Staatssammlung Munchen), 
Klaus Kremb (Winnweilen/Kirchheimbolanden), and Claudius C. Miiller (Mu?
seum fur Volkerkunde Berlin) for their assistance in my archival research. 
1. This area has been known as Rheinland-Pfalz since 1946, but in the nine?
teenth century it was called Rheinpfalz and formed part of the Kingdom of Ba?
varia. Eugen Wolf considered himself Bavarian. 
2. Although the "I" in the title of this work suggests that Wolf intended to 
publish one or more additional volumes on his travels, I have found no evi?
dence that he ever did. 
3. Through his writings, Wolf also expounded his very conservative views on 
politics, education, race, and social inequality. Although unpopular today, his 
perspectives reflected his times and do not differ significantly from those of 
many other European and American travelers of the period. 
4. This and all other translations from German are the author's. 
5. The Museum fur Volkerkunde of Berlin received 148 Chukchi specimens 
from Eugen Wolf in 1899 and 1900 but returned 101 of them to him in 1902. 
The motivation for this unusual return is not revealed in the museum's records 
(Claudius C. Miiller, pers. comm., 23 May 1997), and the whereabouts of these 
specimens is not known. 
NUMBER 44 301 
6. Max Buchner had some experience as a collector in the Far East, spending 
two years there before returning to Munich in 1890 (Schmeltz, 1890c). 
7. These missing items do not correspond to those donated by Wolf to the 
Museum fiir Volkerkunde of Berlin in 1899-1900. 
Literature Cited 
Abel, Herbert 
1969. Beitrage zur Geschichte des Ubersee-Museums II. Veroffentlichung-
en aus dem Ubersee-Museum Bremen, Reihe B, 2(2):75?104. 
Bogoras, Waldemar G. 
1901. Apercu sur l'ethnographie des Tchouktches d'apres les collections 
de N.L. Gondatti. Publications du Musee d'Anthroplogie et d'Eth?
nographic 2: 67 pages, 25 plates. St. Petersburg: Musee d'An?
throplogie et d'Ethnographie. 
1904-1909. The Chukchee. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural 
History, 11: xvii+733 pages. [Also issued as volume 7 of Publica?
tions of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition.] 
Bucher, Gudrun 
1994. Die "Korjaken"-Objekte der Sammlung Gabriel von Max im 
Reifi-Museum Mannheim, xii+126 pages. Bamberg: Wirtschafts-
geographisches Institut der Universitat. 
Dittmar, Carl von 
1856. Uber die Koraken und die ihnen sehr nahe verwandten Tschuktschen 
(Mit einer Karte). Melanges Russes, 3( 1): 1 -48 [St. Petersburg.] 
Dreyer, A. 
1915. Wolf, Eugen. In Anton Bettelheim, editor, Biographisches Jahrbuch 
undDeutscher Nekrolog, 1912, pages 148-151. Berlin: Verlag von 
Georg Reimer. 
Falck, R, and E. Falck 
1963. Teles de harpons Eskimo. 53 pages. Paris: Musee de l'Homme. 
Harrer, Cornelia Andrea 
1993. Das Altere Bayerische National-Museum an der Maximilianstrafie 
in Munchen. 310 pages. Munich: Tuduv-Verlag. 
Kennan, George 
1871. Tent Life in Siberia, and Adventures among the Koraks and Other 
Tribes in Kamtchatka and Northern Asia, ix+425 pages. New York: 
G.P. Putnam and Sons. 
Knox, Thomas W. 
1870. Overland Through Asia: Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar 
Life. 608 pages. Hartford: American Publishing Co. 
Krause, Aurel, and Arthur Krause 
1882. Die Expedition der Bremer Geographischen Gesellschaft nach der 
Tschuktschen-Halbinsel. Deutsche Geographische Blatter, 5:1-35, 
111-141, 177-223. 
Muth, Karl 
1912. Eugen Wolf. Hochland, 9(11):630-632. 
Nordenskiold, Adolf Erik von 
1882. Die Umsegelung Asiens und Europas auf der Vega. 2 volumes. 
Leipzig: FA. Brockhaus. 
Scherman, Lucian 
1922. Das Museum fur Volkerkunde. Sonderdruck aus dem Bayerischen 
Wanderbuch, 1: 12 pages, 4 plates. Munich: Verlag von R. Olden-
bourg. 
Schmeltz, J.D.E. 
1890a. Explorations et explorateurs, nominations, necrologie, VIII: Die Ge-
briider Dorries aus Hamburg. Internationales Archiv fur Ethnogra?
phic 3:48. 
1890b. Explorations et explorateurs, nominations, necrologie, XXIX: Eth-
nologische Reiseausbeute der Gebriider Dorries. Internationales Ar?
chiv fur Ethnographic 3:136. 
1890c. Explorations et explorateurs, nominations, necrologie, XXXVII: Dr. 
Max Buchner, Direktor des ethnographischen Museums. Interna?
tionales Archiv fur Ethnographic 3:168. 
1891. Explorations et explorateurs, nominations, necrologie, XLVII: Les 
voyageurs-explorateurs freres Dorries. Internationales Archiv fur 
Ethnographic 4:308. 
Sliunin, Nikolai V. 
1895. Parmi les Tchouktches. Zemlevedenie, 2(4): 1. [Moscow.] 
1900. 1900 Okhotsko-Kamchatskii krai. 2 volumes. St. Petersburg: De?
partment of Finance. 
Staatliches Museum fur Volkerkunde Munchen (SMV) Archives 
1894-1902. Accession ledger no. SMV-24. [Entries of Eugen Wolf collec?
tion.] 
1899. [Collector's List. File "E. Wolf." Manuscript of 28 pages, "Die ab-
geschickten Sammlungen stammen...."] 
Stephan, John J. 
1994. The Russian Far East: A History, xxiii+481 pages. Stanford, Cali?
fornia: Stanford University Press. 
Stein, F. von 
1881. Die Tschuktschen am Ufer des Eismeeres, ihre Zahl und gegenwar-
tige Lage. Petermann's Geographische Mittheilungen, 2:41?45. 
Wolf, Eugen 
1901. Meine Wanderungen, I: Im Innern Chinas. 298 pages. Stuttgart and 
Leipzig: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. 
1904. Vom Fursten Bismarck und seinem Haus, Tagebuchblatter. 4 pages 
of leaves +231 [1] pages. Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co. 
1905. Deutsch-Sudwestafrika; ein offenes Wort. 33 pages. Kempten and 
Munich: Verlag der Jos. Kosel'schen Buchhandlung. 
1915. Die Hanseatische Sudsee-Expedition im Jahre 1909; Reisebericht 
von E. Wolf. Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft Ab-
handlungen, 36:111-164, 1 map, 12 plates. 

VI. Nature in Culture 

Totemism Reconsidered 
Raymond D. Fogelson and Robert A. Brightman 
The work and days of William C. Sturtevant provide an impor?
tant link between the final breath of the Bureau of American 
Ethnology and a revived Americanist anthropology in the new 
millennium. Sturtevant's multifaceted interests combine rigor?
ous description and thorough scholarship with an openness to 
entertain, if not always embrace, contemporary international 
developments in anthropological method and theory. One ma?
jor theme that connects much of his work is a constant concern 
with classification; another is his abiding interest in exploring 
curious corners of the hidden history of anthropology. This es?
say bears on both these interests. 
Categorial Impositions 
The use of animal categories as classificatory devices is an old, 
largely unconscious convention haunting much of the history 
of Western ideas. These categories were pushed into conscious?
ness with the "discovery" of totemism as a recurrent feature of 
"primitive" societies by the late nineteenth-century evolution?
ary theorists. Totemism was taken as a primary diagnostic fea?
ture that distinguished the "primitive other" from "civilized 
us." In 1903 Durkheim and Mauss (1963) set forth an agenda 
for what would become their version of the sociology of 
knowledge by means of a comparative analysis of Aristotelian 
categories of thought?such concepts as space, time, number, 
person, and classification itself. The notion of totemism as a 
classificatory device was then already assumed, at least implic?
itly. We, as well as the "primitive others," classify our worlds 
by many means, for example, by number (both Roman and Ar?
abic numerals), by letter (both upper and lower case), by color 
(color coding for race being a particularly pernicious example), 
by various measures of time (chronological, cosmological, di?
urnal, and life cyclical, among others), by space or location 
(e.g., left, right, center, or cardinal directions), and, as we have 
come to recognize, by animals (political groups, nations, sports 
teams, and automobiles being conspicuous examples.) 
As a culture we are very concerned about the consequences 
of animal extinction. The cause of conservation attracts both 
Raymond D. Fogelson, Department of Anthropology, University of 
Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637-1587, USA. Robert A. Brightman, 
Department of Anthropology, Reed College, Portland, Oregon 
97202-8199, USA. 
Green Peace activists and segments of the religious right who 
see the preservation of nature as keeping faith with God's di?
vine plan for the universe. Biological scientists worry about 
shrinking gene pools and diminished genetic data banks. Ani?
mal extinctions might even affect early childhood learning? 
mastery of the alphabet might be imperiled without books con?
taining pictures of animals ranging from Aardvarks to Zebras. 
Anthropology has long recognized native people's use of an?
imal categories. Such peoples claimed descent from, named so?
cial groups after, arranged marriages according to, and ob?
served taboos with respect to certain animal species, more 
rarely plants, still more rarely natural phenomena (stars, light?
ning, etc.), and most rarely manufactured cultural objects (pro?
jectile points, baskets, etc.). These categories were usually ap?
plied to classes or species of animals, but less frequently they 
were applied to individual members of particular species. 
Sometimes, as with peoples in northern North America, part?
nerships between specific representatives of animal species and 
human individuals are mutually established through vision 
quest or dream experiences. In parts of Latin America and else?
where certain individual animals are believed to be sympatheti?
cally connected to particular human beings, such that what hap?
pens to the animal may literally or figuratively affect the 
related human individual. This kind of relationship usually is 
referred to as nagualism rather than as totemism, although the 
two phenomena may possess intrinsic similarity. Sometimes, 
rather than an entire species or animal, subclasses of animal 
species or particular body parts are recognized as totems. Thus 
we may have the Bear Paw clan or the Falcon Wing lineage; or 
color qualifiers may be employed, as in Red Deer versus 
Brown Deer groups, White Wolf and Gray Wolf clans, or as in 
Black Cockatoo versus White Cockatoo moieties in Australia. 
At the end of the nineteenth century and during the first two 
decades of the twentieth century, anthropologists and their 
friends confabulated, mystified, reified, transmogrified, and 
exoticized the notion of totemism to reflect, in Levi-Straussian 
terms, the deep chasm between nature and culture, between 
the primitive and the civilized, between "them" and "us." 
(Levi-Strauss, 1963:3). Totemism, or the totemic complex, 
was seen as a primordial form of social organization, an ele?
mentary form of religion, a primitive system of philosophy, 
and an essentialized manifestation of the primitive mind at 
work and play. 
305 
306 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
The origins of totemism, its diffusion, and its logical types 
were subjects of learned debate. Even Sigmund Freud (1952) 
took part with his still-interesting book Totem and Taboo, in 
which he drew analogies between the behavior of primitive 
peoples vis a vis their totemic rites and taboos and the obses?
sive, compulsive behavior of some of his patients. That Freud 
himself was not beyond the temptation to utilize animal catego?
ries may be recognized in his labeling of two of his classic case 
studies the Wolf Man and the Rat Man. 
As noted by French structuralist anthropologist Claude 
Levi-Strauss (1963:3-10), the anthropological obsession with 
totemism peaked by 1920 and soon became a moribund topic. 
It is widely believed that Alexander Goldenweiser, a brilliant, 
first-generation student of Franz Boas, refuted the validity of 
the concept of totemism in his analytic critique of 1910. In 
slightly over 100 tightly argued pages, Goldenweiser took issue 
with the enormous literature that regarded totemism as a uni?
tary phenomenon. He maintained that the assumed totemic 
complex did not cohere, could not be essentialized, that it was 
an artificial anthropological construct, a snare, and an illusion. 
Shapiro (1991), however, noted that Goldenweiser's feat may 
itself have been mythologized and that Goldenweiser avowed a 
fundamental unity of totemism through structural and historical 
relations and metaphysical connections between animals and 
clans in his important later articles "The Origin of Totemism" 
(1933a) and "Form and Content in Totemism" (1933b). Indeed, 
as Shapiro cogently argued, Goldenweisefs rehabilitated to?
temism anticipated the Levi-Straussian structural version in 
many crucial respects. 
It is certainly the case that the subject of totemism was resur?
rected and given new direction by Levi-Strauss's Totemism 
(1963; the full French title of which translates as "Totemism 
Today") and The Savage Mind (1966). Levi-Strauss tried to un?
derstand the fascination with animal-human relations that so 
preoccupied some of the best minds of the West. As condensed 
in his critique of Malinowski's utilitarian theory of totemism, 
Levi-Strauss maintained that it isn't that animals are good for 
eating, but that they are good for thinking. Animal categories 
serve as logical operators in that they encompass naturally oc?
curring gradational differences. 
Levi-Strauss's intellectualist theory has considerable power 
and appeal. Yet totems are more than bloodless cognitive cate?
gories good for thinking; totems are also good to feel, to expe?
rience, to react to. The World War I soldier is expressing more 
than his divisional affiliation when he says "I am Rainbow" 
(Linton, 1924:296). The outrage felt by Chicago policemen 
during the 1968 Democratic Convention at being called "pigs" 
by Yippie protesters reflected more than categorical boundary 
transgression. Totemic identification has an affective dimen?
sion that is based on more than analogy or metaphoric exten?
sion. In this paper we search out and reconsider the original 
sources responsible for introducing the concept of totemism 
into scholarly discourse. 
Native North American Totemism Retransformed 
The original homeland of the term "totemism" is the north-cen?
tral Algonquian-speaking area of North America. Much confu?
sion revolves around the meaning of the term "totem." In the 
original published reference to the phenomenon by the English 
trader John Long, in 1791, totemism clearly refers to an indi?
vidual tutelary or personal guardian spirit (Long, 1904). The 
more usual scholarly usage of the term denotes a relationship 
between descent groups?sibs, clans, phratries, moieties?and 
their eponymous natural species. Such units are often referred 
to in early documents as a tribe, family, or, more rarely, a na?
tion; moreover, in native usage the Ojibwa stem -dodem and 
its close cognates can also refer to a local territorial group, or 
what may be technically classed as a deme. In the case of the 
Ojibwa, -dodem referred both to one's fellow patrilineal clan 
members and to an eponymous animal from which the clan was 
held to be descended or with which its ancestors were other?
wise associated (Warren, 1957:41-53; Jones, 1970:138). Thus, 
for example, the trader Nicolas Perrot recorded in the seven?
teenth century an Ojibwa myth describing the creation by the 
Great Hare (presumably Nenabozho, the Ojibwa trickster-cul?
ture hero) of the clan ancestors from the corpses of different 
animals: "Accordingly some of the savages derive their origin 
from a bear, others from moose, and others similarly from vari?
ous kinds of animals" (Blair, 1996:37). In academic practice 
the sociological referent of totemism has become the unmarked 
category, while the guardian-spirit complex, when associated 
with totemism, is marked or qualified as individual totemism 
(cf. Schoolcraft, 1855:196; Tylor, 1898; Durkheim, 1965; 
Goldenweiser, 1910; Frazer, 1934; and Levi-Strauss, 1963). 
Long's introduction of the terms "totem" and "totemism" 
into the literature was duly noted by Wundt, Tylor, Durkheim, 
Frazer, Freud, Boas, and Levi-Strauss, among others, but it ap?
pears that few of these scholars had actually read the original 
1791 Long account, Voyages and Travels of an Indian Inter?
preter and Trader, despite its eventual accessibility in reprinted 
editions published in Reuben Gold Thwaites's Early Western 
Travels series (Long, 1904) and in the later Lakeside Classics 
series published by R.R. Donnelley (Long, 1922). John Long 
worked out of Caughnawaga and had a close familiarity with 
North American Indians. He spoke French and possessed a 
working knowledge of some variety of Northern Iroquoian and 
of a variety of Ojibwa used in the fur trade, and his book con?
tains appended word lists. Long spent several winters with In?
dian companions in the bush; he was even adopted into an 
Ojibwa band and given the appropriate name Amik, or "Bea?
ver." Given that Long's account of totemism remains a source 
of considerable misunderstanding and ignorance, it deserves to 
be quoted in its entirety: 
One part of the religious superstition of the Savages, consists in each of them 
having his totam, or favorite spirit, which he believes watches over him. This 
totam they conceive assumes the shape of some beast or other, and therefore 
they never kill, hunt, or eat the animal whose form they think this totam bears. 
NUMBER 44 307 
The evening previous to the departure of the band, one of them, whose totam 
was a bear, dreamed that if he could go to a piece of swampy ground, at the 
foot of a high mountain, about five days march from my wigwam, he would see 
a large herd of elks, moose, and other animals; but that he must be accompa?
nied by at least ten good hunters. When he awoke he acquainted the band with 
his dream, and desired them to go with him: they all refused, saying it was out 
of their way, and that their hunting grounds were nearer. The Indian having a 
superstitious reverence for his dream (which ignorance, and the prevalence of 
example among the Savages, carries to a great height), thinking himself 
obliged to do so, as his companions had refused to go with him, went alone, 
and coming near the spot, saw the animals he dreamed of; he instantly fired, 
and killed a bear. Shocked at the transaction, and dreading the displeasure of 
the Master of Life, whom he conceived he had highly offended, he fell down, 
and lay senseless for some time: recovering from his state of insensibility, he 
got up, and was making the best of his way to my house, when he was met in 
the road by another large bear, who pulled him down, and scratched his face. 
The Indian relating this event at his return added, in the simplicity of his nature, 
that the bear asked him what could induce him to kill his totam; to which he re?
plied, that he did not know he was among the animals when he fired at the 
herd; that he was very sorry for the misfortune, and hoped he would have pity 
on him: that the bear suffered him to depart, told him to be more cautious in fu?
ture, and acquaint all the Indians with the circumstance, that their totams might 
be safe, and the Master of Life not be angry with them. As he entered my 
house, he looked at [me and said] "Amik, hunjey ta Kitchee Anniscartissey nin, 
0 Totam, cawwicka nee wee geossay sannegat debwoye:" ?or, "Beaver, my 
faith is lost, my totam is angry, I shall never be able to hunt anymore." (Long, 
1904:123-125) 
Long (1904:125) then explained: 
This idea of destiny, or, if I may be allowed the phrase, "totamism" however 
strange, is not confined to the Savages; many instances might be adduced from 
history, to prove how strong these impressions have been on minds above the 
vulgar and unlearned. To instance one, in the history of the private life of Louis 
XV, translated by Justamond, among some particulars of the life of the famous 
Samuel Bernard, the Jew banker, of the court of France, he says, that he was 
superstitious as the people of his nation are, and had a black hen, to which he 
thought his destiny was attached; he had the greatest care taken of her, and the 
loss of this fowl was, in fact, the period of his own existence, in January, 1739. 
Long's account prompts several comments. First, as is gener?
ally agreed, Long's description seems to refer to the guard?
ian-spirit complex rather than to sociological or clan totemism, 
a point emphasized by Schoolcraft (1855:196) and Tylor 
(1898), neither of whom seems to have read Long directly. 
They believed that sociological totemism and individual to?
temism were different phenomena, with different origins, that 
should not be conflated. Apparently, Long confused the two 
ideas by subsuming them under a single term. 
It should be mentioned, however, that Long's presumed error 
in linking the term totem with "guardian spirit" was indepen?
dently repeated by the famous Jesuit missionary, Pierre de 
Smet. In an article dating to 1838-1839 (and reprinted in his 
collected Life, Letters and Trips (1905)), de Smet mentioned a 
Potawatomi naming ceremony in which a 17-year-old male's 
name, obtained from previous dream experience, is publicly 
proclaimed. To quote de Smet (1905:1093), "The animal which 
presents itself to him will become his manitou or totem 
(dodeme), and all his life long he will carry about him a badge 
of it, whether a claw, a tail, a feather, it matters not." Further, 
the image of the animal, or dodeme, the guardian spirit, was 
painted in red on the top of the grave post of the deceased per?
son (de Smet, 1905:1091-1092). 
Linguistic evidence is crucial in demonstrating that in native 
usage the root from which Long constructed his terms totam 
and totamism refers to kinship. In Algonquian languages, the 
nouns corresponding to English totem are dependent stems, 
which occur only in possessed nouns: thus "my totem" or "our 
totem" but not "[a] totem." According to Ives Goddard (pers. 
comm. cited in Callender, 1978:621), the Proto-Algonquian 
(PA) verb stem *o-te- can be translated as 'to dwell together 
as a group, village' Through regular derivation, *ote- would 
have formed a noun *otewa 'dweller', the possessed form of 
which would be (here with third-person possessor) 
*wet-ote-m-ali, with third-person prefix *wet- (incorporating 
the intervocalic connective *t), possessive ending *-m, and 
animate obviative singular ending *-ali. Ojibwa -dodem and 
its cognates in other Algonquian languages are reflexes of this 
form. PA *wetotemali can then be glossed as 'his or her co-
or fellow dweller'. It is also interesting to consider that the re?
flexes of *ote- together with the final abstract noun-forming 
suffix *-naw formed such Algonquian words for "village, 
town, or settlement" as Ojibwa odena and Woods Cree 
otinaw. We observe, then, two lexical affinities of *ote-, one 
with coresidential kinship groups and the other with residen?
tial localities. 
The semantics of the reflexes of PA *wetotemali refer to 
diverse kinds of consanguineal, affinal, and coresidential rela?
tionships. In Ojibwa, -dodem clearly exhibits the dual mean?
ings of 'patrilineal clan' (or 'member of patrilineal clan') and 
'eponymous clan animal'. For Algonquin at Lake of the Two 
Mountains, Jean-Baptiste Thavenet (in Cuoq, 1886:312-313) 
glossed the first-person possessed form nindodem ("nind 
otem") as "ma tribu" (possibly the patrilineal clan), or an indi?
vidual member of the same. Thavenet correctly identified the 
stem as o te- and glossed it as 'family', but he erred in seeking 
to derive it from -te? 'heart'. He also remarked on the use of 
such constructions as makwa nindodem 'the bear is my clan', 
which clearly exemplify the association of kin groups with 
eponymous animals. For the same dialect (historically the 
Nipissing variety of Eastern Ojibwa), Cuoq (1886:312) gave 
-ote- both as the stem oi nindodem 'my totem' and as having 
the meaning 'village'; he also gave odenaw 'village' but did 
not connect the two forms. J.N.B. Hewitt (1910:787-788), 
who relied heavily on Cuoq, rendered ode- in Ojibwa "and 
other cognate Algonquian dialects" as referring to kinship be?
tween siblings and, by extension, to all members of the exo-
gamic kinship group; he thus glossed ododeman (with third 
person affixes) as "his brother-sister kin." Hewitt also glossed 
the Ojibwa abstract noun-forming final -na(w) (which he gave 
with incorrect vowel length) as "dwelling place" and thus 
glossed Ojibwa odena or odenaw 'village' as "dwelling 
place of the clan." Note that not all Algonquian societies pos?
sessed patrilineal descent groups?the probable referent of 
308 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Hewitt's "clan"?and that this institution, therefore, cannot be 
assumed to have been a feature of Proto-Algonquian social 
structure or to have been a meaning of PA *wetotemali. We 
can infer that Ojibwa -dodem (singular) meant 'clan relative' 
(and, by abstraction, the membership of the clan as a collectiv?
ity) and that -do de-mag (plural) meant 'clan relatives'. In a 
unilinear system, it would make little sense to gloss the plural 
of the dependent noun -dodem as 'clans', although rhetorical 
contexts for such a meaning are imaginable. The usage of two 
nineteenth-century Ojibwa historians of their own people, Wil?
liam Warren and Peter Jones, makes clear that -dodem re?
ferred both to the patrilineal clan and to its eponymous animal 
emblem (Warren, 1957:42; Jones, 1970:138; see also Nichols 
and Nyholm, 1995:66, indodem 'my totem, my clan'). 
Fox exhibits a similar range of meanings. Goddard (1973, 
pers. comm., 1997) gave ote- as the stem of oteweni 'town'. 
For netotema, the meanings 'my sibling' and 'my same-sex 
sibling' are attested and can possibly be extended to "my fel?
low clansperson'. The Fox noun for patrilineal clan, however, 
is not -totem but misoni 'name'. For Fox ototemani, Jones 
(1911:810) gave the meanings "his eldest brother" (specificity 
dubious), "his master" (incorrect), "his clan tutelary," and "his 
giver of supernatural power." The last gloss shows affinities 
with Long's Ojibwa usage, although no textual exemplifica?
tions exist; however, netotema does occur in texts as a term 
of reciprocal address between clan members and their totemic 
animals. 
For Menominee, Bloomfield (1962:260-261, 397, 1975:6) 
gave the medial -ote- as 'household, family', and glossed 
-(t)otem as 'my totem animal, my totemic ancestor'. In Woods 
Cree, singular nitotim is *my relative or friend', and plural 
nitotimak is 'all my relatives and friends'; Crees lack patrilin?
eal descent groups, and -totim has no reference to eponymous 
animals. 
The form is also present in the eastern branch of the Algon?
quian language family, where, however, the social denotata are 
commonly friends or affines. Western Abenaki -dodam is "ani?
mal ancestor, totem' (Day, 1994), i.e., the eponymous animals 
of patrilineal clans. Penobscot -totem is 'friend' and, more spe?
cifically, 'affine' (Frank Siebert, pers. comm., Aug 1997). Mic?
mac -tuttem is glossed as "totem" (somewhat anomalously 
given the absence of Micmac descent groups) and also pos?
sesses the meanings "friend of another nation," "gentleman 
friend," and (as -tuttemisqw) "lady friend" (Rand, 1888; De-
Blois and Metallic, 1984). 
Individual totems, guardian spirits, or personal tutelaries are 
often regarded as an extended type of kin. The vision quest ex?
perience can be likened to an initiation adoption ritual in which 
a new kinship relationship is established. Many Algon-
quian-speaking peoples refer to the individual totem as a spe?
cific manitou, a term that has historically defied precise trans?
lation but can be loosely associated with power, medicine, or a 
divine being. The Ojibwa bawagan?an other-than-human 
person encountered in dreams or vis ions (Hal lowel l , 
1976:369)?could function as a guardian spirit, as could 
adizokanag, ancestral spirits or primordial myth beings 
called grandfathers (Hallowell, 1976:365). Adrian Tanner 
(1979:95, 103) described Mistassini Cree beliefs about winds 
associated with the cardinal directions and with seasonality. 
These winds are personified as spiritual beings who control 
weather and can be propitiated or magically manipulated to in?
sure successful hunting. In particular, the spirit connected with 
the north and winter, Ciiwetinsuu (and secondarily the spirit of 
the west wind), can affect the hunting of nonhibernating, non-
migratory game upon which humans depend for their winter 
survival. This being is honorifically referred to as "your grand?
father," suggesting not only esteem and kinship but also de?
scent. These directional and seasonal spiritual beings thus 
function as masters of generalized classes of game animals. In 
effect, they mediate between the souls of humans and those of 
animal spirits. As such, these beings represent a more general 
and inclusive power than that obtained through the spe?
cies-specific guardian spirit or individual totem. "Grandfather" 
is also a common term of address or reference for spirit entities 
among the Saulteaux Ojibwa and Woods Cree of Manitoba 
(Hallowell, 1976:369; Brightman, 1993:109) and perhaps 
among other Algonquian groups. 
Seldom mentioned in connection with Long's celebrated dis?
covery of totemism is the fact that he clearly recognized the ex?
istence of descent-group or sociological totemism. In the be?
ginning of his book, Long (1904:10) cited Cadwallader Colden 
in reference to the Five Nations Iroquois: "each of these na?
tions is again divided into three tribes or families, who are dis?
tinguished by the names of the Tortoise, Bear, and Wolf." 
These three family totems are recognized among the Mo-
hawk-Oneida and some Eastern Algonquian groups. Visual ev?
idence of totemic affiliation is afforded in the famous 
full-length portraits painted by John Verelst during the visit to 
London of one Mahican and three Mohawk chiefs (or "kings") 
in 1710. At the foot of the Mahican is a turtle, two of the Mo?
hawks are accompanied by wolves, and the third Mohawk, the 
grandfather of the late eighteenth-century political leader Jo?
seph Brant, sports a small bear (Editors of Time-Life Books, 
1992:74-75). Clearly, Long knew of descent group or socio?
logical totemism as well as individual totemism, and he pre?
sumably recognized the presence of both among the Ojibwa. 
Returning to Long's narrative, in the recorded Ojibwa speech 
of the accidental bear slayer is the form "nin, O Totam" for 'my 
totem'. The expected form would be nindodem. Recent re?
search indicates that Long possessed, as he claimed, a certain 
Ojibwa fluency, but it was in the grammatically simplified 
trade language known locally as broken Ojibwa rather than in 
Ojibwemowin or "Ojibwa proper" (Nichols, 1992; Bakker, 
1994). The lexical forms (and presumably the semantics) of 
broken Ojibwa, however, were clearly Algonquian, and Long's 
"nin, O Totam" is recognizable as a pidgin rendering of Ojibwa 
NUMBER 44 309 
nindodem. The supposition that Long's interlocutor used the 
word -dodem as a pidgin improvisation for manido- or 
bawagan 'individual spirit guardian', although possible, is not 
especially probable. Long's reputed error may be less the result 
of faulty diction (Hewitt, 1910:789) and more the lack of a na?
tive appreciation of the subtle analytic and conceptual distinc?
tions posited by late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century arm?
chair anthropologists and social theorists. 
We find it especially difficult to believe that Levi-Strauss, 
who, along with most everyone else, dutifully cited Long as the 
first to enter the term totemism into our discourse (thus becom?
ing our totemic ancestor), would fail to mention the French 
Jewish banker's black hen as an anticipation of his thesis about 
the universal manifestations of totemic thought. Samuel Ber?
nard was, indeed, an important personage, and his portrait 
hangs in the French chateau Chenonceau. Without trying to ad?
vance a Jewish theory of totemism, we do think that had 
Levi-Strauss directly consulted Long's account we might have 
been spared the tortuous genealogy of metaphoric totemism 
from Rousseau out of Bergson through Linton's A.E.F. Rain?
bow Division and Radcliffe-Brown's second theory of to?
temism (Levi-Strauss, 1963:7-8, 83-104)! 
The question of the relationship between so-called individ?
ual totems and hereditary clan totems is interestingly posed by 
the classicist and religious anthropologist James Frazer (1934) 
in the third volume of his massive, if not magnum, opus 7b-
temism and Exogamy, originally published in 1910. Although 
he accepted Tylor's objection that individual totemism and 
clan totemism are different phenomena that should not be 
classed together under the same rubric, Frazer sensed a simi?
larity in attitudes of respect and affection toward the totemic 
being. He suggested that American ethnologists with direct 
field experience?most notably the Canadian Charles 
Hill-Tout, who worked primarily with the Coast Salish? 
tended to derive clan totems from guardian spirits. The essen?
tial argument is the belief that the guardian spirit of the ances?
tor of the clan is transmitted by social inheritance to his or her 
descendants, either in the male or the female line. While 
Frazer granted a certain plausibility to this position, he noted 
that other scholars, with equal plausibility, inverted the argu?
ment by maintaining the priority of clan totemism. For these 
theorists, guardian-spirit beliefs emerged "at a time when the 
totemism of clans was falling into decay, and when conse?
quently individuals, deprived of the protection of the clan 
totem, looked about for a personal guardian of their own to 
supply its place" (Frazer, 1934(3):371). Frazer attributed the 
latter position to E.S. Hartland, A.C. Haddon, Henri Hubert, 
Marcel Mauss, and to personal communication with a young 
Cambridge colleague named A.R. Brown. It is tempting to see 
in Frazer's counter-positions American individualism 
matched against European social apriorists, but we won't pur?
sue this here.1 
Frazer was skilled at posing dilemmas in studying problems 
of origins, but he was less successful in resolving them. By 
tracing the distributions of guardian spirit complexes and clan 
totemism over Native North America, he found an expectable 
overlap; yet some areas clearly possessed totemic clans without 
guardian spirits, and in other areas the situation was reversed. 
Temporal priority cannot be established on the basis of distri?
bution. Although the question of origins is probably moot, if 
not mute, in modern anthropology, it is possible to examine the 
relationships of clan totems to guardian spirits from other an?
gles besides the kind of distributional analyses favored by 
Frazer and others, or, at another extreme, the elegant types of 
analogical exercises championed by structuralists. The diverse 
semantics of Algonquian words for totem allowed us to reex?
amine the late ethnohistorian Harold Hickerson's (1970:42-50) 
argument that the basic social structure of the Chippewas at 
first contact comprised localized clan groups possessing animal 
eponyms. He employed an etymology identical to that followed 
above to interpret the term odena as signifying "clan village" 
(he cited Landes, 1937:33-35, who in turn credited Truman 
Michelson). Hickerson amassed impressive data to demon?
strate the equivalence between Chippewa clan names and their 
names for local groups. One key quotation from Nicolas Perrot 
appears to clinch Hickerson's argument for original clan settle?
ments: "You will hear [the Indians] say that their villages bear 
the name of the animal which has given its people their be?
ing?as that of the crane, or the bear, or of other animals" 
(quoted in Hickerson, 1970:47). 
