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Home , Ethnographic village, Fidelia Fielding, Frances Densmore, Frank Hamilton Cushing, Frederick Webb Hodge, Frederic Ward Putnam

MUSEUMS, NATIVE AMERICAN REPRESENTATION, AND THE PUBLIC:

THE ROLE OF MUSEUM IN PUBLIC HISTORY, 1875-1925

By

Nathan Sowry

Submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

July 12, 2020 Date

2020

American University

Washington, D.C. 20016

© COPYRIGHT

by

Nathan Sowry

2020

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For Leslie, who has patiently listened to me, aided me, and supported me throughout this entire process.

And for my parents, David Sowry and Rebecca Lash, who have always encouraged the pursuit of learning.

MUSEUMS, NATIVE AMERICAN REPRESENTATION, AND THE PUBLIC:

THE ROLE OF IN PUBLIC HISTORY, 1875-1925

BY

Nathan Sowry

ABSTRACT

Surveying the most influential U.S. museums and World’s Fairs at the turn of the twentieth century, this study traces the rise and professionalization of museum anthropology during the period now referred to as the Golden Age of American Anthropology, 1875-1925.

Specifically, this work examines the lives and contributions of the leading and

Native collaborators employed at these museums, and charts how these individuals explained, enriched, and complicated the public’s understanding of Native American . Confronting the notion of anthropologists as either “good” or “bad,” this study shows that the reality on the ground was much messier and more nuanced. Further, by an in-depth examination of the lives of a host of Native collaborators who chose to work with anthropologists in documenting the tangible and intangible cultural heritage materials of Native American communities, this study complicates the idea that anthropologists were the sole creators of representations of American

Indians prevalent in museum exhibitions, lectures, and publications. In this way, this work attempts to return some of the humanity and individuality to many of the forgotten players in

American anthropology’s early years, while also revealing some of the power dynamics involved. Regardless of their sympathy for the hardships suffered by Native American communities, nearly all of the anthropologists portrayed herein ascribed to the common belief that American Indians were a vanishing people, doomed to assimilate to American society or disappear. At the same time, anthropologists also depicted American Indians as existing in an ethnographic present, frozen in time, and thus beyond the bounds of modern society. This study ii

argues that due in part to such anthropological portrayals in museums and World’s Fairs, large numbers of the mainstream public chose to willfully ignore the suffering and marginalization of

Native Americans as the federal government corralled them onto reservations, compelled them to attend Indian Boarding Schools, and forced them to abandon their cultures.

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PREFACE

In the fifty-year period between approximately 1875 and 1925, mainstream America’s conception of Native Americans radically transformed from that of savage enemies posing a real and ever-present threat to American tranquility, to the view of a romanticized historical people not only no longer to be feared, but widely considered to no longer exist. Indeed, by the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century large segments of the American public believed Native

Americans had essentially vanished. Such widely-accepted views were due in no small part to the work of anthropologists at World’s Fairs and in recently created natural history and anthropology museums across the country.1 In fact, one of the few places members of the public sought to find “real” or “authentic” American Indians was in these very museums, specifically as anthropologists represented them in exhibits, lectures, and publications produced for mass consumption on educational and entertainment levels.2

This study argues that the representation of Native Americans created and perpetuated in emerging sites of knowledge production such as museums and World’s Fairs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fostered a willingness on the part of large numbers of the American public to ignore the suffering and marginalization of those Native Americans who very much continued to exist in their midst. The presentation of Native Americans as existing in a romanticized past, rather than a turbulent present, allowed the mainstream public to willfully

1 “Museum anthropology,” as many scholars now use the term, incorporates both the idea of anthropology performed in museums as well as the anthropology of museums. In this study, however, the term “museum anthropology” is restricted to those anthropologists employed by museums and other sites of knowledge production, like the BAE, around the turn of the twentieth century, when museums were by and large the only employers of anthropologists.

2 Although emerging contemporaneously with and to some extent influenced by the rise of professional and academic anthropology in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, this study restricts itself largely to American anthropology as it existed within the between the years 1875 and 1925.

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ignore and disregard contemporary American Indians as the federal government carried out deleterious actions that included the corralling of Native communities onto reservations, mandated compulsory attendance in Indian Boarding Schools, and approved the passage of the

1887 Dawes Act with its subsequent break-up of communally-owned Native lands.

Labeled “a century of dispossession” by historian Frederick E. Hoxie, nineteenth-century

America witnessed the creation of a host of federal laws and policies aimed at the eradication of distinctive Native American cultures, histories, and lifeways. Ostensibly promoting the twin goals of “civilizing” and assimilating Native peoples into Euro-American Christian society, the

U.S. federal government systematically separated American Indian communities from their homelands via successive waves of warfare and legal maneuvering.3 In addition to forced removal, Native communities also faced a myriad of culturally-debilitating hardships and indignities once relocated onto federally-mandated reservation lands. These included unsanitary living conditions, (BIA) usurpation of Native leadership roles, and the prohibition on many reservations against the performance of Native dances or religious ceremonies considered to represent “savage and barbarous practices.”4 While family members living on reservations suffered privation and deculturation in their new lands, many Native youth forced to attend distant Indian Boarding Schools far from their families suffered equally if not more so. As a result, much of the economic marginalization and inter-generational trauma still

3 Frederick E. Hoxie, ed., Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), vii.

4 Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian,” 1880- 1900 (Lincoln: University of Press, 1978), 259.

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rampant in American Indian communities today stem from federal policies enacted during this era.5

Directly related to the federal government’s policies of enforced deculturation of

American Indian peoples at the turn of the twentieth century, natural history and anthropology museum professionals were part of a much larger onslaught of destructive forces entering, and perhaps unintentionally weakening, Native communities. Within the classificatory structure of late nineteenth-century museum anthropology, American anthropologists deemed Native

Americans and other non- peoples “primitive” and incapable of producing history.6

While collectively these Indigenous groups were thus worthy of study as remnants of a shared human evolutionary past, anthropologists depicted Native peoples as frozen in an ethnographic present, outside the temporal bounds of the modern world, and fated to either disappear or assimilate into the larger Euro-American society.7

The perception of Native Americans as “savages,” occupying a twilight zone between nature and was not new, drawing as it did on previous generations’ beliefs in and the moral right of Euro-Americans to possess former American Indian lands.8 What was new in the final decades of the nineteenth century, though, was the scientific “fact” of

Native Americans’ low evolutionary state, as broadcast in museums and World’s Fairs across the

5 Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865-1900 (Norman: University of Press, 1976).

6 Tony Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 2004). Among the many scholars and their works which further elaborate this colonizer/colonized relationship of rejecting Indigenous history, a few of particular note include Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of Press, 1997), Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), and Steven Conn’s History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (: Press, 2004).

7 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 93-94.

8 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 77.

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. Racial science, social evolutionist theory, and later the rise of eugenics within the anthropological field all provided further proof that Native Americans were biologically inferior to Euro-Americans.9 Such views proclaimed that the disappearance of the of

North America, though lamentable, was equally inevitable. It was considered both a mercy and a scientific obligation, then, for anthropologists to capture all the information they could on this

“vanishing race” before it disappeared from the world, practicing what is now termed “salvage anthropology.”10 More than any other factor, the practice of salvage anthropology effectively separated and alienated Native peoples from their tangible and intangible cultural heritage materials, with the end result of placing these objects in distant museums, far from their creators and users.

Of the extremely rich and varied materials anthropologists salvaged or sought during their fieldwork were physical objects such as clothing, basketry, weapons, and sacred items; linguistic patterns, songs, myths, and folklore, recorded textually and later on wax cylinders; images of everyday life and culture, captured through paintings, photographs, and film; and even the collecting of Native skeletal remains.11 Once gathered, it was the museum ’s responsibility to organize, preserve, study, and exhibit these tangible and intangible materials, thereby informing, educating, and in many cases entertaining future generations about those whom their civilization had overcome. Although anthropologists often

9 Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 5; Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 284; Robert E. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880: The Early Years of American (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 250.

10 Deloria, Playing Indian, 90.

11 Samuel J. Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific to Human Prehistory in Museums (Cambridge: Press, 2016).

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claimed such work to be objective, anthropology was hardly a neutral science. Fetishizing and commodifying Indigenous objects, cultures, and bodies, museum anthropologists at the turn of the twentieth century wielded significant power and influence over those around them.12 Further, the mere fact that anthropologists sought to “salvage” or save particular elements of American

Indian cultures while generally disregarding the suffering of Native peoples themselves illustrates a glaring disconnect between the aims of museum anthropology at the time and the needs of Native American peoples. Despite the clearly exploitative nature of museum anthropology in general, however, a closer examination of the individuals involved in this work reveals a much more nuanced reality.

Against this backdrop of U.S. colonialism and enforced American Indian marginalization were the actual museum anthropologists and Native collaborators themselves. Men and women, non-Native and Native, the majority of anthropologists and collaborators who dominated the

American anthropological field in its early days tended to be sympathetic toward American

Indians as well as passionate about preserving the histories, cultures, and beliefs of these supposedly vanishing peoples. Paradoxically, few of these same anthropologists ever sought to actively advocate for or attempt to ameliorate the living conditions and colonized status of the peoples they studied. In this way, the often self-interested, self-serving, and even contradictory actions and writings of many turn-of-the-twentieth-century anthropologists fit squarely into the broader context of middle-class America and its embrace of the pluralist reform movements then sweeping the U.S. and now labeled Progressivism.13

12 Margaret M. Bruchac, Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists (Tucson: University of Press, 2018), 178.

13 Michael E. McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003); Hoxie, Talking Back to Civilization, viii.

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Hardly a monolithic group, early American anthropology consisted of a diverse array of practitioners holding to varying ideas of how best to represent, and in some cases help, American

Indians. Spencer Baird, Lewis Henry Morgan, and , for instance, as members of a self-designated “superior race” believed it their responsibility to protect and aid

Native peoples in their progression from barbarism to civilization.14 and

Alice C. Fletcher, two pioneering anthropologists who advocated for Native American assimilation to Euro-American values, likewise reflected many foundational Progressive elements of middle-class Euro-American Christianity in their fieldwork, lectures, and writings.

Standing in stark contrast to some of their more reform-minded contemporaries were

Frank Hamilton Cushing and James Mooney, both early Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) anthropologists, who championed the preservation of Indigenous lifeways and religious beliefs.

Representing another extreme, and Alfred L. Kroeber generally adhered to a stance of scientific objectivity, removing themselves personally and professionally from the daily hardships of reservation life. The actions of these men contrasted with their anthropological colleagues J.N.B. Hewitt, , and Frank G. Speck who actively advocated for

Native rights.15 Finally, like many of their contemporaries, a number of anthropologists also accepted and promoted social evolutionary beliefs to varying extents. Some, such as WJ McGee and Aleš Hrdlička, ascribed to them more fully, while others like George A. Dorsey and Alanson

14 Lewis Henry Morgan, “Factory Systems on Indian Reservations,” The Nation 23, no. 578 (July 27, 1876): 58; Lewis Henry Morgan, “The Indian Question,” The Nation 27, no. 700 (November 28, 1878): 332; Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis, 263-264.

15 Thomas Buckley, “‘The Little History of Pitiful Events’: The Epistemological and Moral Contexts of Kroeber’s Californian Ethnology,” , Vol. 8: Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed., George W. Stocking, Jr., (Madison: University of Press, 1996), 288.

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Skinner actively challenged popular racial constructs and confronted the widely-accepted idea that Native Americans were inferior.

As this work seeks to illustrate, not all anthropologists can easily be classified into a simple binary of being either “good” or “bad.” History is rarely ever quite so neat, and a closer examination of this time-period and the players involved reveals a much messier and more complicated picture. Some anthropologists were notably indifferent to the hardships they witnessed on reservations, while others were quite vocal in their denunciations of federal policies and missionary attempts to “civilize” Native peoples. Importantly though, all of these anthropologists also worked within a male-dominated power structure that favored the voices of educated Euro-American Protestant men, but which occasionally did permit space for women and Native American anthropologists to also work. By the end of the fifty-year period under review, this power structure and its inclusiveness would significantly change.

No doubt those most directly impacted by the asymmetries of power at play within the anthropological world were the Native collaborators who chose to work alongside anthropologists in documenting and representing Native American cultures to the public.16

Though less well-known today, many of these Native men and women spent the majority of their life’s work preserving the cultural heritage of their communities, and daily confronting the racism, ignorance, and anthropological arrogance of their non-Native peers. Although without the formal educational qualifications of professional anthropologists, these American Indian collaborators nevertheless were the true experts on their cultures’ tangible and intangible cultural heritage, and frequently performed the bulk of the collecting work itself. Usually either confined

16 Jim Enote, “Community & Museums: Thinking Critically About Collaboration,” Smithsonian Roundtable Lecture, , DC, February 1, 2017.

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to a footnote or forgotten altogether in the anthropological literature, this study extensively details the lives and work of collaborators like John V. Satterlee, Robert Spott, Gladys

Tantaquidgeon, and a host of others who fought to not only preserve their cultural heritage for future generations of Native peoples, but also worked tirelessly to correct the often inaccurate or blatantly erroneous anthropological records then depicting their communities.17

In much the same way that this study complicates the accepted notion of early anthropologists as simply either good or bad, so too does it examine the integral role played by

Native collaborators, providing context, humanity, and individuality to so many who have gone unacknowledged in the historical record. While some of these collaborators, Native men like

Tichkematse or D.C. Duvall, only worked within the anthropological realm for a few short years, others including James R. Murie collaborated with a wide number of anthropologists over several decades in order to accurately document those aspects of American Indian cultures he deemed most significant. Regardless of the duration of their work in the employ of particular museums, however, all of these Native men and women were instrumental in creating ethnographic records of their communities that would survive into the future. Viewing anthropological representations of Native Americans as solely the product of non-Native anthropologists, as much of the anthropological literature tends to do, does more than simply disregard the Native individuals involved.18 Significantly and tragically, it obscures and even erases the labor of countless American Indian men and women who resisted a system that told them their cultures were valueless and doomed to disappear.

17 Hoxie, Talking Back to Civilization, 16-17.

18 Margot Liberty, ed., American Indian Intellectuals (St. Paul: West Publishing, 1978), 1-8.

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As anthropologists and Native collaborators were not the only groups interested in Native

American lives, this study also briefly touches on a number of other players involved. Many who would now be labeled “Progressives,” from assimilationists to educators to “Friends of the

Indian,” competed with anthropologists to alter the present and future paths of the Indigenous peoples of the United States.19 Largely representing middle-class, Christian, and Euro-American values and belief systems, these reformers seldom sought the advice or welcomed the opinions of actual Native Americans as they strove for the uplift of all American Indian peoples.20

Some groups, such as Christian reformers and missionaries, endeavored to ostensibly aid

Native American communities. This they attempted through paternalistic laws and federal Indian policies which forced education, assimilation, acculturation, and relocation on American Indians, striving to forcibly transition them from their Native life-ways and belief systems to those which the dominant society deemed best.21 The Dawes, or General Allotment Act of 1887, and the 1893 enactment of mandatory attendance in Boarding and Reservation Schools were some of the fruits borne of these reformers’ efforts to save Native peoples from themselves.22 Founder of the

Carlisle Indian School and author of the infamous phrase “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” was a leader of this latter group as well as one of the most outspoken assimilation advocates of the day.23 Not surprisingly, Pratt often found himself at odds with

19 David Anthony Tyeeme Clark, “Representing Indians: Indigenous Fugitives and the Society of American Indians in the Making of Common Culture,” (PhD diss., University of , Lawrence), 51-52.

20 Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis, 133-134.

21 Bruchac, Savage Kin, 15.

22 Bernd Peyer, ed., American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, -1930s (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 18-20.

23 Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantage of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Corrections (1892), 260-261; Elaine Goodale Eastman, Pratt: The Red Man’s Moses (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1935), 196.

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anthropologists and Native collaborators, among them men like Richard Davis and Cleaver

Warden who were former Carlisle students of Pratt, but had chosen to embrace their American

Indian cultural heritage rather than cast it off as Pratt wished.

Conflict also ensued between early anthropologists and a host of other factions including

Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, Wild West performers, and Native American intellectuals who also warrant brief attention in this study. Dubbed “Red Progressives,” this latter group included

Native men and women like Arthur C. Parker and Gertrude Bonnin who formed the first national

Native American advocacy organization in the United States, the Society of American Indians

(SAI).24 In addition to challenging BIA domination of Native American life on and off of reservations, many SAI members were also highly critical of anthropologists and Wild West performers, who they believed perpetuated stereotypes of American Indians as primitive and backward, rather than as civilized and assimilated Americans worthy of citizenship.25

Simply put, the history of American anthropology has usually been told in one of two ways: either well-meaning anthropologists documented and preserved Native American cultures that were fast disappearing and otherwise would have been lost, or, duplicitous anthropologists used any and all means at their disposal to rob Native peoples of their cultures, physically carrying off tangible and intangible cultural materials to distant museums far from American

Indian communities. In both of these versions, Native peoples are portrayed largely if not wholly as voiceless victims, bereft of agency, and unable to either prevent or aid anthropologists in their work. This study, instead, seeks to show the interrelated lives and overlapping careers of the

24 Hazel W. Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1971), 51-58; Chadwick Allen, “Locating the Society of American Indians,” American Indian Quarterly 37, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 3-4.

25 L.G. Moses, and the Images of American Indians, 1883-1933 (Albuquerque: University of New Press, 1996), 5-8; Hoxie, Talking Back to Civilization, 16-17.

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Native collaborators and museum anthropologists who chose to work together during American anthropology’s infancy. An examination of these individuals, their lives, and work illustrates the richness, complexity, and competing power dynamics integral to the development of anthropological representations of Native Americans at the turn of the twentieth century.

Ultimately, however, those in power – the largely Euro-American male museum anthropologists

– had the final say in depicting Native American cultures to the public via museum exhibitions, lectures, and publications. And the representation that they generally agreed on was that

American Indian peoples were both frozen in time and quickly vanishing.

A comparative study of the lives of these anthropologists and Native collaborators also illuminates the changing nature of the anthropological field during its rapid professionalization and “academization” from 1875 to 1925.26 Lacking formalized academic training, men and women like , Alice C. Fletcher, James Mooney, John Wesley Powell, and Matilda Coxe Stevenson nevertheless represented the highest echelons of professional museum anthropology during the field’s early years. Within a few short decades, however, men such as Franz Boas, Alfred L. Kroeber, and Frank G. Speck, well-situated in university anthropology departments and holding graduate degrees in anthropology and related disciplines, ushered the anthropological field into the twentieth century, and with it, away from museums and into academia. Coinciding with this transition from museums to universities and from a focus on material culture objects to anthropological theory was also a decrease in the number of women anthropologists, Native anthropologists, and Native collaborators employed in the field, as many of these individuals lacked the necessary academic qualifications. With this change in the field’s

26 Regna Darnell, And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in Americanist Anthropology (: John Benjamins, 1998), xi.

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make-up, anthropology, specifically ethnology, became notably less diverse during the early years of the twentieth century than it had been in preceding decades.27

Nominally a history of museum anthropology, this study also intervenes in the fields of

Native American Studies and Public History. Specifically, it examines the rise and professionalization of American anthropology and its influence on how the public conceived of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Investigating the histories of the major U.S. museums of the time, and more importantly, the Native and non-Native men and women who professionalized the field of anthropology within them, this study compares the widespread similarities and notable differences in how these institutions and individuals chose to exhibit and represent Native Americans. Finally, complementing the histories of these museums, this study also traces the interconnected rise of World’s Fairs as sites of knowledge production, and the varying representations of Indigenous peoples anthropologists constructed at each.

The 1876 Philadelphia World’s Fair and the numerous expositions which succeeded it in

Chicago in 1893, Omaha in 1898, St. Louis in 1904, and in 1915 physically and symbolically brought together distant regions and varied of the broader American public. Through the often repeated theme of “progress,” these expositions reaffirmed a collective national identity, one in which changing views on race, evolution, and culture all played a major part.28 Though each World’s Fair was unique in its own way, all of them also advanced middle- class Euro-American Christian values while simultaneously contrasting and exhibiting as

27 Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 6-12; Steven Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 20-22; Tony Bennett et al., Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government (Durham: Duke University, 2017), 1-3.

28 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 4-7.

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primitive or backward those that differed from them.29 While not the sole draw at these expositions, anthropologists and anthropological exhibitions nevertheless played a conspicuous role in disseminating such views.

Though in no way an exhaustive or definitive list, the museums, Indian Crafts

Expositions, and World’s Fairs surveyed herein illustrate a comparative spectrum across the

U.S., both temporally and regionally. Likewise, the lives of individual anthropologists and

Native collaborators examined in this study provide a much richer, though notably messier, picture of how anthropologists worked with Indigenous communities to represent Native cultures. Backed by anthropology’s avowed scientific objectivity and consumed by millions of

Americans over this fifty-year period, the exhibitions, lectures, and publications produced by these museums and World's Fairs played a significant role in shaping how the public understood

Native Americans, both past and present.30

A Few Notes on Historical Context, Timeline, and Wording

Anthropological representations of Native Americans were only one in a myriad of factors that ultimately shaped the public’s understanding of Native peoples. As previous scholars have written at length, depictions of Native Americans were everywhere at the time – in popular dime novels and in high literature, in daily newspapers and in monthly magazines, as performers in ’s Wild West show and depicted on stage on Broadway.31 Anthropology and

29 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 261.

30 Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 77-83.

31 Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Random House, 1979); Conn, History’s Shadow; Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004).

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anthropologists did not control representations of Native Americans. But, by the late nineteenth century with their backing of purportedly objective science, these anthropological representations began to carry much greater authority. Indeed, these representations were viewed by many as nothing less than the pronouncements of scientific experts, of those men and women willing to live among “savage” peoples in “primitive” conditions in order to learn all that they could about a disappearing people.

Although the field of anthropology consists of the four subfields of ethnology (also known as ), physical anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology, only the first, ethnology, is of primary focus here. This reason is due to ethnology’s emphasis on studying living Native cultures in order to learn about, collect, and preserve these peoples’ cultural heritage. Ethnologists, in other words, largely went out into the field, conducted their observations among Native peoples, and then came back to the museum where they disseminated their views to the public. Reflective of the broader American public’s conception of American

Indians, some of these anthropologists supported racist doctrines of the day that towed the social evolutionary line, while others argued vehemently against them.

The specific anthropologists and Native collaborators examined here represent only a fraction of those involved in the discipline’s early days. A number of these individuals are still highly regarded today, many have been forgotten, and at least one, Antonio , was almost certainly an impostor. Further, in some instances only one or two anthropologists are featured per museum, while the staff of the ’s Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) receives much greater attention. This is due in part to the contributions that many of these groundbreaking BAE staff made, while it also emphasizes the lasting influence that the BAE had as the first federal anthropological department in the country.

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Regardless of their more or less well-known contributions to the field of anthropology today, all of the individuals examined in this study shaped the wider public’s understanding of

Native American peoples, past and present. The life experiences of these anthropologists, particularly their political, social, and scientific views, contributed to how they understood

Native peoples, and how in turn these anthropologists presented their views to the public. Thus, each section of this study includes both a biographical sketch of the anthropologist’s life and work, followed by a summary of the anthropologist’s representation of Native American peoples and the public’s resulting consumption of these representations. Combining portraits of these anthropologist’s lives and their reception by the public illuminates the largely unrecognized and lasting influence early museum anthropology and anthropologists had on how large numbers of the American public viewed the Indigenous peoples of North America.

The timeline of this work is bookended by the years 1875 and 1925, fitting broadly into what later anthropologists have labeled the discipline’s “Museum-University Period” or the

“Golden Age of American Anthropology.”32 The former date sheds light on anthropology’s place in American society just before the opening of the 1876 Philadelphia World’s Fair, while the latter date designates the place of anthropology only one year after the 1924 Indian Citizenship

Act which granted citizenship to American Indian and Alaskan Native peoples throughout the country.33 The museums, World’s Fairs, and biographies of the anthropologists and collaborators examined here are all organized chronologically, and with a few exceptions, geographically, as anthropology spread east to west across the country. Within this timeline, then, readers can see

32 William C. Sturtevant, “Does Anthropology Need Museums?,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 82, no. 17 (1969): 622; and Ruth L. Bunzel, eds., The Golden Age of American Anthropology (New York: George Braziller, 1960).

33 Tom Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era (Austin: University of Press, 2005), 182.

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both the role that progressive thought played within the profession, as well as the rapid growth and transition of American anthropology from its changing base in museums and federal institutions to that of academic departments in universities.

Importantly, the museums examined in the following pages did not exist in isolation.

They reflected and were borne out of earlier centuries’ museums and cabinets of curiosity, just as they equally emerged from and paralleled contemporary entertainment shows such as those of

P.T. Barnum and William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Similarly, the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act did not mark the end of the study or exhibition of Native American peoples in U.S. museums or

World’s Fairs. Nevertheless, it marks a transitional shift for anthropology’s seat of power, and with it the study of Native Americans, from the locus of museums to that of universities.

The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed not only the rise and professionalization of the field of anthropology, but also the proliferation of a host of national, regional, and scholarly magazines which provided access to and influence over the minds of large numbers of the American reading public.34 Not surprisingly, nearly all of the anthropologists examined herein embraced the importance of this magazine culture in order to reach their intended audiences, writing for well-known periodicals such as Harper’s Weekly,

Scribner’s Monthly, and The Nation, as well as some less well-known journals including The

American Jewess and Southern Workman. Just as anthropologists like John Wesley Powell and

Franz Boas disseminated their views about Native American communities in the pages of

Science and The , so too did non-Native Christian reformers use The

34 Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996).

