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Home , American Anthropologist, Clark Wissler, Edward Sapir, Frank Speck, Leslie White

in the Correspondence

PIERRE SWIGGERS University of Leuven

The Library of the American Philosophical Society1 has, among other in­ teresting collections relating to the American Indian, an extensive Frank Speck collection. The latter, recently catalogued by David Van Keuren (1986:72-73), comprises: (1) manuscript correspondence, including letters to and from , J. Alden Mason, and Richard Shryock (2) Indian manuscripts, including Catawba texts, Wiyot-Yurok and Algonquian comparisons, and thousands of leaves concerning the Delaware Big House Ceremony, the Naskapi, and the Penobscot (most of these materials have been published) (3) 32 boxes of papers, which include folders, photographs, diaries, reels of movie film, miscellaneous notes, and further correspondence (4) recordings of , Naskapi, Penobscot, Sioux and Winnebago The Speck collection is of primary importance to ethnohistorians, an­ thropologists and linguists. The value of this collection has been gauged by Anthony Wallace in his contribution to the 1968 APS conference on the American Indian (Wallace 1968). There is first the fact that some of the notes (e.g., on Eastern tribes) remain unpublished; then there is the bulk of photographs and film material constituting an impressive collection, with identification of the individuals (e.g., the material regarding the Naskapi); and finally there is the interesting professional correspondence. As noted by Wallace, this correspondence (as well as the notes) should be placed in a kind of oral history — of the scholar, of his fieldwork , of his correspondents.

JI would like to thank the staff of the APS Library for their generous help and advice: Dr. Edward C. Carter III, Librarian, and Elisabeth Carroll-Horrocks, Roy Goodman, and Martin Leavitt. Thanks are also due to Henry Hoenigswald for his much appreciated guidance. Research for this paper was made possible through a grant from the American Philosophical , and through financial support by the Belgian National Science Foundation and the Catholic University of Leuven.

317 318 PIERRE SWIGGERS

The correspondence, which fills four large boxes, includes letters from „.d to Franz Boas, , Alfred Kidder, Alfred Kroeber, Edward an Sapir, Carl Voegelin, , , Alexander Goldenweiser, and John Swanton. The Boas and Sapir letters are complementary and partially overlapping with respect to two other collections: the Franz Boas professional correspondence, which is also in the Library of the APS (there are 93 Boas-Speck letters, 50 to Boas and 43 to Speck), and Edward Sapir's correspondence in the National Museum of Man in Ottawa, recently cata­ logued by Dallaire (1985).2 In what follows I would like to offer a short analysis of Sapir's presence in the Speck papers, which is both interesting from the human and the scientific point of view. Sapir was on very close terms with Speck and his family, and their friendship dates from before 1909, when Sapir was instructor of at the University of Pennsylvania (a job he held from 1908 to 1910), and when Speck was instructor of at the same university and simultaneously assistant curator at the university museum. The two men probably knew each other as students in 1905-1906 (in 1907— 1908 Sapir was instructor at the University of at Berkeley). Their cordial relationship is manifest from a number of post cards sent by Sapir to Speck. On September 14, 1910 Sapir sent Speck a post card from Victo­ ria, British Columbia, with the following text: "Dear Frank, here's some johnny-cake for you to be preserved in your ethnological album. So far expedition has met with no serious accidents. Will decamp in a day or two for a Nootka village, will let you know later where. Best regards to Florence." A few days earlier, on September 9, he had written him in a more familiar way: "Dear Frank, let me know by wireless whether you are already married. If so, good luck. If not, damn you for a sluggard." Thanks to a post card representing a Hopi woman in wedding dress, and stamped "Grand Canyon, May 6 A.M. 1908, ARIZ." we can reconstruct a further bit of Sapir's travels. On the back we read: "To let you know to have her rig up when you get ready to stop batching, E.S." Before we move to the letters, one further post card should be men­ tioned in view of its relevance to Sapir's career. The text of this post card (stamped Brooklyn, May 13, 1908, N.Y.) reads: "Just arrived in Gotham this morning (May 12th). Doctor's exam takes place on the morning of May 20th Shall perhaps see you in a few days. Let me hear from you Yours, E.S. J

2Two other letters of Sapir to Speck (August 1, 1918; January 11, 1924) separately catalogued in the APS; they have been edited by Gursky (1969) are FRANK SPECK CORRESPONDENCE 319