We find difficulties with the notion of exclusive clan vil?
lages. It was desirable, if not necessary, to have lineal relatives 
residing in other settlements.2 As Tylor (1888:266) speculated 
long ago, "Again and again in the world's history, savage tribes 
must have had plainly before their minds the simple practical 
alternative between marrying out and being killed-out." Such 
localized kin groups would seem to be extremely fragile, vola?
tile, and vulnerable to processes of segmentation or amalgam?
ation, or both. Yet there is less difficulty in recognizing clan 
villages as a kind of cultural fiction, a positive ideology stress?
ing the dominance or ascendancy of a particular clan or lineage 
in a particular locale. Here the Stewardian patrilineal bands 
imagined by Hickerson converged with the Ojibwas' own rep?
resentations. Such a group might provide political or religious 
leadership in the local community, serve as the bearers of col?
lective sacred bundles or traditions, or possess special rights or 
relations to a particular territory and its resources. 
We agree with Hickerson that, going back in time, distinc?
tions between clan and local group become blurred. We part 
company in interpreting the nature of the relationship between 
the totemic group and the local territory. Here, spatial coordi?
nates defining locality and generational time inherent in de?
scent intersect. Ideological factors, especially notions of guard?
ian spirits or masters or mistresses of the game, or both, 
become relevant. 
310 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Hickerson's neglect of ideological factors is understandable 
given his strong ecological and cultural-materialist orientation. 
Moreover, he seemed to accept unquestionably Eleanor Lea-
cock's (1954) seemingly persuasive evidence, generalized from 
the Montagnais, that family hunting territories came into exist?
ence only after the establishment of the fur trade (1954). The 
advent of a fur-trading economy, along with devastating epi?
demic disease, certainly brought profound changes to tradi?
tional systems of territorialism, but many recent fieldworkers 
and ethnohistorians, such as Robert Brightman (1993), Harvey 
Feit (1973, 1991), Charles Bishop and Toby Morantz (1986), 
Adrian Tanner (1979), and David Turner (1978), view this 
transformation as less abrupt and absolute. They have also de?
tected certain continuities in ethnoecology and in deeply in?
grained cultural belief structures about relations between ani?
mals and humans and between each of these and the land?a 
kind of symbolic ecology, as it were. 
Leacock (1954) and her followers tend to emphasize the es?
tablishment of sharp boundaries, rules against trespass, and 
strict notions of ownership in the sense of private property as 
defining features characterizing the appearance of family hunt?
ing territories with commercial commodification of animals. 
Boundaries, although marked and ethnocartographically 
mapped, probably were always somewhat fluid, and few legal 
sanctions other than threats to mutual understanding and fears 
of divine punishment protected them against trespass. 
Ownership and private property seem to be the sources of 
contention. The overriding principle is not so much that land is 
owned by individuals or by a local group, but that these per?
sons have rights to the resources, particularly fur-bearing ani?
mals, present in that area. In a more than casual remark, the 
German emigre ethnologist Julius Lips once stated that among 
the Mistassini Cree, animals, not humans, were the true owners 
of the territory (cited in Tanner, 1979:107). 
Adrian Tanner's (1979) study of modern Mistassini modes 
of production and religious ideology, Bringing Home Animals, 
took the comment of Lips seriously and described in detail the 
cultural constitution of Cree spatial orientations, the complexi?
ties of divinatory communication with animal spirits and 
forces of nature, the rituals regulating relations between hunt?
ers and their quarry, and the ritualized respect owed to slain 
animals. Successful hunting, from the native perspective, de?
pends as much upon these ritual relations as upon technical 
proficiency in hunting. It is thought that certain individuals, 
usually elder males and nominal heads of the local group, have 
established special enduring relations of friendship with local 
spirits who control the numbers of animals and access to them. 
It is further believed that these spiritual connections can be in?
herited by a successor, normally a son or an adoptive member 
of the group who has resided in the territory for an extended 
period of time. 
We suggest that the beliefs and practices that Tanner has so 
cogently described for the Mistassini Cree may formerly have 
been much more widespread and that clan totemism, locality, 
and individual totemism were more integrally connected than 
has generally been supposed. Two independent attestations ex?
ist?Long's and de Smet's?of Ojibwa-Potawatomi -dodem 
with the meaning 'individual totem or spirit guardian' (see 
above). Thus, for these groups at least, the noun possessed 
multiple meanings. In Long's time, Ojibwa nindodem 'my 
totem' could mean 'my clan relative' and 'my individual spirit 
guardian' and 'my clan animal'; pluralized, it meant 'my clan 
relatives' or 'my clan'. Thus, eponymous group totems and in?
dividual guardian spirits need not succeed one another in lock-
step evolutionary succession but could coexist in the same so?
cieties (Goldenweiser, 1910). An Ojibwa might have Wolf as 
clan totem and Beaver as an individual spirit guardian, or the 
reverse, or might imaginably possess as guardian spirit a being 
of the same type as the clan totem. 
Consider, for example, Speck's (1917) reflections on "to?
temism" among the Penobscots of Maine. Lacking the unilin-
eal-descent groups of the Ojibwas and other Great Lakes Al-
gonquians (and of other Atlantic Coast Algonquians to the 
south), the Penobscots nonetheless were "totemically" orga?
nized: 13 out of 22 residential bands present in the late nine?
teenth century were named for an individual animal species 
(beaver, otter, moose, eel, etc.) deemed to be distinctively and 
exceptionally populous on their traditional winter foraging ter?
ritories. The individual guardian spirit, which Speck gave as 
"baohigan" (pdwahikan 'token, talisman, fetish object used for 
magic purposes by shamans' (Frank Siebert, pers. comm., Aug 
1997; Ives Goddard, pers. comm., 27 Aug 1997)) was not 
commonly an animal of the type of the group totem. In con?
trast to Ojibwa, the Penobscot word -totem lacks known refer?
ence to spirit or animal beings, and neither does it refer to a 
primary kin group; the sociological reference excludes "con?
sanguines" and seems rather to refer to such "solidary nonkin" 
as friends, acquaintances, and relatives by marriage (Frank 
Siebert, pers. comm., Aug 1997). Speck compared the group 
totemism of the Penobscot with the individual spirit-guardian 
practices of the Quebec Mistassini Cree to the north.3 Mis?
tassini bands lacked zoonymic band totems, and Penobscot 
group totems were distinct from individual spirit guardians. 
Speck, nevertheless, identified a significant parallel between 
the Penobscot totems and the individual dream spirits of the 
Mistassini: both involved animal species that were dietary sta?
ples and were commonly hunted on the winter foraging terri?
tory. In hindsight, we can say that it is a question of Penobscot 
attentiveness to la difference. Although the same project of 
dream-inspired foraging confronted both groups, the Penob?
scot improvised upon regional disparities in particular game 
species to develop a genuinely totemic system in which other?
wise homogeneous winter bands were differentiated on the ba?
sis of statistical heterogeneity in the densities of particular spe-
NUMBER 44 311 
cies on otherwise homogeneous foraging tracts. Thus, with 
apologies to Levi-Strauss: 
species i 
tract i 
band. 
species2 *? 
tract2 *? 
band-, * 
species3 
tract3 
band? 
Here also are parallels between the dietary regulation of hu?
man-animal relationships in the clan totemic and guard?
ian-spirit relationships. Nowhere in the literature on the 
Ojibwa or other Great Lakes Algonquians is there evidence 
that individuals practiced a classically Australian Aborigine 
dietary renunciation of their clan totem animal. Indeed, such 
renunciation would entail impracticable hardship for groups 
whose eponymous clan totems were dietary staples; consider, 
for example, the winter prospects of bands exclusively com?
posed of male hunters of the Moz 'moose' or Amik 'beaver' 
clans. Thus, for example, the testimony of an Ojibwa member 
of the Awazisi 'Bullhead' (Aspidophorus cataphractes) clan: 
"We have great respect of our do'dam, but we eat them; I have 
often eaten bullhead" (Hilger, 1992:155; see also Landes, 
1937:33). Speck (1917:10) long ago observed that Subarctic 
Algonquian "band totemism" of the Penobscot type formed a 
dietary inversion of Australian totemism: the Australians "re?
produced" the eponymous species by renouncing it as food, 
whereas the Algonquians accomplished the same end by ritual 
consumption (see Brightman, 1993:213-243). The same could 
perhaps be said of the dietary relation between the patrilineal 
clans of the Great Lakes Algonquians and their eponymous 
animals. 
The dietary relation to the individual spirit guardian is more 
variable. Speck (1917) emphasized the dietary parallels be?
tween Penobscot bands and their animal totems and between 
Mistassini hunters and individual guardian-spirit animals (both 
were eaten), but there is evidence that guardian-spirit animals 
sometimes imposed dietary taboos on animals of the same spe?
cies. Thus the individual renunciation of the animal-spirit 
guardian attested in Long's eighteenth-century text is paral?
leled in the contemporary practices of some Woods Cree hunt?
ers of Manitoba. Among the latter, the logistical difficulties are 
sometimes adjusted by exempting from the taboo the meat of 
animals of one or the other sex or of those killed by others. In 
cases known to us, for example, a man whosepawakan, or 
guardian spirit, is a female beaver abstains from eating them, 
and a man who survived drowning by dreaming of a sturgeon 
thereafter renounced sturgeon meat. 
The semantics of totemism in Algonquian languages and cul?
tures thus exhibits a rich and geographically variable network 
of associations that reaches from the Atlantic Coast to the 
Great Lakes and north into the boreal forest: coresidential kin 
groups (patrilineal or bilateral), winter foraging tracts, epony?
mous animals, and individual animal spirit guardians. Even 
though the distribution of the cultural forms in question does 
not permit us to reconstruct a Proto-Algonquian totemic sys?
tem, if such ever existed, we observe in them associations 
counter to the rigid typological separation of group from indi?
vidual totemism and counter to the assumption that Long got it 
all wrong at the beginning. In Penobscot totemism we observe 
clear parallels to Tanner's (1979) Mistassini themes of animal 
ownership of the foraging tracts and of enduring transgenera-
tional relations between the humans and animals habitually 
subsisting in the same landscapes. Groups, even nomadic ones, 
dwelt in places, and?Leacock notwithstanding?there was in?
tergenerational continuity between groups and places before 
the fur trade and thus possible relationships with theriomorphic 
spirits-of-place that could be both individual guardians and 
group totems. Curiously, but perhaps not coincidentally, it is 
with the meaning of individual spirit guardian rather than 
group eponym that "totem" has been assimilated to the pop In?
dian spirituality of New Age devotees (Steiger, 1997). 
Conclusion 
This exploration of totemism in its native homeland may not 
have resolved the "problem" of the origin of totemism (Jewish 
or otherwise) that has perplexed the minds of so many social 
scientific theorists. We can, however, perhaps discern in the sit?
uation of parallel existence and reciprocity obtaining between 
humans and animals, and their mediators, a possible solution to 
the classic classificatory problem of reconciling so-called indi?
vidual totemism with the hereditary totemism of descent 
groups. The radical dissociation between individual and group 
totemism may be more an analytic dream, and anthropological 
nightmare, than a native reality. 
Finally, if nothing else, we hope to have indicated the rele?
vance of Native American data to past and continuing debates 
in anthropology, something Claude Levi-Strauss always appre?
ciated and Bill Sturtevant always knew. 
Notes 
This paper has been in process a long time. Those we can recall who made 
useful comments on it include Anne Chien, Raymond DeMallie, Ives God?
dard, Robert McKinley, Toby Morantz, Jay Miller, Frank Siebert, and George 
Stocking. 
1. The American, or better, Canadian, evidence for deriving sociological to?
temism from group totemism was partly dismissed by Frazer in noting that 
Northwest Coast cultures were already highly developed and could not be 
placed on a comparable evolutionary plane as the Australian Aborigines, who 
were regarded by most contemporary scholars as embodying a pristine form of 
totems. Paradoxically, totemism, a Native American phenomenon, came to be 
measured and evaluated against Australian Aboriginal standards and was found 
to be anomalous. 
2. Indeed, Landes (1937:33) pointed out that the dodems at Eno and Manitou 
Reserve "are not localized, whether as villages or within the village," although 
she noted that Radin reported clan localization for the Winnebago, and Michel?
son believed in its former existence among the Fox. 
3. The spirit-guardian experiences of the Quebec Algonquians differ substan?
tially from those of the Crees and Ojibwas to the west. The being was not ac?
quired at puberty during a formal protracted fast but through involuntary 
dreams during early adulthood. 
312 
Literature Cited 
SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Bakker, Peter 
1994. Is John Long's Chippeway (1791) an Ojibwa Pidgin? In William 
Cowan, editor, Actes du Vingt-Cinquieme Congres des Algonquin-
istes, pages 13-31. Ottawa, Ontario: Carleton University. 
Bishop, Charles A., and Toby Morantz, editors 
1986. Who Owns the Beaver? Northern Algonquian Land Tenure Recon?
sidered. Anthropologica, special issue, 28(1-2): 219+[5] pages. 
Blair, Emma H. 
1996. 77ie Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and the Region of 
the Great Lakes. 2 volumes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 
[Originally published in 1911 by the Arthur H. Clark Co., Cleve?
land, Ohio.] 
Bloomfield, Leonard 
1962. The Menomini Language, xi+515 pages. New Haven, Connecticut: 
Yale University Press. 
1975. Menomini Lexicon. CF. Hockett, editor, Milwaukee Public Museum 
Publications in Anthropology and History, 3: xviii+289 pages. Mil?
waukee, Wisconsin: Milwaukee Public Museum Press. 
Brightman, Robert 
1993. Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships, xvi+396 
pages. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
Callender, Charles 
1978. Great Lakes-Riverine Sociopolitical Organization. In William C. 
Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of North American Indians, 
volume 15, Bruce G. Trigger, editor, Northeast, pages 610-621. 
Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
Cuoq, Jean-Andre 
1886. Lexique de la langue algonquinc xii+446 pages. Montreal: J. Chap-
leau et Fils. 
Day, Gordon 
1994. Western Abenaki Dictionary, Volume I: Abenaki-English. Paper 
(Canadian Ethnology Service), 128: lxxii+538 pages. Hull, Quebec: 
Canadian Museum of Civilization. 
De Blois, Albert D., and Alphonse Metallic 
1984. Micmac Lexicon. Paper (Canadian Ethnology Service), 91: xvii + 
392 pages. Ottawa, Ontario: National Museums of Canada, 
de Smet, Pierre-Jean 
1905. Life, Letters and Travels of Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, S.J. Edited 
by Hiran M. Chittenden and A.T. Richardson, 4 volumes. New 
York: Francis P. Harper. 
Durkheim, Emile 
1965. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated from the 
French by Joseph W. Swain, 507 pages. New York: Free Press. 
[Originally published in 1915 by G. Allen and Unwin, London.] 
Durkheim, Emile, and Marcel Mauss 
1963. Primitive Classification. Translated from the French and edited with 
an introduction by Rodney Needham, xIviii+96 pages. London: 
Cohen and West. [Translation of "De quelques formes primitives de 
classif icat ion," published in 1903 in Annee Sociologique, 
1901-1902.] 
Editors of Time-Life Books 
1992. The European Challenge. 192 pages. Alexandria, Virginia: 
Time-Life Books. 
Feit, Harvey A. 
1973. The Ethno-Ecology of the Waswanipi Cree; or How Hunters Can 
Manage Their Resources. In Bruce Cox, editor, Cultural Ecology, 
pages 115-125. Toronto, Ontario: McClelland and Stewart. 
1991. The Construction of Algonquian Hunting Territories: Private Prop?
erty as Moral Lesson, Policy Advocacy, and Ethnographic Error. In 
George W. Stocking, editor, Colonial Situations: Essays on the Con-
textualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, pages 109-134. Madi?
son: University of Wisconsin Press. 
Frazer, J.G. 
1934. Totemism and Exogamy. 4 volumes. Cambridge: Trinity College. 
Freud, Sigmund 
1952. Totem and Taboo; some Points of Agreement between the Mental 
Lives of Savages and Neurotics, x+172 pages. New York: Norton. 
[Originally published in 1913 by Hugo Heller, Vienna.] 
Goddard, Ives 
1973. A Report on Ethnographic and Philological Studies of Michelson's 
Fox Texts. [Paper read at the Algonquian Conference, Green Bay, 
Wisconsin, 6 Apr 1973.] 
Goldenweiser, Alexander 
1910. Totemism, an Analytic Study. Journal of American Folklore, 
23:179-293. 
1933a. The Origin of Totemism. In Alexander Goldenweiser, History, Psy?
chology and Culture, pages 335-342. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 
1933b. Form and Content in Totemism. In Alexander Goldenweiser, His?
tory, Psychology and Culture, pages 343-354. New York: Alfred A. 
Knopf. 
Hallowell, A. Irving 
1976. Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View. In Raymond D. Fo?
gelson, editor, Contributions to Anthropology: Selected Papers of A. 
Irving Hallowell, pages 357-390. Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press. 
Hewitt, J.N.B. 
1910. Totem. In F.W. Hodge, editor, Handbook of American Indians North 
of Mexico. Bulletin, Bureau of American Ethnology, 30(2):787-794. 
Hickerson, Harold 
1970. The Chippewa and Their Neighbors: A Study in Ethnohistory. x+ 
133 pages. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 
Hilger, M. Inez 
1992. Chippewa Child Life and Its Cultural Background, xxxii+204 
pages. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. [Originally 
published in 1951 by the Government Printing Office, Washington, 
D.C] 
Jones, Peter 
1970. History of the Ojebway Indians, with Especial Reference to Their 
Conversion to Christianity, vi + 278 pages. Freeport, New York: 
Books for Libraries. [Originally published in 1861 by A.W. Bennett, 
London.] 
Jones, William 
1911. Algonquian (Fox). Revised by Truman Michelson. In Franz Boas, 
Handbook of American Indian Languages. Bulletin, Bureau of 
American Ethnology, 40(l):735-873. 
Landes, Ruth 
1937. Ojibwa Sociology. [6]+144+[2] pages. New York: Columbia Uni?
versity Press. 
Leacock, Eleanor 
1954. The Montagnais "Hunting Territory" and the Fur Trade. Memoirs, 
American Anthropological Association, 78: xi+59 pages. 
Levi-Strauss, Claude 
1963. Totemism. Translated from the French by Rodney Needham, 116 
pages. Boston: Beacon Press. [Translation of Totemisme anjourd'hui, 
published in 1962 by Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.] 
1966. The Savage Mind, xii+290 pages. Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press. [Translation of La Pensee Sauvage, published in 1962 by 
Plon.] 
Linton, Ralph 
1924. Totemism and the A.E.F. American Anthropologist, 26:296-300. 
Long, John 
1904. Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader.. .April 10, 
1768-Spring, 1782. In Reuben Gold Thwaites, editor, Early Western 
Travels, 1748-1846, volume 2: 329+[4] pages. Cleveland, Ohio: 
NUMBER 44 313 
Arthur H. Clark. [Originally published in 1791.] 
1922. John Long's Voyages and Travels in the Years 1768-1788. Edited 
with historical introduction and notes by Milo Quaife, xxx + 238 
pages. Chicago, Illinois: R.R. Donnelley and Sons. [Originally pub?
lished in 1791.] 
Nichols, John D. 
1992. "Broken Oghibbeway": An Algonquian Trade Language. [Paper 
read at the twenty-fourth Algonquian Conference, Carleton Univer?
sity, Ottawa, Ontario.] 
Nichols, John D., and Earl Nyholm 
1995. A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwa. xxviii+288 pages. Min?
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 
Rand, Silas T. 
1888. Dictionary of the Language of the Micmac Indians, Who Reside in 
Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton 
Newfoundland. 2 pages of leaves+[iii]-viii, 286 pages. Halifax, 
Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia Printing Co. 
Schoolcraft, Henry R. 
1855. Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the 
Indian Tribes of the United States. Volume 5: [vii]-xxiv+25-712 
pages. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J.B. Lippincott and Co. 
Shapiro, Warren 
1991. Claude Levi-Strauss Meets Alexander Goldenweiser. American An?
thropologist, 93:599-610. 
Speck, Frank G. 
1917. Game Totems among the Northeastern Algonquians. American An?
thropologist, 19:9-18. 
Steiger, Brad 
1997. Totems: The Transformative Power of Your Personal Animal Totem. 
218 pages. San Francisco, California: Harper. 
Tanner, Adrian 
1979. Bringing Home Animals: Religious Ideology and Mode of Produc?
tion of the Mistassini Cree Hunters, xx+233 pages. New York: St. 
Martin's Press. 
Turner, David H. 
1978. Dialectics in Tradition: Myth and Social Structure in Two 
Hunter-Gatherer Societies. Occasional Paper, Royal Anthropologi?
cal Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 36: iv+46 pages. 
Tylor, E.B. 
1888. On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions. Jour?
nal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18:245-272. 
1898. Remarks on Totemism with Especial Reference to Some Modem 
Theories Concerning It. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Insti?
tute, 28:138-148. 
Warren, William 
1957. History of the Ojibwa Nation. 527 pages. Minneapolis, Minnesota: 
Ross and Haines. [Originally published in 1885 in volume 5 of Col?
lections of the Minnesota Historical Society.] 

Coyote, Acorns, Salmon, and Quartz: Verse Analysis of a Karok Myth 
Dell Hymes 
The Karok myth analyzed in what follows was transcribed 
from dictation in 1951 by the American linguist William Bright 
and later published in his invaluable account of the Karok lan?
guage (Bright, 1957:204-207). Bright joined in the early work 
in ethnopoetics, and this myth was one of those he analyzed 
(Bright, 1982, 1984). Herein I hope to carry further recognition 
of the form of the text and therefore its meaning. Because I dis?
cussed this myth at a seminar at the Smithsonian Institution,1 it 
seems especially appropriate as part of this tribute to William 
Sturtevant. 
The text of this myth is one of the few for which alternate 
analyses of form have been offered. Two other analyses of 
texts?one Zuni (Hymes, 1982), the other Hopi (Hymes, 
1994)?compare a focus on spoken contours to a focus on lex?
ical and syntactic relationships. In this paper the comparison 
is within a shared framework. Bright and I share the assump?
tion that such a narrative is "measured verse"; his analysis dif?
fers from mine in how units beyond line and verse are distin?
guished. 
Bright distinguished four levels of units: lines, verses, 
scenes, and acts. I follow his identification of lines; the line 
numbers in our accounts are the same. I also follow his identi?
fication of verses, with minor modifications (explained in 
"Analytic Notes," below). In particular, I accept his treatment 
of forms with the profix pa= as distinct lines (supported by a 
personal communication from Victor Golla (20 Mar 1985) 
about neighboring Hupa); however, the manner of our presen?
tations differs. Bright showed lines by spatial relationship 
within verses, and he identified verses by preceding paren?
thetic numbers that are continuous throughout the text. I iden?
tify lines throughout the text by consecutive numbering of ev?
ery fifth line at the right, but I do not number verses. Instead, 
verses begin flush left within stanzas, and stanzas are sepa?
rated by space within scenes. In the profile, I identify verses 
by lower-case letters and stanzas by upper-case letters, with 
the sequence of letters beginning anew within each part. 
Scenes [ii] and [iii] in Act I each have three stanzas, and these 
are labeled (ABC). The other scenes in this narrative have only 
a single stanza each, which could be labeled (A) in each case, 
but that seems redundant. 
Dell Hymes, Department of Anthropology, emeritus, University of Vir?
ginia; 205 Montvue Drive, Charlottesville, Virginia, 22901-2022, USA. 
Bright found acts to correspond to major changes in the lo?
cale of action, but he found scenes to be definable most consis?
tently in terms of the participants involved (Bright, 1984:138). 
Bright did not constrain or have an expectation of the number 
of units a larger unit might contain. His three acts contain five, 
three, and two scenes, respectively, and they vary in the num?
ber of verses the scenes contain. I distinguish stanzas within 
scenes and look for consistent patterns in the grouping of 
verses within stanzas and stanzas within scenes. The differ?
ences can be summarized as follows: 
Acts 
Scenes 
Stanzas 
Verses 
Bright 
3 
5,3,2 
I (3, 6, 4, 6, 7) 
II (5, 4, 4) 
HI (7, 2) 
Hymes 
3 
3,3,5 
(1 ,3 ,3) (1 ,1 ,1) (1 ,1 ,1 , 1, 
(2) (5, 3, 3) (3, 3, 3) 
(3x2) (3x2) (3x2) 
(2, 3, 3, 3, 4 (chiasmus)) 
1) 
In effect, Bright's definitions bifurcate the text. Verses are 
identified by linguistic features, notably initial particles. 
Scenes and acts are identified by content, by a consistent set of 
actors for scenes, and by a major change of location for acts. 
Such features matter, but they seem to take into account only 
the nouns of the plot, as it were, and to omit the verbs. As the 
narrative continues, constellations of actors may recur, but ac?
tions change. 
It does not seem sufficient to identify several segments of the 
text in terms of the presence of the sisters (see profile, below, 
Bright IA, ID, IIC, IIIA), or the sisters and Coyote (Bright IC, 
IE, IIA), apart from the action, or more important, apart from 
the goal of the action involved. When the goal of the action is 
taken into account, the appearance of unity of the segments 
changes. Covariation of form and meaning becomes more evi?
dent in recurrent relations, here threes and fives. Changes 
among them have dramatic meaning (as with Act II). One be?
gins to recognize a repertoire of rhetorical patterns (two such 
are a situation, an action, something said, or a sequence of on?
set, ongoing, outcome). One can grasp the story as ongoing 
arousals and satisfactions of formal expectation. 
These differences can be seen in the side-by-side presenta?
tion of profiles of the two analyses that follows the presentation 
of the text and its translation. Notice that Bright's headings 
315 
316 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
show locations for acts and participants for scenes, whereas my 
headings show actions as well. 
By now such relations and patterns have been found in narra?
tives in about 60 Native American languages, in American En?
glish, and in several Old World languages, including Bulgarian, 
Finnish, Japanese, and Koryak. There appear to be two basic 
alternatives, relations of two and four or relations of three and 
five. The hypothesis of such relations seems reasonable for any 
oral narrative. 
Karok is an interesting case, in that its narrators may make 
use of both basic patterns. Two of Bright's sources, Nettie Re?
uben and Julia Starritt, told him the story of "Coyote's Jour?
ney." Reuben grouped verses, and stanzas, in pairs, whereas 
Starritt grouped them in threes and fives. On the other hand, 
Reuben grouped scenes in threes and fives, and in "Coyote's 
Homecoming," she used three and five grouping throughout. In 
sum, two narrators told the same story with different principles 
of patterning. Different stories with different principles of pat?
terning were told by the same narrator (cf. Hymes, 1985). 
A Karok narrative told by Phoebe Maddux to J.R Har?
rington (of the Bureau of American Ethnology), "Two girls 
apply for marriage with Spring Salmon" (Harrington, 
1932:22-24), also shows both principles of patterning 
(Hymes, 1997). The first scene has three stanzas, each with 
three verses. The second and third scenes each have two stan?
zas but have sets of verses in threes and fives. The fourth 
scene reverses that relationship, having five stanzas, each with 
a pair of verses. The fifth scene has one stanza with five 
verses. The second and third scenes stand out, probably be?
cause the two girls initiate the action. In the fourth and fifth 
scenes that relation is reversed. Others in the village are heard 
speaking, and the girls respond. 
This information makes a theoretical point, but it barely 
scratches the surface as to Karok. Analysis of all the texts and 
narrators (including those in Harrington, 1930, 1932) might 
disclose motivations for choices and connections among them. 
Such work is possible because of Bright's careful, comprehen?
sive foundation. I am glad to have been able to discuss some 
aspects of Karok with Bright in correspondence when begining 
work with Karok texts. 
Coyote Gives Salmon and Acorns to Humans 
The text was dictated to Bright by Mamie Offield, a Karok 
woman, at her isolated home on the slopes of sacred Offield 
Mountain, in northern California (Bright, 1984:136). (The title 
was supplied by Bright.) She also told it, in Karok, to the an?
thropologist E.W. Gifford in 1939. All Gifford's texts were told 
in Karok and then were translated into English, either by the 
narrator or "in most cases [by] a younger bilingual Indian" 
(Kroeber, 1980:xv). The translator of this story probably was 
Offield herself, because with Gifford she translated for older 
Karok and narrated as well (Bright, 1984:136). The result is lit?
tle more than a summary, perhaps 18 lines, with only one in?
stance of quoted speech. 
Offield's dictation to Bright is far superior. The text has some 
111 lines with 15 instances of quoted speech and thought. 
There is a neatly shaped central dialogue. The story leads to a 
transformation and the origin of a basic rite. 
These two versions from Offield are the only ones we have. 
Kroeber, Gifford, Harrington, and Bright have accounts of the 
creation of salmon (Kroeber and Gifford, 1980:360), but only 
Gifford and Bright have accounts of their release. In 1940 an?
other Karok woman, Georgia Orcutt, told Gifford separate ac?
counts of the provision of acorns and of salmon. The first, on 
how acorns came to be available only in the fall, against Coy?
ote's wishes, evidently was popular, because she heard it "from 
Red Cap Tom and others." But her telling of it, or the translation, 
was summary (Kroeber and Gifford, 1980:156). Her account of 
Coyote making salmon available, however, was performed with 
distinct details (Kroeber and Gifford, 1980:156-157). 
Gifford reported that Offield learned from her mother the 
story of Coyote releasing both acorns and salmon. Perhaps this 
integrated version, making Coyote central to the availability of 
both major foods, was specific to her family. In any case, the 
difference as to acorns shows that, as elsewhere, Coyote was a 
contested figure among the Karok (cf. Hymes, 1996). 
In the text that follows, each of the three stanzas of Act II has 
three pairs of verses. A brace (}) at the end of a line calls atten?
tion to the end of such a pair, which is enclosed in paired braces 
in the profile. An exclamation point (!) line-internally in En?
glish corresponds to the Karok word viir(a), which lends em?
phasis to a line without having a translatable meaning. 
7axxak ?asiktan kun9inanik, 
kustaras, 
?Ame-kya-ram. 
Kari xas kunpip, 
"Piira kara vura 9a-ma ^amtihe-sara. 
"Yukun, tanupfssunva, 
pa^a-ma." 
[Coyote gives Salmon and Acorns to Humans] 
Mamie Offield 
I. [Coyote discovers the hidden salmon] 
[i] [Two sisters hide the salmon] 
Two women used to live, 
sisters, 
at Amekyaram. 
Now then they said, 
5 "Nobody ! will eat salmon. 
"See, we've hidden it, 
that salmon." 
NUMBER 44 317 
KarixasPihne-fic 9uxxus, 
"Piixay viira va- kupitihesara." 
Kari xas 9uxxus, 
"Cimi kanimussan." 
Kari xas muvikkapu 9uppecip. 
Kari xas 9e-pa-x 9ukruh. 
Kari xas vikkapuhak 9u06anamnih. 
Kari xas va- kan 9u9u-m, 
yoram 9ukris. 
Kari xas kunpatanvanis, 
"Fatkuma9i- 9ivurayvutih?" 
Kari xas 9uppi-p, 
"Karuk 9iOiv0ane-n9ippan niva-ramutih. 
Xas vura ka-n 9iikri-. 
Kari xas 9uppi-p, 
"Tanaxxiiriha. 
"Ti- mate- 9 ama kan9am." 
Kari xas 9u9e-9risuk, 
pa9epax. 
[ii] [Coyote pretends to have salmon] 
Now then Coyote thought, 
"They're not going to get away with that!" 
10 Now then he thought, 
"Let me go look." 
Now then he picked up his quiver. 
Now then he peeled alder bark. 
Now then he put it in the quiver. 
15 Now then he arrived at that place, 
he just sat in the corner. 
Now then they asked him, 
"Why are you roaming around?" 
Now then he said, 
20 "I'm going to the upriver end of the world." 
Then ! there he sat. 
Now then he said, 
"I'm hungry. 
"I shall eat a bit of salmon." 
25 Now then he took it out, 
the alder bark. 
10 
15 
20 
25 
Kari xas ta9ittam 9u9avahen. 
Kari xas kunxus, 
pa9asiktavansas, 
"Hoy 9 um po-9aramsiprivtihirak? 
"Ka-n hinupa 9 ama kun9amtih." 
Kari xas 9uppe-r, 
pamukustan yiOGa, 
"Cimi numni-si." 
[iii] [The sisters reveal the real salmon] 
Now then already indeed he'd eaten it. 
Now then they thought, 
those women, 
30 "Where is it he comes from? 
"It looks like they're eating salmon there. 
Now then she told her, 
that one sister, 
"Let's cook." 
30 
Ta9ittam yi'OOa pamusvirik muk ma-ka 9u9 ik, 
Oivrihvassuruk. 
Kari xas 9issaha 9uvunissuk. 
Kari xas 9ama 9ukyi-mnisuk. 
Kari xas ta9ittam kunimnissahen. 
Kari xas takun9av. 
Pihne-fic vura va- 9ummu-stih. 
35 Already indeed one struck uphillward with her elbow, 
under a wall-plank. 
Now then water flooded out. 
Now then salmon fell out. 
Now then already indeed they had cooked it. 
40 Now then they ate it. 
Coyote ! is watching that. 
35 
40 
Kari xas kunpip, 
"Cimi 9ippaho-. 
"Yakun nu- tanu9iffikar, 
xuntappan." 
Kari xas 9uppi-p, 
Pihne-fic, 
"Xa-tikni0ivke-." 
Kari xas kunpip, 
"Pu-hara." 
"Vuraxa-tikni9ivke-. 
"Minfk ni99avis." 
Xas kunpi-p, 
"Cimmi man." 