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Indian’s Friend, and Native American “Red Progressives” use The Quarterly Journal of the

Society of American Indians to reach larger numbers of their distinctive bases.

A close reading of this era’s countless newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals reveals much about anthropology and anthropologists’ roles, power, and influence in representing Native American peoples to the American public. To adequately gauge public consumption of and reaction to anthropological representations of American Indians, then, this study relies heavily on a wide variety of extant sources. Included in this grouping are newspapers, magazines, and books contemporary to the time, journals and oral histories from members of the public, museum visitor logs, and the personal and professional correspondence of the anthropologists and Native collaborators involved.35

Issues of language are immensely problematic in any study, particularly one of this scope and size. The notion of “the public,” for instance, comprises nearly one hundred million

Americans from various racial, gender, and socio-economic groupings at the turn of the twentieth century. While to a great extent focused on those individuals who frequented museums, occupied a middle- or upper-class economic background, and considered themselves of Euro-American ancestry, the use of the term “the public” applied here is largely, but not solely, restricted to these groups. Similarly, vestiges of colonial language used to classify

Indigenous peoples continue to carry with them immense weight. While the terms Native

American, American Indian, Indigenous, and Native are used interchangeably in this study, they are also recognized misnomers, fraught with shortcomings and ambiguities. Where possible,

35 Redman, Bone Rooms, 6; Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Purchase Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 11-12.

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culturally appropriate and community approved names are incorporated, followed by their more widely-known yet less correct cultural designations in parentheses.

Finally, the term “collaborator” used to identify the non-professional Native men and women who worked with anthropologists is also problematic. While preferred over the formerly conventional anthropological term “informant,” which carries with it a certain pejorative sense, collaborator nevertheless also identifies the underlying power structure of the colonizer over the colonized. Collaborator as it is utilized here is an explicit marker distinguishing those Native

American individuals who for a variety of reasons chose to work with anthropologists as opposed to those who did not. In this usage, then, the term is meant to signify and more appropriately acknowledge the invaluable contributions of those choosing to collaborate, while still recognizing the inherent asymmetry of power between anthropologists and those whom they studied.36

In sum then, this work contributes to the broader scholarly literature by providing a comparative case study of the most influential U.S. natural history and anthropology museums between 1875 and 1925. In many ways this study is a biographical history of not only these museums and World’s Fairs, but more importantly of the Native and non-Native anthropologists and collaborators who worked together during this time period. In examining how these institutions and individuals shaped and influenced mainstream America’s perception of

Indigenous peoples, this study fills in major gaps about early twentieth-century Native American identity, resistance, notions of power, public consumption, and the significant role that anthropology played in each.

36 Enote, “Community & Museums.”

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost I wish to acknowledge the individuals who most directly aided in the conception, writing, and revising of this dissertation, my American University History

Department dissertation committee members, Drs. Dan Kerr, Kate Haulman, and Malgorzata

Rymsza-Pawlowska (MJ). Their collective suggestions and critical insight helped to exponentially strengthen this work. Alongside my AU committee members, I also want to acknowledge the role played by Dr. Laura Schiavo at George Washington University’s Museum

Studies Program, who kindly agreed to serve as my External Reader.

Thanks are also due to a number of former professors whose mentorship guided me along the path to pursuing my doctorate. Among many others, these include Dr. Paula Kane at the

University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Heather Streets-Salter at Northeastern University, and Dr. Michelle

Caswell at UCLA.

Countless family members, friends, and colleagues supported and encouraged me throughout this process, for which I am very grateful. Many of them gave of their time to read various sections or iterations of this dissertation, and a stalwart few even tenaciously, or foolishly, chose to read it in its entirety. For their particularly helpful feedback and constructive criticism, I wish to thank Dr. Trevor James Bond at Washington State University’s Manuscripts,

Archives & Special Collections, Maria Galban and Cécile Ganteaume at the Smithsonian

Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, and Dr. Diana Marsh at the Smithsonian

Institution’s National Anthropological Archives.

Finally, a number of archivists, librarians, and museum professionals also aided me in my research and deserve recognition for their tireless efforts. In no particular order these include

Kristen Mable, Gregory Raml, and Mai Reitmeyer at the American Museum of Natural History,

Armand Esai and Gretchen Rings at the Field Museum, Katherine Meyers Satriano at the xxii

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and Katherine Crowe and Gina Rappaport at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives, as well as the staff members of the Harvard University Archives, Yale University’s Beinecke Library, and the Manuscript

Division at the . I would be remiss if I didn’t also acknowledge the wonderful work of the staff of the Archives Center at the Smithsonian Institution’s National

Museum of the American Indian, which includes Jeremy Gardner, Tazbah Gaussoin, Rachel

Menyuk, Emily Moazami, and Michael Pahn. Their combined efforts to process, digitize, and make accessible the collections in their stewardship helped to make my research that much more successful, rewarding, and enjoyable.

xxiii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

PREFACE ...... iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... xxii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... xxvi

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS...... xxxi

EXPOSITION 1 1876 PHILADELPHIA WORLD’S FAIR ...... 1

CHAPTER 1 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION AND THE BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY ...... 12

SECTION 1-1 JOHN WESLEY POWELL (1834-1902) ...... 24

SECTION 1-2 FRANK HAMILTON CUSHING (1857-1900) ...... 35

SECTION 1-3 MATILDA COXE STEVENSON (1849-1915) ...... 51

SECTION 1-4 J.N.B. HEWITT (1859-1937) ...... 64

SECTION 1-5 JAMES MOONEY (1861-1921) ...... 74

SECTION 1-6 (1867-1957) ...... 85

SECTION 1-7 FRANCIS LA FLESCHE (1857-1932) ...... 92

CHAPTER 2 PEABODY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY ...... 104

SECTION 2-1 (1839-1915) ...... 110

SECTION 2-2 ALICE C. FLETCHER (1838-1923)...... 115

CHAPTER 3 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY...... 129

SECTION 3-1 FRANK G. SPECK (1881-1950) ...... 139

SECTION 3-2 LOUIS SHOTRIDGE (1883-1937) ...... 150

EXPOSITION 2 1893 CHICAGO WORLD’S FAIR ...... 161

CHAPTER 4 FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY ...... 173

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SECTION 4-1 GEORGE A. DORSEY (1868-1931) ...... 180

SECTION 4-2 WILLIAM JONES (1871-1909) ...... 194

CHAPTER 5 AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY ...... 204

SECTION 5-1 FRANZ BOAS (1858-1942) ...... 214

SECTION 5-2 ALANSON SKINNER (1886-1925) ...... 228

SECTION 5-3 (1870-1947) ...... 244

EXPOSITION 3 1898 OMAHA WORLD’S FAIR ...... 256

CHAPTER 6 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, ANTHROPOLOGY MUSEUM ...... 265

SECTION 6-1 ALFRED L. KROEBER (1876-1960) ...... 275

EXPOSITION 4 1904 ST. LOUIS WORLD’S FAIR ...... 292

CHAPTER 7 ANTONIO APACHE AND THE INDIAN CRAFTS EXPOSITION (ca. 1870-1938) ...... 308

EXPOSITION 5 1915 SAN DIEGO WORLD’S FAIR ...... 323

CHAPTER 8 AND THE MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN, HEYE FOUNDATION (1874-1957) ...... 331

SECTION 8-1 M.R. HARRINGTON (1882-1971) ...... 347

SECTION 8-2 AMOS ONEROAD (1884-1937) ...... 356

CONCLUSION ...... 364

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 372

xxv

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration

Figure 1. Poster Advertising the Philadelphia World’s Fair, 1876 ...... 1

Figure 2. Smithsonian Institution Secretary Spencer Baird, ca. 1880 ...... 3

Figure 3. Smithsonian Institution Exhibit, Philadelphia World’s Fair, 1876 ...... 9

Figure 4. Smithsonian Institution Castle, 1885 ...... 12

Figure 5. Display of Apache “Lay Figures” or Mannequins in U.S. National Museum, ca. 1910 ...... 15

Figure 6. BAE Director John Wesley Powell, ca. 1890 ...... 17

Figure 7. Andrew John, Jr., 1898 ...... 19

Figure 8. Mannequins on Display in U.S. National Museum Exhibit Hall, ca. 1900 ...... 21

Figure 9. John Wesley Powell, ca. 1898 ...... 24

Figure 10. Powell Survey Members, Green River, Wyoming, May 1871 ...... 25

Figure 11. John Wesley Powell (on left) and Members of Geological Survey, 1874 ...... 27

Figure 12. Lewis Henry Morgan, ca. 1875 ...... 32

Figure 13. Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1879 ...... 35

Figure 14. Tichkematse, ca. 1880 ...... 37

Figure 15. Spencer Baird, 1880...... 38

Figure 16. Frank Hamilton Cushing with A:shiwi (Zuni) and Visitors to the East Coast, 1882 ...... 41

Figure 17. Emily Magill Cushing, Wife of Frank Hamilton Cushing, ca. 1926 ...... 43

Figure 18. Frank Hamilton Cushing Dressed in Native Clothing, ca. 1880 ...... 48

Figure 19. Matilda Coxe Stevenson, ca. 1870 ...... 51

Figure 20. James Stevenson with Unidentified Southwest Native Peoples, 1872 ...... 52

Figure 21. We’wha in Washington, DC, 1886 ...... 56

Figure 22. Illustrated Police News Cartoon of Matilda Coxe Stevenson in Zuni, March 6, 188660

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Figure 23. J.N.B. Hewitt in Office, ca. 1900 ...... 64

Figure 24. Erminnie Smith with Officers of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1885...... 66

Figure 25. J.N.B. Hewitt (on right), Onondaga Reservation, New York, ca. 1928 ...... 68

Figure 26. James Mooney, ca. 1893 ...... 74

Figure 27. James Mooney, ca. 1900 ...... 78

Figure 28. Richard Henry Pratt, 1879 ...... 81

Figure 29. Frances Densmore, 1899 ...... 85

Figure 30. Frances Densmore and Posed with a Phonograph Machine, Washington, DC, 1916 ...... 88

Figure 31. Francis La Flesche, ca. 1885 ...... 92

Figure 32. Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, ca. 1890 ...... 104

Figure 33. Peabody Museum North American Gallery, ca. 1890 ...... 107

Figure 34. Frederic Ward Putnam, ca. 1890 ...... 110

Figure 35. Alice C. Fletcher, ca. 1850 ...... 115

Figure 36. Alice C. Fletcher, Meepe, and Martha, , Nebraska, 1888 .. 117

Figure 37. James Reuben, ca. 1890 ...... 119

Figure 38. James R. Murie, 1907 ...... 121

Figure 39. Free Museum of Science and Art, 1899 ...... 129

Figure 40. George Byron Gordon, ca. 1920 ...... 131

Figure 41. Free Museum of Science and Art, North American Gallery, 1912 ...... 135

Figure 42. Frank G. Speck in his Office, ca. 1930 ...... 139

Figure 43. Janie Harmon and , 1922 ...... 142

Figure 44. Gladys Tantaquidgeon and Russell Clark, 1922 ...... 143

Figure 45. Louis Shotridge, 1912 ...... 150

Figure 46. Florence Shotridge Dressed in Plains Indian Clothing, 1912 ...... 153

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Figure 47. Anthropological Building, Chicago World’s Fair, 1893 ...... 161

Figure 48. Buffalo Bill Cody and Unidentified Native Performers, ca. 1890 ...... 163

Figure 49. Wild West Native Performers, Staten Island, New York, 1888 ...... 165

Figure 50. Smithsonian Institution Exhibit, Chicago World’s Fair, 1893 ...... 169

Figure 51. Field Museum, 1907...... 173

Figure 52. Field Museum, North American Ethnology Hall, ca. 1896 ...... 177

Figure 53. Field Museum, Hopi House Diorama with Mannequins, ca. 1900 ...... 178

Figure 54. George A. Dorsey, 1907 ...... 180

Figure 55. Cleaver Warden, 1895 ...... 182

Figure 56. Richard Davis, 1904 ...... 184

Figure 57. James R. Murie, 1905 ...... 188

Figure 58. George A. Dorsey, ca. 1915 ...... 190

Figure 59. William Jones, 1907 ...... 194

Figure 60. Henry Clay Jones, Father of William Jones, 1869 ...... 196

Figure 61. Frederic Ward Putnam in his Office, 1896 ...... 204

Figure 62. Franz Boas, ca. 1910 ...... 206

Figure 63. AMNH, Niitsitapii (Blackfoot/Blackfeet) Tipi Display with Mannequin, ca. 1910 ... 210

Figure 64. Marie Krackowizer and Franz Boas, 1887 ...... 214

Figure 65. George Hunt, 1898 ...... 216

Figure 66. George Hunt and Family with Franz Boas, Fort Rupert, British Columbia, 1894 ... 218

Figure 67. James Teit and Susanna Lucy Antko, Spences Bridge, British Columbia, 1897 ...... 220

Figure 68. Franz Boas, 1893 ...... 223

Figure 69. Alanson Skinner and Wife, Possibly Gladys Macrae, ca. 1918 ...... 228

Figure 70. Alanson Skinner Holding Daughter Esther Mary Skinner, ca. 1922...... 229

Figure 71. John V. Satterlee, 1923 ...... 232

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Figure 72. John Saint Baptist Perrote and Wife, Reservation, Wisconsin, ca. 1912 ...... 238

Figure 73. Alanson Skinner and Amos Oneroad Dressed in Native Clothing, ca. 1920 ...... 240

Figure 74. Esther Florence Allen and Alanson Skinner Dressed in Native Clothing, ca. 1920 . 242

Figure 75. Clark Wissler, ca. 1930 ...... 244

Figure 76. James R. Murie and Unidentified Child, 1904 ...... 250

Figure 77. Omaha World’s Fair, , Sham Battle, 1898 ...... 256

Figure 78. Omaha World’s Fair, Indian Congress, Sham Battle, 1898 ...... 260

Figure 79. Anthropology Museum at the Affiliated Colleges, , California, 1911 265

Figure 80. Alfred L. Kroeber, ca. 1900 ...... 275

Figure 81. Ishi When First “Captured” in Oroville, California, August 1911 ...... 278

Figure 82. R.B. Dixon and Ishi in Front of the Museum at Affiliated Colleges, San Francisco, California, ca. 1914 ...... 280

Figure 83. Juan Dolores, ca. 1930 ...... 283

Figure 84. Robert Spott, 1933 ...... 285

Figure 85. U.S. Indian School Band, St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904 ...... 292

Figure 86. U.S. “Anthropology Days” Performance in Front of U.S. Indian School, St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904 ...... 293

Figure 87. WJ McGee, 1900 ...... 295

Figure 88. Goyathlay (), on Display at the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904 ...... 299

Figure 89. Non-Native Visitors Observing Native Americans at St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904 . 300

Figure 90. Richard Davis Photographed at the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904 ...... 303

Figure 91. Cleaver Warden, 1898 ...... 304

Figure 92. Antonio Apache, ca. 1892 ...... 308

Figure 93. Frederic Ward Putnam and Members of Chicago World’s Fair Staff including Antonio Apache, ca. 1892 ...... 311

Figure 94. Antonio Apache Working for Fred Harvey Company, ca. 1900 ...... 313

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Figure 95. Louis Shotridge and Florence Shotridge Dressed in Plains Indian Clothing, 1912 . 316

Figure 96. Postcard of Indian Arts Building at the San Diego World’s Fair, 1915 ...... 323

Figure 97. Aleš Hrdlička, 1927 ...... 325

Figure 98. Jesse Nusbaum with Unidentified Child, ca. 1915 ...... 326

Figure 99. Construction of Painted Desert, San Diego World’s Fair, 1915 ...... 328

Figure 100. George Gustav Heye, 1938 ...... 331

Figure 101. Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation Staff, 1917 ...... 334

Figure 102. MAI Exhibit Displaying Collections from California, Pacific Northwest, and Southwest U.S., 1921 ...... 342

Figure 103. M.R. Harrington Dressed in Native Clothing, ca. 1905 ...... 347

Figure 104. Bill Skye, 1908 ...... 352

Figure 105. Arthur C. Parker in his Office, 1942 ...... 353

Figure 106. Amos Oneroad, ca. 1920 ...... 356

Figure 107. Alanson Skinner and Amos Oneroad Sitting in Field, ca. 1920 ...... 359

xxx

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AMNH American Museum of Natural History APS American Philosophical Society BAE Bureau of American Ethnology BIA Bureau of Indian Affairs MAI Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation NAA National Anthropological Archives NARA National Archives and Records Administration NMAI National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution NMNH National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution SAI Society of American Indians SI Smithsonian Institution SIA Smithsonian Institution Archives USGS United States Geological Survey WAS Women’s Anthropological Society

xxxi

EXPOSITION 1

1876 PHILADELPHIA WORLD’S FAIR

Figure 1. Poster Advertising the Philadelphia World’s Fair, 1876 Library of Congress LC-HS503-3436

New York’s Harper’s Weekly informed its readers on May 24, 1873, that famed French explorer and ethnological collector Alphone Pinart would soon arrive in America. With ample funds in his hands from the French government, Pinart intended to “effect an exhaustive collection of the [Native] antiquities of ,” the news journal reported. Rather than celebrate this arrival, the article’s author heralded this news of Native object-gathering by a European collector as a wake-up call and warning to America’s citizens. “It is greatly to be regretted,” the anonymous author opined, that the United States government had not taken action to secure “at least some of its own share of this rich prize.” The reporter concluded with the recommendation that Americans gather and exhibit these Native-manufactured objects in their own National

Museum in Washington, DC, or in some other forum instead of “allowing them to be carried off by the agents of other .”37

37 “Scientific Intelligence,” Harper’s Weekly, NY, May 24, 1873.

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Popular news articles such as this one raised awareness in the minds of the American public of the loss of Native American material culture to European collectors and museums the world over.38 This Harper’s Weekly piece and other newspaper articles like it also ushered in the idea of an American World’s Fair or international exhibition, which would showcase Native and non-Native wares across the country. Such an exposition would not only celebrate the young nation’s centenary, but also exhibit its strength to the world as an emerging industrial and imperial power in the late nineteenth century.39

Harper’s Weekly, like its contemporaries The Atlantic Monthly, Century, Cosmopolitan, and a host of other popular magazines, emerged across the nation in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Geared towards particular audiences and promoting specific points of view aimed at increasing readership, periodicals and newspapers such as these wielded an incredible amount of power and influence over the minds of the American public.40 Numerous individuals, anthropologists among them, grasped the importance of this medium, and eagerly used it to disseminate their representations, whether good or ill, of American Indian communities.

So it was that the following year, in 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant called upon government departments, including the Smithsonian Institution, to prepare objects that would illustrate “the functions and administrative faculties of the Government” for an International

Exposition scheduled to take place on the nation’s centennial, 1876, in Philadelphia.41 Spencer

Baird, at the time the Smithsonian’s Assistant Secretary, was overjoyed at the prospect of

38 Douglas Cole, Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts (: University of Washington Press, 1985), 48-50.

39 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 5.

40 Ohmann, Selling Culture.

41 Smithsonian Institution, 1875 Annual Report, 58.

2

increasing the Institution’s collections. The collected materials, he knew, including those related to North American archaeology and ethnology, would ultimately be housed in the nation’s repository, the Smithsonian’s National Museum.42 Seizing the opportunity to receive additional aid from the federal government, Baird informed the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents and members of Congress of the current state of the Institution’s “overcrowded” building, the Castle, which made it “entirely inadequate” to accommodate this collection on its return from

Philadelphia.43 The Regents and members of Congress quickly agreed with Baird’s assessment.

Before the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition had even opened, then, Baird had already secured for the Smithsonian not only the increase of thousands of more objects for its already large museum holdings, but also the promise of an additional exhibition building for their public display.44

Figure 2. Smithsonian Institution Secretary Spencer Baird, ca. 1880 NAA INV 02876200

As the two federal bodies most heavily involved in Native American affairs, the

Department of the Interior and the Smithsonian Institution worked in tandem on the

42 Robert A. Trennert, Jr., “A Grand Failure: The Centennial Indian Exhibition of 1876,” Prologue 6, no. 2 (Summer 1974), 118-120; Smithsonian Institution, 1875 Annual Report, 70.

43 Smithsonian Institution, 1875 Annual Report, 70-71.

44 Smithsonian Institution, 1876 Annual Report, 106.

3

conceptualization, collection, and exhibition of American Indian materials for the Philadelphia

Exposition. According to an Interior Department circular dating to 1875, the two departments envisioned “a series of objects illustrating the habits, customs . . . and general condition of the various , and also of such relics of their predecessors as may be procurable.”45 Baird in particular hoped to create an anthropological exhibit from which the average World’s Fair visitor would take away “a satisfactory idea of the character, disposition and peculiarities of the

American aborigines.”46 To realize such an outcome required both increased and more widespread collecting.

In May of 1875 the Interior Department allocated to Baird’s charge the amount of $5,000 to collect “Indian materials.”47 Baird immediately hired “several gentlemen of much experience in ethnological researches . . . to secure complete collections from the tribes within their reach.”48 These men included James G. Swan working among the Alaska and Puget Sound communities, Stephen Powers in and California, and John Wesley Powell, later to be

Director of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology, working among Wyoming and

Utah’s Indigenous communities. Powell reportedly visited the , Bannock, and Northern

Paiute peoples from whom he purchased “costumes, lodges, and ornaments,” before also traveling to and Arizona where he collected items representative of “the life and customs of the Pueblo Indians.”49

45 Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 70, Interior Department Circular, January 15, 1875.

46 Trennert, “Grand Failure,” 122-123.

47 Trennert, “Grand Failure,” 120.

48 Smithsonian Institution, 1875 Annual Report, 67.

49 Trennert, “Grand Failure,” 122-123.

4

In his directive that the collections be both “exhaustive and complete,” Baird provided his men with a list of typical objects he desired, among them “various articles of clothing, ornaments, household utensils, implements of agriculture, weapons of war and the chase, tools of trade, etc.”50 Baird and his men were ultimately quite successful in their broad collecting work, as evidenced by newspaper articles of the time. The Canadian Daily British Colonist of April 5,

1876, for instance, wrote that the directors of the National Museum in Washington “may congratulate themselves that they will have the best Indian collections in the world” to display at the in Philadelphia. Collectors for the Smithsonian had reportedly gathered “the very finest and most extensive assortment of Indian manufacturers ever collected on the Northwestern Coast,” and one not to be easily duplicated.51

Baird was not content with the collections of Native American physical objects alone, however. He also desired that the Philadelphia Exposition include “an exhibition of living representatives of the principal Indian tribes” from throughout the country. He envisioned approximately four to eight individuals from each major community, “to be brought to

Philadelphia with their native clothing, implements, utensils, apparatus, and dwellings.” There these handpicked individuals would reside on the exposition grounds, living in Native- constructed homes while manufacturing their crafts and practicing “their aboriginal arts” for the education and entertainment of the visiting public. In detailing his initial plan, Baird imagined that “the Navajoes” would display “their methods of weaving blankets and belts; the Pueblos,

50 Smithsonian Institution, 1875 Annual Report, 67.

51 “The Centennial,” Daily British Colonist, British Columbia, Canada, April 5, 1876.

5

their manufacture of pottery; the Piutes, the construction of their stone implements . . . the

Blackfeet their method of dressing buffalo and other skins, &c.”52

In spite of their emphasis on the representative nature of the American Indians selected,

Baird and the exposition directors ultimately chose to adhere to strict guidelines when choosing exactly whom they would exhibit in Philadelphia. These Native men and women, Baird hoped, would adequately represent to the fairgoers the vast territory held by the United States, “from the

Esquimaux of Northwestern Alaska to the [of ], and from the Passamaquoddy

Indians of to those of San Diego, California.”53 From the outset Baird and fellow fair organizer J.Q. Smith decided to exclude those communities they considered “partly civilized

[and] living in the more settled areas of the country.” They believed that these individuals’

“mixture with whites or negroes and their adoption of their manners and customs” rendered them less interesting as objects of ethnological display. At the same time, however, Baird and John

Wesley Powell’s correspondence from early 1876 shows that among the “uncivilized” groups, the exposition directors also sought individuals “more white than Indian,” who were influential among their communities, spoke English, possessed a pleasant disposition, and were the

“cleanest and finest looking” of their compatriots.54

Notably and somewhat surprisingly, a number of American Indian leaders, including

Spotted Tail of the Sicangu Lakota (Brulé ), even suggested that they be allowed to travel to Philadelphia to represent their communities at the exposition.55 Perhaps Spotted Tail’s idea

52 Smithsonian Institution, 1875 Annual Report, 69.

53 Smithsonian Institution, 1875 Annual Report, 69.

54 Trennert, “Grand Failure,” 125.

55 Trennert, “Grand Failure,” 124.

6

was that it would be better to represent himself and his community rather than to have others represent them. In any case, the Department of the Interior denied all such requests by Native peoples to speak for themselves at the 1876 World’s Fair.