Sapir's letters in the Speck papers cover the period January 16, 1911- October 2, 1924. Almost all were written in Ottawa, with the exception of a letter sent on June 11, 1912 from Boston (this letter was written in Florence Sapir's room in the Baptist Hospital in Boston), and a sequence of three letters from the summer of 1915, which Sapir wrote in Berkeley. The letters written in Boston and Berkeley are all handwritten, and so are the first two letters sent from Ottawa (January 16, 1911; September 13, 1911) and two later letters dated August 2, 1913 and July 24, 1916. A significant fact to be noted is that the remaining letters, which are typed, often contain handwritten post-scripta, most of them dealing with confidential or more personal matters. I think this fact merits our attention, since it suggests a possible distinction in Sapir's mind between official correspondence (in his quality of head of the Anthropology Department in the Memorial Museum) and private exchange.3 To give just one example: the long post-script to the letter of October 2, 1924, which contains Sapir's appreciation of the conservative attitude of Boas and his followers (see below) is a handwritten addition to a five-line letter which has nothing exciting about it ("Dear Frank, thanks very much for your letter of September 22nd from Gloucester. I shall let Mr. Young know what you have to say about the photographs that he submitted to Smith. With best wishes.") What information do the Sapir letters give us? I would distinguish be­ tween three types: (1) social information concerning the family; (2) official and semi-official information regarding projects, museum policy, theoretical and descriptive problems in ; and (3) personal appreciations of scholars and scientific attitudes. In the firstcategor y I would put Sapir's presentation of his wife-to-be, Florence Delson, which we find in the first letter of the series: "As to your well-meant attempt to find out whether I am really in love, I suggest that you leave the whole matter in my hands. I shall only say that Florence Delson is absolutely [underlined by Sapir] penniless, much to my delight. Some day, when you have learned to behave, I may try to have you see her." Parts of the letter written from Boston (containing information on Florence's health) and the handwritten post-script4 to a letter of December 6, 1916 also belong here, as well as the greeting formulae, which testify to the cordial relationships between the families.

3 One should also take into account the fact that the official letters were prob­ ably all typed by a secretary. Sapir's handwritten corrections on the typed letters indicate that the letters were not typed by himself. 4 "Thanks for the postal photograph of your baby. He is evidently a fine specimen of humanity. I am sure you and your wife must be very proud of him. Please give her my regards. My own boy, Philip, and his mother are progressing satisfactorily on the whole." 320 PIERRE SWIGGERS As to the second category, there are many letters which concern the arrangements made between the Geological Survey and Speck: provision of grants, collecting of ethnological material, buying of fieldworker s ma­ terial by the Museum. It seems that Speck and the Memorial Museum had intensive and very correct dealings: they exchanged negatives and prints of many Indian tribes (Penobscot, Montagnais, Malecite, Huron, Abenaki; letters of February 2, 1912 and December 15, 1917), and on several occa­ sions Sapir mentions the possibility of the Museum buying some of Speck's material (letters of June 11, 1912;5 June 28, 1915; January 4, 1916). In the same category belong the letters concerning manuscripts sent by Speck to the Geological Survey for eventual publication in one of the Museum series (see e.g., the letters of August 2, 1913; September 6, 1913; May 21, 1915; July 17, 1915; August 18, 1915; undated [proposed date: mid-November 1915]; June 11, 1917; November 2, 1917; February 25, 1918; February 27, 1918). Publication of these manuscripts was slow, and in his (handwritten) letter of August 2, 1913 Sapir writes: "Your second art paper has not yet been submitted for publication. Your firstmus t be safely [underlined by Sapir] pigeon-holed somewhere, so don't worry! Really, I can't say when it will be published. They're slower than mud here. If you wish me to tell you something in my capacity of friend, not Survey official, then better send smaller papers that you wish to see out soon (like your Naskapi myths) to "American ", for we have as yet no means of getting things out quickly." (See also Sapir's letter of July 17, 1915). Far more interesting is the information concerning Sapir's projects, field work and theoretical conceptions. Sapir tells Speck (and us) about his success in obtaining ethnological material at a moderate price (letter of January 16, 1911), and about his fieldwor k among the Montagnais and the Cree. In an interesting letter (September 13, 1911), Sapir provides detailed information about his linguistic work relating to the Algonquian and Iroquian :

... I managed to get a few things that you had not taken yourself, including some Mistassini Naskopie material that there was around. I had time also to