II. [Acorns and salmon for all] 
[i] [Coyote gets them to take him for acorns] 
Now then they said, 
"Go on your way. 
"See, we go to pick them up, 
45 acorns. 
Now then he said, 
Coyote, 
"Let me go along." 
Now then they said, 
50 "No." 
"Let me go along! 
"I'll knock down the acorns for you." 
Then they said, 
"Come on then!" 
45 
50 
318 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Kari xas ka-n kunivyi-hma. 
Ta9ittam kun9iffikahen, 
paxuntappan, 
pa9asiktavansa. > 
Kari xas Pihne-fic 9u9iffik. 
Kari xas kokaninay vura 9iiktir, 
paxunyep, 
maruk, saruk, 
yuruk, karuk. } 
Kari xas 9u0aha-sha, 
paxuntappan. 
Viri va- ku6payem 
paxuntappan ko-kaninay vura 9u9iftih. } 
Kari xas 9upikvip, 
saruk, 
ka-n pa9asiktava-nsa kun9inirak, 
Kari xas 9usxaxxaripa-, 
paOi-vri-hvar. } 
Kari xas pa9issaha 9uvunissuk. 
Xas koviira pa9ama kunivyi-hrisuk. } 
Viri va- kii0 sam 9ussa-mnuputih. 
Karu va- ku0 9 ama 9ukviripra-tih. } 
[ii] [He scatters the acorns] 
55 Now then there they went. 
Already indeed they had gathered them, 
the acorns, 
the women did. 
Now then Coyote picked it [a stick] up. 
60 Now then he beat them everywhere!, 
those tan-oaks, 
uphill, downhill, 
downriver, upriver. 
Now then he scattered them, 
65 those acorns. 
So that's why it is now, 
acorns are growing everywhere! 
[iii] [He frees the salmon] 
Now then he ran back, 
downhill, 
70 there where the women lived. 
Now then he ripped them out, 
those wall-planks. 
Now then water flooded out. 
Then all those salmon came out. 
75 So that's why it flows downriver. 
And that's why salmon run upriver. 
55 
60 
65 
70 
75 
Kari xas kunpinivi-s, 
pa9asiktavansa. 
Kari xas kunpip, 
"Ta hinupa 9utayvar, 
paPihnefic. 
"Viri co-ra, cemmi, 
xa-tik nupke-vis. 
"Yakiin, yi'G 9ara-r 9u9i-nisrihes. 
Ta9ittam kunpiya-ramahe-n. 
Kari xas lom9iffukra-, 
9asanamkarayurukam. 
Kari xas yi'00a 9uppi-p, 
"Tanipipsittani, 
nanisimsim. 
"Cimi kanpavan. 
"Cimi 9 i m 96-knekruntih.' 
Viri po-pkiya-vrin. 
Sam to-pparihfak. 
Viri popittiOun, 
yanava pamukustan, 
9asaxyippit topparihis. 
Xas samvanihic, pamukuncissi-? 
va- karu 9asaxyippit to-pparihis. 
III. [Transformation and renewal] 
[i] [The sisters accept the world to come] 
Now then they came back down, 
the women. 
Now then they said, 
80 "Look, he's spoiled it, 
that Coyote. 
"So let's go, all right, 
let us be transformed. 
"See, another (kind of) person will come to exist." 
[ii] [One returns for her knife] 
85 Already indeed they had gone off again. 
Now then they climbed uphill, 
downriver from Stony Flat. 
Now then one said, 
"I forgot it, 
90 my knife. 
"I'd better go back for it. 
"You'd better wait here for me." 
[iii] [Her sister and their dog become quartz] 
So she turned back. 
She started downhill. 
95 So when she looked around, 
behold her sister, 
she'd turned into quartz. 
Then a little downhill, their dog? 
the same way too it had already turned into quartz. 
80 
85 
90 
95 
NUMBER 44 319 
[iv] [Witnessing the Jump Dance, she becomes quartz] 
Yaktin, yi0 9ara tu9i-nis? 
9I0yaruk po-tkaratih, 
yanava pavuhvuha tu9issipva, 
9u0itti-mti pakunihyi-vtih. 
Kari xas va- ka-n 9asaxyippit 9upparihis. 
Viri hutva ko-
9i0iv0anen 9u9i-naha-k, 
va- vura ko- kunihru-vtihe-s, 
pasimsim, 
va- kummu-k kum'hvi-Otihes, 
pe-sya-t, 
pe-0iv0a-ne-n takunpikyahak. 
100 See, a different (kind of) person had come to exist? 100 
As she looks across river, 
behold the Jump Dance lined up, 
she hears that they're shouting. 
Now then the same way there she turned into quartz. 
[v] [The salmon knife] 
105 So just as long 105 
as the world exists, 
just so long they will use it, 
that knife, 
that's what they'll clean it with, 
110 that spring salmon, 110 
as they make that world again. 
Profdes Side By Side 
The profile on the left, for Bright's analysis and presentation, en?
ables one to infer the ways in which the text is given shape by 
his analysis. The parallel profile is my own analysis, showing 
the points of difference. For example, Bright took lines 4-7 as 
two verses, but I take them as one verse. Bright took the next se?
quence of verses to have six parts, ending with lines 15-16, but I 
Bright 
[I] [Amekyaram Village] 
[A] [The Two Sisters] 
(1) 1-3 
(2) 4-5 
(3) 6-7 
[B] [Coyote] 
(4) 8-9 
(5) 10-11 
(6) 12 
(7) 13 
(8) 14 
(9) 15-16 
[C] [The Sisters and Coyote] 
(10) 17-18 
(11) 19-21 
(12) 22-24 
(13) 25-26 
[D] [The Sisters] 
(14) 27 
(15) 28-31 
(16) 32-34 
(17) 35-36 
(18) 37 
(19) 38 
[E] [The Sisters and Coyote] 
(20) 39 
(21) 40-41 
take it to have five parts, ending with line 14. One can test one's 
own sense of the rhythms and relations of the story by reading 
the two one after the other. The claim made by the right-hand 
analysis is that the story is informed by relations, hence rhythms 
of three and five, that the sequence makes sense so understood, 
and that onsets and outcomes in those patterns fit. 
Hymes 
[I] [Coyote discovers the hidden salmon] 
[i] [Two sisters hide the salmon] 
(a) 
(b) 
1-3 
4-7 
[ii] [Coyote pretends to have salmon] 
(A) (a) 
(b) 
(c) 
(d) 
(e) 
(B) (a) 
(b) 
(c) 
(C) (a) 
(b) 
(c) 
[iii] [The sisters 
(A) (a) 
(b) 
(c) 
(B) (a) 
(b) 
(c) 
(C (a) 
(b) 
(c) 
8-9 
10-11 
12 
13 
14 
15-16 
17-18 
19-20 
21 
22-24 
25-26 
reveal the salmon] 
27 
28-31 
32-34 
35-36 
37 
38 
39 
40 
41 
320 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
(22) 4 2 ^ 3 
(23) 44-^15 
(24) 46-48 
(25) 49-54 
(26) 55 
[II] [In the mountains] 
[A] [The sisters and Coyote] 
(27) 56-58 
(28) 59 
(29) 60-63 
(30) 64-65 
(31) 66-67 
[B] [Coyote] 
(32) 68-70 
(33) 71-72 
(34) 73-74 
(35) 75-76 
[C] [The Sisters] 
(36) 77-78 
(37) 79-81 
(38) 82-83 
(39) 84 
[III] [On the Ridge] 
[A] [The Sisters] 
(40) 85 
(41) 86-87 
(42) 88-92 
(43) 93-94 
(44) 95-99 
(45) 100-103 
(46) 104 
[B] [Epilogue] 
(47) 105-108 
(48) 109-111 
[II] [Acorns and salmon for all] 
[i] [Coyote gets them to take him for acorns] 
{(a) 4 2 ^ 3 
(b) 44-45} 
((c) 46^18 
(d) 49-50} 
{(e) 51-52 
(f) 53-54} 
[ii] [He scatters the acorns] 
{(a) 55 
(b) 56-58} 
{(c) 59 
(d) 60-63} 
{(e) 64-65 
(f) 66-67} 
[iii] [He frees the salmon] 
{(a) 68-70 
(b) 71-72} 
{(c) 73 
(d) 74} 
{(e) 75 
(f) 76} 
[III] [Transformation and renewal] 
[i] [The sisters accept the world to come] 
(a) 77-78 
(b) 79-84 
[ii] [One returns for her knife] 
(a) 85 
(b) 86-87 
(c) 88-92 
[iii] [Her sister and their dog become quartz] 
(a) 93-94 
(b) 95-97 
(c) 98-99 
[iv] [Witnessing the Jump Dance, she becomes quartz] 
(a) 100 
(b) 101-103 
(c) 104 
[v] [The salmon knife] 
(chiasmus) 
(a) 105-106 
(b) 107-108 
(b') 109-110 
(a*) 111 
Analytic Notes 
This analysis incorporates, in quotation marks, notes to the 
text in Bright, 1984:147. It also explains analytical choices 
and provides comment on the point and interpretation of the 
story. 
The analysis is organized in sequence by the lines in ques?
tion, but two sections involve extended discussion of particles 
that have consequences for the shape of the story as a whole: 
yakun (lines 1-7), and ta?ittam (line 27), together with viri. At 
NUMBER 44 321 
line 41 a third discussion focuses further on the implications of 
the two different kinds of shape found in the story. 
Where the Karok text differs in choice of phonemic tran?
scription between Bright, 1957, and Bright, 1984,1 follow the 
latter (e.g., line 44). In 1957 (p. 204) sentence 27 reads yaku 
nu- ta nu?iffikar, whereas in 1984 (p. 141) verse 23 readsyakun 
nu- tdnu?iffikar 
LINES 1-7. Bright identified these lines as three verses. At 
first I did also. The first three lines identify actors and a loca?
tion, a common way of beginning a story. The next two begin 
with a pair of particles recurrent in the story, equivalent to 'now 
then', a kind of marker also found in other western North 
American languages (e.g., Wishram-Wasco Chinook, Santiam 
Kalapuya). 
The third verse poses a problem for my approach. My expe?
rience has been that a single turn at talk may have internal or?
ganization, but it still counts as a single unit in a sequence of 
verses. Why are lines 6-7 a separate verse? The organization 
of the story as a whole leads one to expect sequences of three 
or five, but expectation can only be hypothesis. The answer 
depends on the status of the particle that begins the lines, 
yukiin (elsewhere yakun). (For yakun/yukitn see Bright, 
1957:363, #917; 400, #1657.1. The variation in the first vowel 
is unexplained.) 
Let me set forth the reasoning that at first persuaded me that 
lines 6-7 and 84, although in each case part of a single turn at 
talk, should be considered distinct as verses, because of the ini?
tial particle. The initial yukun 'see', seems semantically strong, 
analogous to a marker, such as the marker qustiaxa 'behold' in 
Wishram Chinook. That it can be the initial marker of a verse is 
clear in line 100; there it begins scene [iv] of Act III. An occur?
rence in line 84 is parallel to that in line 6. In terms of their own 
content and what follows, lines 77-84 must constitute a distinct 
scene, li yakun (in line 84) does not mark a verse, then the first 
scene of act III has just two verses, the second verse a turn at 
talk, both marked by the initial pair kari xas. If yakun marks a 
verse, then the scene has three verses. In this case the third and 
final verse begins with yakun within a turn at talk. (As dis?
cussed at lines 82-83, it is possible that the scene in fact has 
five verses (including that beginning with yakun).) 
All this might seem conclusive, but there is a fourth occur?
rence that has a different context. The first scene of Act II 
would make sense with five turns at talk: the two sisters, Coy?
ote, the two sisters, Coyote, the two sisters. In this view, yakun 
in line 44 is simply the second part of a single turn at talk. The 
overall organization of the act, however, suggests a different 
interpretation. Its three scenes are the center of the story, so far 
as acorns, salmon, and Coyote are concerned. Scenes two (he 
scatters the acorns) and three (he frees the salmon) are spe?
cially marked in organization. Instead of three or five verses, 
each has three pairs of verses. (Three pairs of verses are fre?
quent in languages to the north, such as Kalapuya and Chinoo-
kan). A five-verse first scene would stand apart. Of course such 
a scene is perfectly possible. After all, it is the provision of 
acorns and salmon that counts. But if yakun is taken as having 
the same role here that it has elsewhere, then the first scene has 
three pairs of verses, as do the second and third scenes. The 
second act is marked in the same way throughout. 
There is more to be said about these three occurrences of 
yukun, yakun. I noticed later that they are structurally equiva?
lent in relation to the organization of the text as a whole. Each 
occurs in the first scene of its act, one of the three acts of the 
myth. Each has to do with a focus of the act: hidden salmon, 
going to gather acorns, the end of the myth age and the coming 
of the Indian people who will inherit the benefits that the myth 
recounts. Each is involved in setting the stage for such a focus. 
Notice that these three occurrences are all spoken by the two 
sisters. There is a fourth occurrence in line 100, spoken not by 
them but by the narrator in her own voice. It echoes and con?
firms the third occurrence spoken by the sisters. In effect, there 
is prophecy (by the sisters) and confirmation (by the narrator). 
Things have come to be as they are because of what has hap?
pened in myths, indeed in this myth itself. 
When this analysis was presented to the Smithsonian semi?
nar in 1985, Ives Goddard, Smithsonian Institution, challenged 
taking yakun as a marker, asking if there were a consistent cri?
terion. The challenge led me to notice the parallelism in struc?
tural position and the role of the occurrences. But evidence 
from several other narrative traditions in western North Amer?
ica now leads me to another view. Yakun does have signifi?
cance, as an expressive or rhetorical device, consistently used. 
But there is reason to think that it does not structurally distin?
guish verses. That the first scenes of Acts I and III have two 
verses, not three or five, is not a failure of patterning, but pat?
terning with a special role. 
In the first scene in both acts I and III the two women are 
speaking, asserting authority and announcing a decision. 
I [i] Nobody will eat salmon. 
See, we've hidden it, that salmon. 
II [i] Look, he's spoiled it, that Coyote. 
So let's go, all right, let us be transformed. 
See, another (kind of) person will come to exist. 
Even numbers and women deciding co-occur. This connection 
between women and two- or four-part patterning has been 
found in the Karok myth Phoebe Maddux told to Harrington 
(Hymes, 1997) and in several other western North American 
traditions that otherwise use relations of three and five (Hymes, 
2000). 
It makes special sense, I think, in this case. A woman, telling 
the story, has the women in the story themselves foretell that 
there will be a decisive change, and it is their knife that will be 
used with spring salmon, so long as that world continues to be 
renewed. 
LINE 3. "?amekydra-m, literally 'salmon-making place', 
is at Ike's Falls, on the west side of the Klamath River, not far 
below the confluence with the Salmon River. As the conclud?
ing verses of this text indicate, it was the site of the Jump 
Dance, one of the sacred ceremonies of Karok world-renewal" 
(Bright, 1984:147, note 2). 
322 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
LINE 5. The particle vura has an emphatic force, but it is 
not equivalent to any single English word. I show its presence 
by!. 
LINE 7. Bright gave a separate line to extraposed nouns, 
such as 'that salmon'. (The object in such a case is already 
marked pronominally in the verb: 'we've hidden it'.) This is a 
fine insight, fitting the character of the language and enhancing 
the verbal effect. 
LINE 15. The two presentations diverge again at line 15. 
Bright put lines 15-16 in the same scene as preceding lines be?
cause Coyote continues to be the actor in question. I begin a 
new unit (stanza B) with line 15 because it expresses a signifi?
cant change of location: Coyote arrives at the house of the sis?
ters and sits down in the corner. Perhaps a more thoroughgoing 
use of the criterion of change of locale of action would have led 
Bright to the same finding. (After all, Coyote is just as present 
to the sisters in their house here as he is in line 41, which was 
kept by Bright within a scene that also involved the sisters.) 
The example is one of several in which criteria for verses inter?
act with criteria for larger units. 
LINE 20. I end the verse with line 20 because it ends the 
quoted speech. Also, line 21 begins with the (single) particle 
marker xas. Note that Coyote travels upriver in many myths. 
When only his own gain is in mind, he is usually a comic buf?
foon. When, as here, the welfare of people to come as well as 
himself is in mind, he usually succeeds. 
LINE 26. "Alder bark is red, the same color as salmon 
flesh" (Bright, 1957:205, note 39, 1984:147, note 3). 
LINE 27. Here as elsewhere the present translation may be 
painfully literal and invariant, but that is in order to preserve 
the evidence of structure and emphasis (and sometimes of vari?
ation). Part of the literalness has to do with invariant rendering 
of a particle that marks organization, ta?ittam. The following is 
a discussion of its role. 
Bright usually translated ta?ittam 'so'. I render it 'already', 
partly to distinguish it from viri, which is also translated "so'. 
'So' seems to fit viri best because viri commonly occurs where 
outcomes are indicated. Note the stanza-ending parallel in the 
culminating lines 66-67 and 75-76, when acorns and salmon 
are freed. Viri indeed is clustered toward the end of the story 
(lines 66, 75, 82, 93, 95, 105). 
Ta?ittam, on the other hand, has some association with on?
sets. The connections that emerge between role and meaning, 
and with position in the story, strengthen my conviction that the 
configuration arrived at by this approach has validity and can 
make a contribution to lexicography as well as to narrative. 
Following indications given by Bright in his grammar and lexi?
con, I translate it 'already' 
Bright (1984:138) always took a line containing ta?ittam and 
the anterior tense suffix -hen as the beginning of a scene (lines 
27, 39, 56, 85 herein). In the present analysis, two such lines 
also begin scenes (27, 85), but two do not. Ta?ittam begins a 
stanza in line 39 and begins a verse in line 56, the second verse 
in its scene (and stanza). (Both Bright and I also have one oc?
currence of the particle without the tense suffix beginning a 
verse (35)). 
In lines 27, 35, and 39, ta^ittam forms a pattern marking 
three successive stanzas of a scene (I (iii) ABC). The first and 
third stanzas have the anterior suffix -hen, the second stanza 
does not. Unity of marking parts of a stanza seems to outweigh 
the absence of the suffix. 
As to line 56 not beginning a scene: line 55 cannot be the last 
line of the preceding scene. Travel to a new location, as in 55, 
regularly begins a scene, and the lines that precede line 55 are 
internally quite coherent without it. Line 55 is clearly the start 
of a new sequence. Line 56 is not the first but the second verse 
of its scene, despite having ta?ittam and -hen. It may be that 
the pattern of grouping verses in three pairs, which runs 
through the act, gives ta?ittam some initial force here. The first 
two verses of the scene (lines 55, 56) may work together here 
as an initial group. That finding in turn supports the finding 
that the stanza has such grouping. 
LINE 35. In Bright (1984) the profix/?a= was omitted be?
fore musvirik, evidently by oversight. Compare Bright, 
1957:204, sentence 20. 
LINE 41. I recognize a new verse because the actors change 
from the two sisters to Coyote, there is separate action, and the 
line begins with Coyote's name (rather than a pronoun). (A 
proper name sometimes has such force in other traditions). This 
verse has an important place in the configuration of the story as 
a whole. 
I have said that when the goal of the action is taken into ac?
count, the apparent unity of segments changes. Line 41 is a 
case in point. It is the second line of the second verse in a series 
of seven in Bright (verse (21) in Scene E). In the present analy?
sis it is the culminating third verse in the culminating third 
stanza of a scene that completes an act (I(iii)C). 
The point of the story, after all, in keeping with analogous 
stories among many Native Americans of the Pacific coast, is 
that two women are keeping the salmon (and here, acorns) that 
the people of the future will need, and that Coyote causes these 
foods to be released and become available. Coyote knows at a 
distance that the two sisters hide the salmon and announces his 
intention to correct the situation at his first appearance in the 
story. In this version, he must first find out where they hide the 
salmon. He disarms them by seeming to have salmon of his 
own. When the story tells that the sisters release salmon within 
their dwelling, the point and culmination of the scene comes, 
not simply when they eat but in 'Coyote is watching that!'. 
Now that the secret is out, something can be done. 
That point seems the culmination not only of a scene but of 
the whole first arc of the story: the salmon have been hidden, 
but Coyote finds out where they are. 
LINES 49-54. Bright gave one verse (his (25)) to three 
turns at talk. They are distinguished herein as (d, e, f). 
LINE 52. 'the acorns' because the verb stem -6av uniquely 
implies that it is acorns that are knocked down (Bright, 
1957:389, #1435). The other word in the line, minik, is a parti?
cle expressing reassurance, often translated by Bright as 'all 
NUMBER 44 323 
right' (not 'there', as in his 1982 and 1984 articles). Assurance 
of course is what Coyote wants to convey at this point, and 'for 
you' seems to fit that purpose in this line. 
LINES 62-63. Bright put the four directions on one line, but 
there seems to be internal structure: two directions on hills, 
then two directions on rivers. (The sequence itself forms a chi?
asmus: up, down, down, up). Notice the pairing of uphill, 
downriver in lines 86, 87, and the pairing of downriver, upriver 
in lines 75, 76. In Bright's edition (his verses 41 and 35) as well 
as in mine, the members of both pairs each have a separate line 
in these cases. 
LINE 74. I distinguish this line as a verse because it begins 
with the particle marker xas 'then'. Bright included lines 73 
and 74 in his verse 34. There is a couplet effect in the parallel 
endings, -risuk 'out' (Bright, 1957:101, ?758.18), of the two 
lines (concealed in line 73 by morphophonemics, r > n and 
gemination of s). This effect is part of the 3x2 organization of 
the verses in the scene. The stem in line 74, -ivyi-h-, has the 
connotation 'to arrive', and in one construction the connotation 
'to arrive home' (Bright, 1957:356, #800); indeed, the salmon 
are arriving where they should be. 
LINE 76. I distinguish this line as a verse because it begins 
with the particle sequence karu va- kud 'and that for', parallel 
to viri va- kuO, *so that for', which clearly begins a verse in pre?
ceding line 75. Bright included lines 75 and 76 in his verse 35. 
The initial parallel is part of the 3x2 organization of the verses 
in the scene. 
LINES 82-83. Bright distinguished these lines as a separate 
verse, probably because 82 begins with the particle viri, which 
elsewhere in the text is initial to verses. Those verses, however, 
all occur outside quoted speech (lines 66, 75, 93, 95, 105). In 
Bright's edition the result of counting 82-83 as a verse is that 
the section (his scene C, my scene [i] of Act III) has four 
verses. Counting viri as beginning a verse would have the same 
result for me as I agree with Bright that the next and last line of 
the section, 84, is a verse, despite occurring within quoted 
speech, because of the status oi yakun (see discussion oi yakun 
in regard to lines 1-7). 
A stanza of four verses contravenes the expectation of rela?
tions of three or five. Moreover, the stanza (= scene) in question 
is like the opening stanza of the story, which has three verses, 
one introductory and giving location, one beginning with kari 
xds and starting quoted speech, and a third beginning with 
yakun. That suggests taking this sequence as also having three 
verses, one introductory that begins with kari xds and gives loca?
tion, one that begins with kari xds and starts quoted speech, and 
a third that begins with yakun. I have shown the stanza this way. 
It remains possible that further analysis of Karok narratives 
would lead one to interpret the stanza as having five verses. 
Such an analysis would find parallels to justify treating line 82, 
and line 83, each as a verse. It would recognize a parallelism 
between the two lines, taken as 
'so + let's go' : 'all-right, let we-be-transformed' 
The parallelism would be based on taking 'all-right ' 
(cemmi), not as the end of line 82, as printed by Bright, but as 
the beginning of line 83. Cemmi is related to cimi (cf. its line 
initial use in line 91), used in anticipative meaning, generally 
with imperative and future forms (Bright, 1957:330), and the 
future form is the last word of line 83. 
Bright (1957:348, #660) associated the verb ipkevis 'be 
transformed' with the resultative function of -is (Bright, 
1957:97). Such a result, framed in an optative sense ('let's'), is 
semantically future. Perhaps the verb itself has historically a 
connection with the future postfix -avisl-e-s (Bright, 1957:65)). 
The result of such an interpretation of lines 82 and 83 would 
be a stanza of five verses. 
LINES 98-99. I distinguish a verse here because of the ini?
tial particle xds and the parallel with the preceding verse. Each 
has to do with turning into quartz. 
LINE 100. "I. e., the human race" (Bright, 1984:147, note 4). 
LINES 101-103. I distinguish a verse here because the lines 
initiate an action of a single actor, the remaining sister, and 
ydnava 'behold' is initial in the middle of these three lines, just 
as it is in the middle of the three-line verse of 95-97. The fol?
lowing line (104) is clearly a new verse, beginning with 'now 
then', and the preceding line (100) is apparently a remark ad?
dressed to the audience. 
LINE 104. "Three quartz rocks can still be seen on the 
ridge: two large ones are the sisters, and a smaller one is their 
dog" (Bright, 1984:147, note 5). 
LINES 105-111. These lines were retranslated and aligned 
to bring out the internal structure. Note the recurrence of 
'while the world' (105-106, 111), enclosing 'just...that knife' 
and 'that's what...salmon' (107-108, 109-110). In addition, 
'long' links the first two units (105, 107), and 'they' links the 
three following units. Nicely interwoven. Overall, chiasmus 
seems appropriate for a close that evokes seasonal recurrence 
and renewal. 
Note 
1. Seminar on Discourse, 22 Nov 1985, Department of Anthropology, Smith?
sonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 
Literature Cited 
Bright, William 
1957. The Karok Language. University of California Publications in Lin?
guistics, 13: xi+457 pages. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
1982. Poetic Structure in Oral Narrative. In Deborah Tannen, editor, Spo?
ken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy. Advances 
in Discourse Processes, 9:171-184. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex. 
324 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
1984. Poetic Structure in Oral Narrative. In William Bright, American In?
dian Linguistics and Literature, pages 133-148. Berlin, New York, 
Amsterdam: Mouton. 
Harrington, J.P. 
1930. Karuk Texts. International Journal of American Linguistics, 
6:121-61. 
1932. Karuk Indian Myths. Bulletin, Bureau of American Ethnology, 107: 
v+34 pages. 
Hymes, Dell 
1982. Narrative Form as "Grammar" of Experience: Native American and 
a Glimpse of English. Journal of Education, 164:121-142 [Re?
printed, 1996, in Dell Hymes, Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative 
Inequality, chapter 5, by Taylor and Francis, London.] 
1985. Some Subtleties of Measured Verse. In June Iris Hesch, editor, Pro?
ceedings 1985 (15th Spring Conference, Niagara Linguistics Soci?
ety), pages 13-57. Buffalo, New York: The Niagara Linguistics 
Society. 
1994. Helen Sekaquaptewa's "Coyote and the Birds": Rhetorical Analysis 
of a Hopi Coyote Story. Anthropological Linguistics, 34:45-72. 
1996. Coyote, the Thinking (Wo)man's Trickster. In A. James Arnold, edi?
tor, Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and 
American Identities, pages 108-137. Charlottesville: University of 
Virginia Press. 
1997. A Karok Narrative Dictated by Phoebe Maddux to J.P. Harrington. 
In Jane Hill, P.J. Mistry, and Lyle Campbell, editors, The Life of 
Language: Papers in Linguistics in Honor of William Bright, pages 
281-297. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 
2000. Variation and Narrative Competence. In Lauri Honko, editor, Thick 
Corpus, Organic Variation and Textuality in Oral Tradition, pages 
77-92. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. 
Kroeber, A.L., and E.W. Gifford, compilers 
1980. Karok Myths. Edited by Grace Buzaljko, foreword by Theodora 
Kroeber, folkloristic commentary by Alan Dundes, linguistic index 
by William Bright, index of parallel plot elements by Grace 
Buzaljko. xlix+380 pages. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of 
California Press. 
Kroeber, Theodora 
1980. Foreword. In A.L. Kroeber and E.W. Gifford, compilers, Karok 
Myths, pages xv-xxx. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cal?
ifornia Press. 
The Distribution and Habits of the Ringed Seal and Central Eskimo 
Settlement Patterns 
David Damas 
Research on hunting societies has established that settlement 
patterns of these groups, including their distribution over large 
areas and their annual cycles of fission and fusion, frequently 
are affected by the availability of resources and by the practices 
they adopt to exploit them. For the Central Eskimo1 of the Ca?
nadian Arctic, the ringed seal exerts important influences both 
on the distribution of the total population and on aggregations 
of people. 
The ringed seal (Phoca hispida) reaches an adult length of 
about 155 cm (4.4 ft) and can attain weights of up to 90 kg (200 
lbs), although fat reserves vary seasonally and weights vary ac?
cordingly (McLaren, 1958a: 14). They feed on small planktonic 
animals and arctic cod. In late winter females prepare birth lairs 
in deep snow drifts near shore, especially along tide rifts where 
rafting of ice occurs. 
In his pioneering ethnography The Central Eskimo, Franz 
Boas (1888) laid the groundwork for this study regarding the 
associations among conditions of sea ice, locations of seals, 
and human populations. 
There are only a few districts where the proximity of open water favors wal?
rus hunting during the winter, and all of these have neighboring floes on which 
seals may be hunted with the harpoon....As to the remainder the Eskimo live 
altogether independent of the open water during the winter. 
Generally speaking, two conditions are required for winter settlements, viz, 
the existence of an extensive floe and smooth ice. (Boas, 1888:461) 
Regarding characteristics of settlement over the year, Boas 
(1888:461) wrote: "The natives who lived in large settlements 
during the winter are spread over the whole country in order 
that everyone may have a better chance of traveling over his 
own hunting ground." 
In this passage, Boas referred to hunting seals on smooth ice 
through breathing holes as being the main occupation of the 
winter season. Ringed seals were also hunted in some locales 
in the spring when they basked in the sun beside holes then 
thawed open, in the summer from skin boats, and by several 
other methods. 
David Damas, Department of Anthropology, emeritus, McMaster Uni?
versity; 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L85 4L9. 
Biological Studies and the Distribution of Seal and Human 
Populations 
Although Boas's statement provides a starting point for discus?
sion, animal biologists have broadened our knowledge of the 
habits of the ringed seal. Their studies also lend insight into the 
aboriginal distribution of Central Eskimo populations. For ex?
ample, in a series of papers, Ian McLaren (1958a, 1958b, 1961) 
developed a formula for estimating the populations of seals for 
the east-central Arctic. He found that birth lairs occurred in 
greatest frequency in regions of complex coastlines, where sta?
ble ice and sufficient snow cover existed. Furthermore, these 
places were regions where greater numbers of adult seals, in 
particular, were to be found. In applying his formula, I found a 
striking correspondence between regions of Central Eskimo 
populations and occurrences of complex coastlines in the east-
central Arctic (Figure 1). Conversely, habitual Inuit residence 
is absent in regions of relatively simple or convex coastlines.2 
In the range of the Iglulik Eskimo tribe, the correspondence is 
very close. Aboriginally, the Igluliks were divided into three 
regions of habitation, separated by linear distances of roughly 
400-480 km (250-300 mi) between each. These were Repulse 
Bay-Lyon Inlet at the base of Melville Peninsula, the Iglulik re?
gion itself at the north end of Foxe Basin, and the Admiralty 
Inlet-Pond Inlet region in northern Baffin Island (Mathiassen, 
1928:23-36). According to McLaren's formula, the southern 
section of Melville Peninsula and the area around Iglulik Island 
and northern Foxe Basin should have sizeable ringed-seal pop?
ulations. He estimated a population of 30,000 animals for the 
former region and 47,000 animals for the latter region, but he 
estimated a population of of only 8700 animals for the long 
stretch of relatively smooth coastline in between (McLaren, 
1958b:32?33). Indeed, although this section of coast was fre?
quently traveled, Iglulik Eskimo settlement there was charac?
terized by short-term residence only (Mathiassen, 1928:26). 
Some locales along this coast were favored from time to time 
because of the availability of walruses. 
The third main region of Iglulik Eskimo habitation was 
reached by traveling overland to the north end of Baffin Island. 
The long smooth coast from just west of Fury and Hecla Strait 
to the northwest cape of Baffin Island historically has been de?
void of human habitation. The area comprising the entire north 
325 
326 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
CENTRAL ESKIMO UTILIZATION OF THE RINGED SEAL 
Major Aboriginal Sealing Regions 
Davis Strait 
FIGURE 1.?Central Eskimo utilization of the ringed seal. 
and east coasts of Baffin Island, which included the range of 
the northern groups of Igluliks and also a large part of Baffin-
land Eskimo territory, has a complex coastline (McLaren, 
1958b:32-33). Although these coasts did not exhibit a continu?
ously inhabited stretch, there were no large gaps such as ex?
isted between the Iglulik centers of habitation. The south coast 
of the island is characterized by a central region of great com?
plexity, with less complex coasts toward the extreme east and 
extreme west. Human population there, however, was more 
evenly distributed. According to McLaren (1958a:74), migra?
tion of immature seals from the coasts of greatest complexity 
made possible reasonably high numbers of seals along adjoin?
ing stretches of simpler shorelines. Similar migration into 
Cumberland Sound, where high tides interfere with establish?
ment of birthing lairs, has also been noted (Smith, 1973:50). 
The west coast of Hudson Bay presents a variation from the 
expected relationship between apparently favorable sealing 
conditions and the distribution of human populations. The 
southern coast from Churchill to Eskimo Point and the northern 
section along both shores of Roes Welcome Sound,3 which 
have smooth coastlines, show correspondence between expect?
able scant seal numbers and lack of human occupation 
(McLaren, 1958b:30-33). The stretch of complex shoreline in 
between, however, did have evidence of some winter habitation 
at times. Glover (1969) and Burch (1977) indicated that in the 
period after about 1800 and until the southward movement of 
Aivilingmiut from Repulse Bay, in 1860 (Robinson, 1973; 
Ross, 1975), the region was devoid of winter habitation. 