Acknowledging that the cost of transportation and subsistence for the selected Native individuals and their interpreters for the duration of the Philadelphia Exposition would be “very great,” in March of 1876 Baird went before the Congressional House Committee on Indian

Affairs to plead for funds.56 He presented two major reasons for the inclusion of living Native peoples in the anthropological display. First, Baird said, such an exhibition would illustrate to the

American people and to foreign visitors “the general character of the American Indian.” Second, and more importantly within the context of the “Indian Wars” of the late nineteenth century,

Baird hoped the venue of Philadelphia would “impress the Indians themselves . . . with the powers and resources of the U.S. and of civilization generally.”57 Regardless of Baird’s pleading, however, Congress ultimately decided not to allocate more funding, thus ending any further discussion of Native participation at the Philadelphia Exposition. Because of this decision, a significant anthropological exhibit of Native American “living representatives” would not take place at a World’s Fair until the 1893 Chicago Exposition nearly two decades later.

The Philadelphia Exposition and the Public

On May 1, 1876, the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition officially opened to the public.

The joint display of the Smithsonian and Interior Department known as “the Indian Exhibit” took up approximately 8,000 feet or roughly a third of the space available in the designated

56 Smithsonian Institution, 1875 Annual Report, 69.

57 Trennert, “Grand Failure,” 126.

7

Government Building.58 As Congress denied Baird’s request for the inclusion of Native peoples in the exhibits, he instead substituted several hundred life-size lay figures, or mannequins, dressed in the clothing and ornaments of various American Indian communities.59 In addition,

Baird also displayed photographic images of Native peoples alongside the thousands of objects collected by Powell and others throughout North America.60 Such a vast assemblage of

American Indian materials had not been displayed before at a World’s Fair, and the outcome was less a coherent exhibit than an oversize cabinet of curiosities.61

Fairgoers noted that the anthropological exhibit contained “a full collection of weapons, costumes, and handiwork, baskets and bead-work and rude embroidery on cloth and buckskin.”

Not to be missed were the mannequins created in the likeness of well-known American Indian leaders, including “an effigy of in full ’s panoply” at the center of “this zone of wild life.”62 A reporter for the Atlantic Monthly wrote of the “interesting exhibition of Indian costumes . . . curiously instructive photographs . . . and plaster models” of the Pueblo villages of the U.S. Southwest.63 Another visitor could not hide his dislike for the “grotesque and barbarous devices” the Northwest Coast peoples used to decorate their “small, square, wooden houses.” Of

58 Judith Elise Braun, “The North American Indian Exhibits at the 1876 and 1893 World Expositions: The Influence of Scientific Thought on Popular Attitudes” (MA thesis, George Washington University, 1975), 41; Ira Jacknis, The Storage Box of Tradition: Kwakiutl Art, Anthropologists, and Museums, 1881-1981 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 80.

59 Smithsonian Institution, 1875 Annual Report, 68.

60 Trennert, “Grand Failure,” 129.

61 Braun, “North American Indian Exhibits,” 41.

62 “Characteristics of the International Fair,” Atlantic Monthly 38, no. 223 (October 1876), 496.

63 W.D. Howells, “A Sennight of the Centennial,” Atlantic Monthly 38, no. 225 (July 1876): 103.

8

particular repugnance to this fairgoer were the totem poles, projecting posts “rudely carved into a series of hideous monsters one on top of the other, painted in crude colors.”64

Figure 3. Smithsonian Institution Exhibit, Philadelphia World’s Fair, 1876 SIA Record Unit 95

The general disregard and even antipathy which some visitors felt for North America’s

Indigenous peoples is disturbing, but perhaps not surprising given the context of the time period.

Three months after the opening of the Philadelphia World’s Fair, in July of 1876 the Battle of

Little Big Horn took place, with the resulting death of General and his men. As news reached the East Coast, negative reactions to Baird’s “Indian Exhibit” increased.

In some cases, antipathy turned to vitriol, with one reporter noting of the display, “The red man, as he appears in effigy and in photograph in this collection, is a hideous demon, whose malign traits can hardly inspire any emotion softer than abhorrence.” Regarding reports of the federal government’s distribution of tainted food on Native reservations, this same reporter declared of

American Indians, “moldy flour and corrupt beef must seem altogether too good for them.”65

Other visitors to the World’s Fair, though voiced less acerbically, were nonetheless not

64 “Characteristics of the International Fair,” 496-497.

65 U.S. Congressional Record, Volume 7, 1878, 2797; Howells, “Sennight,” 103.

9

particularly impressed with Baird’s exhibit or its unfortunate timing. “With the tragic fate of

General Custer and his brave troops so fresh in mind, not many of us are inclined to sentimentalize over the Indian just now,” an anonymous author wrote in the October 1876 issue of Atlantic Monthly.66

Spencer Baird, John Wesley Powell, and the other organizers and collectors for the 1876

Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition ultimately were only partially successful in their initial goals.

In impressing upon Native American representatives the strength of the federal government, they failed due to the lack of funding to actually transport these individuals to Philadelphia. In educating non-Native World’s Fair visitors about the diversity of North America’s Indigenous peoples, however, there is some evidence that they succeeded. For instance, one reporter after viewing the “Indian Exhibit” made a clear distinction between what he perceived as the “red savages of the plains,” the and , and the “peaceful and industrious” Pueblo villagers of the Southwest, the Hopi.67 Another enjoyed viewing the exhibits of the “distant tribes of the northwestern coast, with whom we have neither wars nor treaties,” thereby consciously differentiating between Native communities in various regions of the U.S. These comments aside, though, Baird’s anthropological exhibit did not appear to significantly alter the public’s conception of Native peoples in a meaningful way.

In retrospect, Baird’s “grand failure,” as some historians have dubbed it, is not terribly surprising. Through the display of Native-made material culture objects, photographs, and the use of lifeless mannequins dressed in American Indian clothing, the Philadelphia World’s Fair depicted Native peoples as if they were no longer living, and thus not worthy of present-day

66 “Characteristics of the International Fair,” 496.

67 Howells, “Sennight,” 103.

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concerns or empathy.68 While sympathetic toward the plight of Native American communities, then, Baird, like many of his peers, viewed Indians as a vanishing people, doomed to either extinction or assimilation.69 “It is quite reasonable to infer,” Baird wrote in 1875, “that by the expiration of a second hundred-year period of the life of the American republic [by 1976], the

Indians will have entirely ceased to present any distinctive characters, and will be merged in the general .”70 Although ultimately incorrect, pronouncements such as these by leaders in the anthropological field dominated the discourse of the day, subsequently informing and misinforming the American public about the lives, cultures, and histories of Native American peoples.

As recognized Indian experts with the backing of science, anthropologists at the 1876

Philadelphia World’s Fair largely represented Native peoples as either romanticized or exoticized communities who were quickly disappearing.71 Anthropological exhibitions at

World’s Fairs and U.S. museums more broadly would continue to advocate similar views for at least the next half-century. Whether consuming these representations in Chicago in 1893 or

Omaha in 1898, in St. Louis in 1904 or San Diego in 1915, the American public learned that they had little reason to concern themselves with the conditions of life for American Indians on far- off western reservations, or even those living among them in major U.S. cities.

68 Trennert, “Grand Failure,” 129.

69 Dippie, Vanishing American, xi.

70 Smithsonian Institution, 1875 Annual Report, 70.

71 Dippie, Vanishing American, xii.

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CHAPTER 1

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION AND THE BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY

Figure 4. Smithsonian Institution Castle, 1885 SIA, ACC. 11-007, MNH-2889

Since its founding nearly 175 years ago, numerous scholars have written about the history of the Smithsonian Institution. Their works have traced the life of the Institution’s British namesake and benefactor, examined contentious political debates in the halls of Congress over its future, and detailed the myriad collections contained within its walls.72 Of primary focus in this study is the Smithsonian’s involvement with anthropology, its representation of Native

Americans, and how the public consumed these representations. This work was primarily the responsibility of the Bureau of Ethnology, later renamed the Bureau of American Ethnology, which was founded in 1879, and the National Museum, founded in 1881. However, ethnological collections relating to the original inhabitants of North America played a conspicuous role in the

Institution since its very beginning in 1846. In that year Congress established the Smithsonian

72 Nina Burleigh, The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America’s Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian (New York: Harper Collins, 2003); Heather Ewing, The Lost World of James Smithson: Science, Revolution, and the Birth of the Smithsonian (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007); Richard Kurin, The Smithsonian’s History of America in 101 Objects (New York: Penguin Press, 2013); William S. Walker, A Living Exhibition: The Smithsonian and the Transformation of the Universal Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).

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Institution from a bequest of the Englishman James Smithson, a wealthy scholar who never stepped foot in North America.73

As early as December of 1846, the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents passed a resolution requesting the Secretary of War and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to commence the collecting of objects from “the Indian country.” Specifically, they were desirous of obtaining materials which illustrated the “physical history, manners and customs of the various tribes of aborigines on the North American continent.”74 These material culture objects, as the Regents were no doubt aware, would complement those already acquired by the federal government and held in the United States Patent Office in Washington, DC. At least 5,000 ethnographic objects had already been collected during the Wilkes Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842, and these were in addition to C.B. King and George Catlin’s American Indian paintings housed in the

National Institute in Washington since 1840.75

Joseph Henry, first Secretary of the Smithsonian, though opposed to the concept of the

Institution serving as a museum, nevertheless understood the importance of anthropology and anthropological collections to the development of science in America. In the Smithsonian’s 1857

Annual Report, for instance, Henry declared in language echoing the Regents of a decade earlier,

“It is the sacred duty which this country owes to the civilized world to collect everything . . . that may tend to illustrate the character and history of the original inhabitants of North America.”76 In that same year, all of the materials previously stored in the Patent Office were transferred to the

73 Burleigh, Stranger and Statesman, 2.

74 Smithsonian Institution, 1847 Board of Regents Report, 11.

75 William W. Fitzhugh, Origins of Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution and Beyond,” in Anthropology, History, and American Indians: Essays in Honor of William Curtis Sturtevant, eds. William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 180.

76 Smithsonian Institution, 1857 Annual Report, 36.

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Smithsonian, forming what would later become the Institution’s first anthropological museum exhibits.77

The 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and Smithsonian Assistant Secretary

Spencer Baird’s collecting for this event, was the impetus for what eventually became the

Smithsonian’s Arts & Industries Building as exhibition space geared towards the public. In addition to American explorers, surveyors, and anthropologists such as John Wesley Powell,

Baird also sought out U.S. Army personnel familiar with Native American cultures in order to increase the Smithsonian’s holdings of ethnographic material. Learning of Richard Henry Pratt’s command of sixty-five American Indian prisoners of war at a military fort in St. Augustine,

Florida, Baird contacted Pratt in 1877, hoping to acquire not only linguistic information, but also casts of the individuals’ faces.78 Baird endeavored to gain these “face-masks” to use in the construction of life-size Native figures which would feature Indian clothing already in the possession of the museum. A contemporary article in Harper’s Weekly commended the idea, noting that there would be “much value” in “accurate representations of the lineaments of the aboriginal tribes of the world.”79

As evidenced through its partnerships with Western surveyors, missionaries, collectors, and the U.S. military, the Smithsonian did not operate in a vacuum. Baird and his staff regularly undertook cooperative work with private individuals, organizations, and other government agencies to acquire ethnographic data. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, under the direction of the

Secretary of the Interior, often aided such anthropological work. This included the BIA

77 Smithsonian Institution, 1958 Annual Report, 513.

78 Yale University, Beinecke Library, Richard Henry Pratt Papers, MSS S-1174, S. Baird to R.H. Pratt corr., May 21, 1877.

79 “Scientific Intelligence,” Harper’s Weekly, NY, August 18, 1877.

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allocating money for the collection and arrangement of Indian materials for the 1876

Philadelphia World’s Fair, later becoming the bulk of the National Museum’s collections, as well as scheduling Indian delegation visits to the Bureau of American Ethnology. The latter entailed

BAE staff obtaining photographic records and linguistic information from individual delegates in the city on official tribal business.80 With the establishment of these two departments, the Bureau of American Ethnology and the National Museum, the Smithsonian by the end of the nineteenth century had both a research institution focused on collecting Native American cultural materials, and an exhibition space for displaying these objects to the public.

Figure 5. Display of Apache “Lay Figures” or Mannequins in U.S. National Museum, ca. 1910 NAA INV 09709700

Employing non-Native and Native ethnologists, men and women, the Bureau of

American Ethnology was remarkably inclusive for its time, particularly so when contrasted with the rather homogeneous nature the field took on after its “academization” in the early 1900s.81

Further, as the largest and most prominent employer of anthropologists in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the BAE, its professional staff, and its Native collaborators were highly

80 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 23; Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives, Bureau of American Ethnology, J.W. Powell to Secretary of the Interior corr., January 24, 1882.

81 Darnell, Along Came Boas, xi.

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influential in representing American Indian cultures to the public. Despite its early prominence, though, in the years following BAE Director John Wesley Powell’s 1902 death, the Bureau of

American Ethnology lost much of its political clout in the halls of Congress. While it continued to fund collecting expeditions, ethnographic fieldwork, and publications, the BAE no longer retained the prestige or direction Powell had originally envisioned for it. By 1925 its existence largely mirrored the broader trend of anthropologists locating new positions of employment within universities rather than in the federal government or in museums.82

The Smithsonian, the BAE, and the Public

Media reception of the Smithsonian during the half-century between 1875 and 1925 was highly favorable. Newspaper articles across the country regularly lauded the staff of both the

National Museum and the Bureau of American Ethnology for educating and entertaining the public with their representations of Native American cultures. For example, a reporter for the

Portland Oregonian newspaper on March 18, 1886, wrote of the National Museum’s success in throwing light upon the “habits and customs” of the country’s “ancient inhabitants,” while providing a voice for the “unknown people” whom history otherwise had left silent. Their physical belongings, if not their thoughts and ideas, the reporter continued, would receive “some little place in human annals” by their preservation in the museum.83

Highlighting the then widely held belief that Native peoples would either die off or assimilate within the next generation, an anonymous author in Science asserted that the

82 Regna Darnell, “The Development of American Anthropology, 1880-1920: From the Bureau of American Ethnology to Franz Boas” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1969), 263; Sturtevant, “Does Anthropology Need Museums,” 624.

83 “The Passing of the Indians,” Oregonian, OR, March 18, 1886.

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Smithsonian performed an “invaluable service” in its preservation of the “rapidly vanishing native races” of North America.84 As American Indians were doomed to disappear, the

Washington, DC Star newspaper wrote, the work of the Smithsonian was a boon in its exhibition of Indian life-figures, “crystallizing family groups for posterity” before the last of the tribes had

“gone on to the happy hunting ground.”85 Hyperbolic newspaper language aside, the persistence of the notion of Native Americans as a “vanishing race” was nothing new, and would continue well into the middle of the twentieth century.86

Figure 6. BAE Director John Wesley Powell, ca. 1890 NAA INV 02864400

Contemporary scholars and anthropologists also regularly commended the work performed by Spencer Baird and John Wesley Powell. Writing in the scholarly periodical

Science in 1887, noted German-American anthropologist Franz Boas proclaimed the labor of the

BAE “of the greatest value,” specifically as it put an end to “the dilettantism which formerly

84 “The Smithsonian Institution and Its Affiliated Bureaus,” Science 16, no. 412 (November 21, 1902): 802.

85 W.A. Du Puy, “Crystallizing Family Groups for Posterity at the National Museum,” Washington Star, DC, August 24, 1913.

86 Dippie, Vanishing American, xi.

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obtained in American ethnology.”87 Such a statement illustrates the paradigm shift ushered in by

Powell from the armchair anthropology of the previous decades to its transformation into late nineteenth-century professional scientific study.

Native perspectives on the Smithsonian, its National Museum, and the Bureau of

American Ethnology are more difficult to locate in the historical record. A brief statement published in the Carlisle Indian School newspaper, however, indicates that such views were often discussed, if not as often broadcast in Western media. In what may have been a humorous editorial printed in Carlisle’s reform-oriented The Indian Helper of 1893, the anonymous author posed the question, “What is the difference between the Bureau of Ethnology and the Carlisle school?” The answer was that the BAE was “after arrow heads,” while the Indian School was after “Indian heads.” The author clarified, insisting that the former “is after Indians under ground, while the Carlisle School is after Indians above ground.”88 Accusations that anthropologists were only concerned with Native peoples’ pasts and uncaring about their futures was a common criticism made by Richard Henry Pratt, Superintendent of Carlisle, and other

Euro-American Progressive groups advocating immediate assimilation of Indigenous peoples into American society.

87 Franz Boas, “Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology,” Science 9, no. 228 (June 17, 1887): 597.

88 “The Difference between the Bureau of Ethnology and the Carlisle School,” Indian Helper, PA, April 28, 1893.

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Figure 7. Andrew John, Jr., 1898 NAA INV 10000157

The collaborative work of another individual with the Smithsonian provides a glimpse into Native perspectives on the Institution and its ethnographic work. Andrew John, Jr., a Seneca man from New York state and semi-resident of the capital lobbying on behalf of Haudenosaunee

(Iroquois) rights, worked as a liaison between Native delegations and BAE staff at the turn of the twentieth century. Born in 1847, John served a term as President of the Seneca Nation, as well as the appointed “Chairman of the delegates of the Six Nations of New York Indians” to

Washington, DC. As early as 1888 he served as a collaborator with Smithsonian staff, providing information on Seneca life, and even donated some specimens of silver work to the museum.89

The BAE Annual Report for fiscal year 1903-1904 recorded John as “employed to interview and make the acquaintance of all delegations on their arrival” in the city, specifically tasked with conducting Native visitors to the BAE offices to be photographed, measured, and, for those willing, to have plaster masks made of their faces. In 1904 alone the BAE recorded shooting 110 photographic negatives of these delegates.90 For this service, John reportedly received five

89 , “Games of Seneca Indians,” American Anthropologist 1, no. 2 (April 1888): 134.

90 Bureau of American Ethnology, 1903-1904 Annual Report, xxi.

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dollars per day. Smithsonian staff believed the arrangement an ideal one, with the BAE Director stating that John, due to his ancestry, was “able to make their [the Native delegates’] acquaintance, and to manage them with less difficulty than anyone who might be engaged.”91

Lamentably, Andrew John Jr.’s opinions on this working relationship do not appear to have been recorded.

The Smithsonian Institution represented Native Americans to the public through exhibitions, lectures, and publications. These differing formats embraced a wide variety of audiences, including scholarly and lay communities, children and adults, and local, national, and international visitors. It was the exhibitions on display in the National Museum and at many

World’s Fairs, however, which undoubtedly reached the largest number of people. As early as the final decade of the nineteenth century the Smithsonian initiated what became the very popular practice of using groups of Native mannequins or life-figures in its exhibitions. Life- figure groups representing A:shiwi (Zuni), Diné (), Gwich’in (Kutchin), Hupa, , and Lakota (Oglala Sioux) communities were displayed at the Columbian Exposition in

Chicago in 1893.92 A few years later a reporter for the Buffalo Express extolled the Smithsonian group figures on exhibit at the 1901 Buffalo World’s Fair for their importance in both popular education and entertainment.93 “Each group gives the impression of an Indian family suddenly stiffened and made immobile in the midst of its work and play,” he wrote, as around the display

“all day long eddies a curious throng” of spectators. Illustrating the interplay of turn of the

91 Herman J. Viola, Diplomats in Buckskins: A History of Indian Delegations in Washington City (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), 184-185.

92 Smithsonian Institution, 1958 Annual Report, 519.

93 William W. Fitzhugh, “Ambassadors in Sealskins: Exhibiting Eskimos at the Smithsonian,” in Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smithsonian, eds. Amy Henderson and Adrienne L. Kaeppler (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 214.

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century anthropology, education, and colonial constructs of the Other, the reporter concluded,

“All alike understand the spectacle and enjoy it; it is science made easy.”94

Figure 8. Mannequins on Display in U.S. National Museum Exhibit Hall, ca. 1900 NAA INV 09707900

While the Smithsonian’s exhibits were the primary vehicle for reaching the largest audience, its publications, particularly those of the BAE, broadcast new anthropological developments and studies to the public. BAE Director Powell ensured that the Bureau’s Annual

Reports, “big, impressive volumes, with beautiful illustrations,” went to the “right people” such as members of Congress and those individuals whom U.S. Representatives and Senators wanted the books sent.95 Richard Henry Pratt, Carlisle Indian School founder and life-long critic of the

BAE, declared such “expensive and ponderous” publications a waste of tax-payer money,

“which Congressmen like to send to their constituents, or to the libraries in their districts where they are filed away and never read.”96

94 Buffalo Express, NY, August 1901.

95 Virginia Hull McKimmon Noelke, “The Origin and Early History of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1879- 1910” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1974), 65, 164.

96 Eastman, Pratt, 194; “Peyote Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Indian Affairs of the House of Representatives on H.R. 2614,” 1918, 143.

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In spite of Pratt’s comments, however, the BAE’s publications had a major impact on the study of Native peoples, especially its 1907 volume of The Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico. With the release of the second volume in 1910, The Handbook covered a range of topics from biographies of prominent American Indians to articles on Native arts, manners, and antiquities, thus appealing to “the school teacher, the bureaucrat, the armchair anthropologist, and the scientific specialist.”97 Smithsonian leaders demanded these volumes to be written in simple language suitable for nonscientists to read and use, and calculated to awaken public interest or to commend itself to the attention of Congress.98 In this way, the Smithsonian’s

National Museum and BAE shaped the ideas of large numbers of the public in conceptualizing

Native American pasts, and perhaps unintentionally, ignoring their present.

Ultimately, the Smithsonian Institution as a whole was unsympathetic to the plight of contemporary Native Americans. Although some individual BAE staff, such as Frank Hamilton

Cushing, Francis La Flesche, J.N.B. Hewitt, or James Mooney, may have deviated from this practice, many of their colleagues scientifically removed themselves from the present-day concerns of those whom they studied. The National Museum and the Bureau of American

Ethnology represented American Indians as exoticised others, as a rapidly vanishing race, and, at least through the early twentieth century, as occupying a lower stage of evolutionary and mental development. Despite the changing nature of the field and with it anthropology’s transition from museums to universities in the early twentieth century, these largely negative representations of

97 Noelke, “Early History,” 240; NAA, BAE W.H. Holmes to T.C. Platt corr., June 21, 1906.

98 NAA, BAE, W.H. Holmes to F. Boas corr., November 26, 1904; NAA, BAE, W.H. Holmes to S. Langley corr., November 1, 1902.

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Native Americans nevertheless continued to be disseminated by anthropologists, consumed by the public, and consequently, to inform the popular mindset for generations to come.99

99 Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects, 31-32.

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SECTION 1-1

JOHN WESLEY POWELL (1834-1902)

Figure 9. John Wesley Powell, ca. 1898 NAA INV 02867200

Later to become the dominant figure of late nineteenth-century government anthropology, John Wesley Powell’s life was representative of the field’s changing nature as it shifted from amateurs to professionals like Powell, and a few decades later to degree-holding academics like Franz Boas and Alfred L. Kroeber. Born in New York state in 1834 to English immigrant parents, he and his family moved ever westward, with Powell sporadically attending school in before enlisting with the Union Army in May of 1861. Within months of signing up, he and a woman by the name of Emma Dean married the following November in

Detroit, Michigan.100 Fighting in the Battle of Shiloh in April of 1862, he lost his arm, but continued to serve until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Throughout the late 1860s Powell led a number of geological surveys and land expeditions throughout the U.S. West and Southwest, foremost among them safely piloting the Colorado River in 1869. It was here, while exploring

100 Michigan, County Marriage Records, 1822-1940, Ancestry.com; Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 89.

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the Colorado River and its tributaries, that he first developed an interest in the Native peoples inhabiting the surrounding region.101

Figure 10. Powell Survey Members, Green River, Wyoming, May 1871 NAA INV 02868501

During his 1870s geological survey work, Powell frequently noted the devastation caused by increased westward migration. Nevertheless, in publishing articles about these experiences in

Scribner’s Monthly, he found it far easier to romanticize the lives of American Indians for the reading public, rather than to depict the struggles of “starving, half-naked people driven from their homelands.”102 Though his popular narratives would later take on a starker and truer reality, in his early accounts intended for public consumption, Powell chose to conjure the image of

Native peoples existing in an ethnographic present, unchanged by the radical transformations around them.

Powell undertook his first prolonged ethnographic fieldwork while wintering in the

Southwest in late 1870. There, among the Hopi Pueblo peoples near the village of Oraibi in

Arizona territory, he studied the “language and customs of the people,” remaining about two

101 Worster, River Running West, xiii.

102 Judith Luskey, “Early American Anthropologists as Photographers of North American Indians,” Visual Resources 4, no. 4 (1988): 361-364.

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months.103 According to Powell, while there he “observed the marvelous savage and barbaric culture presented in the Pueblo region,” witnessing ceremonies and other “wonderful things.” He later wrote that the memory of “these strange sights” haunted him, but after an “all too short” visit, he wrapped up his fieldwork in the Southwest, and returned to the nation’s capital.104

Even when away from the field, Powell devised methods to continue his ethnological work. Learning of a Northern Paiute delegation visit to Washington, DC, he requested senior

Bureau of Indian Affairs officials, under whose charge the delegation visited, to “detain” these individuals a week or two longer in order to render him “desired assistance” with linguistic and ethnographic work on their communities.105 A particularly notable example of this intergovernmental cooperation to acquire anthropological data is included in correspondence sent from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to Powell, notifying him of the recent arrival of a

Yakama (Yakima) man in Washington, DC, there to conduct tribal business. The Commissioner, aware of Powell’s desire to document Native cultures, wrote that the man was “dressed in barbaric splendor,” adding, “I think you may be glad to photograph him.”106 Such documentation became standard practice for Powell and his BAE staff, as they regularly made arrangements to photograph Indian delegations visiting the city.107

In the years prior to his 1879 appointment as first Director of the Bureau of American

Ethnology, Powell was already heavily involved with the work of the Smithsonian Institution,

103 John Wesley Powell, “The Ancient Province of Tusayan,” Scribner’s Monthly 11 (December 1875), 202.

104 WJ McGee et al., “In Memoriam: Frank Hamilton Cushing,” American Anthropologist 2, no. 2 (April-June 1900), 363-364; Powell, “Ancient Province,” 213.