' "Now, as regards your collecting museum material for us, I understand from Smith that you will probably spend about $500 on your trip. As this sum does not seem large, I see no reason why we in Ottawa should not be prepared to purchase practically all, or indeed actually all, ethnological museum material you n y Ur ay Y U mUSt already realize from vour 3 fit,? ° ° , I '1 ° experience with us that there is no difficulty about our being able to purchase material from you at rates satisfactory to yourself. I should say that I could recommend purchase from you of $300 worth of lower St. Lawrence (and Newfoundland) material - tins would be mainly Montagnais (and Nascopie), of course, but you^nS also pick up Newfoundland Micmac specimens." g ° FRANK SPECK CORRESPONDENCE 321 take down some Montagnais linguistic notes, as well as some Cree from Mrs. Robertson, who comes from Rupert's House. I gather from what she said that Cree and Montagnais are not only mutually intelligible but practically dialects of one form of speech. It struck me, though of course my experience in Algonkin is very limited, that Montagnais is spoken with rather more energy than Delaware or Abenaki, both of which are rather lazy-sounding. At Riviere du Loup I saw Thomas Paul and got some Malecite from him. Malecite is not easy [underlined by Sapir]. As peculiarities I noticed: very weak initial n- "I" before consonants ("d/mto*, probably ndlinctqc); half- articulated initial p- before m- (Pmfcsa-, ?m- probably m with hardly audible voiceless non-nasal lip closure preceding; word cited seems to correspond to Fox pemusd-; I with syllabic value, even long sometimes (thus in dldAkcw there is no vowel between d and long I). Micmac, which I heard at Cacoma, seems easy enough phonetically; G like N. German 7 in Tage, velar voiced spirant, is about all that is in any way out of the ordinary; voiceless w (e.g. neuwt? "one") may also be mentioned. Delaware has voiceless vowels initially as well as finally:ca 6tn "stone" (6 = th in English thin) as compared with Fox Asen1, Montagnais as'ini) (s halfway between s and c; don't you think this is preferable to s-, which I used in Takelma and Yana?); Abenaki slnc shows initial a- dropped entirely (both a- and «- reappear in possessive n-d-asni-mc "my stone"). Delaware often has whole final syllables that are voiceless: wikwaFmlli "houses" . . . Equally fascinating are the interim reports on Sapir's work with . On May 21, 1915 Sapir writes from Ottawa: "I shall probably be leaving within a month for . I have made arrangements with the University of California to do some linguistic work on Southern Yana with the last survivor of the tribe." The three following letters (June 28, July 17 and August 18, 1915), written from Berkeley, give us some idea of Sapir's progress. On June 28 Sapir writes: "I had my firsthal f day with Ishi today and am quite discouraged. He speaks very poor English and is very difficult to nail down. However, if nothing else, I can at least get vocabularies as material for comparative Yanan phonetics. He's a fine specimen of an Indian personally and quite effable." The next letter strikes a more positive note: "I am getting on fairly well with Ishi. He talks almost no English, but my knowledge of N. and C. Yana helps out considerably. His S. Yana is not so different, after all. I can get him to dictate texts quite well now, but it's the mischief of a job to get them interpreted! Anyhow, I don't think my trip will be a failure." And the last letter of this sequence offers a balanced view: "My work with Ishi is necessarily very slow (he talks hardly a word of English, and there is no Chinook to use as lingua franca!), but I am getting on reasonably well. Luckily he's very tractable. For one thing, I succeeded in getting a remarkably full and interesting set of terms of relationship from him." 322 PIERRE SWIGGERS

As to Sapir's theoretical conceptions, the letters help us to trace the genesis and follow the of some of these. In hisfirst letter following his trip to Berkeley Sapir informs Speck that he is "just now working on a methodological paper on time perspective in American " (undated letter, written in November 1915), and in his letter of July 24, 1916 he out­ lines a number of projects and publications in progress, relating to Nootka, Southern Paiute (see also letter of December 15, 1917), Yana, Arapaho, and announces the forthcoming publication of his papers on "Time Perspective" and "Terms of Relationship and the Levirate" (Sapir 1916a, 1916b):