Even though his formula for estimating the distribution of 
ringed seals shows strong correspondence to the nature of 
NUMBER 44 327 
coastlines, McLaren (1961:168) cautioned that "there are com?
plications in other areas (including the ice-locked central Arc?
tic) which have not yet been resolved." Unfortunately, as far as 
I have been able to determine, this statement from 1961 is still 
the case at the time of this writing. 
There are, however, studies from the western extremes of the 
vast west-central area, including regions that were part of the 
aboriginal range of the Copper Eskimo. These studies were 
based on spring aerial surveys of open breathing holes and of 
basking seals in 1971-1974 and 1983-1984 (Smith, 1987) and 
in 1980 (Alliston and McLaren, 1961). The studies revealed 
migrations into Prince Albert Sound and Coronation Gulf from 
Amundsen Gulf to the west. Smith (1987:8) thought that the 
main migration into Prince Albert Sound came in late summer 
and early autumn, while Alliston and McLaren (1961:17) 
opined that migration occurred in late spring. The latter also 
found that in western Coronation Gulf high winter populations 
could be judged by the number of breathing holes. Smith 
(1987:11) thought that the number of basking seals in spring 
"was not representative" of the winter populations. Studies that 
have attempted to estimate populations of seals from numbers 
of breathing holes show rather wide variations from region to 
region and from study to study (Smith, 1973; Finley, 1979; 
Smith and Hammill, 1981; Hammill and Smith, 1990). 
In assessing the general conditions in western Coronation 
Gulf and the sounds and gulfs of western Victoria Island, Allis?
ton and McLaren (1961:29) concluded that seal populations in 
the survey region of 1980 "probably fell in the 'moderate' to 
'high' range when compared to other areas in the Canadian 
high arctic" and that densities found in the Prince Albert Sound 
region exceeded those estimated for southeastern Baffin Island. 
An abundance of seals in part of the area surveyed was af?
firmed by Rasmussen (1932:75), who, regarding his visit in 
February 1924, wrote the following: 
Sealing during the past month has been splendidly successful, the greatest we 
had ever experienced, as many seals being caught in one single day as would 
have taken a whole month at a similar camp among the Seal Eskimos further 
east. It was not because the people here were more skilful, but that the current-
split ice in Dolphin and Union Strait seemed to be a place of assembly for seals 
from east and west. 
To emphasize that there must be regional variations in sealing 
within the west-central regions, Rasmussen's (1931:153) earlier 
report from the "Seal Eskimos," the Netsilingmiut, described a 
village where only 150 seals had been caught all winter by 12 
hunters, which had to feed 31 people and about 30 dogs. 
The apparent relative abundance of seals at the western mar?
gins of the west-central Arctic may have been due in part to im?
migrations from open water, but if one applies the criterion of 
coastline complexity to the region as a whole, estimates of seal 
populations are confounded. There are both smooth coasts, as 
on the southern shore of Victoria Island, and much more com?
plex ones as, for instance, along the shores of Queen Maud 
Gulf. Yet human population was more or less evenly distrib?
uted. Copper Eskimo could be encountered almost anywhere in 
their wanderings, except that they would almost always be 
found on the sea ice in winter. 
In order to examine more closely the role of the ringed seal in 
the economy and the settlement patterns of the Central Eskimo 
as a whole it is necessary to take into account aboriginal eco?
nomic activities and movements of people over annual cycles. 
The Role of the Ringed Seal in Yearly Cycles 
Boas (1888:424^439) described cycles of annual economic ac?
tivity and settlement in the period predating intensive whaler 
contact for the Cumberland Sound-Davis Strait region.4 He 
noted that from December until about the middle of March, the 
hunting of seals at breathing holes, which was carried out from 
encampments on the sea ice, occurred almost everywhere. Dur?
ing the latter half of March, large villages broke up for a period 
of hunting newborn seals at the birthing lairs, although the set?
tlements remained on the sea ice. Hunting of basking seals be?
gan in April on the southern side of Cumberland Sound, but it 
began somewhat later on the northern side. Some groups in?
stead began to move inland toward Nettilling Lake, where they 
hunted caribou until December. A more common practice was 
to extend surface sealing until sometime in July, when the ice 
began to break up. After that, some people moved to the heads 
of fiords for the caribou hunt, and some used skin boats to pur?
sue sea mammals during the open-water season. Late autumn 
was apparently a period of unstable ice, when pursuit of sea 
mammals was curtailed. 
Whale hunts were carried out either along floe edges, as on 
Davis Strait, or from skin boats. There was a potential of col?
lecting large stores of meat and blubber from these animals, 
but "it is not probable, however, that a sufficient number of 
whales were ever caught to support the entire population dur?
ing the whole of winter" (Boas, 1888:440). The cycle of activ?
ities for Davis Strait differed somewhat from that of Cumber?
land Sound because bears that robbed seal birth lairs along 
Davis Strait became the chief quarry during March and April 
(Boas, 1888:439). 
The American explorer Charles F. Hall, who visited the re?
gion just to the south of Cumberland Sound in 1860-1862, 
noted settlement in the bays at the outer end of Hall Peninsula. 
In visiting one of them in February 1861, he observed the fol?
lowing: 
Nearly all the inhabitants of both villages had gone away to Frobisher Bay 
where they hope more success would attend their exertions to procure food. In?
deed, I understand that not less than a hundred were together in one place and 
doing well. (Hall, 1864:325) 
This statement seems to confirm McLaren and Smith's studies 
that indicate seals would be found in greater numbers in the in?
ner parts of fiords than at their mouths or elsewhere. Also, 
there appears to be a suggestion, at least, that breathing-hole 
sealing is in some way best practiced under conditions of large 
gatherings of people, and thus, of hunters. This is discussed 
further under "Seals and Aboriginal Settlement," below. 
328 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
There is very little information available regarding the ab?
original hunting and settlement practices of the people of the 
south shore of Baffin Island, although "the ringed seal has been 
the single most important resource" in that region as for Baffin 
Island in general (Kemp, 1984:467). 
For the regions of the Iglulik Eskimo, we have the first con?
tact accounts of Parry (1824) and Lyon (1824). On 1 February 
1822, while their ships were frozen in at Winter Island near the 
mouth of Lyon Inlet, a group of 64 local Inuit (Aivilingmiut) 
set up camp nearby. These people remained together, hunting 
seals at the breathing holes and walruses at the floe edge, until 
the beginning of April. They then split into two groups, one of 
which moved farther from the floe edge and lived, apparently 
exclusively, on seals (Lyon, 1824:116-118). 
Boas (1888:445-450) drew together material from early ac?
counts of the Aivilingmiut that stressed living on stores for 
most of the winter, although for the winter of 1867-1868, seal?
ing began in early January (Hall, 1879:371). Mathiassen 
(1928:24-25) thought that more commonly these people 
moved onto the sea ice at the end of January or in early Febru?
ary (consistent with Parry and Lyon) for hunting at the breath?
ing holes. The young seals were hunted later in the winter. He 
wrote, "when the weather became warmer (May-June) they 
pitched their tents on points and islands in the bay and hunted 
the seals which basked in the sun until the ice broke up at the 
beginning of August" (Mathiassen, 1928:24-25). After that, 
kayak hunting was carried out from various points of land "at 
the end of August or early September, the young men went in?
land while the older men continued the sea hunt as long as 
there was open water" (Mathiassen, 1928:24-25). When the 
sea froze, these men joined the younger men in the caribou 
hunt. These hunts lasted well into the autumn, after which the 
people lived on stores until the winter sealing began again. 
When Parry and Lyon reached Iglulik Island, in July 1822, 
they found 120 people encamped there (Lyon, 1824:146). In 
September, after the explorers returned, they found people set?
tled there in winter quarters (Lyon, 1824:149-150; Parry, 
1824:279-280). In mid-December people began to move out 
onto the sea ice, where two camps were eventually estab?
lished. One was established near the floe edge for walrus hunt?
ing, and the other was located some distance away, where the 
Inuit were devoted to breathing-hole sealing. Some people re?
mained at the shore through most of the winter. In April some 
moved to the mainland, where walruses were supposed to be 
especially abundant along the shore (Lyon, 1824:251-252; 
Parry, 1824:424-425). 
In his account of the traditional cycle of the Iglulingmiut, 
Mathiassen (1928:29-33) did not describe a long period of liv?
ing from stores but rather autumn aggregations at places where 
winter clothing was sewn. After that, "about the new year they 
assembled at the two winter settlements...and hunted the wal?
rus from the ice edge and seals at the breathing holes" (Mathi?
assen, 1928:30). The spring and summer activities and places 
of residence apparently were identical with those described 
above for the Aivilingmiut. 
In the Pond Inlet region, although Boas (1888) indicated that 
there were places where conditions allowed walrus hunting in 
winter, the Inuit incorporated narwhal hunting at the floe edge 
as a supplement to sealing in winter (McClintock, 1859:157; 
Mathiassen, 1928:34). 
Caribou Eskimo relied for the most part on the animal for 
which they are named, but in the spring, before the end of May, 
about one quarter of the Caribou Eskimo travelled to the coast 
to hunt seals (Birket-Smith, 1929:36, 125). In July "sea mam?
mals are pursued with watercraft" (Arima, 1984:453). 
The Netsilik area was first visited by Sir John Ross (1835), 
whose party encountered people in Lord Mayor Bay on 9 Janu?
ary 1830 when a group of 31 Netsilik men approached the 
overwintering expedition ship Victory. Later, members of the 
Ross party visited their village, which probably housed over 
100 people. Seal hunting was observed only at the breathing 
holes, but the village split into two sections in March, ostensi?
bly to exploit fresh sealing grounds (Ross, 1835:171-172). 
Fishing "was commenced remarkably early" by the Netsiliks 
(Boas, 1888:455), with evidence from both sides of Boothia 
Peninsula pointing to large gatherings at Netsilik Lake, appar?
ently both in the autumn and in the spring (Ross, 1835:228). 
Both McClintock (1859), who visited the region in 1859, and 
Amundsen (1908), whose ship Gjoa spent the years 1903-1904 
and 1904-1905 at King William Island, reported large aggrega?
tions of sealers during the winter months. Rasmussen 
(1931:160) played down the role of spring surface sealing for 
the Netsilik. He found people moving inland early in spring ei?
ther to fish or to intercept the migrating herds of caribou that 
entered the country. Apparently there were subregional differ?
ences, however, because Balikci (1964:41-43) reported surface 
sealing as well as sealing in the water of open holes in spring. 
Also, a special method of spring hunting was practiced at 
Thorn Bay, where seals were captured through both natural and 
artificial holes at a tide crack along which seals migrated in late 
spring (Rasmussen, 1931: 160-161; Damas, 1965). 
For Copper Eskimo regions, sealing commenced about the 
beginning of December, except in eastern parts of the area, 
where normally successful caribou hunting delayed the move 
to the sealing areas about a month (Rasmussen, 1932:77). For 
the western part of the tribal area, Stefansson (1913:169-170) 
developed a model of winter movements based on seal-hunting 
practices. A circle of 8 km (5 mi) in radius was the normal 
hunting range. After about a month, when such a circle was 
hunted out, the snow-house camp was moved about 16 km (10 
mi), and so on, throughout the sealing season, which lasted un?
til mid May. Jenness (1922:120) gave a picture of the move?
ments of Copper Eskimo during the winter of 1915-1916 that 
corresponds in most respects with the model of Stefansson. A 
group of 33 families (perhaps 100 people or more) camped at 
one place from December to early February. After two more 
monthly moves as a unit, in early April the group split into sev-
NUMBER 44 329 
eral smaller groups. This description differs from that of the 
Stefansson model in that the first two months of winter were 
spent at one place. This occurrence, as well as the splitting of 
the village later in this season, can be probably traced to condi?
tions of daylight: 
Spring with its mild, sunny weather brings longer and pleasanter days for hunt?
ing. Seals, although not more plentiful, perhaps, are more easily discovered. 
...Migrations take place more frequently...and the men hunt nearer home, 
staying away eight or nine hours a day instead of four or five as in winter. (Jen?
ness, 1922:119) 
Rasmussen's (1931:78-85) enquiries and mine (Damas, 
1969a:121?122) indicate that much the same picture emerges 
for eastern elements of Copper Eskimo, with the various hunt?
ing groups coalescing during the winter sealing period which, 
as farther east, lasted until about mid-May. 
Two ecological anomalies in the Copper Eskimo area were 
noted by Stefansson. One is that only a few of the older men 
knew of the method of stalking seals on the ice (Stefansson, 
1919:297). I have cited the work of animal biologists, however, 
that shows that numbers of seals were counted basking on ice 
in the western part of Copper Eskimo country. Another anom?
aly was that "environment....does not explain why they never 
hunted seals from kayaks during the summer months" (Stefans?
son, 1951:3). It could be argued that Copper Eskimo could 
more profitably hunt the caribou in the late spring and summer, 
but the hand-to-mouth existence of some elements of the tribe 
(Jenness, 1922:123-124, 127-142) during those seasons chal?
lenged the advantage of omitting sealing at those times. 
Seals and Aboriginal Settlement 
In reviewing the above descriptions of the effects of the habits 
and methods of hunting the ringed seal upon the settlement pat?
terns of the Central Eskimo for aboriginal periods, a number of 
points can be stressed. (1) For the east-central Arctic where bi?
ological data are available, the correlation between regions of 
Inuit habitation and those of expectable large populations of 
seals is striking. (2) In certain east-central locales, hunting of 
large sea mammals obscured the role of the ringed seal and in?
duced groups to split up for part of the winter season; however, 
because these regions had favorable sealing conditions, the seal 
hunt was carried out over a greater part of the year's economic 
and settlement cycle. (3) The development of a variety of seal-
hunting techniques within a region created access to that ani?
mal over the major part of each year and thereby influenced the 
location of settlements. (4) Large winter gatherings were per?
sistently associated with the period when breathing-hole seal?
ing was carried out in most Central Eskimo regions. (5) With 
failure to develop the full inventory of seal hunting methods, 
west-central settlement was influenced by sealing for shorter 
periods of each year than was settlement farther east. During 
the winter and early spring, however, the Inuit were completely 
dependent on breathing-hole sealing and encampment on the 
sea ice at great distance from open water. 
The above statements need some elaboration. First, with re?
gard to hunting larger sea mammals, most hunting techniques, 
especially those for walruses and large whales, entailed consid?
erable danger. Both Lyon (1824:114) and Hall (1864:264-265) 
noted incidents in which men were caught on drifting ice while 
hunting walruses along the floe in winter. Much of the summer 
hunting of larger sea mammals was carried out from kayaks, 
and this frail craft was very vulnerable to animal attacks. There 
is also the fact that seal hunting continued even when ample 
stores of walrus fat were available because of the superiority of 
seal fat as fuel in the stone lamps (Damas, 1960-1961). 
Regarding the size of settlements associated with the various 
sealing methods, both Balikci (1964:17) and the present author 
(Damas, 1969b:51) have posed an almost deterministic linkage 
based on the notion that the more breathing holes that are at?
tended, the greater the chances of success in the hunt. Conse?
quently, there would be an advantage to large numbers of hunt?
ers in this pursuit, implying larger aggregations of people 
during the breathing-hole sealing season. On the basis of the 
above discussion, this hypothesis may have to be modified ac?
cording to the actual numbers of seals in a particular locale, 
and the ratio between numbers of seals and numbers of breath?
ing holes. Also, in a largely reconstructive study like this one it 
is impossible to judge the degree of motivation for these asso?
ciated gatherings that came from the social and ceremonial 
events that accompanied them. 
On the basis of analyzing census data of the Fifth Thule Ex?
pedition (modified by information gathered in the field), 
Damas (1969a: 122) arrived at an average figure of about 100 
individuals for winter groupings of Iglulik, Copper, and Netsi?
lik tribes.5 This figure probably represents the maximum num?
ber of people that could be fed from the normal range of these 
winter hunts. To establish a minimum number of hunters for ef?
fective breathing-hole sealing is more difficult both on the ba?
sis of actual reports from the breathing-hole phases of yearly 
cycles and because of variations in local numbers and of avail?
ability of seals. 
Culture Contact, The Ringed Seal, and Settlement Changes 
There have been three main phases of culture contact in the 
Central Arctic. The first of these, the period of contact with 
commercial whalers, had its beginning on Baffin Island before 
the middle of the nineteenth century. In such places as Cumber?
land Sound, introduction of firearms and wooden boats en?
hanced procurement of game (Boas, 1888:466-467) and made 
the pursuit of larger sea mammals safer and more productive. 
Caribou could also be hunted more easily. The chief change in 
sealing methods was the addition of shooting seals at current 
holes in the ice and at floe edges (Boas, 1888:480, 498). With 
increased game production, settlements became more dispersed 
and permanently established over the year's cycle. Aggrega?
tions on the sea ice for sealing largely faded. Whaling stations 
also drew people for much of the year (Boas, 1888: 467-^468). 
330 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
After 1860 similar improvements in economy and changes in 
sealing methods occurred in the northwestern Hudson Bay re?
gion, but more substantial alterations in settlement also took 
place. Numbers of Aivilingmiut gathered around overwintering 
whaling vessels in the Fullerton Harbour-Depot Island region, 
well to the south of their normal range. Also, some Netsiliks 
were drawn from their traditional hunting grounds to the north?
western Hudson Bay region. Winter hunting began to include 
floe-edge sealing and walrus hunting as well as interior pursuit 
of both caribou and musk oxen (Robinson, 1973; Ross, 1975). 
Only the east-central Arctic was directly involved in the ac?
tivities of commercial whalers, but the entire central Arctic was 
drawn into the second phase of contact, which involved the 
trade in arctic foxes. Between 1910 and 1923, trading posts, 
with very few exceptions, were established throughout the 
area. In general this was an era of improved subsistence and al?
tered settlement practices. For eastern and southern Baffin Is?
land there was a continuation of the changes brought on by the 
whalers, but the benefits of introduced technology were spread 
more widely with the establishment of a chain of posts by sev?
eral trading firms. The practice of floe-edge and current-hole 
sealing increased and the now shore-based settlements were 
dispersed and seasonally more stable. In this period traders dis?
couraged the sort of aggregations around their posts that had 
existed around whaling stations.6 
Indeed, for the central Arctic as a whole, the hunting-trap?
ping base camp set on land at sites of large caches became a 
typical settlement type (Damas, 1988:116). For both Netsilik 
and Copper Eskimo regions, the adoption of sealing in summer 
from boats contributed to the enhanced cache-oriented base 
camp. Other parts of the associated complex of factors were 
improved takes of caribou through the use of rifles (in areas 
where large herds persisted) and large catches of fish through 
the use of nets. In Rasmussen Basin and in the Queen Maud-
Coronation Gulf regions, however, Copper Eskimo continued 
to move to the sea ice to form breathing-hole sealing villages. 
During this period, these moves began later in winter or in 
early spring when supplies were exhausted (Damas, 1988:112). 
The third stage of culture contact began in the mid 1950s and 
was almost fully established by the late 1960s. This was the in?
gathering of people into large centralized settlements of mixed 
ethnic composition. Despite the influx of cash income, subsis?
tence hunting of both land and sea animals continued. By this 
time, additional methods of seal hunting had been introduced, 
including the use of set guns or hooks at breathing holes and 
the use of nets. While the bulk of populations remained in the 
large centers for much of the year, some men made excursions 
(more and more with snowmobiles) for caribou and to visit 
traps, or hunted seals nearby. In summer, shore-based tent en?
campments were sites of seal hunting from boats. A boom in 
sealskin prices began in 1962, bringing a new or expanded 
source of income to the Inuit and enhancing the value of seal 
hunting (Wenzel, 1991). In 1978 an anti-sealing movement 
brought about a sharp decline in trade prices of the skins. After 
a brief resurgence of the trade in the early 1980s, a virtual de?
mise of the industry was brought on by the boycott on importa?
tion of sealskins by the Council of the European Economic 
Community in 1983. This decision was renewed in 1985 (Wen?
zel, 1991:1) and again in 1989 (Wenzel, 1991:179); however, 
subsistence hunting of seals still continued in many places in 
the Canadian Arctic. 
Cultural Ecology versus Environmental Determinism 
I have examined the relationship between the distributions and 
habits of the ringed seal and Central Eskimo settlement. Both 
the overall dispersal of populations and the seasonal cycles of 
subsistence activities and settlement have been argued as sup?
porting such relationships until the attractions of the new cen?
tralized communities provided more powerful incentives for 
aggregation. I have indicated that regions of habitation and 
likely occurrence of good sealing grounds coincided to a great 
degree in the east-central Arctic and that populations were 
evenly spread in the west central area. There were, however, 
unexploited regions of game potential lying outside the central 
Arctic as conceived herein. During the 1920s, 1930s, and 
1940s the Hudson's Bay Company moved native people to 
places where the fur trade could be expanded. The relocations 
of people to Clyde River, which is within the normal range of 
Baffinland Eskimos, and to Somerset Island, which is outside 
the normal habitation of Central Eskimo tribes, are two 
examples7 (Jenness, 1964). Later, in the 1950s, native people 
were moved to Ellesmere Island (Grise Fiord) and to Cornwal-
lis Island (Resolute) by the Canadian government. As in the 
earlier moves, the colonies were established at places that were 
considered to be underexploited for fur and game. Although 
the later moves have involved problems (Tester and Kulchyski, 
1994), successful subsistence hunting, especially of the ringed 
seal, has sustained the relocated people (Bissett, 1968; Free?
man, 1984). Distance from kindred has presented difficulties 
in these cases and may well have been a strong factor in ac?
counting for lack of human occupation of the High Arctic in 
the ethnographic era. 
Other contact-inspired moves have been made on more vol?
untary bases, such as the aforementioned movement of Aivi?
lingmiut and Netsiliks on the west shore of Hudson Bay.8 Also, 
the opening of the Keewatin interior for occupation has been 
attributed to the disappearance of the Chipewyan, largely due 
to an epidemic (Smith and Burch, 1979). 
The frequent occurrence of large aggregations of people in 
winter sealing villages was not the only example of large ag?
gregations during annual cycles of settlement. The period just 
preceding the winter sealing, when Inuit usually lived on 
stores, is a case in point. Certain activities that were usually 
carried out from dispersed groups could have been undertaken 
from larger gatherings. These include surface sealing and sum?
mer sea-mammal hunting. Periodic gatherings are congenial to 
the creation and reaffirmation of kinship and to voluntary asso-
NUMBER 44 331 
ciations among the Central Eskimo, as is the case among other 
hunting peoples. But dispersal has the advantage of easing so?
cial tensions in such societies. In the case of the Central Es?
kimo, blood feuds, witchcraft, the narrow scope of kinship, and 
the almost total lack of political organization served to foster 
interpersonal strife. If students of hunting societies are tempted 
to place too much emphasis on economic factors, it would be 
well for them to take note of the following considerations: 
Groups are forced into this or that kind of aggregation by their size, their tech?
nology, the suitability of the environment for subsistence and settlement, or the 
need for self-protection from enemies. Yet these are not the only determinants. 
...It would seem that groups simply choose a locale congenial to them, that is, 
congenial with regard to the relationships they desire to maintain in all or in 
certain spheres of activity. I suggest that this desire is not further reducible. 
(Nadel, 1951:156) 
Notes 
Archival research was carried out at the National Archives of Canada, the 
Manitoba Public Archives, and the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, 
supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and 
by the Arts Research Board of McMaster University. Field research was spon?
sored by the United States Institutes of Health and the National Museum of 
Canada. I wish to thank the staffs of the libraries and the supporting agencies 
for their assistance. I am also most grateful to George Wenzel for his many 
helpful comments and suggestions. 
1. I follow herein designations set forth for "tribe" and for "Central Eskimo" 
in Damas (1984a:3, 1984b:391, respectively). I include Melville Peninsula, 
Baffin Island, and the west coast of Hudson Bay in "east-central Arctic." For 
"west-central Arctic" I refer to the aboriginal ranges of the Netsilik and Copper 
Eskimo (see Figure 1). 
2. An exception occurs in Amundsen Gulf, where birth lairs have been found 
on shifting but relatively stable ice some distance from land (Smith and 
Stirling, 1975). 
3. An exception is the usually inhabited deep indentation of Wager Bay. 
4. Indeed, there is some difficulty in finding an aboriginal picture for Cum?
berland Sound from Boas's account, which includes references to "shooting 
seals," and settlement had been altered at the time of his visit in 1883-1884 
(Boas, 1888:426,467-468). 
5. I accounted for satellite camps in the Iglulik region in terms of good wal?
rus locations, but some camps relied mainly on seals. Other studies of the 
ringed seal have been made in the Barrow Strait (Finley, 1979; Hammill and 
Smith, 1990), which lies beyond the normal aboriginal range of Central Es?
kimo groups treated herein and is within range of the floe edge for the move?
ments of seals. 
6. Edward Fitzgerald to W.W. Cory, 10 Apr 1925, RG85 volume 1069, file 
251(1), National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. 
7. For Clyde River, see A. Brabant to Edward Fitzgerald, 22 Dec 1922; Ralph 
Parsons to Fur Trade Commissioner, 8 Jan 1922, R.G. 2/4/F87, Hudson's Bay 
Company Archives, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. For Somerset Island, see 
Jenness, 1964:59-64. 
8. This movement inland has been attributed to acquisition of guns, fish 
hooks, and nets (Glover, 1969), and to overpopulation of the coast (Burch, 
1977). Another interpretation is that this coast is unsuitable for breathing-hole 
sealing because its shallowness causes "freezing to the bottom even a good 
way from the shore" (Birket-Smith, 1929:126-127). 
Literature Cited 
Alliston, W.G., and M.A. McLaren 
1961. The Distribution and Abundance of Ringed Seals in Western Coro?
nation Gulf, Prince Albert Sound and Minto Inlet, N.W.T. v+37 
pages. London: Polar Gas Environmental Program. 
Amundsen, Roald E.G. 
1908. Roald Amundsen's "The Northwest Passage. "... 2 volumes. Lon?
don: Archibald Constable and Company. 
Arima, Eugene Y. 
1984. Caribou Eskimo. In William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Hand?
book of North American Indians, volume 5, David Damas, editor, 
Arctic, pages 447-462. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
Balikci, Asen 
1964. Development of Basic Socio-economic Units in Two Eskimo Com?
munities. Bulletin, National Museum of Canada, 202, Anthropologi?
cal Series, 69: x+114 pages. Ottawa, Ontario. 
Birket-Smith, Kaj 
1929. The Caribou Eskimos: Material and Social Life and Their Cultural 
Position. Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, volume 
5(1): 306 pages. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. 
Bissett, Don 
1968. Resolute: An Area Economic Survey, xx+175 pages. Ottawa, On?
tario: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, In?
dustrial Division. 
Boas, Franz 
1888. The Central Eskimo. Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of American 
Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution for the 
Year 1884-1885, pages 399-699. Washington, D.C. 
Burch, Ernest S., Jr. 
1977. Muskox and Man in the Central Canadian Subarctic, 1689-1974. 
Arctic, 30(3): 135-154. 
Damas, David 
1960-1961. Field Notes from the Iglulik Eskimo Region. [In the posses?
sion of the author] 
1965. Field Notes from the Netsilik Eskimo Region. [In the possession of 
the author.] 
1969a. Characteristics of Central Eskimo Band Structure. In D. Damas, ed?
itor, Contributions to Anthropology: Band Societies. Bulletin, Na?
tional Museum of Canada, 228, Anthropological Series, 84: 
116-134. Ottawa, Ontario. 
1969b. Environment, History, and Central Eskimo Society. In D. Damas, 
editor, Ecological Essays. Bulletin, National Museum of Canada, 
230, Anthropological Series, 86:40-64. Ottawa, Ontario. 
1984a. Introduction. In William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of 
North American Indians, volume 5, David Damas, editor, Arctic, 
pages 1-7. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. 
1984b. Central Eskimo: Introduction. In William C. Sturtevant, general edi?
tor, Handbook of North American Indians, volume 5, David Damas, 
editor, Arctic, pages 391-396. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Insti?
tution. 
1988. The Contact-Traditional Horizon of the Central Arctic: Reassess?
ment of a Concept and Reexamination of an Era. Arctic Anthropol?
ogy, 25(2):101-I38. 
Finley, Kerwin J. 
1979. Haul Out Behaviour and Densitities of Ringed Seals (Phoca Hisp?
ida) in the Barrow Strait Area, NWT. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 
332 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
57:1985-1997. 
Freeman, Milton M.R. 
1984. The Grise Fiord Project. In William C. Sturtevant, general editor, 
Handbook of North American Indians, volume 5, David Damas, 
editor, Arctic, pages 676-682. Washington, D .C : Smithsonian In?
stitution. 
Glover, Richard 
1969. Introduction: Andrew Graham, the Royal Society Collections and 
His "Observations." In Andrew Graham, Andrew Graham's Obser?
vations on Hudson's Bay, 1767-1791. Publications of the Hudson's 
Bay Record Society, 27:xiii-lxxii. London. 
Hall, Charles F. 
1864. Life with the Esquimaux: The Narrative of Captain Charles Francis 
Hall. 2 volumes. London: Samson Low, Son, and Marston. 
1879. Narrative of the Second Arctic Expedition Made by Charles F. 
Hall: His Voyage to Repulse Bay, Sledge Journeys to the Straits of 
Fury and Hecla and to King William's Land, and Residence among 
the Eskimos during the Years 1864?69. Edited by J.E. Nourse, 5 
leaves, xlviii + 644 pages. Washington, D . C : U.S. Government 
Printing Office. 
Hammill, M.O., and T.G. Smith 
1990. Application of Removal Sampling to Estimate the Density of 
Ringed Seals (Phoca hispida). Canadian Journal of Fisheries and 
Aquatic Sciences, 47(2):244-250. 
Jenness, Diamond 
1922. The Life of the Copper Eskimos. Report of the Canadian Arctic Ex?
pedition, 1913-18, 12(A): 277 pages. Ottawa, Ontario. 
1964. Eskimo Administration, II: Canada. Technical Paper (Arctic Insti?
tute of North America), 2: 186 pages. Montreal, Quebec. 
Kemp, William B. 
1984. Baffinland Eskimo. In William C. Sturtevant, general editor, 
Handbook of North American Indians, volume 5, David Damas, 
editor, Arctic, pages 463-475. Washington, D .C : Smithsonian In?
stitution. 
Lyon, George F. 
1824. The Private Journal of Captain G.F. Lyon of H.M.S. Hecla, during 
the Recent Voyage of Discovery under Captain Parry. 2 leaves, 
[viii]-xiii, [l]+468 pages. London: John Murray. 
McClintock, Sir Francis E. 
1859. The Voyage of the "Fox " in the Arctic Seas; A Narrative of the Dis?
covery the Fate of Sir John Franklin and His Companions. xxvii+ 
403 pages. London: J. Murray. 
McLaren, I.A. 
1958a. The Biology of the Ringed Seal (Phoca hispida Schreber) in the 
Eastern Canadian Arctic. Bulletin, Fisheries Research Board of 
Canada, 118: vii+97 pages. Ottawa, Ontario. 
1958b. The Economics of Seals in the Eastern Canadian Arctic. Arctic 
Unit Circular, 1: iv+94 pages. Ottawa, Ontario: Fisheries Research 
Board of Canada. 
1961. Methods of Determining the Numbers and Availability of Ringed 
Seals in the Canadian Eastern Arctic. Arctic, 14(3): 162-175. 
Mathiassen, Therkel 
1928. Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos. Report of the Fifth Thule 
Expedition, 1921-24, volume 6(1): 2 leaves, 242 [7] pages. Copen?
hagen: Gyldendal. 
Nadel, S.F. 
1951. The Foundations of Social Anthropology, xi+426 pages. Glencoe, 
Illinois: The Free Press. 
Parry, Sir William E. 
1824. Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a Northwest Pas?
sage from the Atlantic to the Pacific: Performed...in His Majesty's 
Ships Fury and Hecla.... xx+464 pages. London: John Murray. 
Rasmussen, Knud 
1931. The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spiritual Culture. Report of 
the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921-24, volume 8(1-2): 4 leaves + 
[7]-542 [8] pages. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. 
1932. Intellectual Culture of the Copper Eskimos. Report of the Fifth 
Thule Expedition, 1921-24, volume 9: 350 pages. Copenhagen: 
Gyldendal. 
Robinson, Samuel I. 
1973. The Influence of the American Whaling Industry on the Aiviling?
miut, 1860-1919. iv+137 pages. Master's thesis, anthropology, Mc-
Master University, Hamilton, Ontario. 
Ross, Sir John 
1835. Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North West Passage, 
and of a Residence in the Arctic Regions during the Years 1829, 
1830, 1831, 1832, 1833. xxiii+456 pages. Philadelphia, Pennsylva?
nia: E.L. Carey and A. Hart. 
Ross, W. Gillies 
1975. Whaling and Eskimos: Hudson Bay 1860-1915, Canada. Publica?
tions in Ethnology, 10: 164 pages. Ottawa, Ontario: National Muse?
ums of Canada. 
Smith, James G.E., and Ernest S. Burch, Jr. 
1979. Chipewyan and Inuit in the Central Subarctic, 1613-1977. Arctic 
Anthropology, 16(2):76-101. 
Smith, Thomas G. 