105 NAA, BAE, J.W. Powell to C. Schurz corr., January 23, 1880.

106 NAA, BAE, T.J. Morgan to J.W. Powell corr., August 23, 1892.

107 NAA, BAE, H.C. Rizer to T.J. Morgan corr., September 6, 1892.

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and on good terms with both its first and second Secretaries, Joseph Henry, who served 1846 to

1878, and Spencer Baird, who served 1878 to 1887. As early as 1863 Henry printed the book

Instructions for Research Relative to the Ethnology and Philology of America, soliciting linguistic and ethnographic works on American Indians created by missionaries, amateur anthropologists, military officers, and interested travelers.108 These Powell eventually acquired from Henry, serving as the foundation for future BAE work on linguistic and cultural mapping of the Indigenous peoples of North America.109 Indeed, while planning his 1869 Colorado River expedition, it was Henry who “urgently recommended” to Powell to record the “habits and customs” of the peoples he met.110 Later, in the months and years immediately preceding the opening of the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Baird tasked Powell with collecting

Native American objects for display in the World’s Fair. This he did through collecting expeditions in the Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico territories, acquiring objects and ethnographic information.111

Figure 11. John Wesley Powell (on left) and Members of Geological Survey, 1874

108 Smithsonian Institution, 1958 Annual Report, 515.

109 Worster, River Running West, 397.

110 John Wesley Powell, “Testimony before the Townsend Committee,” H.R. Document 612, 52.

111 Trennert, “Grand Failure,” 122-123.

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NAA INV 02873900

By 1879 Powell succeeded in his efforts to create a federal agency focused solely on anthropological research. On March 3rd of that year Congress approved the establishment of the

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), an amalgamation of the previous four Western surveys. Almost incidentally, Congress also established the Bureau of Ethnology, later becoming the Bureau of

American Ethnology in 1894, for the purpose of continuing the anthropological fieldwork initially begun under the surveys.112 Congress named Powell Director of both the USGS and the

BAE, and with each organization he implemented a systematic plan for research, one in geology and the other in anthropology. Concerned over Indians “abandoning their savagery and barbarism” and losing “original habits and customs” due to an increased Euro-American presence in their homelands, Powell organized the first BAE anthropological expedition within months of taking office.113 Its mission was to acquire ethnographic data and material objects from the little known Pueblo communities of the U.S. Southwest before they were gone.

Importantly, Powell’s stated objective encompassed more than the gathering of anthropological information for scholarly use or public consumption. As he wrote in a later BAE

Annual Report, the immediate purpose of these ethnographic expeditions on a practical level was

“the discovery of relations among the native American tribes, to the end that amicable groups might be gathered on reservations.”114 Though sympathetic to the plight of Native peoples,

Powell also believed assimilation into American society the only logical solution to the contemporary “Indian Problem.” He said as much in an address before Congress five years

112 Richard B. Woodbury and Nathalie F.S. Woodbury, “The Rise and Fall of the Bureau of American Ethnology,” Journal of the Southwest 41, no. 3 (Autumn 1999), 284.

113 NAA, BAE, J.W. Powell to S. Baird corr., April 8, 1880.

114 Bureau of American Ethnology, 1891-1892 Annual Report, xxvii.

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earlier concerning Indian life in the Colorado and Utah territories. “There is now no great uninhabited and unknown region to which the Indian can be sent,” Powell averred in 1874. “He is among us, and we must either protect him or destroy him.”115 For the new BAE Director, the

U.S. government’s choice was clear: intensive and immediate ethnological study of American

Indian cultures in order to determine compatibility of different communities when placed on reservations. Alongside forced migration to new homes and hopefully amicable relations on reservations, Powell believed government sponsored education and gradual assimilation programs would take care of the rest.116 Essentially, Powell’s practical goals for the BAE included providing federal policymakers with information about Native Americans, and with rational means in how to adequately deal with them.117

Powell served as Director of the Bureau of American Ethnology for nearly a quarter century, from 1879 until 1902. In addition to leading both the newly formed U.S. Geological

Survey and the Bureau of American Ethnology, Powell also founded or co-founded a number of scientific societies, notably all exclusively male, in Washington, DC. Among these were the

Anthropological Society of Washington, the National Geographic Society, and the Cosmos Club.

Though in poor health and delegating many administrative responsibilities to fellow staff member WJ McGee during his final years, John Wesley Powell continued as Director of the

Bureau of American Ethnology until his death in 1902.

Powell and the Public

115 Don D. Fowler and Catherine S. Fowler, “Anthropology of the Numa: John Wesley Powell’s Manuscripts on the Numic Peoples of Western North America, 1868-1880,” Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology (1971), 119.

116 Worster, River Running West, 398.

117 Darnell, “Development of American Anthropology,” 45.

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Perceptions of John Wesley Powell by his contemporaries were generally favorable.

Typical of newspaper reporters’ embellishments about the anthropologists they reported on, a columnist for the Advocate of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in 1883 asserted that “Major

Powell” stood “first among living authorities upon all matters relating to archaeological and ethnological research as to the Indian tribes of North America.” Continuing, the reporter noted,

“few men have a wider or more intimate knowledge of the Indian tribes of North America, their names, customs, and feelings, or are capable of expressing more intelligent opinions in regard to

Indian affairs generally.”118 Though certainly respected by many in the anthropological field of his time, few would have described Powell in such glowing terms, especially given the man’s relatively limited experience in the field. As a fellow BAE colleague later noted, Powell personally “contributed comparatively little to anthropological research.” However, where

Powell excelled was in “securing the foundation” of the Bureau of American Ethnology.119 As biographers and historians during his own time and since have emphasized, the American ethnological discipline before Powell’s directorship was “discursive, unorganized, and to a large extent dillettanti.”120 Powell changed all of this by personally training and educating a generation of men and women anthropologists to adhere to high scientific standards, all in an era before anthropology existed as a formalized academic discipline.

Little extant written information exists to provide Native perspectives on Powell and his work. However, an interesting editorial about Powell, the Anthropological Society of

Washington, and the anthropological field in general was published in the Carlisle Indian

118 Henry Randall Walte, “Indian Education,” Cherokee Advocate, OK, February 2, 1883.

119 NAA, John Swanton, “Notes Regarding my Adventures in Anthropology and with Anthropologists,” 1944, MSS 4651, 35.

120 G.K. Gilbert, “John Wesley Powell,” Science 16, no. 406 (October 10, 1902), 564.

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School’s newspaper The Red Man. The short statement, published in December of 1899, was almost certainly written by a Native student then attending the school.

It is reported that Major Powell and the Anthropological Society of Washington, D.C. propose the name ‘Amerind’ as a substitute for all other terms used to denote the Indians, or red men, of America. The word ‘Indian,’ to be sure, is an accident and a misnomer – but why not try to dispense with a name altogether? We are not on exhibition and do not require a label.121

This statement, not directed at Powell so much as at anthropologists in general, is powerful in its candor and brevity. Advocating assimilation of Native peoples into Euro-American society, a

Carlisle School emphasis since its founding, it is also a plea to discontinue the anthropologists’ work of exoticizing Native peoples, exhibiting their cultures, and putting them on display in their museums.

Powell represented the Native American communities he studied through lectures, exhibitions, and his writings. In addition to a large number of publications directed to a scholarly audience, such as his 1877 Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages, he also wrote several popular articles about North American Indians geared for the mainstream public.122 Of particular note are a series of popular articles published in Scribner’s Monthly in 1875, recapping his adventures in the Southwest. Titles included “The Canons of the Colorado,” “An Overland Trip to the Grand Canyon,” and his more ethnographically-focused piece, “The Ancient Province of

Tusayan.”123 However, it was his 1893 article, “Are Our Indians Becoming Extinct,” that best illustrated Powell’s equally sympathetic and paternalistic view of Indigenous peoples. Here he

121 The Red Man, PA, December 1899.

122 John Wesley Powell, Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages, with Words, Phrases, and Sentences to be Collected (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877).

123 John Wesley Powell, “The Canons of Colorado,” Scribner’s Monthly 9, no. 3 (January 1875): 293-310; John Wesley Powell, “An Overland Trip to the Grand Canyon,” Scribner’s Monthly 10 (October 1875): 659-678; Powell, “Ancient Province,” 193-213.

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suggested to his readers that rather than separate America’s Native “wards” from their families in order to assimilate them, the federal government should instead allow these people to “remain in compact bodies on reservations,” thereby aiding one another in coming to terms with their status as colonized peoples.124

A follower of Lewis Henry Morgan’s social evolutionist thought, Powell viewed society hierarchically by stages of development. In correspondence written to Morgan soon after reading his 1877 book Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization, Powell enthusiastically wrote “I believe you have discovered the true system of social and governmental organization among the Indians.”125 Not surprisingly, in Morgan’s schema Euro-Americans occupied the top rung, demarcated “civilization,” while

American Indians were relegated to either the middle stage of barbarism, or savagery at the bottom of the scale.126

Figure 12. Lewis Henry Morgan, ca. 1875 NAA INV 02863100

124 John Wesley Powell, “Are Our Indians Becoming Extinct?,” Forum 15 (May 1893), 354.

125 National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the U.S. Geological Survey, Record Group 57, J.W. Powell to L.H. Morgan corr., May 23, 1877.

126 Curtis M. Hinsley, Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846-1910 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), 133.

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Similar to Lewis Henry Morgan and a number of his own BAE staff, Powell believed in the power of education to uplift Native peoples from savagery and barbarism to the level of

Euro-American civilization. However, contrasting with the methods advocated by many

Progressives and Christian reformers like Carlisle Indian School founder Richard Henry Pratt,

Powell preferred the establishment of government-run schools on Native reservations rather than sending children to Indian Schools in the East. Whereas Pratt, for all the opprobrium he now receives, believed in the mental and physical parity of Native and non-Native peoples, Powell, adhering to his social evolutionary thought, believed it fruitless for the two to compete mentally, as the former belonged to a lower stage of development.127

Change would eventually come for Native Americans, Powell believed, but such a radical transformation would take a long time, perhaps many generations. Until the full assimilation of

American Indians into Euro-American society, Powell ardently thought it his responsibility, and the responsibility of those he trained, to document, record, and preserve the rapidly changing and disappearing cultures of Native peoples. His social evolutionary views not only permeated many of his writings, lectures, and exhibition work, but also informed the general public and federal lawmakers about how to paternalistically understand and treat American Indians.

John Wesley Powell, then, like his mentors and colleagues Lewis Henry Morgan and

Spencer Baird, represented the early days of American anthropology. Established before the advent of academic courses and requisite graduate degrees, Powell’s anthropology, though hardly egalitarian, nevertheless illustrated a greater level of inclusivity than what was to follow.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century Powell and his BAE staff had relied to a considerable extent on the work of both women and American Indian anthropologists, as well as

127 Pratt, “Advantage of Mingling,” 50.

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on Native collaborators, to collect and supply ethnological information. With the field’s professionalization and subsequent turn to academia in the following decades, however, many of these non-degree holding individuals were largely excluded from a changing discipline.

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SECTION 1-2

FRANK HAMILTON CUSHING (1857-1900)

Figure 13. Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1879 NAA INV 02644300

Considered by many to be a prodigy of late nineteenth-century anthropology, Frank

Hamilton Cushing was born in 1857 in Pennsylvania. Like many anthropologists of his day, his only schooling at the collegiate level consisted of a matter of months spent at as a student of geology and natural history in the spring of 1875.128 That summer, however,

Spencer Baird, Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, appointed Cushing as an assistant in the preparation of the Smithsonian’s “Indian Collections” exhibit to be included in the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. After the closing of the exposition, Cushing stayed on to take proper care of the collections, and in 1877 traveled to Washington, DC, becoming curator of the Ethnological Department of the Smithsonian’s National Museum.129

128 Joan Mark, Four Anthropologists: An American Science in Its Early Years (New York: Science History Publishers, 1980), 97.

129 Frederick W. Gleach, “Cushing at Cornell: The Early Years of a Pioneering Anthropologist,” Histories of Anthropology Annual 3 (2007), 110-111.

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In 1879 John Wesley Powell, Director of the Bureau of American Ethnology, organized an anthropological expedition to the U.S. Southwest, its goal the collecting of “Pueblo artifacts” and learning the “mysteries of the life of the people” there.130 Powell ordered James Stevenson to head up the expedition. Baird, as Smithsonian Secretary, directed Cushing to accompany

Stevenson, “to find out all you can about some typical of Pueblo Indians.” According to

Cushing, Baird provided great leeway in this assignment, instructing him simply to make his own choice of field, and to use his own methods, but with the desired goal to “get the information.”131 In this manner, Cushing served under Stevenson’s command as well as under

Powell, but reported to Baird as the Secretary’s representative, and thus as an employee of the

National Museum rather than the BAE.132 Due to financial reasons, Baird and Powell agreed to transfer Cushing from the payroll of the Museum to that of the Bureau after his first few years.

Baird assured Cushing that in time he hoped to return him to his position in the Museum, but in the meantime encouraged him to “communicate with me as freely as ever,” advice which

Cushing indeed followed, writing to Baird frequently from the field.133

Before leaving on the Southwest Expedition, Cushing had the good fortune to befriend and learn from a fellow employee of the U.S. National Museum, a Southern Tsitsistas/Suhtai

() man by the name of Tichkematse. Hired on to fill a variety of capacities within the

Museum, Tichkematse, also known as Squint Eyes or John Squint Eye, worked for the

130 McGee et al., “In Memoriam,” 363-364.

131 Frank Hamilton Cushing, “My Adventures in Zuni,” Century 25, no. 2 (December 1882), 191.

132 Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 194.

133 Smithsonian Institution Archives, Spencer Baird Papers, Record Unit 7002, S. Baird to F.H. Cushing corr., January 24, 1882.

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Smithsonian between the years 1879 and 1881.134 In July of 1879 the two men undertook a collaborative study of American Indian sign language, compiling more than 161 detailed cards analyzing the ubiquitous hand gestures common on the Plains.135

Figure 14. Tichkematse, ca. 1880 NAA INV 00439500

Before arriving at the Smithsonian, Tichkematse had already lived an eventful life, especially for one as young as he. Born in 1856 or 1857 in what was then , by age 18 the U.S. Army captured Tichkematse and seventy-one other Native men and women accused or suspected of committing crimes against the United States. These individuals represented a number of southern Plains communities, including the , Inunaina (),

Kiowa, Niuam (), and Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne). Imprisoned without trial, all were forcefully transported to Fort Marion, a U.S. Army-run prison in St. Augustine, Florida, arriving there in May of 1875.136 U.S. Army soldier Richard Henry Pratt, later founder and

Superintendent of the Carlisle Indian School, experimented with efforts to educate the American

134 Candace Greene, “Tichkematse: A Cheyenne at the Smithsonian,” (2000).

135 Karen Daniels Petersen, Plains Indian Art from Fort Marion (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 195-198.

136 Petersen, Plains Indian Art, 193.

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Indian prisoners of war, his ultimate goal being to assimilate them into American society.137

After more than two years of imprisonment, the Department of War transferred the care of the prisoners to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1878. Pratt arranged for seventeen of his most promising students, Tichkematse among them, to attend the Hampton Institute in Virginia, a school originally founded for the education of African American youth, but which began accepting Native American students as well in 1878.138

Figure 15. Spencer Baird, 1880 NAA INV 02876300

After less than a year of schooling at Hampton, however, Pratt and Spencer Baird agreed to send Tichkematse to Washington, DC, there to learn the trade of taxidermy, specifically the preparation of bird and mammal specimens for study and display in the Smithsonian

Institution.139 In addition, Tichkematse and another Indigenous man, George Tsaroff, a Native of the Aleutian Islands, also had charge of the ethnological hall, working with Native object collections in the Museum’s galleries, and interpreting them to the public.140 According to

137 Pratt, “Advantage of Mingling,” 260.

138 Petersen, Plains Indian Art, 193-194.

139 Petersen, Plains Indian Art, 194.

140 Smithsonian Institution, 1881 Annual Report, 40.

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contemporary newspaper accounts, the public regarded Tichkematse as a “great favorite” on account of his “willingness to make himself useful” and for “his knowledge of Indian life.”141

Secretary Baird’s opinions of Tichkematse were more mixed. In the Smithsonian’s

Annual Report of 1881, Baird stated that Tichkematse’s presence in the galleries “attracted much attention,” specifically due to his ability to “explain intelligently the functions of many of the implements and other objects.”142 In his private correspondence with Pratt, however, Baird described Tichkematse as a “fifth-wheel to the coach,” noting that they could get along without him, and would send him back to Carlisle if Pratt so desired.143

Regardless of Baird’s opinions, Tichkematse clearly impressed Cushing with his cultural knowledge and work ethic, and successfully proved that the two worked well together. So it was that in 1880 Cushing wrote from the field to Baird, broaching the idea of sending Tichkematse to the Southwest to aid him in his work. “I value very highly the prospect of having him as an assistant,” Cushing wrote, “as he is – like the Zunis – a constant and very important study to me.”144 Such wording implies that Cushing desired Tichkematse to serve not only as a field assistant, but also as an object of study himself, teaching Cushing about Tsitsistas/Suhtai

(Cheyenne) culture, and perhaps continuing their American Indian sign language studies.

Throughout the remainder of 1880 Cushing continued to write to Baird, stating that he was

141 Cheyenne Transporter, OK, February 25, 1881.

142 Smithsonian Institution, 1881 Annual Report, 40.

143 Yale, Beinecke, MSS S-1174, S. Baird to R.H. Pratt corr., November 5, 1879.

144 SIA, RU 7002, F.H. Cushing to S. Baird corr., September 18, 1880.

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“extremely desirous” of Tichkematse joining him, as “accustomed to Indian ways,” Cushing could think of no one else “who would be of such practical service as himself.”145

By early 1881 plans were in place, with the Darlington, , newspaper, the Cheyenne Transporter, reporting of Tichkematse’s impending travel to New Mexico to

“work with a noted scientist,” and aid his “researches in the wilds of that territory.”146

Tichkematse arrived that June, and soon after departed with Cushing on an ethnological expedition to visit the Havasupai (Coconino) people who inhabited the Grand Canyon region.

Cushing’s purpose in this expedition was, with Tichkematse as “companion and assistant,” to

“take vocabularies and a census” of the Havasupai (Coconino) communities, and “such other notes as possible.” The following year Cushing published two articles in the popular press about their Grand Canyon anthropological adventures, titled “The Nation of the Willows.”147

After returning from their expedition through the lands of the Hopi and Havasupai

(Coconino), Tichkematse chose to remain with Cushing among the A:shiwi (Zuni) people, working alongside his fellow Smithsonian anthropologist colleagues. Baird, perhaps with mixed feelings due to his earlier writings about Tichkematse, nevertheless wrote of his “important service” in ethnological collecting “under the direction of Mr. Cushing and Mr. James

Stevenson.”148 Pratt at Carlisle, too, learned of Tichkematse’s anthropological work in the field, as John D. Miles, U.S. Indian Agent for the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency, updated him on

145 SIA, RU 7002, F.H. Cushing to S. Baird corr., November 28, 1880; SIA, RU 7002, F.H. Cushing to S. Baird corr., December 19, 1880.

146 Cheyenne Transporter, OK, February 25, 1881.

147 Frank Hamilton Cushing, “The Nation of the Willows,” Atlantic Monthly 50, no. 299 (September 1882), 362; SIA, RU 7002, F.H. Cushing to S. Baird corr., June 24, 1881; Frank Hamilton Cushing, “The Nation of the Willows II,” Atlantic Monthly 50, no. 300 (October 1882), 541-559.

148 Petersen, Plains Indian Art, 201.

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Tichkematse’s success in “making collections” in Arizona and New Mexico, while in the

“employ of the Smithsonian Institute.”149 By January of 1882 the Cheyenne Transporter reported

Tichkematse’s return to Oklahoma Indian Territory, quoting him as having “explored New

Mexico to his entire satisfaction.”150 Although Tichkematse continued to live in the U.S. West for many more years and to work at a number of different careers, anthropology was not one of the ones he chose to continue.151 He later married a Northern Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne) woman named Nellie Wolf in 1890, and the two lived together for nearly thirty-five years before her death in 1924. Tichkemtase died on the former Tongue River Reservation in Rosebud,

Montana, in November of 1932, at approximately seventy-six years of age.152

Figure 16. Frank Hamilton Cushing with A:shiwi (Zuni) and Hopi Visitors to the East Coast, 1882 NAA.PhotoLot.59

Cushing, on the other hand, clearly immersed himself in ethnological study, embodying more than most the later anthropological ideal of the participant observer. As Powell and others repeatedly noted of Cushing, he strove to become “deeply versed” in the everyday lives,

149 Jno. D. Miles, Eadle Keatah Toh, PA, October 1881.

150 Cheyenne Transporter, OK, January 10, 1882.

151 Petersen, Plains Indian Art, 194.

152 Montana, Death Index, 1907-2015, Ancestry.com.

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religions, and governments of the Indigenous peoples he studied.153 The sacred and profane elements were of equal interest to him, and what he studied in the cultures of others, he wanted to reciprocate through exposure of American culture. Thus in February of 1882 Cushing departed the Southwest for the East Coast, accompanied by six men. Among the group were five A:shiwi

(Zuni) individuals: Kiasi, Laiiuahtsaila, Laiiuahtsailunkia, Naiiuhtchi, and Palowaihtiwa, all prominent religious and secular leaders of the community, and one Hopi man by the name of

Nanahe.154

While in Washington, DC, the Southwest visitors took in the sites including planting ceremonies in Rock Creek Park, climbing the Washington Monument, and meeting President

Chester A. Arthur. In addition, they also studied material culture heritage objects of their communities in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, interpreting, informing, and no doubt correcting the descriptive records created by non-Native anthropologists.155 According to a contemporary newspaper account, Cushing’s visit “to the East with his Zuni friends” caused a spike in both popular and scholarly interest in the development of anthropology.156 After traveling to New York and Boston, and performing a ceremony along the New England coast of the Atlantic Ocean, four members of the party departed for the Southwest, while Naiiuhtchi and

Palowaihtiwa, A:shiwi (Zuni) Senior Priest and Governor, respectively, chose to remain in the

U.S. capital for the summer.157 There the two men continued their collaborative ethnographic

153 McGee et al., “In Memoriam,” 365.

154 Curtis M. Hinsley, “Zunis and Brahmins: Cultural Ambivalence in the Gilded Age,” in Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, ed. George Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 170.

155 Hinsley, “Zunis and Brahmins,” 171.

156 Sylvester Baxter, “Some Results of Mr. Cushing’s Visit,” The American Architect and Building News 11, no. 331 (April 29, 1882), 195.

157 Hinsley, “Zunis and Brahmins,” 171-172.

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work with Cushing, supplementing the descriptive records of their community in the

Smithsonian collections before returning to their home in New Mexico that fall.

Figure 17. Emily Magill Cushing, Wife of Frank Hamilton Cushing, ca. 1926 NAA INV 02644600

Also in that summer of 1882 Cushing married Emily Magill in Washington, DC. Like a number of spouses of anthropologists, Emily chose to accompany her husband on his anthropological fieldwork, in the words of John Wesley Powell, electing to share with him “the dangers and privations of the wilderness.”158 Returning to the Southwest in October, Cushing brought with him his new bride, her sister, a cook, and a good deal of clout after a successful nine-month journey across the continent with the A:shiwi (Zuni) community leaders. He would remain in the Southwest for much of the 1880s, gradually focusing to a greater extent on archaeology over ethnology. After a number of financial setbacks and health problems, Cushing returned to the East Coast, continuing to work with the Bureau of American Ethnology until his sudden death in 1900 at age forty-two.

Cushing and the Public

158 McGee et al., “In Memoriam,” 367.

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Frank Hamilton Cushing has always maintained a unique place in the field of American anthropology. As a public and professional intellectual of meager actual schooling, Cushing, like his fellow BAE employees J.N.B. Hewitt, James Mooney, and John Wesley Powell, was representative of the early days of American anthropology. His peers, indeed those who were closest to him, paradoxically described Cushing as both a “man of genius” and as “the biggest fool.” In a memoriam published in the American Anthropologist soon after Cushing’s death, and just a few years before his own, BAE Director Powell emotionally wrote that he had loved the younger ethnologist “as a father loves his son.”159

Leaders in the anthropological and museum fields declared Cushing’s Southwest fieldwork “of the very highest importance.”160 Others who worked with him in the New Mexico and Arizona territories, though, criticized his methods and lack of record-keeping, considering him “completely unfit as a leader.”161 Cushing received praise in leading New York and Boston newspapers for his “rich contributions,” and “close and sincere ethnological study,” while simultaneously rumors of his “licentiousness” in the field spread through the halls of the U.S.

Indian Inspector’s Office.162 Some of his anthropologist colleagues, no doubt betraying their own hopes for the profession, saw Cushing’s work as placing Native peoples “on the highroad to

American civilization.”163 Others accused him of exemplifying the mode of “the old barbarian

159 McGee et al., “In Memoriam,” 354, 367; Darlis A. Miller, Matilda Coxe Stevenson: Pioneering Anthropologist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 43-44.