No wonder you can't do much! I have two little beggars around and I know what it means. What am I doing? I'm supposed to do so many different things that I'm afraid I waste much valuable time and energy. I don't seem to progress much. Just now I'm putting together notes on Nootka religion for an article that Swanton contributes on West Coast religion to Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Then too I'm in the midst of the preliminary work for a grammar of S. Paiute which I have promised Boas. It is a big job, as I am planning to do it very thoroughly. I have had 200 pp. of typewriting done of my large report on Na- for our Memoir series for over a year, but have not touched it since my Californian trip. Have recently gathered good evidence to show that Washo is Hokan (I recently sent Kroeber a paper on "The Position of Yana in the " for his series.) I suppose the next thing of mine to come out will be a paper on "Terms of Relationship and the Levirate" in the , after which will probably appear a rather ambitious methodological paper on "Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture" in our series . . . One thing that now interests me is Arapaho. I have gone through Kroeber's recently published "Arapaho dialects". He missed many interesting points of Algonkian and I'm thinking of writing a thorough study of comparative Arapaho for our series. I incline to believe that Arapaho and Cheyenne belong together after all to one group. There are some interesting special points they have in common. E.g., Algonkin -Jfc- becomes -'- in both (e.g. Arapaho Oi'a "9", Cheyenne so'o- . . .)

The letters provide also some interesting information on Sapir's clas­ sificatory hypotheses. The Algonquian-Ritwan connection (see Sapir 1913; cf. Swiggers 1988) turns up in two letters. On February 18, 1915 Sapir thanks Specks for his notes on Penobscot correspondences for Yurok and Wiyot terms, and adds:

Some of your examples seem suggestive. I suspect that your remark about w- of Penobscot corresponding to m- of other Algonkin dialects may not be quite well taken. I would rather be inclined to imagine that this w- is really 3rd person possessive prefix, it being, indeed found in that form, as well as oft). in most Algonkin dialects. Not all Algonkin dialects seem to have prefixed m- in absolute forms of body-part nouns. Thus, this prefix would seem to be lacking, or at least only sparsely represented in Ojibwa, while extremelv common in Cree and Micmac. "emeiy FRANK SPECK CORRESPONDENCE 323

And more than two years later (letter of June 11, 1917), Sapir reverts to the Algonquian-Ritwan connection from the point of view of systems: "Kroeber's California Kinship Systems just came in. I've glanced rapidly at Yurok. Kroeber points out that it (probably also Wiyot, for which there are few data) differs toto coelo from all other Californian sys­ tems in confounding relationship via male or female (e.g. "grandfather" embraces "paternal grandfather" and "maternal grandfather") and in not having reciprocal terms (e.g. "grandfather" is not = "man's grandchild"). But in these matters Yurok precisely agrees with Algonkin, if I am not mistaken. This is highly suggestive and important." Sapir's bird's-eye view of the languages of North America (Sapir 1921, 1929), involving a classification into six stocks, is fully stated6 in a letter dated October 9, 1920:

... I have far-reaching ideas these days in regard to North-American Indian linguistics, some of which will set our friends, the conservatives, by the ears. I have again been greatly interested in Athabaskan and expect to continue one of these days an elaborate work I had begun on Na-dene relations. I feel now that all the linguistic groups in America from the Maya and Aztec north and including the Eskimo may be classified into six large divisions, each of which I feel to be a genetic unity [handwritten addition below: (Even these 6 may not prove to be entirely unrelated).] The most extensive of these groups is the one I tentatively know as Hokan-Siouan. This extends right across the continent in a great southern bend from the Karok in California to the and Muskogi in the East. Let this be enough for the present. In this letter Sapir refers to the "conservatives", and here we are led into the third type of information: the appreciation of the work and con­ ceptions of other scholars. The Speck letters contain a few judgments and statements on Sapir's contemporaries, and some of these are rather neg­ ative (e.g., letters of January 16, 1911 and February 2, 1912 concerning William Mechling; letter of June 11, 1912 concerning Roland B. Dixon; let­ ter of June 28, 1915 concerning Thomas T. Waterman), whereas others are rather positive (e.g., letter of January 16, 1911 concerning C. Marius Bar- beau; letter of December 15, 1917 concerning Leo J. Frachtenberg) or even laudatory (see the passage concerning in the letter of July 17, 1915, and see also Sapir's recommendation of Radin in his letter of Decem­ ber 6, 1916). But the most interesting appraisal — involving both scholars and methodological stands — is Sapir's extensive handwritten post-script to his letter of October 2, 1914 in which he explicates his use of the term "conservatives":7