1973. Population Dynamics of the Ringed Seal in the Canadian Eastern 
Arctic. Bulletin, Fisheries Research Board of Canada, 181: viii+55 
pages. Ottawa, Ontario. 
1987. The Ringed Seal, Phoca hispida, of the Canadian Western Arctic. 
Canadian Bulletin of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, 216: x+81 
pages. Ottawa, Ontario: Department of Fisheries and Oceans. 
Smith, Thomas G., and Michael O. Hammill 
1981. Ecology of the Ringed Seal, Phoca hispida, in Its Fast Ice Breeding 
Habitat. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 59:966-981. 
Smith, Thomas G., and I. Stirling 
1975. The Breeding Habitat of the Ringed Seal, Phoca hispida; the Birth 
Lair and Associated Structures. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 53: 
1297-1305. 
Stefansson, Vilhjalmur 
1913. My Life with the Eskimo, ix+538 pages. New York: MacMillan. 
1919 ("1914"). The Stefansson-Anderson Arctic Expedition of the Ameri?
can Museum: Preliminary Ethnological Report. Anthropological 
Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 14(1): 395 
pages. New York. [Date on title page is 1914; actually published in 
1919.] 
1951. The Copper Eskimos. 11 pages. [Not published; in volume 8 of the 
manuscript of an encyclopedia of Arctic studies sponsored by the 
United States Navy, edited by Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Bound type?
script in the Rauner Library, Rare Book Room, Special Collections, 
Manuscript Stef. Mss/97, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hamp?
shire; microfilm copy owned by the United States Navy, Office of 
Naval Research, Washington, D.C] 
Tester, Frank, and Peter Kulchyski 
1994. Tammarniit (Mistakes): Inuit Relocation in the Eastern Arctic, 
1939-63. xv+421 pages. Vancouver: University of British Colum?
bia Press. 
Wenzel, George 
1991. Animal Rights, Human Rights: Ecology, Economy and Ideology in 
the Canadian Arctic, ix+206 pages. Toronto, Ontario: University of 
Toronto Press. 
Species Transformations in Northern Mexico: Explorations in Raramuri 
Zoology 
William L. Merrill 
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora... 
Ovid, Metamorphoseon, book 1, 1-2, XXXX 
Because of Bill Sturtevant's interest in the ethnobotany of the 
Indians of the southeastern United States, I had the opportu?
nity?in the summer of 1972?to complete a research project 
under his direction on a Southeastern Indian ceremonial bever?
age and emetic called "black drink.'" Over the course of that 
summer, Bill shared his unparalleled knowledge of American 
Indian ethnobotany and ethnology with me. He also loaned me 
his copy oi Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas's path-breaking 
study of the relationship between the social construction of re?
ality and cultural practices. In this work, Douglas (1970) ex?
plored, among many other topics, the linkages between the 
classificatory status of certain animals and the special treat?
ment afforded them in diverse cultural settings, proposing, in 
the best-known example, that the ancient Hebrews had prohib?
ited some kinds of animals as food because these animals were 
classificatory anomalies. 
Douglas's views on such matters took on added significance 
for me in 1977, soon after I began research in the Raramuri 
(Tarahumara) Indian community of Rejogochi, located in the 
rugged Sierra Madre Mountains of northern Mexico.2 One 
morning in July of that year, I was following Mauricio Aquichi, 
a Raramuri man in his mid-twenties, up a pine- and madrone -
covered slope just behind his house in Rejogochi. I always en?
joyed spending time with Mauricio because he usually as?
sumed that I knew little or nothing about anything. As we 
reached a level spot on the trail, he called me over to a small 
pool of rainwater that had collected in a depression in the vol?
canic rock and, with some delight, pointed out a multitude of 
tadpoles wiggling about. He explained that these tadpoles 
would soon grow legs, lose their tails, and emerge from the wa?
ter as frogs and asked me if they did the same in my country. I 
replied that they did. He then asked if squirrels in my country 
change into snakes. Taken aback, I said, "No," and asked for 
details. Scrunching up his shoulders and flattening his arms 
William L. Merrill, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of 
Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560-
0112, USA. 
against his body, he described the process whereby two species 
of squirrels, upon reaching old age, would gradually lose their 
fur and legs, become more elongated, and emerge as two differ?
ent kinds of snakes. 
Intrigued by this view of zoological possibilities, my wife, 
Cecilia Troop, and I began compiling information on Raramuri 
ideas about animals. Through both formal interviews and infor?
mal conversations with a number of people in Rejogochi, we 
worked out the basic structure of their zoological taxonomy 
and recorded a rich corpus of ethological and ecological 
knowledge along with a number of stories in which animals 
figured as the protagonists.3 In the process, we discovered that 
the Raramuri people in this community agreed on eight differ?
ent sets of species transformations that Western zoologists do 
not acknowledge as valid (Table 1). 
These transformations are of three types. The first involves 
the maturation of what the Raramuris identify as immature 
forms into adult forms, in this case, the maturation of sala?
manders into pocket gophers. The second type of transforma?
tion?in which small rodents change into bats, large fish 
change into otters, and squirrels change into snakes?takes 
place when the animals that transform reach old age. The 
Raramuris consider these maturation and old-age transforma?
tions to be inevitable, but they say that the third type of trans?
formation occurs only when certain domesticated animals 
(goats, pigs, and house cats) spend extended periods in the 
wilds beyond areas of human occupation, where they transform 
into their wild equivalents (deer, peccaries, and ring-tailed cats, 
respectively).4 
The Raramuris state that these eight species transformations 
are similar to metamorphoses that are readily observable in na?
ture?for example, the metamorphosis of tadpoles into frogs or 
caterpillars into butterflies?and they do not have separate 
verbs or categories to distinguish between them. They believe 
that, as in the case of the observable metamorphoses, the spe?
cies transformations occur in only one direction and are irre?
versible. They also view the morphological changes entailed by 
these species transformations to be no more radical, and in 
333 
334 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
TABLE 1.?Raramuri species transformations. 
salamanders 
(rotebi) 
small rodents 
(chikuri, rokirike, 
sotochi, chichimo, 
large fish 
rori. 
chikd) 
(kuchu, musi, sikachi) 
red tree squirrels 
(chimori sitdkame, alias 
chimori lachame) 
rock squirrels 
(chipawi) 
goats 
(chibd) 
pigs 
(kochine) 
house cats 
(misi) 
Maturation 
-> 
Old Age 
-? 
-> 
?? 
?> 
Domesticated to Wild 
-? 
-? 
-? 
pocket gophers 
(riposi) 
bats 
(so9pichi) 
otters 
(bahuri) 
large constrictors 
(bahomdwari) 
large rattlesnakes 
(jaydwi) 
deer 
(chomari) 
peccaries 
(kabilin) 
ring-tailed cats 
(rikamuchi) 
some cases less radical, than those involved in the metamor?
phoses. They point, however, to one major difference between 
the species transformations and the observable metamorpho?
ses: all the animals involved in the transformations "breed 
true," that is, they produce offspring. There is one exception. 
The Raramuris believe that salamanders mature into pocket go?
phers without reproducing, comparable in this regard to tad?
poles and caterpillars, which are immature, nonreproducing 
forms of frogs and butterflies. They recognize that adult pocket 
gophers produce their own offspring, which they distinguish 
from salamanders, but, as in the case of the other species trans?
formations, they claim that individual animals that are the re?
sult of transformations are identical to those that mature from 
the natural offspring of members of their species. 
The postulation of such species transformations probably can 
be found in many other societies around the world, but the eth?
nographic record is uneven. The most detailed information, and 
the only systematic efforts to explain the phenomenon, come 
from research among the Kalam and Rofaifo of highland New 
Guinea and the Nuaulu of nearby Seram, most conducted dur?
ing the 1960s and 1970s, the heyday of ethnobiological re?
search in anthropology (e.g., Bulmer, 1967, 1968, 1979; Ellen, 
1972, 1993; Bulmer and Menzies, 1973; Dwyer, 1976a, 1976b). 
These proposed transformations have piqued the interest of re?
searchers primarily because "they often relate to common crea?
tures and contrast sharply with empirical biological knowledge 
which is otherwise extremely accurate" (Ellen, 1993:163; cf. 
Bulmer and Menzies, 1973:101; Dwyer, 1976a: 189, 198). 
In attempting to account for these beliefs, scholars have ad?
dressed two fundamental questions: Why do the people in 
question postulate species transformations that Western zoolo?
gists do not recognize? and Why do they involve these particu?
lar animals rather than others in these transformations? Below I 
offer responses to these questions in regard to the Raramuri ex?
amples of species transformations, evaluating in the process the 
extent to which explanations formulated to account for species 
transformations in other cultural settings can be applied to the 
Raramuri case and vice versa. I argue that the postulation of 
such species transformations is intended in all instances to es?
tablish an affinity among the species involved but that the mo?
tivations for doing so vary widely from one society to another, 
primarily reflecting differences in the ways in which the mem?
bers of these societies approach classifying the animal world. I 
propose that the Raramuris employ species transformations as 
a device to explain why certain animals display features that set 
them apart from most other members of the general taxonomic 
categories with which they are most closely associated. I note, 
however, that at least one animal that appears to be taxonomi-
cally "singular," the ropogopali, an unidentified lizard, is not 
involved in such transformations, and I offer my perspective on 
why this particular exception exists. I also suggest more gener?
ally that, because such bodies of knowledge are dynamic sys?
tems in the process of being developed through individual in?
tellectual activity, it is unrealistic to expect that specific 
phenomena within them (like species transformations) can be 
exhaustively explained at any particular point in time. 
I then discuss some interconnections between the Raramuris' 
zoological knowledge and other areas of their thought, propos?
ing that they apply their concrete, empirical knowledge about 
animals to support fundamental but ultimately nonverifiable 
propositions about the nature of their universe. I conclude by 
considering the characteristics of the metaphysical systems 
within which the postulation of such species transformations 
might be expected to occur. 
Raramuri Species Transformations 
The Raramuris of Rejogochi employ three verbs to convey the 
meaning 'to transform': nahitama, so?petama, and nirema. I 
found that people tended to use nirema to refer to any sort of 
change in condition or form, whereas they usually restricted 
nahitama and so?petama to refer specifically to transforma?
tions of one kind of being into another. When discussing such 
transformations, they tended to employ nahitama more fre?
quently than so?petama and to employ both more frequently 
than nirema. Otherwise I discovered no differences among 
these verbs.5 The Raramuris' use all three to denote the con?
temporary transformation of one kind of animal into another 
and to denote as well the transformation of humans into ani?
mals, which took place in the ancient past and can also occur 
today, but only after death.6 Here I focus on the three types of 
contemporary animal transformations that the Raramuris pro?
pose, returning to the human-to-animal transformations near 
the end of the essay.7 
The first transformation type?maturation?includes only 
one example that Western zoologists do not recognize: the mat-
NUMBER 44 335 
uration of salamanders into pocket gophers.8 The Raramuris re?
port that the salamander develops from eggs in the water, and 
then, when it has grown legs, it emerges from the water and 
burrows underground, where they often encounter it while hoe?
ing their maize (this "intermediate" stage is labeled by some as 
ru
?
rusi). There it grows fur and gradually develops into a 
pocket gopher. No one in Rejogochi was entirely sure what an?
imal is the mother of the salamander. All agreed that it is not 
the pocket gopher, and those who hazarded a guess suggested a 
frog, although they could not explain where this frog comes 
from if all salamanders change into pocket gophers. 
The second type of transformation occurs only when the ani?
mals that undergo transformation reach old age. Four sets of 
animals are involved in these transformations. The first set con?
sists of mice, rats, shrews, chipmunks, and small ground squir?
rels, all of which grow wings and become bats when they grow 
old. A number of species of bats are found in the Rejogochi 
area, but the Raramuris include all of them under the single 
term so?pichi. They explain that they differ in appearance be?
cause they derive from different animals. 
The second set of animals involved in old-age transforma?
tions is composed of fish that, when old, move under a stream 
bank and grow fiir, emerging as otters. Three kinds of large fish 
are mentioned by most people, all of which live in the principal 
streams where otters are found. Of these, the catfish (must) is 
most often named because of its "whiskers." 
The third and fourth sets of old-age transformations involve 
squirrels that transform into snakes when they reach old age. 
The red tree squirrel hides itself inside a hole in a tree where it 
loses its fur and limbs and a few weeks later slithers out as a 
large constrictor. The rock squirrel, which climbs bushes but 
not trees, transforms into the largest rattlesnake of the 
Raramuri area in the underground burrows where it lives. 
Some people claim that the animals that undergo transforma?
tion at old age can decide when but not whether they will trans?
form; if they delay too long, the transformation will occur any?
way. When one of these animals transforms, the resultant 
animal is believed to be at a slightly earlier stage in its life cycle 
than the animal from which it derived. Such transformations 
thus involve rejuvenation and replace, or at least delay, death 
for the original animals, but the Raramuris disagree whether 
this consequence is desirable. Some assume that these animals 
are pleased to be able to postpone death momentarily, whereas 
others express sympathy for them, commenting that, as in the 
case of human beings, it is good to die when one is old.9 
In the third type of contemporary transformations, three 
kinds of domesticated animals are believed to change into wild 
animals if they abandon the Raramuris' settlements for the sur?
rounding forests and mountains: goats transform into deer, pigs 
into peccaries, and house cats into ring-tailed cats.10 These 
transformations can occur at any point in the life cycle of these 
domesticated animals but only if they remain in the wild long 
enough to transform, usually two to three weeks. If they are 
there for shorter periods, they will not transform, nor will any 
wild animals that the Raramuris capture and take to their 
homes change into their domesticated equivalents. By the same 
token, domesticated animals that have undergone transforma?
tion will not revert to their former selves if they return to the 
human sphere. 
When I asked people in Rejogochi how they knew that these 
eight sets of species transformations actually occur, all re?
sponded that they had learned of them from their elders or from 
acquaintances. Familiarity with metamorphoses that occur in 
nature reinforces confidence in the reliability of this transmit?
ted knowledge, as does the fact that a few people claim to have 
seen rock squirrels in the process of changing into rattlesnakes 
(cf. Lumholtz, 1902:309). Although most said that they have 
never seen such transitional forms, they did not regard this ab?
sence of firsthand experience of the transformations as suffi?
cient to undermine their belief in their reality. They pointed out 
that these transformations are difficult to observe because they 
take place outside the human realm?in the deep forest, under 
river banks, below the ground, or high in trees?and that once a 
transformation is complete, evidence of the derivative species 
disappears. Some people also speculated that an animal might 
not transform if it realized it was being watched by humans. 
Explaining Species Transformations 
The species transformations postulated by the Raramuris are 
quite similar in form to those proposed by the Kalam and Ro-
faifo of highland New Guinea and the Nuaulu of Seram, Indo?
nesia, but the kinds of animals involved are for the most part 
quite different. Among the last three societies, these animals 
include roundworms, flatworms, earthworms, beetle larvae, 
fruit flies, butterflies, crabs, eels, snakes, lizards, sea turtles, 
terrapins, frogs, birds of paradise, bats, rats, marsupial cats, 
pigmy possums, ring-tailed possums, cuscuses, and bandicoots. 
Researchers have concluded that some of these transformations 
are postulated because people lack information on the complete 
life cycles of the animals they involve in these transformations 
and do not realize that the animals that are the end products of 
the proposed transformations produce their own offspring. In 
the case of most of these transformations, however, the people 
who maintain that they occur recognize that each of the linked 
species also breeds true. Because the transformation of one re?
producing species into another does not occur in nature, the 
postulation of these species transformations cannot be attrib?
uted to a mistaken extrapolation from observation but be must 
be motivated by something else (Ellen, 1993:166). I consider 
only these "motivated" transformations here. 
The Kalam propose six motivated species transformations, 
all of which involve rodents and marsupials (Table 2). Bulmer 
(1968) and Bulmer and Menzies (1973) described in detail the 
similarities between the linked species to indicate why the 
Kalam might postulate these transformations. They suggested 
that the transformations possibly are based on a confusion be?
tween the linked species caused by the existence of atypical ex-
336 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
TABLE 2.?Kalam, Rofaifo, and Nuaulu species transformations. 
shrew-like marsupials 
(as alri) 
shrew-like marsupials 
(as a In) 
prehensile-tailed rats 
(as ymgenm) 
bush rats 
(as mwg) 
long-snouted rats 
(as sjan) 
ring-tailed possums 
(kmn wcm) 
small rats 
(sogolobawe) (unmarked) 
large rats 
(soka) (unmarked) 
prehensile-tailed rats 
(hiongo heriwe) 
prehensile-tailed rats 
(hiongo anduaba) 
pygmy possums 
(anumuna songi) 
ring-tailed possums 
(heufa, honingi heufa) 
small snakes 
(sorafainya) 
fruit fly larvae 
(mumne) 
intestinal nematodes 
(sohane) 
frog taxon no. 1 
(notu anae) 
various frog species 
(notu) 
various frog species 
(notu) 
frog taxon no. 4 
(poro-poro) 
water monitor lizards 
(puo) 
snakes 
(tekene) 
reticulated pythons 
(tekepatona) 
sea turtles 
(enu) 
hermit crabs 
(kumake) 
Kalam 
Rofaifo 
Nuaulu 
ring-tailed possums 
(kmn skoyd, kmn ymdn) 
"native cat" 
(kmn swatg) 
ring-tailed possums 
(kmn skoyd) 
giant rats 
(kmn abperi) 
giant rats 
(kmn mosak wlm-ket) 
cuscuses 
(kmn atwak, kmn maygot) 
small bandicoots 
(warena hawa) 
large bandicoots 
(warena ekiriva) 
ring-tailed possums 
(mi noi) 
cuscuses 
(igana) 
ring-tailed possums 
(mi) 
cuscuses 
(duana eniona, duana mula) 
amphibious lizards 
(leme) 
intestinal nematodes 
(susue) 
tapeworms 
(nikonake) 
various frog species 
(notu) 
frog taxon no. 1 
(notu anae) 
frog taxon no. 3 
(kako) 
frog taxon no. 5 
(inararai) 
geckos 
(imasasae ai ukune) 
agamid (or dragon) lizards 
(kasa 'un) 
skinks, lizards, centipedes 
(nopa ina, poso, niniane) 
amboinan box terrapins 
(peku) 
coconut crabs 
(katanopu sipu-sipu) 
amples of each. Alternatively, they proposed that, by linking 
animals that are subject to different dietary restrictions, the 
Kalam may be able to manipulate these restrictions through 
"taxonomic casuistry" (Bulmer and Menzies, 1973:104). They 
expressed, however, their dissatisfaction with these explana?
tions and concluded that the postulation of these transforma-
NUMBER 44 337 
tions possibly is motivated by beliefs about which they were 
unaware (Bulmer and Menzies, 1973:104). 
The majority of the species transformations proposed by the 
Rofaifo also involve rodents and marsupials (Table 2)." In his 
analysis of the Rofaifo's transformations, Dwyer (1976a) 
sharply criticized the explanations offered by Bulmer and Men?
zies for the transformations proposed by the Kalam. He noted 
that these transformations could not be motivated simply by the 
existence of similarities among the species involved because 
such similarities can be found among many other species. He 
also rejected the suggestion that these transformations emerged 
as a mechanism for dealing with dietary restrictions, arguing 
that such exploitation of these transformations presupposes the 
existence of the beliefs in them and thus cannot be used to ex?
plain these beliefs. 
Dwyer attempted to explain the Rofaifo's postulated trans?
formations by isolating certain trends that the transformations 
all display to varying degrees. Most significant to his analysis 
is the discovery that the animals that undergo transformation 
tend to be more abundant but less culturally significant than 
those that are the end result of transformation. He proposed that 
the Rofaifo postulate these transformations to resolve what 
might be called the "hunter's paradox," the fact that rare but 
culturally valued species continue to exist despite being "so 
constantly and capably culled by men" (Dwyer, 1976a:203). 
Yet, acknowledging that this hypothesis cannot account for all 
the transformations, Dwyer (1976a:203) resorted to a teleologi-
cal argument, attributing the transformations as a whole to the 
human preoccupation with order. In the end, he failed to ex?
plain why the Rofaifo have involved these particular animals in 
transformations or to address the problem of why the Kalam 
and Rofaifo should propose transformations among many of 
the same kinds of animals. 
In his impressive study of animal classification among the 
Nuaulu of the island of Seram, located to the west of New 
Guinea, Ellen (1993) evaluated the explanations of species 
transformations offered by Bulmer, Menzies, and Dwyer and 
found them wanting. He concurred with Dwyer s critique of 
Bulmer and Menzies but also characterized Dwyer's sugges?
tion that transformations are postulated in part to resolve the 
hunter's paradox as a local, ad hoc explanation, not applicable 
to the Nuaulu (Ellen, 1993:163-171). 
Although there is some overlap in the faunas of Seram and 
highland New Guinea (Ellen, 1993:14-15), the animals that the 
Nuaulu involve in species transformations are quite different 
and include no rodents or marsupials (Table 2). Ellen suggested 
that the Nuaulu postulate these transformations to explain the 
existence of similarities between certain kinds of animals and, 
more importantly, to establish linkages between animals that 
are peripheral to the taxonomic scheme and those that fit com?
fortably within it. The latter, called "focal taxa," are believed to 
transform into, and in a sense give rise to, the peripheral taxa so 
that "assertions of inter-species ontogeny may locally serve to 
confirm convenient classificatory relationships of otherwise 
ambiguous and marginal creatures" (Ellen, 1993:171). 
This explanation apparently accounts for most of the species 
transformations proposed by the Nuaulu, but there are some an?
imals that seem to fit the conditions for inclusion in transfor?
mations that are not involved in them. For example, two spe?
cies of land crabs exist in the Nuaulu area but only one is 
included in a transformation (from the hermit crab) (Ellen, 
1993:165, 272). Although Ellen did not explain why such ani?
mals are not involved in transformations, his ideas have great 
merit because they suggest that the postulation of species trans?
formations is closely tied to processes of classification. Most of 
the species transformations proposed by the Nuaulu involve 
animals that share a number of morphological features: worms 
to worms, crabs to crabs, frogs to frogs, lizards to geckos, 
snakes to lizards, and turtles to terrapins. By linking these ani?
mals through transformations, the Nuaulu reinforce the connec?
tions, based on other criteria, that exist between them. 
Bulmer, Menzies, and Dwyer did not indicate if the animals 
that the Kalam and Rofaifo include in transformations are focal 
or peripheral taxa, but because these transformations link simi?
lar kinds of animals?primarily rodents and marsupials? 
Ellen's perspective probably is applicable to them as well. Both 
the Kalam and Rofaifo organize smaller rodents and marsupials 
into one higher-level category and larger rodents and marsupi?
als into another, but they do not propose a more encompassing 
category that would include all rodents and marsupials.12 In ev?
ery case but one, the transformations they propose among ro?
dents and marsupials involve small rodents or marsupials 
changing into large rodents or marsupials. The exception, 
which is found in both societies, is the transformation of one 
large marsupial (a ring-tailed possum) into another (a cuscus). 
These transformations thus bridge the taxonomic division sepa?
rating large and small mammals and establish linkages between 
rodents and marsupials. The result is a strengthening of the ties 
among these mammals in the absence of a higher level taxo?
nomic category that would consolidate them.13 As such, these 
transformations apparently play an organizational role within 
the Kalam and Rofaifo animal classification schemes compara?
ble to that proposed by Ellen for the species transformations 
postulated by the Nuaulu. 
With some adjustments, this explanation is also relevant to 
understanding the domesticated-to-wild transformations pro?
posed by the Raramuris because these transformations involve 
animals that are morphologically similar. Most of the matura?
tion and old age transformations, however, link quite different 
kinds of animals (e.g., salamanders and pocket gophers, fish 
and otters, squirrels and snakes) and thus appear to require a 
different kind of explanation. As the point of departure for de?
veloping an explanation of these transformations, I evaluate the 
hypothesis, suggested by the work of Douglas (1957, 1970), 
that these animals are selected for such special treatment be?
cause they are classificatory anomalies.14 
338 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Raramuri Animal Classification 
CLASSIFICATORY ANOMALIES 
To determine whether the animals involved in these species 
transformations are anomalous first requires a clarification of 
the concept "classificatory anomaly." Douglas (1970:50) de?
fined an anomaly as "an element which does not fit a given set 
or series," and noted the affinity, in practical terms, between 
anomaly and ambiguity, the latter defined as "a character of 
statements capable of two interpretations." Scholars who have 
focused their attention on folk biological taxonomies have ar?
rived at a similar view in their formulation of the concept of 
"aberrant taxa" (Berlin et al., 1974:26, 30-31). Like all taxono?
mies, a folk biological taxonomy consists of a hierarchical or?
ganization of categories, or taxa. In their ideal model of such 
taxonomies, ethnobiologists propose five principal levels: 
unique beginner (an example from English is "animal"), life 
form ("mammal"), generic ("dog"), specific ("schnauzer"), and 
varietal ("giant schnauzer") (Hunn, 1976, 1977:41-75). In 
terms of this model there are two kinds of aberrant taxa: unaf?
filiated taxa, which are generic taxa that are not incorporated 
into any of the life-form taxa, and ambiguous taxa, which are 
generic taxa that exhibit characteristics of two or more life-
form classes. Because it is formulated in relation to taxonomic 
structures, the ethnobiologists' concept of aberrant taxa is more 
precise and operational than Douglas's concept of anomaly. 
Herein I define classificatory anomalies as these two kinds of 
aberrant taxa. 
RARAMURI ZOOLOGICAL TAXONOMY15 
At the unique beginner level, the Raramuris have a term? 
namuti?that means 'animal(s)', but often they use this same 
term in a more specific sense to denote 'livestock' and in a 
more general sense to mean 'thing(s)'. Because this noun is 
polysemous, it is important to mention other evidence that sup?
ports the conclusion that the Raramuris maintain a concept that 
closely corresponds to the English concept of "animal." 
To begin with, they incorporate the various animal species 
that they recognize into the category ariweame, which literally 
means 'soul-possessing' and can be more freely translated as 
'living things'; the term ahdkame also denotes 'living things'. 
This category includes, in addition to animals, human beings 
(raramuri)16 and plants (a?wiame, literally 'things that 
sprout'). They also employ some terms primarily in reference 
to animals, for example, owira 'male', bamird 'female', and 
nasawima, a verb denoting sexual intercourse among animals. 
When these terms are used in reference to humans, they have 
somewhat vulgar connotations. Another, more tenuous bit of 
evidence for the conceptual reality of this category is the fact 
that Raramuri people who speak Spanish employ the Spanish 
term for animal without making mistakes, whereas they mis?
use other terms in Spanish for which there are no comparable 
terms in the Raramuri language, for example, some kinship 
and color terms. 
Immediately below the level of "animal" are seven life-form 
classes. Four of these life-form classes are labeled: 'birds' 
(chuluwi), 'fish' (rochi), 'snakes' (sindi), and 'lizards' (rochd). 
The remaining three life-form classes are unlabeled (marked 
with "< >"): <mammals>, <amphibians>, and <inverte-
brates>.17 The Raramuris incorporate all the animals with 
which they are familiar into at least one of these seven life-
form classes.18 Thus, there are no unaffiliated taxa in the 
Raramuri zoological taxonomy but there are three examples of 
ambiguous taxa. The first is the bat, which the Raramuris usu?
ally classify as a 'bird', but they recognize the morphological 
features that it shares with mammals, especially its fur and 
teeth. The second is the otter, which they tend to think of as a 
<mammal>, but they often classify it with 'fish' because of its 
extraordinary swimming ability. The third is an unidentified 
lizard called ropogopali, which they classify as both a 'snake' 
and a 'lizard'.19 The ropogopali shares many morphological 
features with lizards, including legs, but the Raramuris con?
sider it to be more closely related to snakes than to lizards. 
They comment that its tail is longer than those of other lizards 
and, more importantly, they believe that, unlike any other lizard 
in their area, it is venomous, defending itself by spitting its sa?
liva, which causes the skin to swell.20 
Understanding Raramuri Species Transformations 
Of the 23 animals (i.e., named taxa) included in the eight sets 
of species transformations proposed by the Raramuris, only 
two?the otter and bat?fit the definition of classificatory 
anomaly, and a third anomaly?the ropogopali?is not in?
volved in a transformation. The Raramuris' postulation of these 
transformations thus cannot be explained as a way of dealing 
with such anomalies. 
An alternative hypothesis is suggested by Hunn's (1979) re-
analysis of the dietary prohibitions of the ancient Hebrews. 
Hunn (1979:113-114; cf. Ellen, 1993:183) argued that the ani?
mals prohibited as food by the ancient Hebrews stand out be?
cause they display "empirically infrequent trait complexes," the 
most famous example being the pig, which, unlike most cloven-
hoofed mammals, does not chew the cud. He referred to such 
animals as "singular," but because the zoological taxonomic 
scheme of the ancient Hebrews has never been reconstructed, 
he did not consider whether these singular animals were also 
taxonomic anomalies in the sense of being aberrant taxa. 
If Hunn's notion of singularity is applied to the Raramuri 
case, all the animals that are the end products of the maturation 
and old age transformations are, from the Raramuris' perspec?
tive, singular. The bat is singular with respect to birds because 
it has fur and teeth, and it is singular with respect to mammals 
because it flies. The mammalian features of the otter set it apart 
from fish, and both it and the pocket gopher are singular among 
mammals because their typical domains?aquatic for the otter 
and subterranean for the pocket gopher?differ from the 
aboveground habitat of the other thirty-plus taxa included in 
NUMBER 44 339 
the <mammal> life-form class. Similarly, the large rattlesnake 
and large constrictor are singular because they are the only 
snakes considered edible by everyone.21 
These examples allow a clarification of the relationship be?
tween the concepts of singularity and taxonomic aberrancy. By 
definition, taxonomic aberrancy exists only in terms of a partic?
ular taxonomic scheme, whereas singularity in Hunn's sense is 
a feature of the biological world, which exists independently of 
any particular taxonomic scheme. Obviously the recognition of 
singularity and the significance attached to it are culturally 
conditioned, but the features that render an animal singular 
may be irrelevant to the criteria used to classify it within a tax?
onomic system. In this regard, it is crucial to distinguish be?
tween singularity and uniqueness. All named taxa are unique in 
some way or they would not be named. For an animal to be sin?
gular, it must be unique with respect to features that character?
ize all or most of the other members of the class or classes with 
which it is most closely associated. 
From this perspective, it can be proposed that all aberrant 
taxa will be singular but not all singular animals will be taxo-
nomically aberrant. In other words, all animals that are re?
garded as members of two or more categories or that are not af?
filiated with any other categories will be singular, but the 
singularity of a particular animal may not result in its being in?
corporated into two or more separate categories or placed in an 
unaffiliated category. In the Raramuri case, the bat and otter are 
singular and also taxonomically ambiguous because the fea?
tures that set them apart from one life-form class are typical of 
another. In contrast, the pocket gopher and snakes are singular 
but are not taxonomically ambiguous because the pocket go?
pher's habitat and the edibility of the two snakes are not defin?
ing features of any other life-form classes. 
On the basis of this analysis, we can conclude that the 
Raramuris propose that these five animals are the end results 
of transformations in order to explain why they display fea?
tures that make them singular with respect to their life-form 
classes. By this logic, they should also propose that ropogo?
pali is the end result of a transformation, either deriving from 
a snake to explain why a 'lizard' is venomous or, more likely, 
deriving from a lizard to explain why a 'snake' has legs. That 
the Raramuris fail to incorporate the ropogopali into a trans?
formation is puzzling, and I can offer only ad hoc suggestions 
to account for this failure. Perhaps the Raramuris do not in?
volve the ropogopali in a transformation because, except for 
its legs, it is quite similar to snakes and is believed to be ven?
omous, a highly salient although not universal feature of 
snakes that the Raramuris regard as one of the principal char?
acteristics distinguishing snakes from lizards. Its presumed 
venomness and its morphological similarities to snakes per?
haps render the fact that it has legs sufficiently insignificant to 
the Raramuris that they feel that it does not warrant explana?
tion. An alternative suggestion, which I find more satisfactory, 
is that the ropogopali is a prime candidate for inclusion in 
transformations that might be proposed in the future. I develop 
this idea in more detail below. 
In contrast to the animals that are proposed as the end prod?
ucts of the maturation and old-age transformations, none of the 
animals that are said to transform appears to be singular. This 
conclusion is supported by the fact that, in the case of the bat 
and otter, several different animals are proposed to transform 
into them. Such multiple origins suggest that the choice of 
which animals will undergo transformation is not significant as 
long as these animals display the same features that make the 
end products of transformation singular. Nonetheless, second?
ary considerations render certain animals more likely candi?
dates for transformation than others. Small rodents are more 
similar to bats than are other mammals, and the fish said to 
transform into otters are the largest ones in the area and live in 
the larger streams where otters are found; the catfish's barbels 
also echo the otter's whiskers. Similarly, the salamander is ap?
propriate as an immature pocket gopher because the habitats of 
these animals overlap and because the Raramuris assume that 
the salamander is a larval stage, more like tadpoles than like 
other mature amphibians. 