160 NAA, BAE, F.W. Putnam to J.W. Powell corr., April 4, 1882.

161 Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 202.

162 “The Passing of the Indians,” New York Sun, March 10, 1886; Sylvester Baxter, “Zuni Revisited,” The American Architect and Building News 13, no. 377 (March 17, 1883), 124; NAA, BAE, C.H. Howard to J.W. Powell corr., December 26, 1882.

163 McGee et al., “In Memoriam,” 365.

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rather than of civilization.”164 Such characterizations have not slowed with time, either. A late twentieth-century biography of Cushing labeled him “brilliant, quixotic,” and the strangest figure in the history of American anthropology.165

Lamentably no such perspectives are readily available from the Indigenous peoples who lived, worked, and collaborated with him. Later generations are able to glean a bit of insight into how some A:shiwi (Zuni) viewed Cushing, however, through the community members’ choice to adopt him and eventually raise him to the level of Bow Priest and First War Chief of the

Zunis.166 It was certainly no secret that Cushing from the beginning strove to be accepted by the people he studied, working tirelessly to be admitted into the “supreme order of the Zunis,” and to gain knowledge of their “sacred rites.”167 As early as October of 1879, only recently arrived in the Southwest, Cushing wrote to Baird, “I live among the Indians, I eat their food, and sleep in their houses . . . Because I look with unfeigned reverence on their beautiful and ancient ceremonies, never laughing at any absurd observance, they love me, and I learn.” Due to his show of cultural respect and willingness to participate in social immersion, Cushing optimistically believed, “my notes will contain much which those of all other explorers have failed to communicate.”168

Whether unknown to him, or simply because Cushing chose not to acknowledge it, his curiosity and adoption of local customs were hardly the sole motivations for his acceptance into

A:shiwi (Zuni) society and into the priesthood. As with countless “adoptions” of non-Native

164 NAA, BAE, C.H. Howard to J.W. Powell corr., December 26, 1882.

165 Mark, Four Anthropologists, 96.

166 Hinsley, “Zunis and Brahmins,” 179.

167 NAA, BAE, F.H. Cushing to S. Baird corr., December 4, 1881.

168 NAA, BAE, F.H. Cushing to S. Baird corr., October 29, 1879.

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peoples into Indigenous communities, the benefits were intended not just for the initiate, but for the community members as well in gaining a mouthpiece for protection and/or advocacy from a largely intolerant non-Native society. For example, as early as 1879 the A:shiwi (Zuni) governor

Palowaihtiwa encouraged Cushing’s participation in pueblo politics, particularly land rights issues with neighboring Diné (Navajo) communities and ever-present Euro-American encroachments onto Native land.169 Cushing, unlike local Indigenous leaders, could appeal to a nearly limitless number of people to aid him and thus to aid the A:shiwi (Zuni), due to his race, gender, and connections in the nation’s capital. Not surprisingly, Cushing’s words and actions on behalf of his adopted family, again perhaps unknown to him, were more likely truly those of the governor and the village leadership.170 In fact, there is some evidence to indicate that Cushing’s

September 1881 initiation in the Priesthood of the Bow was reciprocity for him making it possible for select community leaders to travel to Washington, DC, New York, and Boston and to meet the U.S. president only six months later, something formerly unprecedented for the

A:shiwi (Zuni).171

When viewing Cushing’s influence in the field of anthropology, specifically how he represented Native American peoples to the public, one must also examine the contributions of his collaborator, Tichkematse. Although his work in the field of anthropology was relatively short, lasting only from 1879 to 1882, Tichkematse’s potential influence was great, and is worthy of brief consideration. Tickkematse began working for the Smithsonian Institution in 1879, representing his and other Native cultures to the public. Lauded in the press for his commendable

169 Hinsley, “Zunis and Brahmins,” 178-179.

170 Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 196.

171 Hinsley, “Zunis and Brahmins,” 178.

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work as a guide in the Indian galleries and ethnological hall, the twenty-two-year-old demonstrated knowledge and ability in interpreting material culture objects to a diverse museum audience. In this way, Tichkemtase disabused the public of their racial stereotypes about supposedly brutal and ignorant Native Americans. Further, his very presence as a

Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne) man working alongside fellow Smithsonian Unangan (Aleut) employee George Tsaroff combatted monolithic views of the Indigenous peoples of North

America.

In representing Native peoples to a broad American audience, Cushing published and lectured frequently. In addition to numerous scholarly publications directed toward the anthropological profession, Cushing also wrote pieces for popular periodicals including the

Atlantic Monthly and Century Illustrated, two of the most prominent monthly magazines of the late nineteenth century. Specifically, he wrote a three-part series published in 1882-1883 titled

“My Adventures in Zuni,” and another two-parter about his ethnological journey to the people of the Grand Canyon, titled “The Nation of the Willows.” The general format and idea of these articles was modeled roughly on John Wesley Powell’s popular publications a decade earlier in

Scribner’s Monthly, detailing his experiences exploring the Colorado River and visiting the

Indigenous people there. While some recent scholars have postulated that the need for money drove Cushing to publish these articles, it seems more likely that he was trying to reach a broader audience in order to change and influence their perceptions of American Indians.172

Cushing’s sympathy for Native peoples, though cloaked in social evolutionary and colonialist language, is nevertheless apparent in his writings and lectures. For instance, in a lecture delivered to the Board of Indian Commissioners in 1897, Cushing emphasized that his

172 Mark, Four Anthropologists, 105.

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work at the BAE was not for science alone, but to more fully understand the lives of Native

Americans. He argued such labor was performed “that we may be the better able to treat with him as a subject or ward, and to aid him to overcome in his sadly unequal struggle with an advancing and alien civilization,” rather than allow Native peoples to become “further degraded or utterly destroyed.”173

Figure 18. Frank Hamilton Cushing Dressed in Native Clothing, ca. 1880 NAA INV 02854700

Cushing’s sympathy if not outright stance of equality for Native peoples was evident in his actions, lectures, writings, and the writings of others about him as well. His willingness to immerse himself in the cultures of those whom he studied, fairly radical in his day and among his contemporaries, was also clear. His advocacy on behalf of his “adopted people,” however, was what separated Cushing from other anthropologists.174 No doubt due to a combination of his emotional connection with a culture not his own, his desire to excel in his anthropological career, and the urging of Governor Palowaihtiwa, Cushing went above and beyond in protecting and

173 Frank Hamilton Cushing, “The Need of Studying the Indian in Order to Teach Him,” Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners (1897), 109.

174 Autry Museum of the American West, Frank Hamilton Cushing Collection MSS 6, F.H. Cushing to S. Baird corr., June 20, 1880.

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advocating for A:shiwi (Zuni) land rights. Among those receiving his enmity were missionaries, those “most unscrupulous rascals,” as well as his “special enemies: Mormons and .”175

He repeatedly involved himself in struggles between the A:shiwi (Zuni) and neighboring Diné

(Navajo) people over property disputes and stolen horses, labeling his enemies “wandering .”176 In 1882, angered over Diné (Navajo) horses grazing on A:shiwi (Zuni) land,

Cushing openly admitted to Galen Eastman, U.S. Indian Agent for the Navajo Indian Agency, that he had been acting according to his authority when he fired “three times into two different bands of horses belonging to the Navajo Indians,” intending to kill them.177 Eastman was astonished at Cushing’s readiness to take the law into his own hands. He argued that through such a lawless course, instead of bringing “the Indian up to our standard,” Cushing had retrograded down to their level.178

Cushing’s acts of physically confronting those he perceived as his enemies faded with time and with distance. By the late 1890s he was again living in Washington, DC, far from his adopted family and culture in the Southwest. He nevertheless continued to advocate for

Indigenous rights, though now more commonly with sympathetic words and compelling arguments than with guns. Summing up the experience common to anthropologists of their day,

Cushing’s friend and amateur field ethnologist, John G. Bourke, wrote “Very few of our people

[Americans] care for the Indians and nearly all of them manifest a suspicion of a man who

175 NAA, BAE, F.H. Cushing to S. Baird corr., December 4, 1881; NAA, BAE, F.H. Cushing to S. Baird corr., July 2, 1880.

176 Autry, MSS 6, F.H. Cushing to S. Baird corr., June 20, 1880.

177 NARA, RG 75, F.H. Cushing to G. Eastman corr., October 11, 1882.

178 NARA, RG 75, G. Eastman to F.H. Cushing corr., October 21, 1882.

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presumes to consider their manners, customs, and ideas worthy of note and preservation.”179

Such words well describe the uphill battle sympathetic individuals like Cushing faced from

Christian reformers, Bureau of Indian Affairs employees, Western land-barons, politicians, and a multitude of other interested groups and individuals across the country.

Accepting that provocative names and acts would not prevent Euro-American encroachment onto Native lands, Cushing urged that government policies of civilization and

Christianization be gradual. He asked that Native assimilation to American society, if it must occur, proceed slowly in changing the beliefs of American Indians. “However wrong from our standpoint,” Cushing argued, Native American beliefs remained influential for good in the conduct of their own lives. He advocated studying and understanding the Native individual first, before presuming to “admonish him too freely or instruct him in the better or more rational ways of life that we lead.”180 Despite the accusations of his detractors, Cushing was nevertheless a sympathetic fighter for American Indians. He hoped that through his anthropological representations of Native peoples, others would be too.

179 Autry, MSS 6, J.G. Bourke to F.H. Cushing corr., September 30, 1884.

180 Cushing, “Need of Studying,” 114-115.

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SECTION 1-3

MATILDA COXE STEVENSON (1849-1915)

Figure 19. Matilda Coxe Stevenson, ca. 1870 NAA INV 02881900

Matilda Coxe Stevenson, known among her associates as Tilly, came to be a leader in the field of early twentieth-century anthropology, particularly in her advocacy for the equal place of women within this newly emerging discipline. Born in Texas in 1849 as Matilda Coxe Evans, she later grew up in Washington, DC, marrying James Stevenson there in 1872.181 This marriage introduced Matilda to a life of travel and exploration throughout the U.S. West, and importantly, to an anthropology career that spanned more than forty years, ending with her death in 1915. As the first professional woman anthropologist in America, her work not only inspired and continues to inspire countless others, but it also illustrates a level of inclusivity in the early days of American anthropology which would soon change.

Between 1872 and 1878 James Stevenson conducted numerous surveys throughout what are now the states of Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming for the Hayden U.S. Geological

181 Nancy J. Parezo, “Matilda Coxe Evans Stevenson,” in Women Anthropologists: Selected Biographies, ed. Ute Gacs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 337.

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Survey. Matilda often accompanied her husband, and it was during a visit to the Ute and

Inunaina (Arapaho) peoples that he taught her “the rudiments of ethnographic technique,” i.e., learning Indigenous languages, observing local customs and habits, and recording these observations for publication and dissemination. By 1879, with the founding of the Bureau of

American Ethnology, Director John Wesley Powell recruited James to undertake an expedition to the Pueblo communities in the Arizona and New Mexico territories. Hired as “volunteer coadjutor in ethnology,” or assistant to her husband, Matilda accompanied this BAE expedition on its first anthropological journey to the Southwest, and would continue to work in this capacity for the next five years.182

Figure 20. James Stevenson with Unidentified Southwest Native Peoples, 1872 NAA INV 02870600

In his correspondence with James Stevenson, Powell enumerated the expedition’s three goals:

First: To make collections representing the arts and industries of the inhabitants – said collections to be deposited in the National Museum. Second: To make photographs and drawings for illustrative purposes, of the Indians, their houses, and scenes representing their daily life. Third: To make investigations into their language, customs, and habits, mythology, government, architecture, etc., etc. – such materials as are collected to be deposited in this office for publication.183

182 Parezo, “Stevenson,” 337.

183 NAA, BAE, J.W. Powell to J. Stevenson corr., September 8, 1880.

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In this way, Powell strove to acquire photographic, manuscript, linguistic, and other ephemeral collections for use in the BAE’s publications, while at the same time seeking to acquire material culture objects to display in the exhibition halls of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum.

In addition to providing education and entertainment for the popular and scholarly communities,

Powell also sought to appease members of Congress. Based on the data gathered by his staff in the field, he supplied U.S. lawmakers and government officials with information he believed would be helpful and effective in dealing with American Indians residing in recently conquered U.S. domains.

Matilda Stevenson’s unprecedented role as a female ethnological assistant in the Southwest

Expedition, perhaps surprisingly, had the support of a number of leaders in the anthropological and museum fields both domestically and in Europe. Powell and Secretary of the Smithsonian

Institution Spencer Baird believed Stevenson would have access to information about Native

American women otherwise inaccessible to her male colleagues.184 In addition to Powell and

Baird, the famous British Anthropologist and Keeper of the Oxford University Museum of Natural

History, E.B. Tylor, also publicly lauded Stevenson’s work. After visiting the Stevensons’s

Southwest worksite in 1884, Tylor encouraged women’s inclusion in ethnological undertakings, arguing that they would be better able to draw out information men could not, due in part to their

“natural sympathy with the Indian females.”185 Nineteenth-century characterizations of women as both “morally superior” to men and as “desexualized” created a place for women in anthropology,

184 Parezo, “Stevenson,” 338.

185 Noelke, “Origin and Early History,” 140-141; E.B. Tylor, “How the Problems of American Anthropology Present Themselves to the English Mind,” Science 4, no. 98 (December 19, 1884), 545-551.

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including for such notable figures as Erminnie Platt Smith, Alice C. Fletcher, and Frances

Densmore.186

In addition to her fieldwork, Stevenson also proved foundational to the anthropological discipline through her organization and advocacy of women in the sciences. In 1885 she founded and was elected first president of the Women’s Anthropological Society (WAS), a Washington,

DC-based national women’s organization aimed at promoting anthropological study.187 Organized to open to women new fields for systematic investigation in the field, it was also a clear response to the male-only Anthropological Society of Washington, founded six years earlier.188 Her husband

James, though encouraging of her ethnographic work, thought such an organization of women

“impracticable,” believing “not a half-dozen ladies could be found deeply enough interested in science to form the nucleus.”189 Matilda, no doubt quite proudly, proved him wrong. The first meeting of the WAS on June 8, 1885, included ten women. Less than a year later this number had risen to thirty-four, and by July of 1889 the WAS boasted sixty-four women including active, honorary, and corresponding members in DC and other East Coast cities.190

According to Anita McComb McGee, recording secretary of the society, medical doctor, and wife of later BAE ethnologist WJ McGee, the Women’s Anthropological Society members had no desire to perpetuate a distinction of sex in science. With few scientific professional

186 Kamala Visweswaran, “‘Wild West’ Anthropology and the Disciplining of Gender,” in Gender and American Social Science: The Formative Years, ed. Helene Silverberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 98.

187 “A Woman’s Society,” Washington Evening Star, DC, February 13, 1886.

188 “Women Who Serve Science,” Washington Evening Star, DC, July 6, 1889; Daniel S. Lamb, “The Story of the Anthropological Society of Washington,” American Anthropologist 8, no. 3 (July-September 1906), 564.

189 Miller, Stevenson, 71-72.

190 Anita Newcomb McGee, “The Women’s Anthropological Society of America,” Science 13, no. 321 (March 29, 1889), 240; “A Woman’s Society,” Washington Evening Star, DC, February 13, 1886; “Women Who Serve Science,” Washington Evening Star, DC, July 6, 1889.

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opportunities or organizations open to men and women equally, however, the Women’s

Anthropological Society was satisfied to exist independently “in anticipation of the time when science shall regard only the work, not the worker.”191 The society continued with “undiminished enthusiasm and vigor,” until in late 1898, at the urging of the male-only Anthropological Society of Washington, the women were invited to become members.192 The two societies merged in

January of 1899, with forty-nine women swelling the ranks of the previously male-dominated organization.193

Matilda Stevenson, like Frank Hamilton Cushing and other anthropologists of her day, strove not only to travel to the homelands of Native peoples to study their lives, but also encouraged those whom she studied to travel to her home for a reciprocal form of learning. In

1886 We’wha, an A:shiwi (Zuni) lhamana or two-spirit person, accompanied Stevenson to

Washington, DC.194 We’wha’s knowledge of A:shiwi (Zuni) culture proved a boon to Stevenson as she lived with and assisted her in “her studies of Zuni customs,” and even attended an early meeting of the Women’s Anthropological Society.195

Numerous Washington, DC, newspapers covered We’wha’s visit, intrigued by this “ideal priestess of a barbaric people.”196 Throughout their collaborative relationship over the years,

Stevenson interchanged the use of male or female pronouns to describe We’wha, describing her in a 1904 publication as “perhaps the tallest person in Zuni; certainly the strongest, both mentally

191 McGee, “Women’s Anthropological Society,” 240.

192 “The Woman’s Anthropological Society,” Science 13, no. 312 (January 25, 1889): 60-61.

193 Lamb, “Anthropological Society,” 577.

194 Will Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 5.

195 “A Woman’s Society,” Washington Evening Star, DC, February 13, 1886.

196 “A Zuni Princess,” Washington National Tribune, DC, May 20, 1886.

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and physically.”197 Perhaps expectedly, the local press remarked frequently on the nature of

We’wha’s gender. A reporter for the Washington National Tribune noted “Wewha is very much larger in frame and more masculine in appearance than is usual with the Zuni” women.198

Another argued that due to her “rather masculine” figure and “carriage,” people who had formed poetic ideals of Indian maidens “after the pattern of Pocahontas or Minnehana, might be disappointed.”199 Such comments, one reported noted, “made her [We’wha] quite indignant.”

Other portrayals proved kinder, however, labeling her “a most intelligent young woman” and “a

Princess and a Priestess in her tribe.”200

Figure 21. We’wha in Washington, DC, 1886 NMAI P10732

197 Matilda Coxe Stevenson, “The Zuni Indians: Their Mythology, Esoteric Fraternities, and Ceremonies,” Bureau of American Ethnology, Twenty-Third Annual Report, 1901-1902 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Press, 1904), 310.

198 “A Zuni Princess,” Washington National Tribune, DC, May 20, 1886.

199 “Making an Indian Blanket,” Washington Evening Star, DC, June 12, 1886.

200 “A Zuni Princess,” Washington National Tribune, DC, May 20, 1886.

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We’wha performed the role not only of cultural ambassador for her community, but also as educator to the people of Washington, DC.201 Serving a very important purpose in describing and illustrating the various masks, dance-rattles, and other Southwest material culture objects in the Smithsonian’s collections, she arranged and interpreted specimens, providing a sorely needed

Native perspective on her cultural belongings on display.202 In June of 1886, before a crowd of photographers and onlookers, We’wha demonstrated the technique of A:shiwi (Zuni) blanket weaving on a Pueblo loom in one of the Smithsonian’s galleries. This event itself would also ultimately be incorporated into the museum’s exhibits, as “the loom with the blanket upon it” and the “photographs of Wa-Wah at work upon it” were themselves later placed in a display case.203

After nearly a decade of working together as a BAE-directed husband and wife anthropological team, James Stevenson died in 1888. Following his death, Powell tasked Matilda with putting her and her husband’s “notes together,” a temporary appointment on the BAE federal payroll which eventually became permanent.204 In March of 1890 Powell hired her on as an Assistant Ethnologist, the first full-time professional anthropologist position for a woman in the Bureau.205 Authorized to travel with one assistant, BAE Secretary May Clark, Powell instructed Stevenson to return to the Southwest, to the communities of “Silla, Jemez, and Zuni,

New Mexico, for the purpose of investigating the customs of the Indians of these pueblos.” Of particular importance were recording “their history, mythology, medicine practices, usages with

201 Roscoe, Zuni Man-Woman, 73.

202 “A Zuni Princess,” Washington National Tribune, DC, May 20, 1886.

203 “Making an Indian Blanket,” Washington Evening Star, DC, June 12, 1886.

204 Parezo, “Stevenson,” 339.

205 Miller, Stevenson, 89.

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regard to the training of children, the rites and privileges pertaining to their secret societies, etc.”206 For the remainder of her life, another quarter century, Stevenson continued to travel to the Southwest to further her anthropological fieldwork. Regarding the future growth of anthropology and its potentialities for the study of humankind, she optimistically wrote to a colleague of the many “great fields [that] yet remain to be explored.”207

Stevenson and the Public

Perceptions of Matilda Coxe Stevenson during and after her life remain extremely mixed.

While contemporary newspaper columnists frequently extolled her intelligence, enthusiasm,

“physical endurance,” and “mental endowments,” many of her male colleagues focused instead on her “intrusive,” “aggressive,” and “domineering” nature.208 Regarding her early work as assistant to her husband, a reporter for Harper’s Weekly stated that she proved “herself of the greatest service as a collector and observer,” procuring “numerous facts and specimens” from those whom she studied.209 Conversely, one of her BAE colleagues argued that she procured these Native material culture objects “by going after what she wanted and taking it.”210 Another pointed to her patronizing language in which she referred to the A:shiwi (Zuni) people as “‘my

Indians,’ as though nobody else had any interest in them,” or indeed as though they were not

206 NAA, BAE, J.W. Powell to M.C. Stevenson corr., March 15, 1890.

207 National Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation Records, M.C. Stevenson to G. Pepper corr., May 1, 1905.

208 “Women Who Serve Science,” Washington Evening Star, DC, July 6, 1889; Miller, Stevenson, 41, 58-59.

209 “The Zuni Indians,” Harper’s Weekly, NY, January 28, 1882.

210 NAA, MSS 4651, 41.

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their own people.211 In spite of these conflicting or negative descriptions of Stevenson’s personality among her immediate colleagues, scholars both during her lifetime and later would characterize her field methodology and analyses as “objective” and “precise,” remarking that in several cases her fieldwork was better than that of her male contemporaries.212 Some in the media certainly agreed with this assessment, as just a few months before her death, the Santa Fe

State Recorder newspaper of 1915 declared her “one of the most accomplished students of

Indian life in the country.”213

Always a controversial figure, Stevenson received criticism from those outside of the field of anthropology as well. Francis E. Leupp, later the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs and no friend to anthropologists, derisively referred to Stevenson as “one of the ‘Scientific Set’ who wished to preserve Indian cultures for scholarly examination.”214 In his 1897 Notes of a

Summer Tour among the Indians of the Southwest, Leupp argued that due to the petting, pampering, and coddling by anthropologists such as Matilda Stevenson and Frank Hamilton

Cushing, the A:shiwi (Zuni) people had “come to consider themselves a little better than the whites,” an unthinkable situation for a man such as Leupp.215

211 , “Frederick Webb Hodge, Ethnologist: A Tape-Recorded Interview” (Berkeley: Corene Gilb, 1957), 77.

212 Parezo, “Stevenson,” 341.

213 Santa Fe State Recorder, NM, March 19, 1915.

214 William T. Hagan, The Indian Rights Association: The Herbert Welsh Years, 1882-1904 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 225-226.

215 Francis E. Leupp, Notes of a Summer Tour among the Indians of the Southwest (Philadelphia: Office of the Indian Rights Association, 1897), 14.

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Figure 22. Illustrated Police News Cartoon of Matilda Coxe Stevenson in Zuni, March 6, 1886 NAA 53-516

Among the A:shiwi (Zuni) who remembered Stevenson’s fieldwork from their youth, one woman recalled her as “arrogant,” repeatedly entering forbidden ceremonial chambers, and photographing individuals without permission. Apparently Stevenson was “disliked by many

Zunis,” and indeed some of them did not want her visiting their communities. As her collaborative relationship with We’wha clearly demonstrates, however, there were also those who were willing to work closely with her.216 According to Stevenson in a 1911 interview, “the

Indians realize that their old life is passing, and they are willing to co-operate with me to make its memory immortal.”217

Matilda Stevenson’s public representation of Native peoples took many forms. She regularly lectured, published articles and books for scholarly and lay communities, and created and planned exhibitions. In 1881 Stevenson published her first work on her field expeditions in the Southwest, The Zuni and the Zunians, a scholarly ethnography geared toward a popular

216 Triloki Nath Pandey, “Anthropologists at Zuni,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 116, no. 4 (August 15, 1972): 326-327.

217 Margaret B. Downing, “Mrs. Mathilda Coxe Stevenson, Connected With Scientific Bureau of Government,” Washington Star, DC, February 26, 1911.

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audience.218 As founding member of the Women’s Anthropological Society and later member of the Anthropological Society of Washington, she regularly presented papers and lectured on her

Southwest studies. A paper she delivered in 1888 on “Zuni religion” was pronounced “the best presentation of a savage religion yet written,” and in 1905 she proposed a lecture series to be coordinated through the Chicago Lyceum Bureau. This lecture series on the Pueblo Indians,

Stevenson claimed, would “charm the most intellectual as well as persons of ordinary attainments.”219

In addition to her publications and lectures, Matilda also strove to educate the public about Native American cultures through exhibitions, including those at the Smithsonian’s

National Museum with We’wha’s assistance, and at World’s Fairs in Chicago in 1893 and St.

Louis in 1904. In fact, she intended to bring a number of A:shiwi (Zuni) representatives to St.

Louis during the summer of 1904 for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition as part of the

Anthropology Department’s Races of Mankind exhibit. Although later cancelled for reasons outside of Stevenson’s control, her proposed inclusion of A:shiwi (Zuni) representatives illustrates another example of her continuing work to inform the public about Native cultures.220

In keeping with portrayals of Stevenson’s arrogant or high-handed manner toward others,

Native and non-Native alike, was her disdain for those anthropologists who chose to dress and

“live like Indians” in order to understand them. In the late nineteenth century anthropology had just begun to promote the idea of the participant observer, and while Stevenson would certainly be characterized as an observer, she would hardly be labeled a participant. Contrary to

218 Parezo, “Stevenson,” 338.

219 “Zuni Religion,” Science 11, no. 268 (March 23, 1888), 136; Miller, Stevenson, 176.