6For an earlier, less explicit , see Sapir's letter of August 1, 1918 published by Gursky (1969: 18). 7The passage is quoted, at least in part, by Darnell and Hymes (1986: 223), 324 PIERRE SWIGGERS

I know nothing about a "Reichard situation". You do not mean that anyone has run away with that estimable lady, do you? If you refer to nothing more exciting than her Wiyot work, all I can say is that she does not believe her Wiyot evidence supports my theory of Algonkin-Yurok-Wiyot connection. Undoubtedly I must have made a considerable number of errors of detail, working as I did with Kroeber's fragmentary data, and it will be well to have all there's of dry rot in my papers eliminated, but I cannot see how she can take away from the strength of some of the evidence. At last analysis these controversies boil down to a recognition of two states of mind. There are conservative intellectualists, like Boas (and his camp-followers, Goddard and Reichard for instance), who refuse absolutely to consider far-reaching sugges­ tions unless they can be demonstrated with a crushing mass of evidence and who, unconsciously to themselves, come to consider a failure to make this demonstration equivalent to a real negation. Hence, from an over-anxious desire to be right they generally succeed in being more hopelessly and fun­ damentally wrong, in the long run, then many more superficial minds who are not committed to "principles". (But Boas is so highly inhibited a nature that he has always preferred to show that a thing might not be so than to suggest that it might be.) The second type is more intuitive and, even where the evidence is not as full or theoretically unambiguous as it might be, is prepared to throw out tentative suggestions and to test as it goes along. It begins to build the house, so to speak, before the roof-shingles are delivered. I have no hope whatever of ever getting Boas and Goddard to see through my eyes or to feel with my hunches. I take their opposition like the weather, which might generally be better but which will have to do!

It is with these words, written in Ottawa, that the last Sapir letter in the Frank Speck Papers ends.

REFERENCES

Dallaire, Louise 1984 Edward Sapir's Correspondence: An Alphabetical and Chronologi­ cal Inventory, 1910-1925. Canada. National Museum of Man, Mer­ cury Series, Ethnology Service Paper 97. Ottawa.

but with a few errors. Darnell and Hymes quote the passage beginning from "At last analysis" up to "like Boas", then from "who refuse" to "evidence", again from "Hence" to "principles", from "The second type" to "goes along", and finally from I have till the end. I have noted the following errors: "One, conservative intellectualists (instead of: "There are conservative . . ."); "demonstrated by a mass of evidence" (instead of "demonstrated with a crushing mass of evidence") Instead of even where the evidence . . .» they read "even when . . » Jd although the word is difficult to read, it seems that we should read "where"' Se last letter is certainly not n). * FRANK SPECK CORRESPONDENCE 325

Darnell, Regna, and 1986 Edward Sapir's Six-Unit Classification of American Indian Lan­ guages: The Search for Time Perspective. Pp. 202-244 in Studies in the History of Western Linguistics: In Honour of R.H. Robins. Theodora Bynon and Frank R. Palmer, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gursky, Karl-Heinz 1969 Edward Sapir: Bemerkungen zur Klassifikation der nord- und mit- telamerikanischen Sprachen in zwei Briefen an Frank G. Speck. Ab- handlungen der Volkerkundlichen Arbeitsgemeinschaft 19:18-21. Sapir, Edward 1913 Wiyot and Yurok, Algonkin Languages of California. American Anthropologist 15:617-646. 1916a Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A Study in Method. Anthropological Series IS, Memoirs of the Canadian Geo­ logical Survey 90. Ottawa. 1916b Terms of Relationship and the Levirate. American Anthropologist 18:327-337. 1921 A Bird's-Eye View of American Languages North of Mexico. Science 54:408. 1929 Central and North American Languages. Encyclopaedia Britannica (14th edition) 5:138-141. Swiggers, Pierre 1988 Theoretical Implications of C.C. Uhlenbeck's Algonquian Studies. Pp. 225-234 in Papers of the Nineteenth Algonquian Conference. William Cowan, ed. Ottawa: Carleton University. Van Keuren, David 1986 'The Proper Study of Mankind': An Annotated Bibliography of Man­ uscript Sources on Anthropology & Archeology in the Library of the American Philosophical Society. : American Philo­ sophical Society. Wallace, Anthony F.C. 1968 The Value of the Speck Papers for . Pp. 20-26 in The American Indian. A Conference in the American Philosoph­ ical Society. American Philosophical Society Library Publication 2. Philadelphia.