Because edibility is a characteristic of so many animals, it is 
not clear why squirrels should be the animals selected to trans?
form into snakes. The Raramuris' rationalization for this 
choice is that squirrels have elongated bodies, their meat is 
highly regarded as food, and their domains overlap with those 
of the constrictor and the large rattlesnake: the constrictor 
climbs trees like a squirrel, whereas the rock squirrel never 
does, living among rocks and in caves like a rattlesnake.22 
These snakes also prey on these squirrels, but they eat many 
other animals as well. Nonetheless, it would appear that lizards 
would be more appropriate than squirrels to transform into 
these snakes because some lizards are edible and they are 
much more similar to snakes than are squirrels. Perhaps the 
choice of squirrels over lizards in this case reflects an attempt 
to maintain a clear distinction between the closely related life-
form classes of 'lizards' and "snakes', a distinction that would 
be blurred if lizards were said to transform into snakes. The 
fact that the Raramuris classify the ropogopali as a snake with?
out proposing a transformation to explain why it looks like a 
lizard suggests that some sort of classificatory boundary main?
tenance is at work here, in addition to whatever survival value 
classifying all poisonous reptiles in a single category might 
have.23 This suggestion, like that offered to account for why the 
Raramuris do not involve the ropogopali in a transformation, is 
ad hoc. It is impossible, however, to evaluate it further because 
no other life-form classes within the Raramuris' zoological 
taxonomic system are as closely related to one another as 
'snakes' and 'lizards'. 
In the case of the bat and otter?the only taxa involved in 
transformations that are linked to two separate life-form 
classes?an examination of the animals that are said to trans?
form into them provides some insight into the life-form class 
with which the Raramuris consider each of them to be more 
340 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
closely associated. The transformation of small rodents into 
bats suggests that the Raramuris think of bats primarily as birds 
rather than as mammals. If they regarded the bats as mammals, 
they would have used transformation to explain why a mammal 
can fly, presumably by proposing that it derives from one or 
more species of birds, such as the barn swallow, which they 
consider to be very similar to bats in dietary preferences, time 
of activity, and style of flight. In contrast, they appear to regard 
otters more as mammals than as fish because the transforma?
tion of fish into otters explains why a mammal is such an adept 
swimmer, not why a fish has mammalian features. 
The only animals involved in transformations that remain to 
be discussed are goats, pigs, and house cats, which change into 
deer, peccaries, and ring-tailed cats, respectively, if they move 
to the wilds (kawichi) to live. None of these animals is singular 
with respect to the defining criteria of the life-form class 
<mammals>. The domesticated animals that undergo transfor?
mations, however, share two features that, when taken together, 
distinguish them from all other mammals: they all have close 
equivalents among wild mammals and all were introduced to 
the region during the Spanish colonial period. 
I suggest that the Raramuris involve these introduced ani?
mals in transformations today because this is the manner in 
which they dealt intellectually with these animals when they 
first encountered them 400 years ago. This historical perspec?
tive differs from that of the contemporary Raramuris them?
selves, who do not consider any animals to be introductions, 
but it does account for why only certain animals are included 
in these transformations.24 Of the other domesticated animals 
that the Raramuris own today, those that were introduced? 
horses, mules, burros, cattle, sheep, and chickens?do not 
have wild equivalents, and dogs, which do have a wild equiva?
lent in the coyote (basachi), were not introduced. Turkeys are 
also indigenous to the New World. The Raramuris occasion?
ally capture wild turkeys and bring them to their homes to 
tame, and they also acquire domesticated turkeys through pur?
chase or trade (cf. Pennington, 1963:85-86). They acknowl?
edge the possibility that domesticated turkeys can escape to 
the wild, but they do not propose that they transform into wild 
turkeys, probably because they consider both wild and domes?
ticated turkeys to be the same "kind" of bird, which they label 
with a single term, chiwi. 
Raramuri Species Transformations in Broader Context 
The animals that are the end results of maturation and old age 
transformations stand out primarily because the life-form 
classes with which they are associated?<mammals>, 'birds', 
'fish', and 'snakes'?are homogeneous in the sense that their 
members share a number of morphological, ecological, or be?
havioral features (Hunn, 1977:48-50). In this regard, these life-
form classes contrast with more heterogeneous ones, like <am-
phibians> and <invertebrates>, none of the members of which 
are proposed as the end products of transformations. Yet the 
ropogopali is not involved in a species transformation even 
though it is singular with respect to two homogenous life-form 
classes: 'snakes' (because it has legs) and 'lizards' (because it 
is believed to be venomous). I suggested that the Raramuris do 
not involve the ropogopali in a transformation because it shares 
so many characteristics with snakes, including the highly sa?
lient feature of being venomous, and also possibly because pro?
posing that the ropogopali derives through transformation from 
either a snake or a lizard would obscure the boundary between 
these two life-form classes. Nonetheless, it is equally plausible 
to regard the ropogopali as a "transformation-in-waiting," the 
most likely candidate for inclusion in a transformation at some 
later time. 
These two perspectives on the ropogopali are not mutually 
exclusive. The first attempts to account for how the Raramuris 
have, in the present, addressed the taxonomic dilemma pre?
sented by the ropogopali, whereas the second suggests how 
they might address this problem and develop their thinking on 
the topic in the future. Like all bodies of knowledge, Raramuri 
ideas about animals are not static or finished constructions that 
can be explained exhaustively at any given point in time. In?
stead they are works-in-progress, subject to revision and elabo?
ration through the intellectual activities of human actors, who 
develop their ideas in terms of their experiences of the world 
according to culturally specific principles of knowledge cre?
ation and organization as well as more general (and presum?
ably universal) mental processes. 
The dynamism of such knowledge is exemplified by the fact 
that some people in Rejogochi suggested a few species trans?
formations in addition to the widely accepted transformations 
discussed above, for example, that rabbits transform into a 
small variety of rattlesnake and other fish transform into otters. 
Many also proposed some transformations of humans into ani?
mals in the ancient past that other people did not (see below). It 
was evident from my conversations with these people that they 
had thought a great deal about these transformations, had re?
flected on the principles governing their postulation, and had 
selected animals to be involved in additional transformations 
on the basis of this understanding.25 Presumably they will con?
tinue to do so. 
The alternative perspectives on the ropogopali that I have 
suggested are based on the assumption that, although many as?
pects or areas of knowledge lend themselves to synchronic 
analysis, others can only be understood diachronically. This as?
sumption also underlies my proposal that the Raramuris dealt 
intellectually with certain domesticated mammals introduced 
during the Spanish colonial period by linking them through 
transformations to the indigenous animals that they most 
closely resembled. This explanation resembles Ellen's 
(1993:171) proposal that the Nuaulu postulate species transfor?
mations primarily to create linkages between peripheral and fo?
cal taxa. The historical record indicates, however, that the 
Raramuris rapidly incorporated Old World domesticated mam?
mals into their economies and presumably into their zoological 
NUMBER 44 341 
taxonomy as well (Merrill, 1988:44-45, 1993),26 and today 
these animals are in no way regarded as peripheral or singular. 
The possibility of their transformation into wild animals exists 
today not as a way of resolving their persisting marginality but 
as one of many markers of the dichotomy between the human 
and nonhuman domains of the world and a commentary on the 
implications of moving between them.27 
The contemporary Raramuris link focal and peripheral taxa 
simply by noting that they are similar and by incorporating 
both into more inclusive categories. For example, they regard 
horned lizards (wikokere) as distinct from other lizards, but 
they also say that they are 'relatives' (nahiremaga; singular: 
rihimdra) and include homed lizards in the life-form category 
'lizards' (rochd). The Rofaifo adopt this same approach (Dw?
yer, 1976b, 1979), but, together with the Nuaulu and Kalam, 
they also employ species transformations to establish connec?
tions among similar animals that are separated taxonomically.28 
The Raramuris differ most significantly from the Nuaulu, 
Kalam, and Rofaifo in their use of transformation as an explan?
atory device. The Nuaulu, Kalam, and Rofaifo invoke transfor?
mations to explain similarities between peripheral and focal 
taxa, whereas the Raramuris propose transformations?at least 
maturation and old age transformations?to explain why cer?
tain singular taxa are different from the other members of the 
life-form classes with which they are most closely associated. 
Unlike the Raramuris, the Nuaulu, Kalam, and possibly the Ro?
faifo tend to explain the existence of such singular taxa prima?
rily through myth (Ellen, 1972, 1993:184; Bulmer, 1967, 1968; 
Dwyer, 1979:17).29 
Apart from the role that these species transformations play in 
the Raramuris' approach to organizing the animal world, many 
are linked to important cosmological concepts or moral values. 
The otter, for example, is criticized for being a cannibal be?
cause it eats its 'relatives', the fish. Such ideological signifi?
cance is also evident in many of the transformations of humans 
into animals that the Raramuris propose. I recorded over 20 of 
these human-to-animal transformations, which are of two 
types: those that occurred in the ancient past and those that oc?
cur today, after death. In both cases, these transformations are 
associated with a time (the beginning of the present world) or a 
sphere (the world of the dead) within which form is regarded as 
more fluid. 
The ancient human-to-animal transformations that most peo?
ple mention are those reported in well-known stories or that are 
suggested by the fact that the name of an animal coincides with 
a kinship term. For example, because ochikare means both 
'grasshopper' and 'paternal grandfather' people assume that in 
the ancient past a human being, who was a paternal grandfa?
ther, transformed into a grasshopper. More variation is encoun?
tered where such transformations are believed to have occurred 
simply because the behavior of an animal is perceived to be 
similar to that of humans. In some of these transformations, hu?
mans changed into animals while they were alive, in others 
they were reincarnated as animals. The Raramuris often at?
tribute the origin of these animals to such transformations, but 
they also maintain that all animals as well as humans were cre?
ated by God or by the Devil near the beginning of the world. 
Animals seen as industrious and of benefit (or at least harm?
less) to humans are believed to have been created, like the 
Raramuris and other Indians, by God. Those that threaten hu?
mans or that display features interpreted as moral defects are 
assumed to have been created, like non-Indians, by the Devil 
(Merrill, 1988:73-78). 
The contemporary transformation of humans into animals is 
believed to occur only after a person dies and is regarded as a 
punishment for a person's misdeeds. People who commit incest 
or who ally themselves with peyote during their lives or who 
die while lying on an animal skin usually are said to transform 
into a special kind of coyote, called 'short-tailed coyote' (basa-
chi pochi), the human origin of which is revealed not only by 
its short tail but by its skill at entering residential areas unde?
tected to steal livestock.30 When the requisite series of death rit?
uals are performed for these people, the animals into which 
they transform die and their souls are released. This destiny 
contrasts with an alternative fate believed by some to befall in?
cestuous people. One or more souls of such people transform 
into a special kind of moth, called 'soul moth' or 'ancestor 
moth' (nakarowili ariwd or nakarowili anaydwari), which God 
sends from heaven back to earth to die in the fires of the living, 
to which these moths are irresistibly attracted.31 
This interpretation of the behavior of these moths reveals an 
important epistemological dimension to the Raramuris' ideas 
about animals. They frequently regard such ideas as providing 
empirical confirmation of basic propositions about the nature 
of the universe and their place within it, propositions that are 
nonverifiable and nonfalsifiable (Rappaport, 1979:117, 
209-210). Such confirmation is particularly evident in the ac?
counts that the Raramuris relate to explain distinctive charac?
teristics of certain animals.32 
The Raramuris have a story that might be titled "Why the 
Burro Has a Short Tail," in which the Raramuris' chief deities 
sent a flood to destroy the world that preceded the present one. 
All the different kinds of animals in the world assembled on 
top of a cylindrical-shaped mountain to escape the boiling wa?
ters of the flood, but the burro arrived just as the mountain be?
gan to rise to heaven and, because of its tardiness, about half of 
its long tail was burned off. 
In addition to providing an entertaining explanation for why 
the burro's tail is shorter than those of the horse and the mule, 
this story proposes that the shortness of its tail substantiates an 
event?the destruction of the previous world?that no living 
person witnessed. The assumption that the current world is but 
the most recent in a series of worlds is linked to fundamental 
ideas in Raramuri philosophy and religion about the cyclical 
nature of time, the magnitude of the power of their deities, and 
the implications for their continued survival if they fail to ful?
fill their ritual obligations towards these deities. These ideas in 
turn structure and motivate much of Raramuri social action. 
342 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
Such accounts, found throughout the world, have always struck 
me as much too elaborate to have been developed simply to ex?
plain the special features of certain animals, but their complex?
ity is comprehensible if they are understood as exploiting these 
features to confirm basic assumptions about the universe. 
In a broader cosmological perspective, the Raramuris regard 
transformations as part of the natural course of things and as an 
important aspect of the development of the current state of af?
fairs. At the same time, they tend to associate all transforma?
tions?ancient and modern, humans-to-animals and animals-to-
animals?with the Devil, and some maintain that the transfor?
mation of humans into animals in the ancient past was possible 
only because the people involved had not yet been baptized. 
Today the members of those Raramuri communities who have 
accepted an affiliation with the Roman Catholic Church refer to 
themselves as 'baptized Raramuri' (Raramuri pagotame) and 
employ baptism as a symbol of and metaphor for order, regard?
ing a nonbaptized state and the Raramuris who have histori?
cally rejected such an affiliation as epitomizing disorder (Mer?
rill, 1988:76-77, 1993). Their views on these matters echo the 
Spanish colonial perspective that conversion to Christianity and 
incorporation into the colonial system were prerequisites for 
the creation of order in indigenous New World societies. That 
the contemporary baptized Raramuris should maintain these al?
ternative and rather contradictory views on transformation re?
veals how thoroughly intertwined indigenous and colonialist 
ideas have become in their thinking. 
Conclusions 
Proposing that one kind of animal transforms into another is an 
indirect but vivid way of stating that the two are closely con?
nected. The postulation of such transformations thus should not 
occur randomly within a zoological classification system but 
only where people want to suggest or emphasize a special af?
finity between certain animals. Within this restricted range of 
appropriate applicability, species transformations can be used 
as a conceptual tool to accomplish many different things. 
If my analysis is correct, the Raramuris employ species 
transformations primarily to account for why certain animals 
should deviate from patterns that characterize the higher-level 
taxonomic classes with which they are most closely associated. 
As such, the postulation of species transformations serves as an 
adjunct to taxonomic classification, reinforcing taxonomic 
boundaries by explaining (or explaining away) challenges to 
them (cf. Douglas, 1970). In contrast, the Nuaulu, and probably 
the Kalam and Rofaifo as well, use species transformations to 
establish horizontal linkages between taxa where a taxonomic 
scheme of hierarchically ordered sets of increasingly inclusive 
classes is poorly developed. Here species transformations ap?
pear to play a role that is more organizational than explanatory, 
serving as an alternative rather than an adjunct to taxonomic 
classification. 
Given the diversity of the biological world, peripheral or 
singular taxa probably will be found in the biological classifi?
cations schemes of all human societies, but species transfor?
mations apparently are encountered only in some. Such cross-
cultural variation presumably reflects, among many other 
things, differences in approaches to organizing the biological 
world and in the extent to which peripheral or singular taxa are 
regarded as problematical. Alternative solutions to the same 
problem also exist. The Raramuris deal with singular taxa by 
involving them in species transformations, whereas the mem?
bers of other societies explain their singularity in myths or 
compartmentalize them through dietary prohibitions or other 
ritual restrictions. Others simply ignore them. These variations 
in turn reflect differences in their relationships to the biologi?
cal world and in their fundamental attitudes toward order and 
disorder. 
Throughout the centuries, people around the world have en?
tertained the idea that one kind of being can transform into an?
other, but most have relegated this notion to the realm of fiction 
or folklore. In such cases, we can say that they have a concept 
of species transformation but not the belief that species trans?
formations actually occur as part of an ongoing biological real?
ity (Ellen, 1993:166). Only where people assume that the world 
they experience during their waking lives represents only one 
dimension of reality, that appearances can be deceiving, and 
that the universe as a whole is characterized more by fluidity 
than by stasis is a belief in the reality of species transforma?
tions likely to be found. 
Involving animals in species transformations is just one of 
the many ways in which people in different societies have af?
forded animals special treatment. Animals figure prominently 
in myths, provide apt metaphors and the weapons of verbal 
abuse, and serve as markers of social distinctions. The useful?
ness of animals as intellectual tools has led Claude Levi-
Strauss and others to observe that animals are good to think, 
good to eat, and good to prohibit (Levi-Strauss, 1963, 1966; 
Leach, 1964; Tambiah, 1969; Bulmer, 1979). To this litany I 
would add that animals are also fun to think. People every?
where derive great pleasure from watching, talking, and think?
ing about animals; the Raramuris are no exception. They regard 
animals as interesting, at times puzzling, and more often than 
not humorous, and they consider the possibility of the transfor?
mation of one kind of animal into another as an intriguing as?
pect of the animal world. As a result, their postulation of spe?
cies transformations should not be reduced to a mechanism that 
only enhances order within their understanding of the animal 
world. Indeed, by proposing these transformations, the 
Raramuris not only explain the singularity of certain animals 
but simultaneously render them even more singular, involving 
them in a process that sets them apart from all other animals. 
A society's ideas about animals often provide a privileged 
window through which to view the basic values of its members 
and their understandings of their society, their history, and their 
cosmos (Willis, 1974). Unfortunately, over the past two de-
NUMBER 44 343 
cades anthropological interest in studying such ideas has 
waned. A dedicated but small group of scholars has continued 
such research, but most anthropologists have shifted their at?
tention to other topics. Like many other disciplines, anthropol?
ogy tends to focus intensely but briefly on one topic or theory, 
soon abandoning it to move on to the next. One result, probably 
inevitable, is an uneven ethnographic record. Another, more re?
grettable consequence is the growing expanses of theoretical 
issues only partially explored. The prospect that anthropology 
will adopt a more systematic, sustained approach anytime soon 
appears remote, but the discipline will continue to contribute to 
a more profound understanding of humanity as long as its prac?
titioners maintain a firm commitment to the standards of good 
scholarship. This is the lesson that Bill Sturtevant taught me in 
1972 and one that he has applied unfailingly in his own work. 
Notes 
I prepared the original version of this essay in 1979 as an oral presentation de?
livered to the Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution, during the 
course of my interview for the position I currently hold. Michael Brown, 
Richard Ford, Charles Hudson, Raymond Kelly, and Cecilia Troop read the 
written version of this presentation and offered suggestions for improving it. 
Jonathan Amith, Michael Brown, Don Burgess, Roy Ellen, Ives Goddard, Eu?
gene Hunn, and Cecilia Troop did the same for the revised version. Their com?
ments have been of invaluable assistance to me in preparing the final version. I 
am also grateful to Cecilia Troop for working on this project with me and to the 
residents of the Rejogochi area, especially Candelario Martinez, Agustin 
Duran, Chunel Perez, and Moreno Sahuarare, for sharing their knowledge of 
animals with us. I also thank Don Burgess, Miguel Carrillo, and Ventura 
Orozco for providing information on Raramuri zoology from other communi?
ties; George Zug for his guidance through the herpetological literature; and 
Ana Silva for her assistance in organizing our fieldnotes. Finally, I would like 
to acknowledge the University of Michigan, the National Institute of Mental 
Health, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the 
Smithsonian Institution for providing the financial support that allowed me to 
undertake this research. 
1. I began this project in 1971 as part of my senior honors thesis at the Uni?
versity of North Carolina under the direction of Frederick McEvoy and Richard 
Yarnell. I developed the section on black drink in collaboration with Charles 
Hudson (Cable et al., 1971; Hudson, 1979; Merrill, 1979), who was instrumen?
tal in my receiving a Smithsonian internship and who introduced me to the con?
cept of classificatory anomalies through his own work on Southeastern Indian 
ethnology (see Hudson, 1976:139-149,318, 1978). 
2. For information on the Raramuris of Rejogochi, see Merrill, 1988; Hard 
and Merrill, 1992; and Graham, 1994. 
3. Ellen (1993:22-34, 93-125) provided a well-reasoned overview of the 
methodological problems associated with documenting and analyzing zoologi?
cal classification systems and the debates that have surrounded them. In our 
case, we began by recording comments about animals made by different people 
and then inquired in more detail about specific animals during both informal 
conversations and open-ended interviews. When we had compiled what ap?
peared to be an exhaustive list of Rardmuri animal names?over 170 terms in 
all?we copied each of them onto an index card. We then asked two men? 
both in their twenties, literate, and bilingual in Raramuri and Spanish?to orga?
nize these cards into groups. Their responses provided the basis for the model 
of Rardmuri zoological taxonomy that I present herein. We attempted the same 
exercise with a man in his fifties, a nonliterate, monolingual speaker of 
Raramuri. It was very difficult for him to keep track of so many cards without 
the benefit of literacy, so we dropped the card-sorting exercise and simply dis?
cussed relationships among animals and groups of animals with him. We also 
talked about the local fauna with lifelong, non-Indian residents of the area to 
learn Spanish common names and to compare their ideas about animals with 
those of the Raramuris. Because I did not originally envision that my project 
would involve ethnobiological research, I did not secure a permit from the 
Mexican government to collect zoological specimens and thus cannot provide 
scientific identifications of the species involved. The obvious limitations of our 
ethnozoological research are made more apparent when our research is com?
pared to the thorough studies completed elsewhere (e.g., Hunn, 1979; Taylor, 
1990; Ellen, 1993). 
4. Raramuris in other communities propose some of these same species 
transformations: fish into otters, small rodents into bats, salamanders into 
pocket gophers, and rock squirrels into snakes (Lumholtz, 1902:309; Thord-
Gray, 1955:420, 518-524, 961, 1034; Brambila [1980]: entries for bahuri and 
so?pechi; Burgess, 1985:97, 119, 142). In an account recorded by Burgess 
(1985:142), rattlesnakes are said to transform into rock squirrels rather than 
the reverse. Lumholtz (1902:436) indicated that around the turn of the century 
the Raramuris' neighbors, the Northern Tepehuan, also proposed the transfor?
mation of catfish into otters, one kind of squirrel into a bat, another kind of 
squirrel into a parrot, rock squirrels into serpents, and certain insect larvae 
into doves. 
5. Raramuri people who live to the west, in the area known as the Tarahu-
mara Baja, rely primarily on the verb form gayena 'to transform, become, ar?
rive' when discussing these animal transformations. They tend to use the form 
nahita when the entity in question is in the process of transforming and to use 
so?peta when it is about to do so; so7peta is especially associated with old age 
transformations. When referring to readily observable metamorphoses, like 
that of tadpoles into frogs, some people prefer to use the form ochera 'to grow, 
mature, age' instead oi gayena (Don Burgess, pers. comm., 14 Nov 1997). I did 
not encounter these usages in Rejogochi. 
6. During the Spanish colonial period, missionaries occasionally reported 
that Rardmuri "witches" could change into animals at will (e.g., Tarda and 
Guadalaxara, 1676:362). Although this idea is found in many societies, it is im?
possible to determine whether its attribution to the colonial Raramuri is accu?
rate or is simply another example of missionary efforts to discredit Raramuri 
ritual specialists. Today the Raramuris of Rejogochi deny that sorcerers (suku-
ruame) can change into animals, although they firmly believe that sorcerers ex?
ist and that certain kinds of animals, particularly large birds called oromd, iden?
tified with shooting stars, assist them in their malevolent work (Merrill, 
1988:75). 
7. The Raramuris of Rejogochi propose no cases of animals transforming 
into humans, but stories of such transformations, as well as transformations of 
humans into animals, are found in other Raramuri communities (Mares Trias, 
1975; Burgess, 1985). I encountered only one example of an animal-to-animal 
transformation taking place in the ancient past: one man proposed that a dog 
changed into a hare in order to account for why the hare has a black tail. Simi?
larly, the only animal that is believed to undergo reincarnation today is the dog, 
which is said by many people to come back as a "furry" brown caterpillar. An?
other kind of transformation, involving humans only, occurs when a man or 
woman goes to a special mountain and touches articles associated with the op?
posite sex that are found there. Thereafter, the person switches sex (in both 
genitalia and orientation) each month. There are two such mountains in the Re?
jogochi area, which people say came into existence in the ancient past when 
God decapitated a Raramuri man. The man's head became one of these moun?
tains, his stomach the other. 
8. Many people in Rejogochi also believe that the germs of maize kernels 
sometimes transform into moths (Merrill, 1988:92). This belief arises from the 
fact that the moths deposit their eggs in maize kernels and the larvae consume 
the germs. Taylor (1990:73-74) noted a few examples of the transformation of 
plants into animals proposed by the Tobelo of Halmahera Island, Indonesia. 
9. The association between old age and transformation is also encountered in 
other areas of Raramuri thought. For example, the Raramuris state that the 
world itself ages and that when it becomes old, the normal state of affairs will 
be reversed: livestock will eat humans, objects will come to life and attack their 
owners, and so forth. The old world will then be replaced by a new one, at 
which point the possibilities for transformation will increase dramatically. 
344 
10. When I asked if sheep transform into wild animals, one man speculated 
that if they did they would become bears because both animals are "woolly." 
This transformation is not proposed by anyone, probably because sheep and 
bears share few other characteristics and because the Raramuris regard sheep 
as the epitome of dumb animals, entirely dependent on humans for their sur?
vival. They assume that sheep would not survive long enough in the wild to un?
dergo transformation. 
11. Both the Kalam and Rofaifo propose the transformation of females and im?
mature males of various species of birds of paradise into adult males of the 
same or different species. The Kalam also propose a sequential transformation 
involving certain kinds of worms, snakes, and eels (Bulmer, 1968; Dwyer, 
1976a). Because these transformations are based on a misunderstanding of the 
reproductive cycles of the animals involved, I do not consider them here. I also 
have not included in Table 2 two sequential transformations that the Rofaifo 
propose, although they recognize or believe that most of the animals involved 
breed true: (1) beetle larvae (foua) -> butterflies and/or moths (ongombila) -> 
bats (litimbi); and (2) very small rats (sogolobawe hunahimi) -> small rats (so-
golobawe) -? medium-sized rats (soka-sogolobawe) -> large rats (soka) -> 
largest large rats (soka hendea) -? giant rats (fuema lolamba) -? largest giant 
rats (fuema angaia). 
12. The Kalam classify large marsupials and rodents in the category kmn, 
which they distinguish from small marsupials and rodents, classified along 
with frogs in the category as. They maintain separate categories for dogs, pigs, 
and house and garden rats (Bulmer and Menzies, 1973). Similarly, the Rofaifo 
classify small rodents and marsupials as hunembe and classify larger mammals 
as hefa, a class that includes pigs and dogs and, in an extended sense, also cas?
sowaries (flightless birds) and eels (Dwyer, 1976b). 
13. According to Dwyer (1979:16-17), the Rofaifo are much more inclined 
than are the Kalam to postulate higher-level categories, but they do not orga?
nize mammals into a single category. 
14. Douglas's ideas have stimulated a number of studies of the significance of 
classificatory anomalies in diverse cultural settings, most of which have sug?
gested that her original perspective should be revised (Tambiah, 1969; Willis, 
1974; Sperber, 1975; Hunn, 1979; Ellen, 1993:179-184). 
15. Taxonomic classification based on set inclusion is one of three procedures 
that the Raramuris use to organize the animal world. They also create chains of 
linked pairs of taxa connected horizontally on the basis of isolated features they 
share, for example, color, or an aquatic habitat. These features vary from one 
dyad to another, for example, a bird and a snake might be linked because both 
are red and the same snake might be linked to a specific insect because both are 
associated with water. Because any feature can be used to link two taxa, and 
this chaining procedure in and of itself generates no higher-level categories, 
neither unaffiliated nor ambiguous taxa are associated with it. Another process 
involves organizing zoological taxa into categories that crosscut the entire tax?
onomic classification scheme. These categories tend to be quite general (e.g., 
edible versus nonedible), and each set of them exhausts the universe of possi?
bilities. Because this cross-cutting procedure is applied to the entire set of zoo?
logical taxa, there are by definition no unaffiliated taxa, but some taxa can fall 
between the categories, for example, animals that are eaten by some people but 
considered inedible by most. 
16. The term raramuri has meanings on several different levels of increasing 
specificity: 'human beings' as opposed to 'non-humans', 'Indians' as opposed 
to 'non-Indians', 'the Raramuri proper' as opposed to the members of other In?
dian societies, and 'men' as opposed to 'women' (Merrill, 1988:78). 
17. The names I assign to these unlabeled classes represent what I consider to 
be the English terms that best describe the animals included in each of them by 
the Raramuri men who completed the card-sorting exercise described in note 3. 
The psychological reality of such covert categories has been thoroughly de?
bated (see Taylor (1990:42-51) and Ellen (1993:93-125) for summaries). I am 
confident that, with the exception of the ambiguous taxa discussed in the text, 
the Raramuris think of the animals included in each of the unlabeled life-form 
classes <mammals> and <amphibians> as a set, more closely related to one an?
other than to the members of other life-form classes, and they point to features 
that distinguish the members of each of these two unlabeled classes from those 
of all other life-form classes. In the case of <mammals>, these features are pri-
SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
manly the fact that all have fur and are quadrupeds. In the case of <amphibi-
ans> which includes frogs, toads, and their larval forms, they emphasize the 
morphological similarities of the adult forms and their unusual reproductive 
cycle. In contrast, the unlabeled life-form class <invertebrates> may exist only 
as a by-product of the card-sorting exercise, emerging as a catch-all category 
for several lower-level classes and unaffiliated taxa that did not fit into any of 
the other life-form classes. 
18 The Raramuris regard the horned toad (wikdkere) and the earthworm 
(sari) to be somewhat atypical of their life-form classes ('lizards' and <inver-
tebrates>, respectively), but they apparently do not consider these animals suf?
ficiently distinct as to require their placement in separate, unaffiliated catego?
ries. Water monsters (waluluwi) and rainbows (konomi), both regarded as 
extremely dangerous to humans, are classified as 'snakes* (sindi), even though 
they are said to be able to shift between serpent and human forms (Lumholtz, 
1902:310; Bennett and Zingg, 1935:324-325; Burgess, 1985:103, 133, 140; 
Merrill, 1988:73-74). 
19. It is possible that the term chuluwi is better glossed as 'birds plus bats', a 
grouping found in other parts of the world (Bulmer, 1967:7; Dwyer, 
1976a:188; Bulmer, 1979:61; Kesby, 1979:43), and the term sindi glossed as 
'venomous reptiles and snakes'. Expanding the semantic scope of these life-
form labels would incorporate the bat and ropogopali more comfortably into 
these classes, but these animals would remain ambiguous because both are as?
sociated with two life-form classes. 
20. During a visit in May of 1997 to the capital city of Chihuahua, I asked 
Ventura Orozco, a Raramuri man living there, if he knew about a lizard that 
spits venom. He immediately gave the name pakdkle (a form related to ropogo?
pali) and, on the basis of photographs in 77ie Audubon Society Field Guide to 
North American Reptiles and Amphibians, identified it as the Arizona alligator 
lizard (Gerrhonotus kingi) (Behler and King, 1979, pi. 446 and p. 541; some 
herpetologists classify G. kingi (or G. kingii) as Elgaria kingi Gray (Flores-
Villela, 1993:22, 67)). I did not have the opportunity to check this identifica?
tion with the residents of Rejogochi, but Mr. Orozco is originally from the 
Raramuri community of Samachique, located about 20 km south of Rejogochi. 
His identification is supported by information provided to me, also in 1997, by 
Don Burgess, a linguist. Mr. Burgess told me that Raramuri people who live 
farther west also report the existence of a lizard that spits venom (which they 
call gu?dgali, ko?dgali, or variants of these terms), and that a Raramuri 
woman from this area showed him open sores on her body that she said had 
been caused by this lizard. He has seen this lizard and noted that it closely re?
sembles the Arizona alligator lizard illustrated in A Field Guide to Western 
Reptiles and Amphibians (Stebbins, 1966, pi. 25). He suggested that this lizard 
may excrete venom from its skin rather than spitting it. 
Non-Indians in the vicinity of Rejogochi concur with the Raramuris that the 
ropogopali spits venom. They refer to it as escupidn ('spitter'), or escorpidn, 
the latter term used elsewhere to designate the scorpion, which is known in lo?
cal Spanish as alacrdn and in Raramuri as ma?chiri. Other published sources 
on the Raramuris also report spitting, venomous lizards, called guapahdeare 
and kojdwari (or kujdwari); a third spitting lizard, called ropagdkuri, is said to 
be harmless (Brambila [1980]; Wheeler, 1993:47). Thord-Gray (1955:220, 
972) identified, probably incorrectly, the "ro-pa-go-go-ri" as the homed toad 
and the "ko-hawa-ri" as the scorpion (in this case, possibly confusing the local 
Spanish common name for the "spitting" lizard with the term for "scorpion"). 
Herpetologists recognize only two venomous lizards in the world, neither of 
which spits its venom: the Gila monster and the Mexican beaded lizard. Both 
are members of the same genus (Heloderma) and are reported from northern 
Mexico but outside the Raramuri area (Bogert and Martin del Campo, 1956; 
McCranie and Wilson, 1987; George Zug, pers. comm., 23 Jan 1997). Al?
though none are known to be venomous, alligator lizards display several snake?
like features, including elongation and lateral undulation (Kelly Zamudio, pers. 
comm., 11 Dec 1997). Assuming that the identification of the ropogopali as an 
alligator lizard is correct, such features may account for the Rardmuris' associ?
ation of it with snakes. 