220 NMAI, Heye, G. Pepper to F.W. Putnam corr., June 29, 1904.

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Stevenson’s observational approach was her fellow 1879 Southwest Expedition member and

BAE colleague, Frank Hamilton Cushing, who immersed himself in A:shiwi (Zuni) society. In language that adequately illustrates her view of the social development of Indigenous peoples and simultaneously her disregard for Cushing, she stated that she could not understand “those who think that anything is gained by sinking to the level of Indian civilization.”221 Of Cushing

Stevenson would later write, “this man was the biggest fool and charlatan I ever knew.”222

Matilda believed that Native peoples were capable of being studied and eventually assimilated into mainstream American society, but, like many other Progressives of her day believed, only in the way she deemed best. She said as much in a 1904 BAE Annual Report where she wrote that those individuals “possessing superior intelligence and a love for humanity,

[e.g., anthropologists], and only such may lead our Indians from darkness to light.”223 In order to save themselves, James and Matilda Stevenson once argued, the A:shiwi (Zuni) had to give up their customs, dances, and religious beliefs, in essence, their culture and history. “They are wretchedly ignorant and degraded by the crudest superstition,” declared James in an 1884 newspaper interview. “I know that the Zunis have natural ability,” but “will never advance so long as they spend night after night in their religious dances.” Their cultures were not the only things the A:shiwi (Zuni) people had to shed, however; they also had to let go of their children if they wished for them to survive and assimilate. “What they need more than anything else, is education for their youth,” James stated with finality. Whether through their own willingness, or perhaps due more to the pressure exerted by the Stevensons, some Native parents eventually did

221 Downing, “Stevenson,” Washington Star, DC, February 26, 1911.

222 Miller, Stevenson, 43-44.

223 Stevenson, “Zuni Indians,” 406.

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acquiesce to this demand, with a Santa Fe newspaper later reporting that the “Zuni war-chiefs allowed her [Matilda] to bring away with them and place at school in Albuquerque a couple of

Zuni children.”224

Matilda Coxe Stevenson, like many Progressives and reformers of her time, ultimately represented Native Americans as sympathetic figures, worthy of study before they “vanished,” and deserving of American “civilization” in the form of education.225 Importantly, though, she did not represent American Indians as the equals of Euro-Americans, but rather believed the best solution was for their assimilation into mainstream society. Throughout her life she presented these beliefs in her exhibitions, lectures, and publications for the public to both consume and pass on to others.

224 “Zuni-Land Zephyrs,” Santa Fe New Mexican, NM, December 9, 1884.

225 Downing, “Stevenson,” Washington Star, DC, February 26, 1911.

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SECTION 1-4

J.N.B. HEWITT (1859-1937)

Figure 23. J.N.B. Hewitt in Office, ca. 1900 NAA Photo Lot 155, I.28

Although not as well-known today, John Napoleon Brinton, or J.N.B., Hewitt, was the first Native American anthropologist employed on a permanent basis by the Bureau of American

Ethnology. Of Native American ancestry and lacking a formalized graduate school education,

Hewitt’s life well-illustrates the changes that the anthropological field underwent during the half- century under review, with both its transition from museums to universities, and from a level of relative inclusivity to greater exclusivity among professional anthropologists. Born on the

Tuscarora in western New York state in 1859, Hewitt’s father was a non-

Native physician who practiced on the reservation, and his mother was of Tuscarora and Euro-

American ancestry. A member of the Tuscarora Bear in a matrilineal society, Hewitt’s mother’s clan membership passed to J.N.B. as well.226 When Hewitt joined the Bureau of

American Ethnology in 1886, then, he was the first and only full-time Native American

226 NAA, MSS 4651, 45.

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ethnologist on staff until Francis La Flesche came on board nearly a quarter century later in

1910.

Hewitt married several women throughout his long life, including Agnes Naughton in

1882, from whom he later separated, Katherine Stuart in 1913, who subsequently died five years later, and Carrie Hurlbut in 1925, who outlived him.227 Hewitt also belonged to a number of anthropological organizations, serving in capacities as a member and an officer. He was a founding member of the American Anthropological Association, on the membership lists of the

American Museum of Natural History in New York, and a member of the Anthropological

Society of Washington, serving as Treasurer from 1912 to 1926, and as President from 1932 to

1934.228 He also joined the progressive Society of American Indians, serving for a time on its

Executive Council.229

Hewitt first got his start in anthropology when he met BAE staff member Erminnie Smith doing linguistic fieldwork on the Tuscarora Reservation in 1880. Although having never taken an academic anthropology course, Smith nevertheless was an intelligent and formidable student of the discipline. She served as a corresponding member of the Women’s Anthropological Society of Washington, DC, and as a member of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and

Ireland.230 In addition, Smith also received the rare recognition of being the first woman elected

“Fellow” of the New York Academy of Sciences, the first woman to present a paper before the

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in 1879, and the first, and at the

227 Elisabeth Tooker and Barbara Graymont, “J.N.B. Hewitt,” Histories of Anthropology Annual 3 (2007): 90-92.

228 John R. Swanton, “John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt,” American Anthropologist 40, no. 2 (April-June 1938): 288.

229 Tooker and Graymont, “Hewitt,” 89.

230 “A Woman’s Society,” Washington Evening Star, DC, February 13, 1886.

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time of her death, the only woman to be appointed an officer within the AAAS, as Secretary of the Section of Anthropology.231

Due to her importance within these scientific circles, John Wesley Powell hired Smith on as a “regular attaché” to the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1880, directing her to make a study of the “dialects and folk-lore of the Six Iroquois nations,” including the Cayuga, Mohawk,

Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora peoples living in New York, Wisconsin, and

Canada.232 As such, she was one of the few women employed by the Bureau as an ethnologist, and worked as both a contemporary of anthropologist Matilda Coxe Stevenson and a predecessor of Frances Densmore.

Figure 24. Erminnie Smith with Officers of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1885 NAA INV 02872300

Soon after arriving on the Tuscarora Reservation, Smith recognized Hewitt’s linguistic abilities “with the Iroquoian tongues,” and subsequently hired him on as her assistant and interpreter.233 Starting in 1880 and continuing for the next six years, the pair eventually visited a

231 Vimala Jayanti, “Erminnie Adelle Platt Smith,” in Women Anthropologists: Selected Biographies, ed. Ute Gacs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 328; Sara L. Saunders-Lee, In Memoriam: Mrs. Erminnie A. Smith, 1837-1886 (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1890), 34.

232 “Mrs. Erminnie A. Smith,” Christian Herald, MI, August 13, 1885.

233 Saunders-Lee, In Memoriam, 47; NAA, BAE, J. Pilling to J.N.B. Hewitt corr., September 11, 1880.

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number of reservations in New York and Canada, collecting Native linguistic materials in “all their wealth of forms and peculiarities.”234 Their most important and greatest undertaking together was a Tuscarora grammar and dictionary which resulted in the classification of over

15,000 words.235

On the day of Smith’s burial in June of 1886, Hewitt wrote to BAE Director Powell, informing him of the importance of continuing Smith’s labors. “With my experience of six years in this Iroquoian linguistic work,” he wrote, “I take the liberty to ask you for the place on the

Staff of the Bureau of Ethnology made vacant by the death of the late incumbent, Mrs. Erminnie

A. Smith.” Hewitt knew this was a big request, writing that he viewed it not only as a kind favor, but also a “hard-earned promotion” after years of faithful study and application.236 While

Powell’s personal thoughts on the matter are absent, he clearly valued the continuation of the

Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) ethnographic project, as in less than a month he requested Hewitt to proceed to Washington, DC.237

Hewitt started as a full-time BAE Assistant Ethnologist on July 20, 1886, gradually taking on a number of clerical, archival, and reference responsibilities.238 Due to his organizational abilities he had charge of the manuscript collections, eventually becoming the official custodian of these important records.239 Perhaps his largest role in the office, however, was in responding to public inquiries about the histories, cultures, and languages of the

234 Saunders-Lee, In Memoriam, 49.

235 Jayanti, “Smith,” 328.

236 NAA, BAE, J.N.B. Hewitt to J.W. Powell corr., June 11, 1886.

237 NAA, BAE, J.W. Powell to J.N.B. Hewitt corr., July 15, 1886.

238 Tooker and Graymont, “Hewitt,” 75-76.

239 Swanton, “Hewitt,” 288.

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Indigenous peoples of North America. To answer accurately, he read widely and omnivorously.

At a late date in his career, he tallied having written more than 1,500 letters to correspondents.240

According to one of his colleagues, responding to this correspondence was an obligation which

Hewitt accepted very seriously, and in the execution of which he performed “invaluable service.”241 As a Native person himself, passionate about his culture’s history and those of other

American Indian peoples, he was well qualified.

In addition to daily office work while in Washington, DC, Hewitt also continued the linguistic work begun by his mentor and friend Erminnie Smith in 1880. Within the first few years of his employment with the BAE, Powell repeatedly sent Hewitt into the field “for the purposes of studying the Tuscarora mythology and language and of procuring a vocabulary.”242

Hewitt continued the endeavors begun earlier by himself and Smith, collaborating with Native individuals on a number of reservations and collecting linguistic information in the Mohawk,

Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca languages.

Figure 25. J.N.B. Hewitt (on right), Onondaga Reservation, New York, ca. 1928 NAA Photo Lot 155, III.6-11

240 Noelke, “Origin and Early History,” 163.

241 Swanton, “Hewitt,” 288.

242 NAA, BAE, J.W. Powell to J.N.B. Hewitt corr., July 30, 1888.

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Gathering information on Native, specifically Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), beliefs, languages, and cultures for decades, over time Hewitt became one of the foremost experts and leading authorities on the ceremonies and customs of the “Iroquois League.” In 1914 he received the Cornplanter Medal for Iroquois Research in recognition of his efforts to preserve “the history and ethnology of the Indians of New York State.”243 He continued his important office and field work for decades more, eventually totaling fifty-one years of service with the BAE by the time of his death in 1937.

Hewitt and the Public

J.N.B. Hewitt’s contemporaries and later historians generally described him and his work in a favorable light. His BAE colleagues declared him “a genius in Indian languages,” and wrote of his extensive knowledge in Indigenous philology and customs. However, many of those who worked closely with him also frequently noted his extreme dilatoriness in performing his job, describing him as “very safe and sound, very slow,” and not the type to be hurried.244

Contemporaries viewed his slowness as a “praiseworthy wish for completeness,” and recent historians suggest his need for accuracy at the expense of publication deadlines as perhaps due to his American Indian ancestry.245 As a Native anthropologist informing and representing

American Indian cultures to a largely Euro-American audience, this theory posits, Hewitt continually struggled to present his subject matter completely and correctly.246 Indeed, some of

243 Swanton, “Hewitt,” 288.

244 Hodge, “Frederick Webb Hodge,” 63; NAA, MSS 4651, 46.

245 Swanton, “Hewitt,” 288.

246 Tooker and Graymont, “Hewitt,” 85.

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his later lectures and publications seem to validate such conjecture, as he repeatedly called for greater historical and cultural context when presenting information about Indigenous peoples.

Newspapers of his day wrote of Hewitt and his anthropological work in glowing terms.

The Oklahoma-based Cherokee Advocate, in describing his 1897 linguistic fieldwork in the

Canadian Grand River Reserve, called it a novel expedition of study, noting that he brought with him a new device, the phonograph, to preserve his collaborators’ words and voices. He reportedly could speak eight American Indian languages and would “live Indian” while there, with the ultimate goal of creating dictionaries and grammars.247 Years later the Carlisle Indian

School periodical The Red Man wrote too of his “very profound studies of Indian life” and interesting work on the customs and languages of “the Indian people.”248 Importantly, both of these media served primarily Native audiences, and stressed Hewitt’s Tuscarora ancestry, thus highlighting the nearly unprecedented existence of an American Indian anthropologist studying and representing other American Indians.

Hewitt lectured and wrote for both scholarly and popular audiences. In 1912 he spoke at the Carlisle Indian School’s commencement ceremonies, delivering an address titled “The

Indian’s History, His Ideas, His Religion, His Mythology, and His Social Organization.” In this address he advocated for further study and investigation of American Indian cultures, encouraging his young Native audience to fully appreciate the strength of their minds.249 The following year he published a similar article in the Quarterly Journal of the Society of American

247 “The Tongues of Six Nations,” Cherokee Advocate, OK, December 26, 1897.

248 M. Friedman, “Commencement Exercises at the Carlisle Indian School, 1912,” Red Man 4, no. 9 (May 1912): 372.

249 J.N.B. Hewitt, “The Indian’s History, His Ideas, His Religion, His Mythology, and His Social Organization,” Red Man 5, no. 3 (November 1912): 114.

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Indians titled “The Teaching of Ethnology in Indian Schools.” Herein Hewitt explicitly argued the importance of Native youth learning and appreciating the ethnology of their cultures, even suggesting the creation of a textbook of American Indian anthropology for Native students.

Comprehensive study of this nature would lead to a “wholesome race pride,” Hewitt believed, and proof that the mental and physical capacity of the American Indians were in no way inferior to that of any other group.250 For Hewitt, it was absolutely clear from his historical studies that

Native Americans were equal to non-Native peoples, and profoundly important to him that

American Indian youth knew this.

In 1911 Hewitt joined the recently formed Society of American Indians, so named to stamp it unmistakably as an American Indian movement, and remove it from the category of

Progressive “white-run Indian associations” so prevalent at the end of the previous century.251

Though unable to attend the first meeting in Columbus, OH, Hewitt championed the society’s pan-Indian approach, arguing that the time had come for American Indians to “look beyond tribal ties” to the “broader field of a common race.” The SAI’s leaders proclaimed that their new organization provided a platform to which “all Indians” could come and “discuss the rights of their people.”252 As it turned out, however, certain Native voices were more welcome than others.

Over time, Hewitt came to see himself and the SAI’s leadership in opposition. This was largely due to what Hewitt viewed as the SAI leaders ignoring the concerns of Native Americans

250 J.N.B. Hewitt, “The Teaching of Ethnology in Indian Schools,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 1, no. 1 (April 15, 1913): 34-35.

251 Hertzberg, Search for an American Indian Identity, 71.

252 NAA, J.N.B. Hewitt Correspondence, MSS 4271, J.N.B. Hewitt to A.C. Parker corr., December 20, 1911; NAA, MSS 4271, J.N.B. Hewitt to A.C. Parker corr., September 3, 1912.

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living on reservations. These latter individuals tended to be less educated in Western schools, less affluent, less assimilated to Euro-American society, and thus more “traditional.” In Hewitt’s words, the “American Indian who dwells on a reservation or on a restricted allotment, vexed and harassed by the forces of greed and graft around him, is the one who most needs wise counsel and efficient legal services.” Such services, at least nominally intended for those living on reservations, failed to materialize due to the SAI leaders’ unwillingness to take the former “into the confidence of the Society.”253

Exclusionary tactics practiced by the SAI’s leadership mirror those tacitly or even explicitly maintained by countless reformist organizations throughout the Progressive era, and provide a glimpse into the contradictory and at times hypocritical nature of the work of both

Native and non-Native progressives.254 Essentially, Hewitt viewed the SAI leaders as out of touch with actual American Indian matters, and he chose to become less of a presence in the organization because of this. Relatedly, several of Hewitt’s fellow BAE ethnologists, sympathetic to the plight of Native peoples living on reservations, voiced similar concerns about the factionalism present in the SAI. Two of these, James Mooney and Francis La Flesche, attracted national attention a few years later as proponents of religious freedom for American

Indians, specifically in regard to peyote use and the rise of the .255

Through his “painstakingly conscientious” work at the Bureau of American Ethnology for more than a half-century, J.N.B. Hewitt became a fixture in the anthropological field.256 As

253 NAA, MSS 4271, J.N.B. Hewitt to A.C. Parker corr., September 27, 1915.

254 Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 241.

255 Thomas C. Maroukis, “The Peyote Controversy and the Demise of the Society of American Indians,” American Indian Quarterly 37, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 161-180.

256 Swanton, “Hewitt,” 287.

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one colleague later noted, after more than five decades in federal service with the Smithsonian,

Hewitt was eventually viewed as a kind of Bureau institution himself.257 More than this, though, he was also a dutiful and passionate chronicler of Indigenous histories, cultures, and languages.

He was sympathetic to the plight of Native peoples living on and off of reservations, and was a vocal advocate for change and equality. Further, he was among the very first in a long line of

Native anthropologists who struggled to accurately represent American Indians to a largely non-

Native public.

257 NAA, MSS 4651, 45.

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SECTION 1-5

JAMES MOONEY (1861-1921)

Figure 26. James Mooney, ca. 1893 Autry Museum of the American West

One of the most sympathetic of the non-Native anthropologists of the late nineteenth century, James Mooney was born in in 1861 to Irish Catholic immigrant parents.258 From a young age he displayed an intense interest in American Indian cultures. As early as 1882, at the age of twenty-one, he wrote to Director John Wesley Powell of the Bureau of American

Ethnology, expressing his desire to “obtain a place” on his staff.259 Receiving a negative response, Mooney wrote again in 1883, and yet again in 1884.260 Finally, after visiting Powell personally in Washington, DC, in 1885, the Director recognized the young man’s intelligence, and his tenacity, and hired him on as an Ethnologist. This position Mooney retained for the next thirty-six years.261

258 “James Mooney,” American Anthropologist 24, no. 2 (April-June 1922): 209.

259 NAA, BAE, J. Mooney to J.W. Powell corr., June 9, 1882.

260 NAA, BAE, J. Mooney to J.W. Powell corr., February 14, 1883; NAA, BAE, J. Mooney to Peltney corr., December 14, 1884.

261 “Mooney,” American Anthropologist, 209.

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Soon after arriving in the nation’s capital, Mooney joined a number of scientific societies.

These included the American Anthropological Association, which he helped to co-found, and the

Anthropological Society of Washington, where he served as Vice-President from 1909 to 1910, and as President from 1914 to 1915. Mooney married later in life, when he was thirty-seven years old, to Ione Lee Gaut. Together they had six children, and one can’t help but think of the challenging marriage this would have been for Ione, with Mooney spending weeks and months at a time in the field, and her performing the role of single parent without him.262

In his early years with the BAE Powell directed Mooney to work on his “Indian

Synonymy,” a complex list of Native and non-Native naming conventions for Indigenous communities throughout North America that Mooney began while still in his teens. This project was the foundation for what would become the BAE’s landmark two-volume publication The

Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, published in 1907 and 1910. Mooney was more well-known for his fieldwork, however, which he undertook primarily among the Southeast and

Great Plains communities.263

By 1887 Mooney was living with the Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina, hard at work day and night collecting ethnographic information. He reported to Powell from the field that he had invited his collaborators “to live in the same room with me” in order to continue their work late into the night.264 Three years later, on his way to conduct ethnologic work in

Oklahoma, Mooney learned of trouble brewing with the rise of the Ghost Dance among Plains

Indian communities. Showing his early sympathetic leanings, he asked and received permission

262 “Mooney,” American Anthropologist, 210-211.

263 Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 157-158; “Mooney,” American Anthropologist, 209.

264 NAA, BAE, J. Mooney to J.W. Powell corr., October 29, 1887.

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to investigate the situation and “report the real truth,” subsequently undertaking ethnographic work on the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation in early 1891. There he first met Cleaver

Warden, a young Southern Inunaina (Arapaho) man and former Carlisle student, who would continue to play a major role in his collaborative ethnological work with many anthropologists over the succeeding decades.265

According to Mooney in a public lecture he delivered years later, members of the

Inunaina (Arapaho) and Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne) communities knew of newspaper stories and U.S. Army reports circulating about possible “Indian mischief” connected with the Ghost

Dance. Fearing the outcome of such stories, they were anxious to explain to Mooney their belief system so that the public might know why they were dancing and that “they were not going to hurt anybody.” As Mooney later recalled, Cleaver Warden and others were happy for the young anthropologist’s interest, and explained in detail the Ghost Dance doctrine, its vision and songs.

As they repeatedly stated to Mooney, “we want the white people to understand.”266 This episode illustrated two important factors in the collaborative relationship between Mooney and those whom he studied. The first was Mooney’s willingness to serve as a mouthpiece or link between

Native communities and a non-Native public. The second was American Indian recognition that virtually the only means to influence important leaders and policymakers in Washington was through cooperation with sympathetic individuals like Mooney.

As with his work on behalf of Ghost Dance participants in the 1890s, Mooney continued to advocate for Indigenous communities for the remainder of his career. Several times his actions put him on the wrong side of government agencies and American Indian assimilation

265 James Mooney, “The Indian Ghost Dance,” Proceedings and Collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society 16 (1911): 170-172.

266 Mooney, “Indian Ghost Dance,” 171-172.

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organizations. His work documenting a 1903 Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne) Sun Dance, his frequent criticism of missionaries, and his defense of peyote ceremonial use eventually were enough to get him recalled to the office in later life. James Mooney died relatively young, at the age of sixty-one, in Washington, DC, a few days before Christmas 1921.267

Mooney and the Public

Perceptions of James Mooney among his contemporaries and later historians were rather mixed. Not surprisingly, many of his anthropological colleagues and Native American friends and collaborators spoke about him fondly, lauding him for his good work. One fellow BAE anthropologist, for instance, declared Mooney “an excellent researcher,” though a “funny- looking little man, with his hair hanging down on his shoulders. Not very prepossessing.”268

Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, missionaries, and Native American assimilationists, on the other hand, viewed Mooney and his anthropological endeavors differently. Regardless of their contrary views on other aspects of his life, though, all more or less agreed that Mooney was a man “set in his opinions.”269

Newspapers ranging across the country, from Indiana, to Illinois, to Louisiana, reported on James Mooney, “the Indian Man,” an expert who knew more of the North American Indians

“than anybody else in the world.”270 The Indiana Richmond Palladium declared him “a student, a fearless thinker,” and a man with a “broad, unbiased sympathy among the wild tribes of man.”271

267 “Mooney,” American Anthropologist, 209.

268 Hodge, “Frederick Webb Hodge,” 78-79.

269 NAA, MSS 4651, 43.

270 Lida Rose McCabe, “The ‘Indian Man,’” Inter-Ocean, IL, August 20, 1893.

271 “The Room Was Crowded – James Mooney’s Interesting Talk,” Richmond Palladium, IN, November 29, 1893.

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Many noted his habit of donning “Indian dress” when in the field, and his broadminded “humane liberality” for the peoples he studied. In comparing Mooney with an anthropological peer, the

New Orleans Daily Picayune declared him the only white person in whom all the Indians placed implicit confidence, “with the exception perhaps of Miss Alice Fletcher.”272

Figure 27. James Mooney, ca. 1900 NAA INV 02862900

Missionaries did not look with particular favor on the placing of so much Native confidence in Mooney, however. The 1918 correspondence from a missionary living among the

Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne) of Oklahoma to a Reverend in Kansas reveals a wealth of information detailing Mooney’s hurtful and baneful influence among their intended flock. The anthropologist reportedly spoke often against the work of the missionaries, encouraging Native communities to dance and continue other “old customs” frowned upon by Christian reformers seeking to aid the “progress” of American Indians.273

Indian assimilationist groups, reformers, and some Native American leaders, labeled

“Red Progressives,” also sought to curb Mooney’s influence. Corresponding with Richard Henry

272 “Prof. Mooney,” Richmond Daily Telegram, IN, November 28, 1893; “Twenty Years among Indians,” Daily Picayune, LA, October 18, 1893.

273 Yale, Beinecke, MSS S-1174, T.J. Davis to Kinney corr., November 18, 1918.

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Pratt, former founder and Superintendent of the Carlisle Indian School, Society of American

Indians’ member Gertrude Bonnin, of the Nakota (Yankton Sioux) community, wrote of

Mooney’s attitude as “detrimental to the progress of the Indians.” Bonnin went so far as to suggest that some prompt action be taken “to disarm him of his government position.”274 In this she and Pratt were partially successful, as Mooney’s supervisor at the BAE soon after recalled him to Washington, DC, permanently.275

As hinted at in the missionary’s correspondence, many Native people valued Mooney’s advocacy in support of their cultural traditions. The “Old time Indians,” those who continued to practice their religious beliefs and dances on the reservations, spoke very highly of him. Many considered Mooney “the one friend” helping to keep the “old customs and ways in the tribes.”276

Recent historians, too, have focused on Mooney’s concern for politically and culturally oppressed peoples.277 Some attribute this natural sympathy to his “ethnic heritage” as an Irish

Catholic living in a predominantly Protestant society.278 It is not surprising that in addition to his many articles and lectures in support of and freedoms in North America, he also spoke often for liberation and independence in his parents’ native Ireland.

In spite of his frequent work in the field, Mooney still regularly published, lectured, and worked on public exhibits, representing Native peoples and their cultures to a largely non-Native audience. Mooney wrote probably his most popular work, The Ghost Dance Religion and the

Sioux Outbreak of 1890, published in the Bureau of American Ethnology’s 1893 Annual Report.

274 Yale, Beinecke, MSS S-1174, G. Bonnin to R.H. Pratt corr., January 29, 1919.

275 NAA, MSS 4651, 44.

276 Yale, Beinecke, MSS S-1174, T.J. Davis to Kinney corr., November 18, 1918.

277 Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 207.

278 L.G. Moses, The Indian Man: A Biography of James Mooney (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 31.

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According to later historians, this famous memoir marked his maturity as a reporter, historian, and ethnologist, remaining the major source of his enduring reputation.279 Importantly, Mooney did not confine his studies of the Ghost Dance “craze” to just those communities among the

Sioux, to whom many Eastern reporters credited potential war preparations. Rather, with his penchant for methodical research, he eventually studied the dance in “some twenty tribes in several different states and territories.”280 What he found was that the Ghost Dance movement consisted of a series of loosely connected beliefs focused on the “dream of a redeemer” and a return to “halcyon days” for a colonized people reduced to poverty, oppression, and isolation on reservation lands.281

The same year of the BAE’s annual report on the Ghost Dance, Mooney was in Chicago preparing Native American exhibits for the Columbian Exposition of 1893. A popular newspaper reported on his work “modeling and dressing” all of the Indian mannequins in the exhibit. Asked if it would not be simpler to use similar outfits for multiple figures, Mooney reportedly responded, “The exhibit is to educate, not mislead the people.”282 His goal was to correctly portray Native cultures, regardless of time or cost. Later in drafting his plans for exhibiting ethnologic museum collections, Mooney wrote that exhibits representing American Indian life should appear “so genuine and exact in detail” that in seeing it, any Native person would be satisfied.283

279 Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 215-216.

280 Mooney, “Indian Ghost Dance,” 178.

281 Moses, Indian Man, 87.

282 McCabe, “The ‘Indian Man,’” Inter-Ocean, IL, August 20, 1893.

283 NAA, James Mooney, “Outline Plan for Ethnological Museum Collections,” 1894, MSS 4788, 4.

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In following years, Anthropology Departments at subsequent World’s Fairs, including the

Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition at Omaha in 1898 and the Louisiana Purchase

Exposition at St. Louis in 1904, engaged Mooney for his knowledge of American Indian cultures and for his exactitude in exhibiting them. However, it was his advocacy for the use of peyote in

Native ceremonial and religious practices which ultimately garnered more headlines and occupied the thoughts of powerful people in Washington, DC. Some Southern Plains and

Southwest Native American communities had used peyote for ritual and spiritual functions going back centuries. Mooney first learned of the peyote ceremony in 1891, where it existed largely in a syncretic form combining earlier Native belief and custom with Christianity.284 Over the succeeding decades the dogged anthropologist championed peyote’s use as a Native reconciliation with the past, not hesitating to argue with missionaries, Bureau of Indian Affairs

Agents, or others who believed such use “demoralizing” and evil.285

Figure 28. Richard Henry Pratt, 1879 NAA INV 06828100

284 Moses, Indian Man, 192.

285 “Peyote Hearings,” 141; Maroukis, “Peyote Controversy,” 168.

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Gertrude Bonnin, Society of American Indians member and “Red Progressive,” saw

Mooney’s defense of peyote among Native “traditionalists” on the reservations as self-serving.

She believed he took advantage of his ethnological fieldwork as a government employee to

“encourage peyote eating among the tribes,” thus winning them over and more easily extracting

Indian lore for his books.286 Richard Pratt believed similarly, stating that this spirit had animated the BAE for a long time. Government anthropologists gathered curious and peculiar facts about

Native peoples, he said, and portrayed them in their immense illustrated books. In a vitriolic statement, Pratt claimed “ethnologists egg on, frequent, illustrate, and exaggerate at the public expense, and so give the Indian race and their civilization a black eye in the public esteem.” By such actions, Pratt believed, these men and women misinformed the public, highlighted and romanticized antiquated belief systems for public consumption, and effectively “blocked the way of Indian education very largely.” In scathing words, he informed a U.S. House of

Representatives Subcommittee on Indian Affairs in 1918 that in his experience the Bureau of

American Ethnology had “never been helpful to the Indians in any respect.” Instead of civilizing

Native peoples or ushering them towards citizenship, “the ethnologists always lead the Indian’s mind back into the past.” In a final thrust at Mooney and his colleagues, the former Carlisle

Indian School Superintendent stated that it was a well-established fact that Euro-American men such as Mooney were the “promoters if not the originators” of the Ghost Dance movement of the

1890s, and “this peyote craze is under the same impulse.”287

Essentially, Pratt and Bonnin labeled Mooney as the instigator for not only the rise of the peyote ceremony throughout Indian Country, but even for the Ghost Dance movement of thirty

286 Yale, Beinecke, MSS S-1174, G. Bonnin to R.H. Pratt corr., January 29, 1919.

287 “Peyote Hearings,” 143-147.

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years earlier. U.S. law eventually protected peyote use as a religious freedom for the Native

American Church. However, in spite of a lack of evidence for Pratt’s allegations, and despite massive support from reservation Indians, Native anthropologists and collaborators including

Francis La Flesche, Richard Davis, and Mooney’s friend Cleaver Warden, the Bureau of Indian

Affairs eventually barred Mooney from ethnological fieldwork in Oklahoma, and the Director of the Bureau of American Ethnology recalled him to the office permanently.288

Mooney’s sympathy and advocacy on behalf of the Native communities he studied and with whom he lived were apparent throughout all of his life’s work. He repeatedly fought for freedom of worship and the right to practice Native customs and lifeways throughout Indigenous lands. He frequently criticized the U.S. government for its “mismanagement” of Indian affairs, and rebuked missionaries and other Christian proselytizers for their “narrowness, selfishness” and “lack of wisdom.”289 As he argued before a public lecture hall in Indiana in 1893, Mooney declared American Indians were “just as sincere and as devoted” to their religions, and had just as much right to them “as we have to ours.”290

Mooney once told a reporter that Native Americans liked him “because I come to them in sympathy, eager to preserve all that is sacred to them, while the missionary and the [Bureau of

Indian Affairs] agent come to destroy” their traditions.291 He believed that “unless you live with a people you cannot know them. It is the only way to learn their ideas and study their character.”292 In spite of this statement and his years of living among Cherokee, Inunaina

288 Maroukis, “Peyote Controversy,” 175.

289 “Prof. Mooney,” Richmond Daily Telegram, IN, November 28, 1893

290 “The Room Was Crowded – James Mooney’s Interesting Talk,” Richmond Palladium, IN, November 29, 1893.

291 “Twenty Years among Indians,” Daily Picayune, LA, October 18, 1893.

292 McCabe, “The ‘Indian Man,’” Inter-Ocean, IL, August 20, 1893.

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(Arapaho), Kiowa, Oglala Lakota (Oglala Sioux), Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne), and other Native communities, he confided to a friend and fellow anthropologist that every subsequent excursion into the field served only to convince him more than before “that at the best, a white man can only hope to gather scraps around the edge of his Indian subject,” never to truly know them.293

293 Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, J. Mooney to W. Matthews corr., July 4, 1897.

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SECTION 1-6

FRANCES DENSMORE (1867-1957)

Figure 29. Frances Densmore, 1899 NAA INV 02855100

An early woman anthropologist and pioneer in , Frances Densmore, along with other women ethnologists Matilda Coxe Stevenson, Erminnie Smith, and Alice C.

Fletcher, represented the diversity and inclusivity prevalent in the early days of American anthropology. Known as Fanny in her youth, Densmore was born in eastern in

1867.294 Exhibiting a passion for at a young age, from 1884 to 1886 she attended the

Oberlin Conservatory of Music where she studied “piano, organ, and harmony.”295 Like her role model in the anthropological world, Alice C. Fletcher, Densmore chose not to marry. Beyond her field work, lectures, and publications, she also joined a number of scholarly organizations including the Anthropological Society of Washington, the Women’s Anthropological Society,

294 1870 United States Census, Red Wing, Goodhue County, Minnesota, Ancestry.com; 1880 United States Census, Red Wing, Goodhue County, Minnesota, Ancestry.com.

295 Charlotte J. Frisbie, “Frances Theresa Densmore,” in Women Anthropologists: Selected Biographies, ed. Ute Gacs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 51.

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and the Society for Ethnomusicology, of which she was a founding member and later an officer.296

In 1893 Densmore attended the World’s Fair in Chicago, taking in the anthropological displays of Native peoples where she saw “Indians dancing and heard them singing.” She recorded in a letter written decades later that this experience was her start on the subject of North

American Indian music.297 It was also around this time that Densmore, having heard of anthropologist Alice C. Fletcher’s work recording Native songs, wrote to the latter about her interest in the field. “If she had been less gracious in her response,” Densmore later recalled, “it is probable that I would not have taken up the study of Indian music.”298 Fortunately Fletcher encouraged the younger woman in this pursuit, and as early as 1900 Densmore began conducting fieldwork at her own expense among the Native communities of Minnesota and Wisconsin.299 As a single non-Native woman working as a field anthropologist at the turn of the twentieth century, some scholars have labeled Densmore’s work as emblematic of the rise of “evangelical ethnology.”300 Essentially, gender roles of this period highlighted women’s supposed moral and spiritual superiority, thus qualifying them for reform work outside of the home, and even in the anthropological field. Individuals such as Erminnie Smith, Matilda Coxe Stevenson, Alice C.

Fletcher, and Densmore herself took advantage of these opportunities to insert themselves into a largely male-dominated profession.

296 Michelle Wick Patterson, “She Always Said, ‘I Heard an Indian Drum,’” in Travels with Frances Densmore: Her Life, Work, and Legacy in Native American Studies, eds. Joan M. Jensen and Michelle Wick Patterson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 43-44.

297 Patterson, “She Always Said,” 33.

298 Frisbie, “Densmore,” 51.

299 Patterson, “She Always Said,” 40.

300 Visweswaran, “‘Wild West’ Anthropology,” 98.

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In 1903 Densmore first wrote to William H. Holmes, then “Chief” or Director of the

Bureau of American Ethnology, inquiring about the possibility of securing a position and/or funding to continue her fieldwork.301 Although unable to provide funding or a permanent position at that time, the BAE later hired Densmore on as an independent contractor, paying for and publishing her ethnographic manuscripts, and granting her Smithsonian office space when she was in Washington, DC.302 In correspondence with Holmes several years later, Densmore stressed her scientific method and objectivity in the field, thus distancing herself from any notion that she was merely a dilettante. “My object is not to prove the beauty of Indian music – that has been Miss Fletcher’s work,” she wrote. Rather, “my aim is to make it an exact branch of scientific research and by the accumulation of data, properly classified, to pave the way for larger work on the part of those who will work after me.”303 Like many of her male counterparts, then, Densmore saw her role as collecting or salvaging Native cultures before they disappeared.

It was for future generations of anthropologists to analyze the material she gathered, and then to arrive at factually-supported theories about humankind and its past.304

Often accompanied by her sister Margaret, Frances Densmore visited numerous Native communities throughout the upper Midwest, including the Minnesota Chippewa peoples living on the Grand Portage and White Earth Reservations. There she witnessed ceremonies, photographed dances, and recorded songs with a borrowed phonograph. Impressed with her

301 Franz Boas, “The Bureau of American Ethnology,” Science 16, no. 412 (November 21, 1902): 828.

302 Joan M. Jensen, “Getting the Depression Blues,” in Travels with Frances Densmore: Her Life, Work, and Legacy in Native American Studies, eds. Joan M. Jensen and Michelle Wick Patterson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 175-178.

303 NAA, BAE, F. Densmore to W.H. Holmes corr., March 25, 1909.

304 Hodge, “Frederick Webb Hodge,” 230.

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documenting abilities, the BAE provided her with a new Columbia graphophone in 1908.305 Her work over the following years spanned the development of mechanical recording equipment from wax cylinders to audio tape and took her throughout North and Central America, visiting dozens of different Native communities.306 Within these communities she regularly hired Native collaborators to interpret for her, preferring those educated at one of the many Indian Boarding

Schools such as the Hampton Institute or the Carlisle Indian School.307 Not surprisingly,

Densmore occasionally encountered difficulties in locating Native individuals willing to speak with her about sensitive information. Lone Man, for instance, a Lakota (Teton/Western Sioux)

Sun Dance participant, informed her in 1911 that many in his community feared to speak with her regarding the Sun Dance ceremony, as they considered it “sacred talk.”308 Sharing this material was not only prohibited, but could carry with it human or even divine retribution.

Figure 30. Frances Densmore and Mountain Chief Posed with a Phonograph Machine, Washington, DC, 1916 NMAI P19125

305 Frisbie, “Densmore,” 52.

306 , “Women in Early American Anthropology,” in Pioneers of American Anthropology: The Uses of Biography, ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), 70.

307 Frisbie, “Densmore,” 54-55.

308 NAA, BAE, F. Densmore to F.W. Hodge corr., October 28, 1911.

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Although never a permanent, full-time staff member of the Bureau of American

Ethnology, Densmore’s collaborative work with the Bureau and with the Smithsonian Institution lasted decades. In addition, however, she also collected material culture objects while in the field which she later sold to other repositories including the Museum of the American Indian, Heye

Foundation and the Minnesota Historical Society.309 Densmore relied on other part-time work throughout her life to allow her to pay her bills and continue her ethnographic passion. Her constantly changing job titles from “Music Teacher” to “Writer of Indian Music” to “Freelance

Writer for Scientific Publications” listed in federal census records testify to this fact.310 Frances

Densmore died in 1957 at the age of ninety in the town of her birth, Red Wing, Minnesota.311

Densmore and the Public

Coverage of Frances Densmore’s life and work by both her non-Native contemporaries and from later historians has been generally positive. A St. Louis newspaper in 1904, for instance, reported that a recent lecture of hers was well-received by an audience of educators attending the Louisiana Purchase Centennial Exposition.312 More recently, historians have focused on the important role she played as a woman in shaping the early fields of anthropology and ethnomusicology, and in her “sympathetic understanding” and “deep respect” for American

Indians.313 Perhaps this sympathetic understanding for Native peoples partly explains the

309 Jensen, Travels with Densmore, 1.

310 1900 United States Census, Red Wing, Goodhue County, Minnesota, Ancestry.com; 1930 United States Census, Red Wing, Goodhue County, Minnesota, Ancestry.com; 1940 United States Census, Red Wing, Goodhue County, Minnesota, Ancestry.com.

311 Minnesota Death Index, 1908-2017, Ancestry.com.

312 Patterson, “She Always Said,” 40.

313 Jensen, Travels with Densmore, 7-8; Frisbie, “Densmore,” 54.

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favorable reception she received in several American Indian-run newspapers of her day. The

Carlisle Indian School’s The Arrow of March 1908, for example, praised her recent lecture with

“three Chippewa braves,” and commended her “exhaustive researches among the Indians of

Minnesota.”314 Similarly, in April of 1919, Minnesota’s The Tomahawk newspaper, the “official organ of the Minnesota Chippewas,” extolled her life’s work documenting Native music. To

Frances Densmore, the article stated, “belong the honor and credit of having done far more than anyone else in the world to save the songs of the Indians from extinction.” The article continued,

“she has recorded, analyzed, and published . . . more than 1,000 Indian songs, chiefly those of the Chippewa and Sioux.”315

Densmore represented Native American cultures, and especially Native American music, through a great number of lectures and publications aimed at both scholarly and popular audiences. While she struggled in her early years to prove to her fellow ethnologists that her work was scientific, she never stopped lecturing and publishing for the masses, hoping to increase “public understanding of Indian music and culture.”316 In total, she published more than twenty books and over one hundred articles on musicology, ethnology, and .317

Densmore also lectured numerous times throughout her long life, from delivering lectures before an audience of fairgoers at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, to formal scholarly presentations before the Anthropological Society of Washington in the nation’s capital in 1909. A few of her

314 “Music by Chippewa Indians,” Arrow, PA, March 6, 1908.

315 “Indian Songs and Music,” Tomahawk: Official Organ of the Minnesota Chippewas, MN, April 10, 1919.

316 Frisbie, “Densmore,” 53.

317 Jensen, Travels with Densmore, 1.

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lecture titles included “The Music of the American Indian,” “The Indians’ Natural Sense of

Harmony,” “Primitive Rhythms,” and “Indian Life Expressed in Music.”318

Frances Densmore spent the majority of her life observing and documenting Native cultures, and then disseminating these observations to a diverse public. In general, she represented her subjects in sympathetic, though also paternalistic, terms. She hoped that by learning about Native American music, her largely Euro-American audience would recognize

Native peoples’ humanity, and thus change their prejudices and pre-conceived notions toward these groups.319 An example of this is the following statement included in the introduction to one of her 1906 publications: “Until we can understand the Indian we cannot treat him or his affairs sympathetically.”320 Densmore also reflected the popular social evolutionist and Progressive thought of her day, though, viewing Native peoples largely as wild children deserving tenderness and understanding, but not necessarily equality.321 Although an advocate for Native peoples to a certain extent, she, like many of her anthropological colleagues, stopped short of vocalizing the needs of or demanding change for the contemporary peoples she studied.

318 Patterson, “She Always Said,” 40; “Music by Chippewa Indians,” Arrow, PA, March 6, 1908.

319 Patterson, “She Always Said,” 38.

320 Frances Densmore, The Plea of Our Brown Brother (Chilocco: Indian Print Shop Press, 1906), 1.

321 Visweswaran, “‘Wild West’ Anthropology,” 100.

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SECTION 1-7

FRANCIS LA FLESCHE (1857-1932)

Figure 31. Francis La Flesche, ca. 1885 NMAI P09175

One of the most recognizable Native American anthropologists of the turn of the twentieth century, Francis La Flesche was born in 1857 on the in Nebraska territory. He was the son of a distinguished Omaha chief who favored assimilation and allotment.

La Flesche’s sisters, too, were notable for their education and activism on behalf of their community. An older sister, Susette, advocated for Native land-rights and participated in speaking tours for reform efforts, while a younger sister, Susan, pursued her medical degree and later ministered to her Omaha community in Nebraska.322 In his youth, La Flesche attended the mission school in Bellevue, Nebraska, run by the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. Later he received his bachelor’s and master’s of law degrees from the National University School of

Law, in 1892 and 1893, which was afterward merged with the George Washington University, in

322 Margot Liberty, “Francis La Flesche: The Osage Odyssey,” in American Indian Intellectuals, ed. Margot Liberty (St. Paul: West Publishing, 1978), 45-46.

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Washington, DC.323 Although he never attended Carlisle or the Hampton Institute, two of the leading Indian Boarding Schools of his day, La Flesche frequently visited and spoke at Carlisle, and his younger siblings attended Hampton. It was at the latter school where they befriended fellow student James R. Murie, who would prove to be a lifelong friend to La Flesche and a leading Native collaborator in the field of museum anthropology for decades to come.324

La Flesche married three times in his life, each time to a woman of Native ancestry. In

June of 1877 he married fellow Omaha community member Alice Mitchell, who died approximately eighteen months later. In August of 1879 he married again, this time to Omaha woman Alice Cline. This marriage was short-lived, however, as they separated less than two years later and formally divorced in 1884. La Flesche married for a third and final time in 1906, when he was nearly fifty years old. His thirty-five-year-old bride, Rosa Bourassa, was of

Michigan Chippewa ancestry, worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and later became a prominent member and officer of the Native-run Society of American Indians. This marriage did not last long either, and by 1910 the two had separated. Recent historians speculate that La

Flesche’s third marriage was “doomed from the start,” and lay the blame largely at the feet of both Alice C. Fletcher and Francis La Flesche.325

Fletcher and La Flesche developed a close relationship ever since first meeting in 1879.

After collaborating for more than a decade on ethnological research, Fletcher legally adopted the younger man as her son in 1891, and the two moved into a house together at 214 First Street,

323 Francis La Flesche, The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys from the Omaha Tribe (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1900), 42; Liberty, “La Flesche,” 46.

324 Joan Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 274-275.

325 Mark, Stranger, 220, 307-315.

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S.E., in Washington, DC, with another of Fletcher’s companions, Jane Gay.326 The adoptive mother and son continued this living arrangement for more than thirty years, until Fletcher’s death in 1923, after which La Flesche wrote her obituary.327 In an effort to quell the ever-present rumors about their unusual living situation, especially after Gay’s 1906 departure from the house, Fletcher invited her friend Emily Cushing to live with them as well, which she did off and on for the next twelve years.328 As Cushing was the widow of famed anthropologist Frank

Hamilton Cushing, as well as the sister-in-law of anthropologist Frederick Webb Hodge, this certainly made for an interesting residence, including as it did one of the first professional women anthropologists and one of the first professional Native American anthropologists.

Although La Flesche worked briefly as an interpreter for linguist and missionary James

Owen Dorsey in 1878, he did not undertake his first ethnological work until a few years later in

1881 when Alice Fletcher visited the Omaha Reservation.329 The following year he aided her in overseeing the allotment of Omaha tribal lands after the U.S. Congress passed the 1882 Omaha

Act and appointed Fletcher a “special agent” to conduct such work.330 It was around this time that the young man moved to the nation’s capital, taking a job as a clerk in the Bureau of Indian

Affairs. La Flesche remained in this position until 1910, when he accepted the job of ethnologist with the Bureau of American Ethnology, joining J.N.B. Hewitt as the second permanent Native

326 Liberty, “La Flesche,” 46-47.

327 Francis La Flesche, “Alice C. Fletcher,” Science 58, no. 1494 (August 17, 1923): 115.

328 U.S., Consular Registration Applications, 1916-1925, Ancestry.com; Mark, Stranger, 314; U.S. City Directories, Washington, DC, 1822-1995, Ancestry.com.

329 Mark, Stranger, 219; Liberty, “La Flesche,” 46.

330 Andrea S. Temkin, “Alice Cunningham Fletcher,” in Women Anthropologists: Selected Biographies, ed. Ute Gacs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 96.

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American anthropologist on staff.331 He worked with the BAE for nineteen years before retiring in 1929.332 In addition to his professional work, La Flesche was also a member and officer of a number of anthropological and scientific organizations, including the American Anthropological

Association, the Society of American Indians, a Fellow of the American Association for the

Advancement of Science, and President in 1922 of the Anthropological Society of

Washington.333

On becoming a member of the BAE staff in 1910, the Director requested La Flesche to immediately proceed to Oklahoma, there to pursue “ethnological studies among the Osage

Indians and, if found necessary, among related tribes.”334 He did just that, undertaking fieldwork with the Osage, Omaha, and peoples, and in his words, “making a special study” of their histories, their traditions, and their social customs.335 In particular, La Flesche worked with a number of Native collaborators who helped him in securing sensitive information and acquiring sacred objects. Among these were two Osage elders, Saucy Calf and Páthinwawexta, both of whom possessed “full knowledge” of their community’s “most important” rites and ceremonies.336 On at least one occasion in 1910 the BAE covered expenses for La Flesche and

Saucy Calf to travel from Pawhuska, Oklahoma, to the Smithsonian offices in Washington, DC,

331 1900 U.S. Federal Census, Washington, DC; 1910 U.S. Federal Census, Washington, DC; Mark, Stranger, 325.

332 Liberty, “La Flesche,” 46.

333 Jessie W. Cook, “The Representative Indian,” Red Man, PA, June 1900; John W. Larner, ed., The Papers of the Society of American Indians (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1987), A.C. Parker to F. La Flesche corr., November 15, 1913; Hartley Burr Alexander, “Francis La Flesche,” American Anthropologist 35, no. 2 (April-June 1933): 329.

334 NAA, BAE, F.W. Hodge to F. La Flesche corr., August 10, 1910.

335 “Peyote Hearings,” 117.

336 Kate Graber, “Francis La Flesche and Ethnography: Writing, Power, Critique,” Ethnomusicology 61, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 129; Thomas D. Thiessen, “Tradition and Historical Summary,” Plains Anthropologist 49, no. 192 (November 2004): 362; NAA, BAE, F. La Flesche to F.W. Hodge corr., May 8, 1911.

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where Saucy Calf recorded numerous sacred songs via phonograph. BAE staff even wrote to their anthropological colleagues at the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation in

New York and the Field Museum in Chicago, informing them of the treasure trove that was

Saucy Calf, and offering his expertise in aiding these other museums with describing the Osage materials in their collections.337 Such an example illustrates the willingness of museum anthropologists to cooperate across institutional boundaries and to share information they deemed worthy of preservation.

Saucy Calf’s sudden death in early 1912 derailed much of the community support La

Flesche had so far generated, however. In a letter to BAE Director, or “Ethnologist-in-charge,”

Frederick Webb Hodge, La Flesche wrote, “The death of Saucy-calf has made much difference in the progress of my work as many of the people believe that the shortening of his life came about from his giving away the No-ho-zhi-ga [Osage secret society] rites.”338 Compounding La

Flesche’s difficulties, another collaborator, Páthinwawexta, who had formerly agreed to share with him “some of the songs and rituals,” now refused to do so, telling La Flesche that “any one who gives away the rites can not live long.”339 The death of Saucy Calf only further solidified the beliefs and concerns of many Osage community members who feared human or divine punishment for revealing sacred information to anthropologists, even to Native anthropologists such as Francis La Flesche.

337 NAA, BAE, F.W. Hodge to F. La Flesche corr., November 19, 1910; NAA, BAE, F.W. Hodge to F. La Flesche corr., December 14, 1910; NAA, BAE, F.W. Hodge to F. La Flesche corr., December 28, 1910.

338 Neil M. Judd, “Frederick Webb Hodge,” American Antiquity 22, no. 4 (April 1957): 402; Daniel C. Swan, “Early Osage Peyotism,” Plains Anthropologist 43, no. 163 (February 1998): 68.