21. Among the Raramuris, taxonomic status is unrelated to dietary prohibi?
tions. Instead of taxonomic singularity motivating dietary prohibitions, here 
edibility renders these snakes singular. One man claimed that, in addition to the 
NUMBER 44 345 
saydwi and bahomdwari, two other snakes are edible: a small rattlesnake 
(chopesini) and a constrictor (rindlowi), which is similar in length but is thin?
ner than the bahomdwari, with quite distinct markings. Other people say that 
the small rattlesnake is not eaten because it has little meat and that the meat of 
the rindlowi cannot be eaten because doing so will make a person sick. This 
same man differed from everyone else I consulted by reporting that the larger 
constrictor (bahomdwari) is not involved in transformations but that the two 
rattlesnakes (saydwi and chopesini) both change into rock squirrels rather than 
only the larger rattlesnake deriving from the rock squirrel. The bahomdwari 
and rindlowi are the only two constrictors found in the Rejogochi area. In the 
canyon country to the southwest, the Raramuris keep a constrictor called niwi 
in their fields and near springs to kill squirrels and other pests that raid their 
fields (Miguel Carrillo, pers. comm., 26 Apr 1995). 
22. The Rardmuris have two named taxa of tree squirrels, the labels for which 
can be translated as 'red tree squirrel' (chimori sitdkame or chimori lachame) 
and 'gray tree squirrel' (chimori siydname). Some people also report a third 
taxon, the 'white tree squirrel' (chimori rosdkame), which they closely associ?
ate with the 'gray tree squirrel' and which perhaps is a subspecies of it. Only 
'red tree squirrels' are said to transform into the large constrictors, probably be?
cause they tend to be found in the same areas as the constrictor. 'Gray tree 
squirrels' are said to live only at higher elevations. 
23. The life-form label sindi 'snake(s)' is also used metaphorically to refer to 
insects that sting. 
24. Of course, they recognize that the new breeds of livestock they acquire are 
introductions, but these recent breeds are not new kinds of animals. From the 
Raramuri perspective, all the different kinds of domesticated animals were cre?
ated by God (or in the case of the pig, by the Devil) in the ancient past and were 
acquired directly or indirectly by their ancestors from these deities. 
25. I should note that many other people seemed to regard the species transfor?
mations as isolated, natural facts or curiosities rather than exemplifications of 
principles that could be extended to other animals. I did not, however, encoun?
ter any Raramuris who rejected the possibility or reality of species transforma?
tions entirely, although I imagine some do. Such individual variation in ap?
proaches to knowledge creation, as well as differences in the content of belief, 
presumably is found in all human societies. 
26. Unlike the members of many other New World societies, the Raramuris 
did not assign names to Old World domesticated animals derived from those of 
similar indigenous animals. The majority of their names for these Old World 
introductions are adapted from Spanish. Exceptions include totori, 
'chicken(s)', from the Nahuatl tbtol-in (Karttunen, 1992:248), and bo7wd, 
'sheep', a Rardmuri term that probably originally meant 'fur' and 'feathers' 
and presumably was extended to include sheep. It is interesting that the 
Rardmuris of Rejogochi use the term kabitin (from Spanish jabali) for peccar?
ies, even though these animals are indigenous to the Raramuri area. Pennington 
(1963:102) gave the term gowi as the Raramuri name for these wild pigs. The 
Western, or Baja, Tarahumara designate domesticated pigs as gowi and wild 
pigs as gowi gusigame 'pig(s) of the forests or wilds' (Don Burgess, pers. 
comm., 21 Sep 1997). 
27. For a discussion of Raramuri views on the relationship between the human 
and nonhuman realms, see Merrill, 1988:72. 
28. The Rofaifo appear much more inclined to postulate higher-level categories 
than are either the Kalam or the Nuaulu. It could be suggested that the reported 
absence of higher-level covert categories among the Nuaulu and Kalam reflects 
the reluctance of researchers to accept the existence of unlabeled categories. 
Ellen (1993:93-125), however, provided a detailed explanation of why he be?
lieved such categories do not exist to any great extent within the Nuaulu animal 
classification scheme, and the data presented by Bulmer and his colleagues for 
the Kalam support his argument (Bulmer, 1967; Bulmer and Menzies, 1973; 
Bulmer et al., 1975; cf. Dwyer, 1979, and Dwyer and Hyndman, 1983). 
29. It would be expected that zoological classification schemes that include 
few higher-level categories would be associated with few singular taxa and 
with a tendency to leave "unusual" animals in separate, unaffiliated categories. 
Contrary evidence comes from Dwyer (1979:16-17), who reported that the Ro?
faifo animal classification system includes a number of higher-level classes but 
that "striking anomalies are few." Unfortunately, he provided no detailed pic?
ture of their zoological taxonomic system as a whole, and, although he stated 
that such anomalies "may be rationalized in terms of economic or ritualistic 
criteria" (Dwyer, 1979:17), he failed to describe what these anomalies or ratio?
nalizations might be. There is no evidence that the Rofaifo deal with such 
anomalies by involving them in transformations (Dwyer, 1976a). 
30. Such people are also reported to transform into other kinds of animals, usu?
ally carnivorous mammals like foxes and skunks, but sometimes large birds, 
like owls (rutukare) or turkey buzzards (wilu) (Merrill, 1988:158-159). The 
Raramuris explicitly associate owls with death, but such symbolism is not asso?
ciated with turkey buzzards, despite their status as scavengers. Except for grass?
hoppers and the moths known as soul or ancestor moths, all the animals into 
which humans are believed to reincarnate or to have transformed into in the an?
cient past are either mammals or birds. This fact suggests that the Rardmuris, 
like the members of societies in many other parts of the world, regard mammals 
and birds as the kinds of animals most closely associated with humans. 
31. Some people believe that the souls of all people transform into these 
moths, not as a punishment for incest but as the final stage in a series of rein?
carnations (Merrill, 1988:113-114). The term anaydwari also means 'ancient 
people' and sometimes is used to denote very old living people. 
32. Examples of stories about animals collected in other Raramuri communi?
ties can be found in Lumholtz, 1902:296-310; Thord-Gray, 1955:517-524; 
Hilton, 1969; Burgess, 1970, 1978, 1985; Mares Trias, 1975; Lopez Batista, 
1980; and Wheeler, 1993. Some information about the fauna of the Sierra 
Tarahumara from the perspective of non-Indian residents is found in Boudreau, 
1975. 
Literature Cited 
Behler, John L., and F. Wayne King 
1979. The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Reptiles and 
Amphibians. 719 pages. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 
Bennett, Wendell C, and Robert M. Zingg 
1935. The Tarahumara: An Indian Tribe of Northern Mexico, xix+412 
pages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 
Berlin, Brent, Dennis E. Breedlove, and Peter H. Raven 
1974. Principles of Tzeltal Plant Classification: An Introduction to the Bo?
tanical Ethnography of a Mayan-Speaking People of Highland Chi?
apas. xxii+660 pages. New York: Academic Press. 
Bogert, Charles M., and Rafael Martin del Campo 
1956. The Gila Monster and Its Allies: The Relationships, Habits, and Be?
havior of the Lizards of the Family Helodermatidae. Bulletin of the 
American Museum of Natural History, 109, article 1: 238 pages. 
Boudreau, Eugene H. 
1975. Move Over, Don Porfirio. 71 pages. Sebastopol, California: Pleasant 
Hill Press. 
Brambila, David 
[1980]. Diccionario Rardmuri?Castellano (Tarahumar). xxii+614 pages. 
Mexico City: Buena Prensa. 
Bulmer, Ralph 
1967. Why Is the Cassowary Not a Bird? A Problem of Zoological Taxon?
omy among the Karam of the New Guinea Highlands. Man, new se?
ries, 2:5-25. 
1968. Worms that Croak and Other Mysteries of Karam Natural History. 
Mankind, 6:621-639. 
346 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
1979. Mystical and Mundane in Kalam Classification of Birds. In Roy F. 
Ellen and David Reason, editors, Classifications in Their Social 
Context, pages 57-79. London: Academic Press. 
Bulmer, Ralph N.H., and J.I. Menzies 
1973. Karam Classification of Marsupials and Rodents. Journal of the 
Polynesian Society, 81 (4):472-499, 82(1):86-107. 
Bulmer, R.N.H., J.I. Menzies, and F. Parker 
1975. Kalam Classification of Reptiles and Fishes. Journal of the Polyne?
sian Society, 84:267-308. 
Burgess, Don 
1970. Anaydbari Ra?ichdriara Jipe Nerugame Ra?ichari (Cuentos de An?
tes y Hoy). 33 pages. Mexico City: Instituto Linguistico de Verano. 
1978. Rabbit Steals Coyote's Bladder (Western Tarahumara). In William 
Bright, editor, Coyote Stories. International Journal of American 
Linguistics, Native American Texts Series, monograph 1:178-183. 
Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. 
1985. Leyendas Tarahumaras. In Bob Schalkwijk, Luis Gonzalez Ro?
driguez, and Don Burgess, Tarahumara, pages 71-176. Mexico 
City: Chrysler de Mexico. 
Cable, Harold, Charles Hudson, and William Merrill 
1971. The Black Drink of the Southeastern Indians. [Paper presented at 
the annual meetings of the American Society for Ethnohistory, Ath?
ens, Georgia.] 
Douglas, Mary 
1957. Animals in Lele Religious Symbolism. Africa, 27:46-58. 
1970. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. 
220 pages. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books. 
Dwyer, Peter D. 
1976a. Beetles, Butterflies and Bats: Species Transformations in a New 
Guinea Folk Classification. Oceania, 46:188-205. 
1976b. An Analysis of Rofaifo Mammal Taxonomy. American Ethnologist, 
3:423^45. 
1979. Animal Metaphors: An Evolutionary Model. Mankind, 12:13-27. 
Dwyer, Peter D., and David C. Hyndman 
1983. "Frog" and "Lizard": Additional Life-Forms from Papua New 
Guinea. American Anthropologist, 85:890-896. 
Ellen, Roy F. 
1972. The Marsupial in Nuaulu Ritual Behavior. Man, new series, 7: 
223-238. 
1993. The Cultural Relations of Classification: An Analysis of Nuaulu An?
imal Categories from Central Seram. xxi + 315 pages. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press. 
Flores-Villela, Oscar 
1993. Herpetofauna Mexicana: Lista anotada de las especies de anfibios y 
reptiles de Mexico, cambios taxonomicos recientes, y nuevas espe?
cies / Annotated List of the Species of Amphibians and Reptiles of 
Mexico, Recent Taxonomic Changes, and New Species. Edited by 
CJ . McCoy. Special Publication, Carnegie Museum of Natural His?
tory, 17: iv+73 pages. 
Graham, Martha 
1994. Mobile Farmers: An Ethnoarchaeological Approach to Settlement 
Organization among the Rardmuri of Northwestern Mexico. Inter?
national Monographs in Prehistory, Ethnoarchaeological Series, 3: 
viii +113 pages. Ann Arbor, Michigan. 
Hard, Robert J., and William L. Merrill 
1992. Mobile Agriculturalists and the Emergence of Sedentism: Perspec?
tives from Northern Mexico. American Anthropologist, 94: 
601-620. 
Hilton, K. Simon 
1969. Relatos Tarahumaras. Tlalocan (Mexico City), 6:76-88. 
Hudson, Charles M. 
1976. The Southeastern Indians, xviii+573 pages. Knoxville: University 
of Tennessee Press. 
1978. Uktena: A Cherokee Anomalous Monster. Journal of Cherokee 
Studies, 3:62-75. 
Hudson, Charles M., editor 
1979. Black Drink: A Native American Tea. 175 pages. Athens: University 
of Georgia Press. 
Hunn, Eugene S. 
1976. Toward a Perceptual Model of Folk Biological Classification. Amer?
ican Ethnologist, 3:508-524. 
1977. Tzeltal Folk Zoology: The Classification of Discontinuities in Na?
ture. xliv+368 pages. New York: Academic Press. 
1979. The Abominations of Leviticus Revisted: A Commentary on Anom?
aly in Symbolic Anthropology. In Roy F. Ellen and David Reason, 
editors, Classifications in Their Social Context, pages 103-116. 
London: Academic Press. 
Karttunen, Frances 
1992. An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. xxxiv+349 pages. Norman: 
University of Oklahoma Press. 
Kesby, John D. 
1979. The Rangi Classification of Animals and Plants. In Roy F. Ellen and 
David Reason, editors, Classifications in Their Social Context, 
pages 33-56. London: Academic Press. 
Leach, Edmund 
1964. Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Ver?
bal Abuse. In Eric H. Lenneberg, editor, New Directions in the Study 
of Language, pages 23-63. Cambrige: M.I.T. Press. 
Levi-Strauss, Claude 
1963. Totemism. Translated from the French by Rodney Needham. 116 
pages. Boston: Beacon Press. 
1966. The Savage Mind, xii+290 pages. Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press. 
Lopez Batista, Ramon 
1980. QuPyd Iretaca Nahuisdrami (Relatos de los Tarahumaras). 33 
pages. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista. 
Lumholtz, Carl 
1902. Unknown Mexico. Volume 1: xxxii+530 pages. New York: Charles 
Scribner's Sons. 
Mares Trias, Albino 
1975. Jena Ra7icha Raldmuli Alue 9Ya Muchigame Chiquime Niliga 
(Aqui Relata la Gente De Antes lo Que Pasaba en su Tiempo). 112 
pages. Mexico City: Instituto Linguistico de Verano. 
McCranie, James R., and Larry D. Wilson 
1987. The Biogeography of the Herpetofauna of the Pine-Oak Woodlands 
of the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico. Milwaukee Public Mu?
seum Contributions in Biology and Geology, 72: 30 pages. 
Merrill, William L. 
1979. The Beloved Tree: Ilex vomitoria among the Indians of the South?
east and Adjacent Regions. In Charles M. Hudson, editor, Black 
Drink: A Native American Tea, pages 40-82. Athens: University of 
Georgia Press. 
1988. Rardmuri Souls: Knowledge and Social Process in Northern Mex?
ico. xi+237 pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
1993. Conversion and Colonialism in Northern Mexico: The Tarahumara 
Response to the Jesuit Mission Program, 1601-1767. In Robert W. 
Hefner, editor, Conversion to Christianity; Historical and Anthropo?
logical Perspectives on a Great Transformation, pages 129-163. 
Berkeley: University of California Press. 
Pennington, Campbell W. 
1963. The Tarahumar of Mexico: Their Environment and Material Cul?
ture. 267 pages. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. 
Rappaport, Roy 
1979. Ecology, Meaning, and Religion, xi+259 pages. Richmond, Califor?
nia: North Atlantic Books. 
Sperber, Dan 
1975. Pourquoi les animaux parfaits, les hybrides et les monstres sont-ils 
bon a penser symboliquement? L'Homme, 15:5-34. 
Stebbins, Robert C. 
1966. A Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians, xiv+279 pages. 
Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 
NUMBER 44 347 
Tambiah, S.J. 
1969. Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit. Ethnology, 
8:423-459. 
Tarda, Joseph, and Thomds de Guadalaxara 
1676. Unpublished letter to Francisco Ximenez, 15 Aug 1676, n.p. Archi-
vum Romanum Societatis Iesu [Rome], Mexicana 17, folios 
355r-392v. 
Taylor, Paul M. 
1990. The Folk Biology of the Tobelo People: A Study in Folk Classifica?
tion. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, 34: vii+187 
pages. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
Thord-Gray, I. 
1955. Tarahumara-English, English-Tarahumara Dictionary and an In?
troduction to Tarahumara Grammar. 1170 pages. Coral Gables, 
Florida: University of Miami Press. 
Wheeler, Romayne 
1993. Life through the Eyes of a Tarahumara. 161 pages. Chihuahua, Chi?
huahua, Mexico: Editorial Camino. 
Willis, Roy 
1974. Man and Beast. 142 pages. New York: Basic Books. 

Quenching Homologous Thirsts 
Sidney W. Mintz 
Although his major scholarly effort has been focused upon the 
native peoples of the Americas, William Sturtevant has ranged 
widely in his writing. His pioneering paper on the black drink 
(1979), his well-known study of root crops (1969), and his 
wonderfully concise essay on Taino agriculture (1961) attest to 
an enduring interest in ingestible substances. One would not 
describe Sturtevant as an anthropologist of food, but his inter?
est in processes connected with the production of edible mate?
rials may justify the inclusion, in a work in his honor, of a pa?
per on two "modern" drinks. 
In "Black Drink and Other Caffeine-Containing Beverages 
among Non-Indians," Sturtevant illuminated the manner in 
which beverages can slip in and out of a structurally "indige?
nous" position as well as jockey for primacy in a commercial 
market. The drinks described below are at a large remove from 
indigenous America, and they differ in many ways from each 
other; however, a brief comparison of the histories of their use 
might serve to substantiate some of Sturtevant's arguments (see 
Sturtevant, 1979). 
Tea and Coca-Cola are primarily associated with different 
countries, they are consumed in quite different ways, and their 
histories differ radically. One is a generic beverage base; the 
other has a trademark and could be said to have been invented. 
Yet as the world grew smaller, the histories of these beverages 
became intertangled. Along the routes to their eventual inter?
section, one discerns certain parallels. These may be called 
"structural" (even if one has reservations about some of the 
things that word is taken to mean) because they suggest that 
like forces may exploit certain inherent or situational similari?
ties to achieve like results. Partly because of their intrinsic na?
tures, partly because of the purposes for which they were used, 
and partly because of the context in which their uses grew, in 
important ways these two drinks are more alike than different. 
In looking at them, however?in studying the ways in which 
they differ as well as the ways in which they seem to accord 
with any postulated universal features of our humanity?it is 
useful to keep in mind the dividing line between their common 
Sidney W. Mintz, Department of Anthropology, emeritus, Johns Hop?
kins University, 404 Macaulay Hall, Baltimore, Maryland 21218-
2684, USA. 
and their distinctive features. Along that line one descries the 
making of human history. 
The history of liquids for drinking is of course far longer 
than the human career, but their history as labeled products is 
extremely short. As Sturtevant pointed out, Western societies 
learn to drink most novel liquids first as medicines or tonics 
and only later as beverages. Some of these liquids, of course? 
ipecac, cod liver oil?will probably never stop being medi?
cines. Others, including many so-called "teas"?valerian, cam?
omile, and the black drink, cassina?continue to be quasime-
dicinal (Sturtevant, 1979). Yet others have largely lost their 
medicinal character to become beverages. Precious medicines, 
of course?drugs to counteract acquired immunity deficiency 
syndrome or baldness?often begin by being available only to 
the wealthy. As wonder drugs have their uses extended over 
time, they usually become cheaper and more available, thus re?
peating an old and familiar pattern. 
Tea 
One index of how the world has changed is the downward 
movement that typified the history of substances within Euro?
pean social systems, beginning in the seventeenth century. 
Some of what are today among the most important liquid foods 
in the West acquired that importance only when they changed 
from being the luxuries of European royalty to being the every?
day beverages of the masses. I wrote (Mintz, 1985) about this 
transition with the seventeenth century's three new beverages, 
coffee, tea, and chocolate, in mind. In particular, I was inter?
ested in the ways these beverages became common and popular 
in England, Scotland, and Wales. The British people had long 
been drinkers of ale and beer as well as milk, drinks that would 
by no means be completely supplanted by the new ones. But in 
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, keeping a cow be?
came more difficult because of where people lived and the 
work they had to do; milk lost ground as a daily beverage. Over 
time, ale also became less a home product and more something 
to be purchased at alehouses. The gradual and partial elimina?
tion of milk and of home-brewed ale was related to the in?
creased difficulty working people faced in finding time to pro?
duce them and in securing what was needed?fodder in one 
case, hops and malt in the other. The latter difficulty was aggra-
349 
350 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
vated both by urban living and, even more, by the taxes im?
posed upon hops and malt. 
Although a decline in milk-drinking and ale-making marked 
the eighteenth century in urban (and even rural) England, cof?
fee, tea, and chocolate did not become common drinks until the 
last quarter of the seventeenth century. Before about 1670 or 
1680, they were consumed only in exiguous quantities, mainly 
by royalty and the privileged in English society. All these 
drinks had been consumed without sweetening in their indige?
nous contexts?coffee in the Middle East and Africa, tea in 
Asia, and chocolate in the New World.1 In Europe, however, it 
became the custom to add sweetening to all of them, usually in 
the form of molasses or low-quality granular sugar. No one has 
so far been able to specify the time or place that these practices 
began, but Smith (1992) proposed that sugar with tea took hold 
widely in Britain around 1695 or 1700. In some parts of Eu?
rope, different substances, such as cardamom seeds or lemon 
peel, were added to coffee, but these were probably culturally 
specific customs that diffused from certain locales, along with 
the use of coffee itself. In other places, such as Spain, cinna?
mon was sometimes added to chocolate, and this may have 
been where sugar was first added to chocolate. (These usages 
were innovations, whereas the use of vanilla with chocolate 
had indigenous origins.) In England, lemon or milk came to be 
added to tea, together with sugar. Of all the many varied addi?
tions to the three new drinks, sugar was certainly the most 
widespread. Because all three beverages are bitter, Europeans 
probably found drinking them without a sweetener disagree?
able. Probably not long after such beverages were introduced, 
sugar began to be added to them, perhaps as part of the transi?
tion from medicinal to beverage status. All were served hot, 
and all contain caffeine or a caffeine-like drug. Of the three, 
only chocolate has any food value. Sweetening made them 
more attractive to European palates and also added substantial 
calories to all of them. 
In the mid-nineteenth century, the partial shift away from 
short beer or ale and toward tea preceded many other changes 
in mass diet in Britain, such as the rising consumption of store-
brought bread to replace bread baked at home. Increasing ur?
banization and the participation of women in the work force 
outside the home meant that, to meet the time schedules of the 
mills, they had to leave food for school-age children and to pre?
pare dinner more quickly at the end of the work day. But in the 
case of ale, the immediate impulse for the shift toward other 
drinks came from the imposition of substantial taxes on malt by 
the state, such that home brewing was taken out of the eco?
nomic reach of laboring families. In the eighteenth and nine?
teenth centuries, tea and bread together came to make up one 
entire meal each day for many British workers (Burnett, 1966). 
Easy to prepare, heavy with calories, hot and appetizing, tea 
taken with bread heavily spread with jam became a favorite, es?
pecially for women and children. In my own work, I have 
pointed out that meat tended to be monopolized by the husband 
(Mintz, 1985:144). If there were intrafamilial figures on tea 
and sugar consumption for working-class Britain in the eigh?
teenth and nineteenth centuries, they would probably indicate 
that women and children consumed them more than men did 
and that men were getting most of the meat. 
Tea's success was swift. By 1700 it was immensely popular 
in England; soon, even the Scots and the Irish had become 
sworn consumers of it. In his pioneering studies of rural life, 
the Scottish cleric David Davies argued persuasively that the 
rise in tea consumption was in response to the increased cost of 
small beer or milk and was not simply a preference for tea. 
"Tea (with bread)," he wrote, "furnishes one meal for a whole 
family every day, at no greater expense than about one shilling 
a week, at an average. If any body will point out an article that 
is cheaper and better, I will venture to answer for the poor in 
general, that they will be thankful for the discovery" (Davies, 
1795:37). Davies was indignant that the well-off would criti?
cize the poor for drinking tea. "After all," he wrote, 
it appears a very strange thing, that the common people of any European nation 
should be obliged to use, as part of their daily diet, two articles imported from 
opposite sides of the earth. But if high taxes, in consequence of expensive 
wars, and the changes which time insensibly makes in the circumstances of 
countries, have debarred the poorer inhabitants of this kingdom the use of such 
things as are the natural products of the soil, and forced them to recur to those 
of foreign growth; surely this is not their fault. (Davies, 1795:39) 
The Scottish historian David MacPherson wrote that the re?
duction in duties on tea in 1784, combined with the higher 
taxes on malt, opened the way to an even greater expansion of 
tea consumption: 
Tea has become an economical substitute to the middle and lower classes of so?
ciety for malt liquor, the price of which renders it impossible for them to pro?
duce the quantity sufficient for them as their only drink... .We are so situated in 
our commercial and financial system, that tea brought from the eastern extrem?
ity of the world, and sugar brought from the West Indies and both loaded with 
the expense of freight and insurance...compose a drink cheaper than beer. 
(MacPherson, 1812:132) 
Not everyone was charmed by the rapid spread of tea-drink?
ing, particularly among the laboring poor. In addition to re?
formers' complaints that the poor should use their pennies for 
better things, tea was held responsible for illness among the 
needy. But at least some of the critics recognized that the work?
ing classes had little choice. Dr. Lettsom, an English physician 
and amateur botanist writing at the very end of the eighteenth 
century, quoted a doctor in Leeds who believed excessive tea-
drinking caused new mothers to lose their milk and who argued 
that tea was addictive in nature: 
The difficulty with which animal food is procured by the lower ranks of soci?
ety, in quantity sufficient for daily nutriment, has led many of them to substi?
tute, in the place of more wholesome provisions, a cheap infusion of this for?
eign vegetable, whose grateful flavour (and perhaps narcotic quality, which it 
possesses in a small degree in common with most ever-greens) is found to cre?
ate an appetite for itself. (Lettsom, 1799:98) 
Today, a radical transformation of the basic foods of ordinary 
people might not surprise us, but in the seventeenth century it 
was probably happening for the first time in world history. 
NUMBER 44 351 
Tea became even more important in the nineteenth century, 
when its cultivation?innovated, organized, and managed by 
the British?was established in India. This obviated the need to 
deal with the emperor of China, where tea cultivation was na?
tive and its commerce managed by bureaucratic intermediaries. 
Because the Royal East India Company controlled the tea trade 
with China, it also destroyed the company's monopoly on the 
tea trade: 
Its early adventures in the Far East brought it to China, whose tea was des?
tined later to furnish the means of governing India. ...During the hey-day of its 
prosperity John Company [the East India Company] maintained a monopoly 
of the tea trade with China, controlled the supply, limited the quantity import?
ed to England, and thus fixed the price. It constituted not only the world's 
greatest tea monopoly but also the source of inspiration for the first English 
propaganda on behalf of a beverage. It was so powerful that it precipitated a 
dietetic revolution in England, changing the British people from a nation of 
potential coffee drinkers to a nation of tea drinkers, and all within the space of 
a few years. (Ukers, 1935:67) 
In Britain, tea, whatever its nutritive deficiencies, increased 
labor productivity. It also yielded great profit to capital and to 
the state. But not all such products are benign, even in the 
short term. In the case of imperial China, for instance, the 
"need" of the Chinese people for opium hardly explains its im?
portation there. 
Opium was supplied to the Chinese by British "pushers." In 
the early nineteenth century, before tea production was shifted 
to India, the emperor of China and his bureaucracy struggled 
violently but in vain against British insistence upon smuggling 
into the country great quantities of opium, which was being 
produced in India. A.S. Thelwall, in The Iniquities of the 
Opium Trade with China (1839), wrote that His Majesty's 
Government was thriving on an evil commerce. Although rec?
ognized, this was an evil none would try to prevent: 
But public men knew of the evil and in most cases deplored it. Their difficulty 
was that they did not see how the Government of India could manage without 
the revenue that it derived from opium or how the tea trade (from which the 
home Government derived vast revenues) could be carried on unless tea were 
paid for by opium. (Waley, 1958:89) 
Thus a modern European government supported the production 
of a dangerous drug in one of its own colonies to export to an 
archaic non-Western state, against the will of its rulers, in order 
to pay for its importations of another, much less dangerous 
drug. Because of China's strenuous but futile attempts to stem 
British opium smuggling, the British navy attacked Chinese 
forts and China was forced to cede Hong Kong and trading 
rights in Chinese cities to Britain. We are never told why the 
British imported tea, rather than opium, to sell to their own 
working class. 
Tea's eventual and long-term success in competition with the 
other stimulant beverages in Britain owed at least in part to the 
re-siting of its production within the Empire. But that success 
is in some ways less interesting than how a costly luxury of the 
wealthiest class could be transformed into an absolutely essen?
tial food of the poorest. Tea not only became the beverage of 
the ordinary person, it also became the very essence of hospi?
tality in the British home, an exportable symbol as central as 
cricket or the Union Jack, and more profitable. The precocious 
democratization of tea consumption is a leitmotif in the study 
of the evolution of capitalism itself. 
Tea gained its popularity because it could descend through 
the social system to enter into the food habits of masses of ordi?
nary people. I believe it did so particularly in connection with 
meals eaten outside the home. I think tea and sugar were first 
consumed by laboring people in association with their work; 
these were interval or snack foods, linked to the need for brief, 
specific moments of rest and ingestion at labor. 
Although it was amid the demanding rhythms of modern la?
bor that people probably learned to consume these stimulant 
beverages, they were not consumed only at work, nor did they 
end up being consumed primarily as work foods. This was not 
simple emulation or imitation of others. What such new foods 
supplied physiologically was quite different from what they 
supplied to the privileged classes, and the daily rituals with 
which they became associated were also different. 
The frequent drinking of strong, heavily sweetened tea de?
veloped in the late seventeenth century and matured in the 
eighteenth century. As late as 1700, a majority of English peo?
ple had not yet tasted sweetened tea. By 1800, probably every 
English person alive had tasted it and wanted more of it. From 
about the middle of the nineteenth century onward, if not ear?
lier, tea became the household drink. Soon it became a daily 
marker of time, as coffee is for many Europeans and for most 
North and South Americans. It was already solidly established 
as the daily work drink in Britain. 
The initial downward diffusion of tea in the eighteenth cen?
tury had helped to displace home-brewed ale and short beer. In 
the late nineteenth century and thereafter tea became competi?
tive with alcoholic beverages, particularly gin but also whiskey 
and rum, through the British temperance movement. 
Before the 1820s, the temperance movement had been di?
rected specifically against the "ardent liquors": whiskey, rum, 
and gin. Temperance thinking held that partial abstinence, at 
least from hard liquor, was a necessary first step on the road to 
temperance. But as the nineteenth century wore on, the feeling 
grew among temperance reformers that all alcohol, not just 
hard liquor, would have to be proscribed. The term "teetotal-
ism," used to mean complete abstinence, was coined by a Brit?
ish worker in the early nineteenth century. The word "teetotal," 
meaning complete or absolute, had a long history predating this 
innovation, but once the new meaning had been imparted to it, 
"teetotal" became the property of the temperance movement. 
(It was not connected with the word "tea," although such an as?
sociation has sometimes been incorrectly attributed to it.) As 
complete abstinence grew, the role of nonalcoholic drinks in 
the politics of temperance grew with it. 
In the three new tropical drinks, the temperance movement 
found useful weapons in its struggle (Harrison, 1971). But the 
importance of alcoholic beverages for British workers, and the 
ensuing fight against them, makes sense only if one sees the so-
352 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
cial context within which such drinks were consumed. During 
the first half of the nineteenth century, the houses of urban En?
glish workers were small, uncomfortable, and often wretched. 
Domestic poverty and meanness of abode, when added to the 
nearly complete lack of locales of entertainment, meant that for 
most workers, bars were the only social centers and meeting 
places they had. This doubtless enhanced the consumption of 
alcoholic beverages. 
The nineteenth-century temperance movement found that the 
nonalcoholic drinks, such as soda, lemonade, and soda flavored 
with ginger, were attractive alternatives to alcohol. The temper?
ance reformers, however, were more active in encouraging the 
consumption of tea and the other hot beverages rather than selt?
zer or soda pop (Harrison, 1971). This was not a matter of 
taste: barkeepers encouraged their clientele to mix soft drinks 
with whisky, so such drinks facilitated the consumption of al?
cohol, rather than supplanting it. Hence the reformers took an 
adversarial position toward the bars as such, plumping in favor 
of cafes, which, before the nineteenth century, were frequented 
more by middle-class persons than by laboring people. The ca?
fes served tea and coffee and light refections rather than seltzer 
and soda and alcohol. They were places to meet, converse, and 
read while drinking and eating. The character of many of them 
changed, partly as a consequence of a new clientele. 
When the temperance movement was still concentrating on 
hard liquor consumption, leading Quaker families, such as the 
Whitbreads, the Barclays, and the Lucases, had been involved 
in the promotion and sale of beer, a drink viewed by the tem?
perance reformers at that point as a preferable alternative to 
rum, whisky, or gin. But in the nineteenth century, other Quak?
ers, such as the Tuke, Mennell, and Horniman families, became 
leaders in the creation of tea import and retailing outlets, pro?
moting tea against all alcoholic drinks, including beer. The 
Quakers were the first to create the "tea meeting," an institution 
both religious and secular, where tea was consumed regularly 
as a sort of interval drink in the religious service. Chocolate 
(cocoa), as well as tea, was also promoted by important Quaker 
commercial families, including the Cadburys, the Frys, and the 
Rowntrees. 
In the construction of these events as part of a movement 
against alcohol, one sees the emergence of new patterns of con?
sumption, consonant with the industrial work day. The ideal 
worker would renounce alcohol, consuming instead these other 
drinks, often in the company of his family. The tea garden, like 
the tea meeting, was an institution that provided a context for 
consumption, as well as a product to consume. A writer of the 
mid-nineteenth century suggested that the calendar of proletar?
ian social life was affected by tea when he wrote of "Sunday 
afternoon tea, the most formidable appliance of the match?
maker of working-class society, and a really powerful means of 
promoting courtship and matrimony among the working 
classes" (Wright, 1867:236). By drinking nonalcoholic bever?
ages in a familial context, it was thought, the worker saved his 
family from ruin. He also got to the factory sober, early Mon?
day morning. Sobriety was healthful, moral, and economical; it 
was also in the service of the society and its leaders. 
The habit of combining meals with hot beverages, taken in 
restaurants where alcoholic beverages were not sold, became 
stabilized just at the middle of the nineteenth century. In Scot?
land, in Dundee and Glasgow, and soon enough in England, in 
Manchester and London, workers began to buy their lun?
cheons at midday and to consume them with coffee, tea, or 
chocolate. Later, industrial canteens, selling hot beverages at 
low prices, became institutionalized within large mills and 
factory complexes. 
Even before 1870 the temperance movement had concerned 
itself not only with the consumption of alcohol but also with 
the consumption of other foods and with the social circum?
stances of ingestion. The growing awareness, earlier in the cen?
tury, that the laboring classes had no places outside the bars in 
which to meet and enjoy themselves was a sociological insight 
of the first order. Tea gardens, important particularly on week?
ends and holidays, were hence a significant innovation. The 
provision of venues for ritual and familial gatherings among 
the laboring classes transformed to some degree the ways in 
which the consumption of alcoholic and nonalcoholic bever?
ages took place; they also helped to alter the eating habits of or?
dinary people. The temperance movement in England had im?
portant consequences for British drinking habits. At the least, it 
helped to enrich the participation of English workers in a pub?
lic social life, and as part of this process, it deeply influenced 
the consumption of various nonalcoholic beverages, such as 
tea, and the circumstances of their consumption. 
Tea was a new beverage in Britain in 1660, but by the mid-
eighteenth century it had become a truly national beverage. Le?
gal imports of barely nine metric tons in 1700 had grown to 
more than 9000 metric tons by 1800 (Mintz, 1985:113). After 
1850, tea increasingly was drunk. One might say that from that 
time on, at least, drinking tea embodied Englishness. Indeed, 
the production, sale, and consumption of tea played a certain 
part in international politics, in connection with the pacification 
and rule of India, in the wresting of control of Hong Kong and 
various commercial privileges from the Chinese, in the provi?
sion of markets for West Indian molasses and sugar, in national 
taxation policy, and otherwise. In its emergence as a marker or 
symbol of British culture, tea also played some part in the tem?
perance movement. Teetotaling was invented in connection 
with tea. Religious meetings were conducted with, and around, 
the drinking of tea, and it seems certain that tea played a part in 
the forging of a sober labor force for British industry. 
In approximately two centuries, the "oriental vegetable" had 
been changed from an exotic medicinal of the court into a daily 
necessity of the poorest people. It did so together with other 
changes underway in Britain, and it was pressed into service 
for objectives that probably would never have occurred to per?
sons in the ancient tea-drinking cultures of China or Japan. 
What tea was had become different; what tea meant had be?
come even more different. 
NUMBER 44 353 
Coca-Cola 
No matter from what perspective?except for the fact that it, 
too, is a beverage?Coca-Cola gives an impression radically 
different from that given by tea. One was a product of the sev?
enteenth century, brewed from the leaves of a single plant; the 
other is a product of the end of the nineteenth century, com?
posed of diverse ingredients. One is usually consumed hot, the 
other is usually consumed cold. One is marked, often dramati?
cally, by the ritual of its preparation; the other is sold ready to 
be drunk as is, anywhere, anytime, by anybody. One is an an?
cient drink, emphatically foreign and exotic; the other is "in?
digenous" and modern, a concocted beverage with its own in?
ventor (even if most of its ingredients were at least known, and 
reputedly medicinal). Yet there are basic ways in which these 
drinks are alike. 
During the first half-century of its existence, Coca-Cola was 
a regional drink, consumed principally in the South. It was not 
well known in other regions of the United States and was even 
less known in the rest of the world,2 with one major exception. 
Special efforts were made by the Coca-Cola Company to dif?
fuse Coca-Cola to Cuba soon after it fell under United States 
control in 1898-1899. At least two Coca-Cola bottling plants 
were built in Cuba (one was built principally to supply the 
United States naval base at Guantinamo). Coca-Cola was made 
part of the active Protestant missionization undertaken in Cuba 
by Warren Candler, a Methodist bishop who was the brother of 
Asa, the head of the Coca-Cola Company (Louis and Yazijian, 
1980:29-30).3 
In contrast, tea had been spread across the globe, largely by 
the British, centuries before the invention of Coca-Cola. In its 
world spread, tea was a beverage linked to the dried leaves of a 
single specific plant. Tea leaves compacted in the form of 
bricks traveled well and could be stored for long periods, and 
some European regions, such as Imperial Russia, had been im?
porting tea for centuries. There were tea companies and tea 
brands, as well as varieties of tea. In these ways, tea was a 
product quite different from Coca-Cola. Like coffee and choco?
late but unlike sugar and Coca-Cola, it was not standardized for 
a one-product market. 
Like tea, Coca-Cola began as a medicinal. Its inventor, John 
Styth Pemberton, a pharmacist, had wanted to perfect a 
tonic?his word?rather than a beverage. What he did on his 
first try was to copy a French beverage called "Vin Mariani," 
which was sold as a medicine in France and elsewhere. Vin 
Mariani was a brutally simple drink: a pedestrian Bordeaux 
red wine, heavily dosed with extract of coca leaves. Its con?
sumption produced a mood both tranquil and euphoric. Pem?
berton named his first such invention "French Wine Coca: 
Stimulant and Ideal Brain Tonic." Its basic chemical nature re?
sembled that of Vin Mariani. But Pemberton could already 
foresee Prohibition in the United States, and he was prescient 
enough to gamble on creating a new product that would pro?
vide the effects of Vin Mariani but without the alcohol. This 
latter criterion constituted an important aspect of the eventual 
success of Coca-Cola, although Pemberton could not have 
forecast in precisely what way. The formula for Coca-Cola 
(both "classic" and "new") is proprietary, but we do know that 
Pemberton modified his "French Wine Coca" in order to pro?
duce Coca-Cola. He eliminated the wine and added caffeine, 
cola extract, and vegetable oils. For a couple of decades after 
Coca-Cola was perfected, the cocaine was also retained, in the 
form of fresh-brewed coca leaves. As frequently happens with 
the inventors of new products, Pemberton had to improvise to 
get things started. The first Coca-Cola was distributed to re?
tailers in the form of syrup, packaged in old beer bottles. In the 
soda fountain-pharmacies that sold Coke, the custom emerged 
of mixing a soup spoon of syrup with water. This was taken as 
a remedy by customers who were suffering from headaches 
(especially those caused by overindulgence in spirituous li?
quors). In 1886, the year of its creation, Coca-Cola was first 
mixed with soda water; this was the mixture that then became 
standardized as a drink, rather than as a syrup, which one 
might add to water. Its medicinal, curative nature changed 
from medicine to medicine/beverage. 
Pemberton soon had to sell his enterprise. His Coca-Cola 
ended up eventually in the hands of a man named Asa Candler. 
In contrast to Pemberton, Candler definitely was a business?
man. The total price of Pemberton's enterprise, including his 
vats and his little stock of substances, was slightly more than 
2000 dollars. From such beginnings came today's Coca-Cola. 
Candler suffered from headaches and dyspepsia and was ap?
parently very happy to become the sole proprietor of a remedy 
for both maladies. Always a fiercely religious man and a fer?
vent member of the Methodist Church, Candler was also a life?
long teetotaler, and he was unusually astute in the ways of 
commerce. He clung to the definition of Coca-Cola as a medi?
cine, and he was strait-laced about how its virtues were touted. 
Under his guidance, even the publicity for Coca-Cola was 
monitored. During the first half-century, advertising for the 
drink stressed its purity and its nonalcoholic nature. For a 
lengthy period under Candler's leadership, Coca-Cola was ad?
vertised exclusively in religious magazines. Candler clearly 
thought that he was doing God's work with this product.4 
Yet at the same time?and, as it were, informally?Coca-
Cola acquired a reputation as a mixer, and its fame in this re?
gard was diffused even more widely than the drink itself. In 
some parts of the United States, Coca-Cola also acquired a rep?
utation as a contraceptive douche. One suspects that what had 
begun as a medicinal consolation to middle-aged over-indulg-
ers was now becoming a drink of youth and adolescence. The 
company under Candler, however, never advertised the drink's 
fame as a mixer. 
In the British social setting, tea and alcohol were counter-
posed. Although alcohol can be added to tea, I have noted that 
this is clearly glossed as medicinal in British usage. But in the 
American social setting, Coca-Cola and alcohol were not 
354 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
counterposed. Coca-Cola's taste is so powerful that many 
young women?and young men?got their first introduction 
to alcohol through Coca-Cola. Particularly convenient was the 
fact that alcohol could be poured into a half-empty bottle of 
Coca-Cola?at dances, for instance?and disingenuously car?
ried about. Coca-Cola was also much touted in the subculture 
of adolescence in the 1930s for its usefulness, once spiked, for 
seduction. 
As a company jingle promised, apparently things did go bet?
ter with Coke. The Coca-Cola Company profited from Coca-
Cola's nonalcoholic virtue even while it was becoming a popu?
lar alcoholic mixer among many of its users. Before Prohibi?
tion became federal law, Candler's ideal temperance beverage 
turned out to be an ideal mixer, especially in the dry South, 
where local moonshiners marketed various poisons as whisky. 
After the enactment of Prohibition, in 1919, what had become 
custom in the South spread more widely. To some extent, the 
transformation of Coca-Cola into a national drink hinged upon 
its use as a mixer during Prohibition. From this vantage point, 
it is possible to see that Coca-Cola was a more adaptable drink 
than tea. Tea can be mixed with other substances, including al?
cohol, but it has never been very successful as a mixer, except 
medicinally, and then only to a limited degree. How Coca-Cola 
became a social drink when combined with alcohol is only part 
of its later history. From an antidote for the consequences of 
overindulgence, Coca-Cola changed not only into a mixer but 
also into a drink of the work day. 
Coca-Cola was vigorously promoted as the South became 
less rural and agrarian, more urban and industrial, and less iso?
lated and overwhelmingly dry. After World War I, southern in?
dustry grew at a rate and on a scale that might allow one to 
compare it superficially to western Europe's Industrial Revolu?
tion, a century and a half or so earlier. The rising intensity of 
mill work in the South was marked by changes in the length 
and tempo of the work day and by sharp alterations in the pre?
scribed times for respite. These changes were all the more dra?
matic for occurring as often in small towns and open country, 
where the mills sprang up, as in large cities. 
Most of the workers came from agrarian backgrounds. In 
North Carolina, "At 12:00 the whistle sounded, and Gastonia 
County's twenty five thousand mill workers left to go to the 
villages to eat a hot meal. At 12:55 it was time to start again, 
the whistle said" (Hodges, 1986:29). Living by the clock was 
something Southerners, too, had to learn about. Rhyne 
(1930:12) wrote also of mill laborers in North Carolina: 
Promptly at 12 "dinner" is ready and on the table in the kitchen. After hurriedly 
washing his hands, perhaps occasionally bothering to comb his hair, the mill 
worker sits down to his noon-day meal which he finishes with as much dis?
patch as does the college boy on his commons?perhaps fifteen minutes. Then 
by 12:30 o'clock he is ready to start back to "the mill." At 12:30 a second whis?
tle blows, repeated sometimes at 12:45, to warn the worker that either in 25 or 
in 20 minutes he must be on the job again. If he gets to the mill a few minutes 
ahead of time he goes to the inevitable drink stand and drinks his coca-cola, al?
though he often partakes of this refreshment in the middle of morning or after?
noon working periods. A stand in the mill may supply him, although in most 
mills he is free to go out to a shop across the street. 
The easy availability of liquid refreshment?nonalcoholic 
liquids only?was an "urbanizing" feature of the southern fac?
tory village. The laborers neither brought nor fixed their drinks; 
they bought them. Almost exclusively they drank Coca-Cola. 
Carlton (1982:175), describing factory conditions in South 
Carolina in the period 1880-1920, stated that the generally ac?
cepted workday began at 4:30 a.m. and ended at 9:30 p.m. 
Twelve hours belonged to the mill; the other five and a half 
were mainly for eating but were a wasteful use of time in the 
view of the mill owners. "Efficiency experts" worked to speed 
things up after World War I. Workers could eat faster if they 
didn't go home at noon and could eat faster yet if the foods 
they ate were available right in the shop: 
Mills encouraged that habit by operating "dope carts" that sold cold drinks and 
sandwiches. "They had what they called 'dope wagons,' Mack Duncan ex?
plained. "People used to call Coca-Colas 'dope'." (Hall et al., 1987:209) 
The usefulness of Coca-Cola as a workday drink was en?
hanced by the concerted movement across the South to make 
alcohol illegal. Thanks to the efforts of Southern religious 
leaders, the temperance movement had significantly changed 
the social situation. As early as 1907, for instance, of the 994 
counties in the former Confederate states, 825 were dry (Louis 
and Yazijian, 1980:26). That there was some relationship be?
tween the temperance movement and the expansion of Coca-
Cola seems certain. Candler was not only a teetotaler, he was 
also a fierce exponent of Coca-Cola as brain tonic, refresher, 
and medicine designed for clean living. Tea, which came to be 
known in the United Kingdom as "the beverage that cheers but 
does not inebriate," found its match in what was soon being 
referred to as "the holy water of the South" (Louis and 
Yazijin, 1980:26). 
Pemberton, the inventor of Coca-Cola, had perfected his 
nonalcoholic formula while retaining the coca leaves, thus 
adapting his beverage to the times. At the end of the nine?
teenth century, however, leaders of the antinarcotic movement 
in the United States, including a number of physicians, pushed 
for the classification of cocaine as a narcotic. Candler, the cre?
ator of Coca-Cola's image, reacted violently; in 1892 he de?
clared that he would give up Coca-Cola if it could ever be 
shown that cocaine was addictive (Louis and Yazijian, 
1980:33). But as pressure against the unregulated distribution 
of cocaine mounted, Coca-Cola quietly took the cocaine out of 
its syrup, replacing it with spent coca leaves. Federal narcotics 
regulations (1914-1922) did not prohibit the importation of 
coca leaves for medicinal purposes. The Coca-Cola Company 
still (AD 1990) purchases the spent leaves from the Stepan 
Pharmaceutical Company to be used in its syrup (Louis and 
Yazijian, 1980:35). 
Under Candler's direction, Coca-Cola continued to be adver?
tised heavily in religious journals: "Coca-Cola revives and sus?
tains"; "full of vim, vigor and go"; "refreshes the weary, bright-
NUMBER 44 355 
ens the intellect"; "the drink that quenches the heart's desire." 
Other claims, as assertively cheery as they were absolutely 
vague, were also made. The main thrust was that Coca-Cola 
was "good for you"?good for the spirit as well as the body. 
Above all, such advertisements imparted a sense of inner clean?
liness. A therapeutic undercurrent typified the messages. The 
appeals, at least during the early decades, were always astrin?
gently innocent of any sensual overtones, stressing instead 
brightness, purity, and friendship. The analogous message in 
today's advertising appears to be that for vaginal douches, such 
as Massengill's. Continuity with the past, yet appropriate for 
today's youth: "with it," but traditional. 
The line against suggestive ads of any kind was held to 
sternly by the Coca-Cola Company, at least until the end of 
World War II. But the wartime ads did stress Coke's virtues for 
persons in the armed services. Coke expanded greatly between 
the wars, but only with World War II did Coke become a truly 
national drink. 
Soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, 
General George Catlett Marshall invited all of his field com?
manders and general officers to request the construction of 
Coca-Cola bottling plants so that the product could be pro?
duced at the front. By his letter Marshall endowed Coca-Cola 
with the same status in the wartime economy as that occupied 
by food and munitions (Watters, 1978:164; Louis and Yazijian, 
1980:56-57; Pendergrast, 1993:203-204). It is quite unclear 
why he did so, but Marshall was a southerner; his estimate of 
the popularity of the beverage may have been influenced at 
least in part by his own origins and experiences. The Army 
thus officially spared Coca-Cola from sugar rationing at a time 
when sugar was?as is always so in war?highly prized. In all, 
64 Coca-Cola plants were established in allied theaters of war, 
including the Pacific theater, Australia, North Africa, and else?
where. The Coca-Cola Company was asked by the armed 
forces to supply technicians to run the production; 148 such 
technicians were sent by the company, and three were killed in 
theaters of war during World War II. 
War stimulates symbol production. In the case of Coca-Cola, 
such production was enhanced by advertising, connecting the 
beverage to the war effort and to the simple virtues of fighting 
men and women. The drink acquired its national stature as 
American forces occupied more and more remote portions of 
the earth's surface, for Coke had been enabled to travel with 
them. Its traditional public associations with health, virtue, and 
nonalcoholism were in good measure relinquished as Coke be?
came the drink of the United States armed services. Although 
the war years were full of stories of small southern villages 
where thirsty GIs were charged extortionate prices for Coke, it 
was Coke that they drank. The men and women under arms 
were truly national: Native Americans, patriotic young Nisei 
out of the relocation camps, black Americans in segregated 
units?in short, some of nearly everybody?ended up in uni?
form. As they learned so much else in the service, so they 
learned to be drinkers of Coke. War remakes diet. But the sig?
nificance of Coke went much farther. The first bottle to come 
ashore during the Allied landing at Anzio, for instance, was 
shared by 19 GIs. And it was not unusual to find in the letters 
that servicemen wrote home the assertion that they were fight?
ing for the right to drink Coca-Cola (Louis and Yazijian, 
1980:59). It was in this manner that Coke became a national 
symbol among the warrior youth of the 1940s generation. That 
so many members of the professional officer corps and of the 
noncommissioned officer ranks were southern?a legacy from 
an earlier war and its divided spoils?may also have played a 
role in the story. 
In the last 50 years, Coca-Cola has changed from a national 
to an international drink. Its worldwide expansion has accom?
panied the spread of American influence and power; to some 
degree the Coca-Cola Corporation has been a stalking-horse 
for American culture. Today's advertisements confirm Coke's 
popularity while increasing it further. The oddly shaped bottle,5 
once critical to the identification of Coke as Coke, is no longer 
important; the very name "Coke" has supplanted the bottle as?
sociated with it. The association between Coke and a particular 
generation?the GIs of the 1940s?has been deliberately 
downplayed, as has Coke's association with specific times of 
day, specific foods and, most of all, with the United States. Yet 
drinking a Coke has become a powerful way of validating a 
symbolic identification with American might and influence. In 
recent decades, the Coca-Cola Company has become a multi-
commodity corporation and (together with its arch rival, Pep-
sico) one of the 50 largest corporations in the United States. It 
may have all begun with a mixer for bad booze and seduction, 
or a stimulant to help one endure the long hours of drudgery in 
southern mills, but that is not the way it has stayed. Arguably, 
Coke is now the best-known symbol of the United States in the 
world; its company is one of the most powerful private eco?
nomic organisms in that world. Some of the most important 
figures in American public life won their spurs selling soft 
drinks?and before then, hard drinks. When American Revolu?
tion patriot John Adams contended that molasses (from which 
rum is made) was "an essential ingredient in American inde?
pendence," he was referring to the political consequences of 
the mother country's policy of taxation without representation 
(Mintz, 1985:256). That latter-day patriots may view Coca-
Cola as an essential ingredient in American power world-wide 
today resonates a bit oddly with Adams's view. Soda pop is big 
business?indeed, it is about as big as business gets. 
Conclusions 
This paper offers its readers a comparison. It may appear that 
the comparison is between two drinks, and, on the face of it, 
that is correct. But if one were to seek a broader way to de?
scribe this comparison, it might be called systadial (Childe, 
1946:250). I do not use this word in its geological or archaeo-
356 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 
logical sense, but to refer to the same social process occurring 
in different places and at different times. This essay is not so 
much a comparison of two drinks as it is a comparison of two 
places and two historical moments or periods. Or as I would 
prefer to suggest, it really deals with one stage?but unfolding 
at two different times, and in two different places. That we 
deal with two drinks is relevant, of course. Anthropologists 
care about substances: their origins, uses, contexts, and mean?
ings. But beyond the drinks themselves, the backdrop matters. 
These drinks figured in the histories of two societies in situa?
tions in which they were modernizing themselves by becom?
ing industrial. In both instances?although widely separated in 
time as well as by space?large numbers of people were be?
coming habituated to factory schedules, and their eating habits 
were changing accordingly. And in both instances, drunken?
ness was a problem with which industry had to cope. In both 
instances, beverages of a certain sort turned out to serve simul?
taneously as "proletarian hunger-killers" (Mintz, 1966) and as 
antidotes of a kind for alcohol. As hunger-killers, these drinks 
served to punctuate the day, to mark intervals between exer?
tions, and to enhance repasts. Much as a cup of tea could turn 
a cold meal into a hot one (Burnett, 1966) for the British labor?
ers, so Coca-Cola could turn bread and cheese, or a hamburger 
sandwich, into a modest feast. It is scarcely a coincidence that 
both of these beverages packed a double wallop: powerful 
stimulants, charged with plenty of calorie-heavy sucrose. But 
coincidence or no, laborers in two different places, at two dif?
ferent times, found that these two different interval beverages 
provided solid comfort. 
It seems to me that systadial comparisons of this sort serve 
more than one purpose. They often enhance one's understand?
ing of the individual time periods, limned as each period is by 
the shadow of the other. But of course comparison also reveals 
differences between the periods?and these turn out to be dif?
ferences of a different kind. By this I mean that the original 
comparison, which may seem so outlandish at the start, turns 
out to be useful because the structural-functional similarities 
between the things compared expose in turn other, more impor?
tant differences between them. 
At the outset, it may be difficult to see what could possibly 
be learned from comparing eighteenth-century England with 
the early twentieth-century United States South in any regard; 
and even less from comparing two such different beverages. 
But if it turns out that the comparison does, in fact, bring some?
thing into clearer focus, then the similarities between these 
beverages reveal?by contrast?a new sort of difference. For 
purposes of this comparison, for instance, it is not particularly 
important that one beverage is usually served hot, the other 
usually served cold. It is not even important that one is a com?
pound, whereas the other is made from a single plant. Nor is it 
important?for this sort of comparison?that the time periods 
are different. More important is that tea became a national 
drink, first as the exclusive luxury of the wealthy, and was sup?
ported from the outset by the policies of an imperial govern?
ment, made from products of faraway lands and, soon enough, 
colonies. In contrast, Coca-Cola began as a local hangover 
remedy for ordinary people and only acquired national status 
with the help of good friends in high places, in time of war. Or, 
again, it is more important that at the outset tea was controlled 
by a single distributor?different (although perhaps not too dif?
ferent) from what has happened with Coca-Cola in much more 
recent times. 
Throughout the so-called Third World today, much of it con?
sisting of former British colonies, the half century since the 
Second World War has witnessed a continuous expansion of 
Coca-Cola. In many parts of the world, people whose families 
drank tea for 250 years have been learning to drink Coca-Cola. 
Yet nowhere are masses of Coca-Cola drinkers now learning to 
drink tea. When we anthropologists argue that human beings 
are the only symbol-making and symbol-using creatures, we 
stand on secure ground. But we must also learn to explain, bet?
ter than we have, under what circumstances symbols are cre?
ated for us by others who profit from our capacity to employ 
symbols. Symbol creation can itself be an important source of 
power. If, nearly everywhere in the world, Coke is supplanting 
tea, is that because Coke tastes inherently better? Because it is 
cheaper? Because it is healthier? Because things go better with 
Coke? And if none of those is the right answer, what is the an?
swer?if not the power that Coke connotes, and the cultivated 
need people have to identify with that power? 
Notes 
1. Chocolate was drunk by the indigenous peoples of highland Mexico mixed 
with hot dried peppers (Capsicum spp.), annatto (Bixa orellana L.), and ani?
seed. There are also descriptions of it mixed with honey, but this does not ap?
pear to have been important. Coe and Coe (1996:89), for example, described 
chili as a "universally popular" addition to chocolate throughout Mesoamerica 
but listed "honeyed chocolate" as only one of nine sorts of indigenous choco?
late drink. 
2. Pendergrast (1993) thought that I underestimated Coca-Cola's importance 
nationally and internationally during the pre-World War II period. 
3. I have never seen any historical account of the drink called "Cuba libre" 
("Free Cuba"), but I believe that this name for the rum and Coca-Cola drink 
originated at the time of the introduction of Coca-Cola to that country, soon af?
ter the United States occupation. 
4. This was not a trivial matter. When the western Coca-Cola Bottling Com?
pany of Chicago produced a free?and unauthorized?tray with the legend 
"Wherever ginger ale, seltzer or soda is good, Coca-Cola is better," graced by 
a young seminude female in classic European portrait style, the parent com?
pany, horrified, disavowed the tray and stopped its distribution. Thereby they 
turned the item into one of the rarest and costliest collectibles in American ad?
vertising art. 
5. There is some humor in the fact that the bottle designer, instructed to cre?
ate a container resembling the kola nut, mistakenly designed one resembling a 
cocoa bean pod. No matter; it turned out to be one of the serendipitous coups of 
modem advertising. 
NUMBER 44 357 
Literature Cited 
Burnett, John 
1966. Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to 
the Present Day. x+296 pages. London: Thomas Nelson. 
Carlton, David L. 
1982. Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920. xii + 313 pages. Baton 
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 
Childe, V. Gordon 
1946. Archaeology and Anthropology. Southwestern Journal of Anthro?
pology, 2(3):243-251. 
Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe 
1996. The True History of Chocolate. 280 pages. London: Thames and 
Hudson. 
Davies, David 
1795. The Case of Labourers in Husbandry. ...8, 200 pages. London: G.G. 
and J. Robinson. 
Hall, Jacqueline Dowd, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu 
Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly, editors 
1987. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. xxiii+ 
468 pages. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 
Harrison, Brian 
1971. Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 
1815-1872. 510 pages. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of 
Pittsburgh Press. 
Hodges, James A. 
1986. New Deal Labor Policy and the Southern Cotton Textile Industry, 
1933-1941. xii+252 pages. Knoxville: University of Tennessee 
Press. 
Lettsom, John C 
1799. The Natural History of the Tea-Tree. ix+102 pages. London: Printed 
by J. Nichols, for Chas. Dilly. 
Louis, J .C, and H.Z. Yazijian 
1980. The Cola Wars. 386 pages. New York: Everest House. 
MacPherson, David 
1812. The History of the European Commerce with India. 6, 440 pages. 
London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. 
Mintz, Sidney W. 
1966. The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area. Cahiers d'Histoire Mondi-
ale, 9(4):912-927. 
1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. xxx+ 
274 pages. New York: Viking. 
Pendergrast, Mark 
1993. For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Unauthorized History of the 
Great American Soft Drink and the Company that Makes It. xvii+ 
556 pages. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 
Rhyne, Jennings J. 
1930. Some Southern Cotton Mill Workers and Their Villages, x+214 
pages. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 
Smith, Woodruff 
1992. Complications of the Commonplace: Tea, Sugar and Imperialism. 
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23(2):259-278. 
Sturtevant, William C. 
1961. Taino Agriculture. In Johannes Wilbert, editor, The Evolution of 
Horticultural Systems in Native South America: Causes and Conse?
quences?A Symposium. Antropologica, supplement, 2:69-82 
[Spanish text, pages 120-125]. Caracas: Sociedad de Ciencias Natu-
rales La Salle. 
1969. History and Ethnography of some West Indian Starches. In P.J. 
Ucko and G.W. Dimbleby, editors, The Domestication and Exploita?
tion of Plants and Animals, pages 177-199. London: Gerald Duck?
worth and Co. 
1979. Black Drink and Other Caffeine-Containing Beverages among 
Non-Indians. In Charles M. Hudson, editor, Black Drink: A Native 
American Tea, pages 150-165. Athens: The University of Georgia 
Press. 
Thelwall, A.S. 
1839. The Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China. ...x+178 pages. Lon?
don: W.H. Allen 
Ukers, William H. 
1935. All about Tea. Volume 1: xxix+796 pages. New York: The Tea and 
Coffee Trade Journal Co. 
Waley, Arthur 
1958. The Opium War through Chinese Eyes. 257 pages. London: Allen 
and Unwin. 
Watters, Pat 
1978. Coca-Cola: An Illustrated History, xv+288 pages. Garden City, 
New York: Doubleday. 
Wright, Thomas 
1867. Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes; By a Journeyman 
Engineer, x+276 pages. London: Tinsley Bros. 

REQUIREMENTS FOR SMITHSONIAN SERIES PUBLICATION 
Manuscripts intended for series publication receive substantive 
review (conducted by their originating Smithsonian museums or 
offices) and are submitted to the Smithsonian Institution Press with 
Form SI-36, which must show the approval of the appropriate 
authority designated by the sponsoring organizational unit. Requests 
for special treatment?use of color, foldouts, case-bound covers, 
etc.?require, on the same form, the added approval of the 
sponsoring authority. 
Review of manuscripts and art by the Press for requirements of 
series format and style, completeness and clarity of copy, and 
arrangement of all material, as outlined below, will govern, within the 
judgment of the Press, acceptance or rejection of manuscripts and 
art. 
Copy must be prepared on typewriter or word processor, 
double-spaced, on one side of standard white bond paper (not 
erasable), with 1VV margins, submitted as ribbon copy (not carbon 
or xerox), in loose sheets (not stapled or bound), and accompanied 
by original art. Minimum acceptable length is 30 pages. 
Front matter (preceding the text) should include: title page with 
only title and author and no other information; abstract page with 
author, title, series, etc., following the established format; table of 
contents with indents reflecting the hierarchy of heads in the paper; 
also, foreword and/or preface, if appropriate. 
First page of text should carry the title and author at the top of the 
page; second page should have only the author's name and 
professional mailing address, to be used as an unnumbered footnote 
on the first page of printed text. 
Center heads of whatever level should be typed with initial caps of 
major words, with extra space above and below the head, but no 
otiier preparation (such as all caps or underline, except for the 
underline necessary for generic and specific epithets). Run-in 
paragraph heads should use period/dashes or colons as necessary. 
Tabulations within text (lists of data, often in parallel columns) can 
be typed on the text page where they occur, but they should not 
contain rules or numbered table captions. 
Formal tables (numbered, with captions, boxheads, stubs, rules) 
should be submitted as carefully typed, double-spaced copy 
separate from the text; they will be typeset unless otherwise 
requested. If camera-copy use is anticipated, do not draw rules on 
manuscript copy. 
Taxonomic keys in natural history papers should use the 
aligned-couplet form for zoology and may use the multi-level indent 
form for botany. If cross referencing is required between key and text, 
do not include page references within the key, but number the 
keyed-out taxa, using the same numbers with their corresponding 
heads in the text. 
Synonymy in zoology must use the short form (taxon, author, 
yearpage), with full reference at the end of the paper under 
literature Cited." For botany, the long form (taxon, author, 
abbreviated journal or book title, volume, page, year, with no 
reference in "Literature Cited") is optional. 
Text-reference system (author, yearpage used within the text, 
with full citation in "Literature Cited" at the end of the text) must be 
used in place of bibliographic footnotes in all Contributions Series 
and Is strongly recommended in the Studies Series: "(Jones, 
1910:122)" or "...Jones (1910:122)." If bibliographic footnotes are 
required, use the short form (author, brief title, page) with the full 
citation in the bibliography. 
Footnotes, when few in number, whether annotative or biblio?
graphic, should be typed on separate sheets and inserted immedi?
ately after the text pages on which the references occur. Extensive 
notes must be gathered together and placed at the end of the text in 
a notes section. 
Bibliography, depending upon use, is termed "Literature Cited," 
"References," or "Bibliography." Spell out titles of books, articles, 
journals, and monographic series. For book and article titles use 
sentence-style capitalization according to the rules of the language 
employed (exception: capitalize all major words in English). For 
journal and series titles, capitalize the initial word and all subsequent 
words except articles, conjunctions, and prepositions. Transliterate 
languages that use a non-Roman alphabet according to the Library 
of Congress system. Underline (for italics) titles of journals and 
series and titles of books that are not part of a series. Use the 
parentheses/colon system for volume (number):pagination: 
"10(2):5-9." For alignment and arrangement of elements, follow the 
format of recent publications in the series for which the manuscript is 
intended. Guidelines for preparing bibliography may be secured from 
Series Section, SI Press. 
Legends for illustrations must be submitted at the end of the 
manuscript, with as many legends typed, double-spaced, to a page 
as convenient. 
Illustrations must be submitted as original art (not copies) 
accompanying, but separate from, the manuscript. Guidelines for 
preparing art may be secured from the Series Section, SI Press. AH 
types of illustrations (photographs, line drawings, maps, etc.) may be 
intermixed throughout the printed text. They should be termed 
Figures and should be numbered consecutively as they will appear 
in the monograph. If several illustrations are treated as components 
of a single composite figure, they should be designated by lowercase 
italic letters on the illustration; also, in the legend and in text 
references the italic letters (underlined in copy) should be used: 
"Figure 9b." Illustrations that are intended to follow the printed text 
may be termed Plates, and any components should be similarly 
lettered and referenced: "Plate 9b." Keys to any symbols within an 
illustation should appear on the art rather than in the legend. 
Some points of style: Do not use periods after such abbrevia?
tions as "mm, ft, USNM, NNE." Spell out numbers "one" through 
"nine" in expository text, but use digits in all other cases if possible. 
Use of the metric system of measurement is preferable; where use of 
the English system is unavoidable, supply metric equivalents in 
parentheses. Use the decimal system for precise measurements and 
relationships, common fractions for approximations. Use day/month/ 
year sequence for dates: "9 April 1976." For months in tabular listings 
or data sections, use three-letter abbreviations with no periods: "Jan, 
Mar, Jun," etc. Omit space between initials of a personal name: "J.B. 
Jones." 
Arrange and paginate sequentially every sheet of manuscript 
in the following order: (1) title page, (2) abstract, (3) contents, (4) 
foreword and/or preface, (5) text, (6) appendices, (7) notes section, 
(8) glossary, (9) bibliography, (10) legends, (11) tables. Index copy 
may be submitted at page proof stage, but plans for an index should 
be indicated when the manuscript is submitted.