339 NAA, BAE, F. La Flesche to F.W. Hodge corr., June 13, 1912.

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In addition to collecting sensitive information in the form of stories or songs, La Flesche also collected material culture objects while in the field. As early as 1884 he and Alice Fletcher donated, on behalf of the Elk family, “one of the Sacred tents of the Omaha Tribe” to the

Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology “for preservation.”340 A quarter century later when working among the Osage peoples, La Flesche again began collecting objects for deposit in East Coast museums. In 1911 BAE Director Hodge wrote to the Director of the

Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum, Richard Rathbun, requesting money “for the purpose of enabling Mr. Francis La Flesche of the Bureau to purchase ethnological collections among the Osage Indians.” In spite of the fact that the “best Osage collections in the country” had already been acquired “by the Field Museum and by Mr. George G. Heye of New York,”

Hodge believed that “valuable specimens” were still obtainable. La Flesche, due to both “being an Indian” and “speaking the ,” had “exceptional opportunities for procuring” these objects, Hodge urged.341 Hodge’s letter shows an awareness on the part of anthropology museum staff to know the collections of their colleagues/competitors, but also to beat them in the

“scramble” to acquire Native objects.342 La Flesche continued to collect both tangible and intangible materials from the Osage, Omaha, and Ponca communities before succumbing to poor health in 1929 and retiring from the BAE. He soon after moved back to the Omaha Reservation in Nebraska where he was born, and died there in 1932 at the age of seventy-four.343

340 NAA, Alice Fletcher and Francis La Flesche Papers, 1873-1939, MSS 4558, A. Fletcher to F.W. Putnam corr., June 7, 1884.

341 NAA, BAE, F.W. Hodge to R. Rathbun corr., January 14, 1911.

342 Cole, Captured Heritage, xii.

343 Alexander, “La Flesche,” 328.

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La Flesche and the Public

Recent scholars have described Francis La Flesche in a generally favorable, if not always accurate, light. Anthropologist Margot Liberty, for instance, referred to him in a biography she wrote as “the first professional American Indian anthropologist,” wholly neglecting the careers of J.N.B. Hewitt at the BAE and William Jones at the Field Museum, both of whom preceded La

Flesche as professional anthropologists in their own right. Liberty was closer to the mark when she noted that of the “wide range of roles played by American Indians in American anthropology,” La Flesche performed nearly all of them, as informant, interpreter, field assistant, author, and scholar.344 The reception of La Flesche among his non-Native contemporaries was somewhat mixed. While a fellow anthropologist wrote of his “modest and unassuming character,” and the “trust and direct admiration” La Flesche’s Native and non-Native colleagues felt for him, former Carlisle Indian School Superintendent and assimilationist Richard Henry

Pratt viewed him differently.345 Pratt, opposed to the work of anthropologists in general and the

Bureau of American Ethnology in particular, regularly opined that the Bureau had “never been helpful to the Indians in any respect,” and accused ethnologists of leading “the Indian’s mind back into the past” instead of preparing them for the future. He held La Flesche, as a Native anthropologist and a product of Indian Boarding School education, in particular contempt, as is reflected in a 1918 statement:

I think that my friend, Mr. La Flesche, who has fallen under Bureau [of American Ethnology] employment, and has become very enthusiastic [about such work], is a victim. A few years ago, when I first knew him, he was quite a different sort of man, and it is not so pleasant for me to meet him as it used to be. What is he doing? He is not

344 Liberty, “La Flesche,” 45, 53.

345 Alexander, “La Flesche,” 330.

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lifting up his race. He is not trying to do that, but he is trying to find something extraordinary that he may get into print in the ethnological publications.346

Fortunately for La Flesche, many of his Native contemporaries did not characterize him or his work in the same vituperative language as that used by Pratt. Rather, several Native-run newspapers including The Indian Helper and The Red Man praised La Flesche, highlighting him as a “brave example to his people in pluck and perseverance,” and as one of the “quiet men and women of Indian blood who are a power among us.”347 Congratulating La Flesche on his 1893 graduation from the National University School of Law, The Indian Helper held him up as a role model, asking “Who’ll be the next?”348 Further, James Reuben, a Nimi’ipuu () protégé of Alice C. Fletcher in the late 1880s, after meeting La Flesche in Washington, DC, wrote of him as “very kind, and a gentleman.” Reuben continued, “I like Frank very much, he is [a] real Indian in every way, he has not got that high-toned actions which education give to young Indians.”

Reuben concluded his letter by predicting, “He will in future be some service to his race in some higher position.”349 Whether La Flesche’s later work as an anthropologist was praiseworthy, as believed by his museum colleagues and some of his Native community members, or worthy of condemnation, as espoused by Pratt and other Native individuals, was largely subjective.

La Flesche represented Native peoples, including his own Omaha community, to scholarly and lay audiences through a variety of mediums including exhibitions, lectures, and publications. As early as 1885 he delivered an address before the American Association for the

Advancement of Science on Omaha systems. A reviewer noted that the study was “very

346 “Peyote Hearings,” 143.

347 Indian Helper, PA, January 30, 1891; Cook, “The Representative Indian,” Red Man, PA, June 1900.

348 Indian Helper, PA, June 9, 1893.

349 NAA, MSS 4558, J. Reuben to A.C. Fletcher corr., June 27, 1889.

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clearly explained,” but more importantly, that it was “of especial value” as it afforded the audience to hear “not from one who had gathered his information from strangers, but from one who had received it from his parents, and grown up among the customs described, and who spoke of his own people.”350 At the Chicago World’s Fair eight years later La Flesche and

Fletcher represented Indigenous cultures to a more popular audience, lecturing on “Omaha

Indian music,” and exhibiting related Omaha sacred pipes.351

However, La Flesche was perhaps most well-known for his publications depicting Native lives and cultures. In 1900 he published the book The Middle Five, an autobiographical account of his experiences as an Omaha youth attending the Presbyterian-run mission school in Bellevue,

Nebraska.352 Regarding its anticipated release, one newspaper reporter in June of 1900 wrote that the book “promises to let us into the secrets of Indian boy life as no other book has done or could do.”353 Geared for more scholarly groups, La Flesche subsequently published in 1911 The

Omaha Tribe with Alice Fletcher, and later his own studies on the Osage community.354

La Flesche was both a sympathizer with the plight of contemporary Native peoples, and an advocate for change in these communities. While always passionate about documenting his community’s culture, his views on what aspects were worthy of preserving and what should be abandoned changed throughout his life. Coming from a family who early on championed Indian assimilation and allotment, it is not too surprising to learn of La Flesche using language typical

350 “Proceedings of the Section of Anthropology,” Science 6, no. 136 (September 11, 1885): 232.

351 Mark, Stranger, 233.

352 La Flesche, Middle Five.

353 Cook, “The Representative Indian,” Red Man, June 1900.

354 Alice C. Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, The Omaha Tribe (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1911).

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of many Progressives and Christian reformers when he described his fellow community members as “yet in the shades of superstition.”355 At the same time though, he was also critical of Euro-

American society, telling Native students at Carlisle that throughout his life he had met “a great many white people,” and had determined that “all their ways are not good.”356 He presented many of his more direct criticisms of Euro-American society in the recollections of his school days. In his 1900 publication The Middle Five, he exposed at an early date the abuse and cultural arrogance rife in Indian Schools. Immediately upon entering the school, La Flesche and his fellow Omaha students encountered “a rule that prohibited the use of our language, which rule was rigidly enforced with a hickory rod.” In addition to the silencing if not relinquishing of their language, La Flesche recorded, he and the other young pupils also had to accept “English names,” as the missionaries considered their Native names “heathenish.” La Flesche correctly pointed out thirty-five years after this experience that these English substitute names were “no less heathenish” in origin than the ones the children’s families and communities originally bestowed on them.357

In the early twentieth century La Flesche also became more vocal in his support of the

Native American Church and its embrace of peyote for ceremonial and religious use. Like his fellow BAE colleague James Mooney, La Flesche viewed peyote as an integral part of Native peoples’ worship, and disagreed with those who labeled such use harmful or immoral. “Let the peyote stay among the Indians,” he declared as a witness before a 1918 Congressional hearing on peyote use. When asked why he chose to voluntarily speak on this subject, he responded, “I am

355 Mark, Stranger, 165.

356 “Items,” School News, PA, May 1883.

357 La Flesche, Middle Five, xvii.

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interested in this matter, for it affects my own people, for whom I have a great affection.” In addition, La Flesche provided his frank opinion on the potential dangers of taking away a people’s religion. “I am thoroughly convinced that these Indians are worshipping God in their own simple way,” he stated, “and if their religion is interfered with by the Government or anybody else, and it is suppressed, the consequences will be very grave.”358 The impact of such a statement from a Native person only a quarter century removed from the Ghost Dance and

Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 was not lost on the Congressional representatives or on the public. Indeed, statements such as these earned La Flesche the enmity of missionaries, politicians, and many Native progressives who made up the majority of the Society of American

Indians; the latter an organization in which his membership had lapsed.

Some recent scholars have tried to pinpoint Francis La Flesche’s reasons for undertaking ethnological work in the first place. Historian Joan Mark, for instance, in her biography of La

Flesche, argues convincingly that he “did it, not for anthropologists, but for future generations of

American Indians.”359 His mentor, colleague, and life-long friend Alice C. Fletcher also wrote of his “desire to preserve in written form the history of his people . . . their music, the poetry of their rituals, and the meaning of their social and religious ceremonies.”360

As a product of both his Native heritage and a Western educational system, Francis La

Flesche strove to not only represent Indigenous peoples accurately to the public, but also to record their cultures, histories, and beliefs for future generations. In this way, he was similar to a number of Native anthropologists and collaborators of his time, including Ella Cara Deloria,

358 “Peyote Hearings,” 80-84, 120.

359 Mark, Stranger, 352.

360 Fletcher and La Flesche, Omaha Tribe, 30.

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William Jones, James R. Murie, Amos Oneroad, and Gladys Tantaquidgeon. In the preface to his work The Middle Five, La Flesche explained to his readers that his object was to “reveal the true nature and character of the Indian boy,” in order for these “little Indians to be judged, as are other boys, by what they say and do,” not by their outward appearance.361 In his ethnological work he did much the same thing, by leaving a record to remember those peoples who were otherwise labeled savage, or more often simply forgotten.

361 La Flesche, Middle Five, xv.

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CHAPTER 2

PEABODY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY

Figure 32. Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, ca. 1890 Peabody, PM 2004.24.1828

In 1866 philanthropist established the Peabody Museum of American

Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, making it the oldest specifically anthropological museum reviewed in this study. In spite of the Peabody’s early founding, though, it dims in comparison with the Smithsonian Institution and Bureau of American

Ethnology, which outshone the Peabody in terms of ethnological work undertaken during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Further, while the Peabody’s longtime Curator, Frederic Ward

Putnam, was known throughout the country for his archaeological work on Indian mounds, the focus herein is largely confined to each museum’s ethnological work among living Native

American communities, which for the Peabody was accomplished almost solely by museum ethnologist Alice C. Fletcher.

One month after the Peabody Museum’s October 1866 founding, it’s first Curator,

Jeffries Wyman, recorded the museum’s collections as totaling approximately fifty objects, and consisting of Native American skeletal remains, stone implements, and a few articles of

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pottery.362 Scholars then and now have highlighted the Peabody’s “unique” status at the time as

“the only museum in America specially devoted to anthropology.”363 With its focus on both ethnology and archaeology, Curator Putnam later wrote that the museum’s holdings were representative of the “present condition” of American Indians as well as instructive in tracing their Native history.364

Ethnological fieldwork at the Peabody, as noted above, was largely the bailiwick of Alice

C. Fletcher. Beginning in 1882, Fletcher would spend the next several decades collecting tangible and intangible materials from a number of Native peoples including the Ho-Chunk

(Winnebago), Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce), Omaha, and Ponca, in addition to the Alaska Native communities inhabiting southeastern Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. Writing in one of his

Annual Reports, Putnam noted that due to her longtime residence among Native peoples and because of her close work with her Omaha friend and associate Francis La Flesche, Fletcher had

“learned to view things from the Indian standpoint.” Again using loaded language typical of the time, Putnam wrote that he hoped Fletcher would be able to continue her “noble work” of gathering information on the “vanishing customs of the Indians” before they all completely disappeared.365

Fletcher was not completely alone in collecting linguistic, ceremonial, and other ethnographic materials for the Peabody Museum, however. In 1904 Putnam reported the recent labors of young anthropologists M.R. Harrington and Arthur C. Parker at an archaeological

362 Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1868 Annual Report, 5.

363 Darnell, Along Came Boas, 117; Peabody, 1877 Annual Report.

364 Conn, History’s Shadow, 184.

365 Peabody, 1891 Annual Report, 90, 103; Peabody, 1887 Annual Report, 532, 565-566.

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excavation in New York state. There, in addition to their primary focus on archaeology,

Harrington and Parker “secured” for the museum “a small ethnological collection” from the local

Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peoples living on the Cattaraugus Reservation.366 Notably, Putnam recorded, Parker was also of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) ancestry himself, and was in the process of writing anthropological accounts of related Indigenous ceremonies and beliefs.

Since its founding, the Peabody Museum had maintained a “peculiar” relationship as an independent institution but also a constituent part of Harvard University.367 Although originally envisioned to include instruction in anthropology at the university, Harvard did not officially establish the Division of Archaeology and Ethnology until 1890, with Putnam as a Professor.368

BAE anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, a former mentee of Putnam’s, wrote that while the

Peabody was not the largest, it was certainly the most “teachful” museum in the nation.369

Relatedly, one of Putnam’s early course descriptions from 1891 listed the anthropology track as

“intended to give the graduate student as thorough training in American Archaeology and

Ethnology” as possible in a three year course of study.370 Of Putnam’s many students to follow this path and later become influential leaders in the field, two of the earliest were George A.

Dorsey and George Byron Gordon. Dorsey received his PhD in 1894, later directing the Field

Museum’s Anthropology Department, while Gordon graduated in 1903 and subsequently directed what is now the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and

366 Harvard University, 1902-1903 Annual Report, 281.

367 Peabody, 1891 Annual Report, 87.

368 Darnell, Along Came Boas, 119.

369 Curtis M. Hinsley, “The Museum Origins of Harvard Anthropology, 1866-1915,” in Science at Harvard University: Historical Perspectives, eds. Clark A. Eliott and Margaret W. Rossiter (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1992), 139.

370 Peabody, 1891 Annual Report, 99.

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Anthropology.371 Both of these men illustrated the changing world of American anthropology, in which the attainment of graduate degrees was becoming more of a necessity by the early years of the twentieth century.

The Peabody Museum and the Public

Although not as well represented in the national press, Boston area newspapers regularly lauded the exhibitions on display at the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and

Ethnology. One local newspaper in 1886, for instance, dubbed the Peabody’s work “remarkable progress in the study of man.”372 Reflecting the public’s acceptance of social evolutionary thought, the Boston Herald described the Peabody Museum as “devoted to the exposition of the manifold steps in the evolution of civilization.” Receiving large numbers of lay and scholarly audiences alike, a newspaper reporter quoted Putnam as saying that many visitors came to the museum “from a thousand miles away” or more to work with the collections there.373

Figure 33. Peabody Museum North American Gallery, ca. 1890 Peabody, PM 2004.24.7023

371 Hinsley, “Museum Origins,” 134; Harvard, 1902-1903 Annual Report, 281.

372 “The Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology,” Boston Herald, MA, August 27, 1886.

373 “An Hour with Savans,” Boston Herald, MA, December 14, 1879.

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Marshaling even greater public interest than the Peabody’s anthropological exhibits, however, was the ethnological work performed by Alice C. Fletcher. Articles in both the Boston

Post and the Boston Globe referred to Fletcher’s “unique” work illustrating and “throwing much light upon” the “lives and customs” of American Indians.374 Her role as a single non-Native woman living alongside and working with American Indians in their own homes intrigued and fascinated the public. Regrettably, other than the willingness of Native American anthropologists

Francis La Flesche and Arthur C. Parker to support the mission of the Peabody Museum, there is a dearth of Native American opinions about how this museum and its staff characterized Native cultures.

Like its fellow museum institutions across the country, the Peabody represented Native

Americans to the public in a variety of formats, including via exhibitions, lectures, and publications. As early as 1876, for example, only a decade after its founding, the Peabody

Museum loaned a number of specimens to Smithsonian Assistant Secretary Spencer Baird for inclusion in the displays of the popular 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia.375 Putnam later described some of the museum’s American Indian collections in detail, noting paintings, photographs, weapons, basketry, and even “a life size model of a Sioux Indian . . . dressed in native costume.” For Putnam, the goal of the museum was to bring together in an instructive manner objects “of each linguistic family of North American Indians and Eskimo . . . to illustrate the life and customs of each tribe.”376 The museum’s lectures and publications followed a similar

374 “Archaeology and Ethnology,” Boston Post, MA, June 19, 1887; “Gratifying Results,” Boston Globe, MA, June 24, 1891.

375 Peabody, 1876 Annual Report, 15.

376 Harvard, 1902-1903 Annual Report, 278.

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format, with lectures presented to area schoolchildren, and publications sent to members and potential donors.377

In comparison with other anthropology museums of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology did not particularly stand out from its peers in terms of representing Native peoples in either a wholly positive or negative light. While less effusive in its use of social evolutionist language than some others, such as the Bureau of American Ethnology, though, the Peabody Museum as an institution nevertheless presented Native Americans as occupying a primitive stage on the path to

Euro-American civilization. For the public who consumed these implicitly and explicitly racist notions, American Indians were seen as neither equal to Euro-Americans, nor long for the rapidly industrializing world.

377 Peabody, 1891 Annual Report, 97-98.

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SECTION 2-1

FREDERIC WARD PUTNAM (1839-1915)

Figure 34. Frederic Ward Putnam, ca. 1890 AMNH 2A5220

An integral player in the spread of professionalized anthropology across the country,

Frederic Ward Putnam was born in Massachusetts in 1839. Although matriculating at Harvard

University at the age of seventeen, he never completed his studies there. Nevertheless, due to his intelligence and talent, at the age of thirty-six he became the Curator of the Peabody Museum of

American Archaeology and Ethnology, and in 1887 became the Harvard Professor of

Ethnology.378 With his dual roles in both the museum and the classroom, Putnam represented the changing nature of anthropology, contrasting with the career path of his self-taught and government-funded contemporaries like John Wesley Powell at the Bureau of American

Ethnology. It was a younger generation of students and colleagues including Franz Boas, Alfred

L. Kroeber, and Frank G. Speck, however, who followed in Putnam’s footsteps and transitioned the field away from museums, ultimately solidifying anthropology’s place in academia. After

378 Stanley A. Freed, Anthropology Unmasked: Museums, Science and Politics in , Vol. I: The Putnam-Boas Era (Wilmington: Orange Frazer Press, 2012), 112-114.

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nearly a half-century affiliated with Harvard University and the Peabody Museum, Putnam eventually retired in 1909 at the age of 70.379

Putnam married twice, first to Adelaide Edmonds in 1864, and later, after Adelaide’s early death, married a second time, to Esther Clarke, in 1882. Outside of his personal relationships, he served as a member or officer of many scientific and anthropological organizations. He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, elected AAAS president in 1898, a member of the American Anthropological Association, elected AAA president in 1905, and an associate member of the Society of American Indians.380

Though never truly a field ethnologist, Putnam is now remembered in anthropology for his archaeological work, institution building, and mentorship to the leading anthropological figures of the following generation. Some of these individuals included Franz Boas, George A.

Dorsey, Alice C. Fletcher, M.R. Harrington, William Jones, and Alfred L. Kroeber, among many others. Throughout his long career, in addition to serving as Curator and later Professor at

Harvard University, Putnam also directed the Anthropology Department at the 1893 Chicago

Exposition, laying the foundation for what became the Field Museum of Natural History, directed the Anthropology Department at the American Museum of Natural History from 1894 to

1903, and subsequently chaired the Anthropology Department and Museum at the University of

California, Berkeley, from 1903 until his retirement in 1909.381 In this way he aided, if not directed, the spread of academic museum anthropology across the country from east to west in

379 Mark, Four Anthropologists, 31.

380 Larner, SAI, A.C. Parker to F.W. Putnam corr., September 23, 1912.

381 Franz Boas, “Frederic Ward Putnam,” Science 42, no. 1080 (September 10, 1915): 331.

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less than a quarter century. Frederic Ward Putnam died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1915 at the age of seventy-six.

Putnam and the Public

Perceptions of Frederic Ward Putnam by his non-Native contemporaries were almost all glowing, with the exception of the opinions of a few Chicago newspaper reporters. One of these, opposed to Putnam’s proposal for anthropological displays at the intended 1893 Chicago

World’s Fair, referred to him as a “dried-up prehistoric specialist” who encouraged exposition planners to waste tax-payer dollars on materials which could already be “amply provided from the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.”382 Such derisive comments about the man and his work were few and far between, however. Franz Boas, the leading anthropologist in American anthropology during the first half of the twentieth century, for instance, believed Putnam to have been the “most potent factor” in the development of U.S. anthropological institutions. Writing his obituary in Science in 1915, Boas named Putnam as the last of the three “founders of modern anthropology in America,” alongside Daniel Garrison Brinton of the University of Pennsylvania and John Wesley Powell of the Bureau of American Ethnology.383

Native contemporaries also tended to view Putnam in a favorable light. Arthur C. Parker,

Seneca archaeologist, director of the Rochester Museum, and mentee of Putnam, wrote in a 1912 letter that he had always been proud to consider himself “one of Professor Putnam’s boys.”384 In his obituary three years later, Parker wrote that Putnam was “a devoted friend of the red race,

382 “Prehistoric Crankery,” Chicago Tribune, IL, September 16, 1890.

383 Boas, “Putnam,” 330.

384 Larner, SAI, A.C. Parker to F.W. Putnam corr., September 23, 1912.

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and one of the most noted students of its history.”385 Similarly, William Jones, Sac and Fox anthropologist, recalled his first meeting with Putnam while Jones was a Harvard University undergraduate student in 1897. Due to the “very nicest talk” with Putnam that day, Jones decided to forever abandon his dreams of a medical profession, and instead pursued anthropology as a career, later working at both the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the

Field Museum in Chicago.386

Although Putnam regularly lectured, published, and oversaw exhibits on Native

American topics, the one event which historians have written the most about was his organization and directorship of the Anthropology Department at the Chicago 1893 Columbian

Exposition. Boas wrote that Putnam “solved the difficult task of bringing together in a short time material illustrating prehistoric America as well as the primitive life of the historic American

Indian.”387 Not surprisingly, the logistics of such planning were years in the making, with

Putnam urging Chicago residents in the Chicago Daily Tribune as early as May of 1890 to

“make an important contribution to science” by building a “perfect ethnographical exhibition of the past and present peoples of America.” He counseled that such a project be undertaken before

“the present American tribes are absorbed” or assimilated into the larger non-Native population.388 This idea of the “vanishing Indian race” was a fixture and a constant concern for

Putnam, as it was for many anthropologists of his era.

385 “Frederic Ward Putnam,” American Indian Magazine 3, no. 3 (July-September 1915): 224.

386 Henry Milner Rideout, William Jones: Indian, Cowboy, American Scholar, and Anthropologist in the Field (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912), 41-42.

387 Boas, “Putnam,” 331.

388 Frederic Ward Putnam, “American Ethnology,” Chicago Tribune, IL, May 31, 1890.

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In addition to the Chicago World’s Fair, Putnam also oversaw anthropological exhibits at

AMNH in New York, the University Museum in Berkeley, California, and the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he and Alice C. Fletcher displayed sacred Omaha material culture objects as early as 1884.389 As noted, Putnam also lectured and published on anthropological and Native American topics. In 1905, for instance, he and Alfred L. Kroeber published a short booklet on the newly formed Department of Anthropology of the University of

California. Therein they informed lay and scholarly audiences of the ethnological and linguistic work undertaken by the University staff, about museum objects on display, as well as “lectures and instruction” available to the public.390

Although concerned about the plight of contemporary American Indians, and encouraging of Native peoples to enter the anthropological field, Putnam was not an advocate for such issues. While sympathetic, as is seen in his joining the progressive Society of American

Indians soon after its founding, he, like Franz Boas, Alfred L. Kroeber, John Wesley Powell, and other leaders in anthropology, tended to remove himself scientifically from the day to day problems on Indian Reservations. In attempting to professionalize their field as an objective scientific study, many of these early anthropological leaders believed it unwise to be too familiar or friendly with those whom they studied, for fear of being labeled “sentimentalists.”391

389 NAA, MSS 4558, A.C. Fletcher to F.W. Putnam corr., June 7, 1884.

390 Frederic Ward Putnam and Alfred L. Kroeber, The Department of Anthropology of the University of California (Berkeley: The University Press, 1905).

391 Baxter, “Zuni Revisited,” 124.

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SECTION 2-2

ALICE C. FLETCHER (1838-1923)

Figure 35. Alice C. Fletcher, ca. 1850 NAA 83-11264

Probably the most well-known female anthropologist of her day, Alice C. Fletcher was born in Cuba in 1838 to American-born parents who were then visiting the island. She grew up in New York, and eventually chose neither to marry nor to have children. Fletcher, though never labeling herself a Progressive, certainly fit many of the descriptions of the late nineteenth- century activist. She was an ardent reformer, believing education, assimilation, and Christianity were the keys to moral and social uplift for Native Americans. As such, she mirrored a number of her like-minded East Coast peers involved in “Indian reform,” and fought to eradicate , communal ownership of land, and even reservations themselves.392 In the 1870s and

1880s she joined or became involved with several powerful reform groups, including the Indian

Rights Association, the Friends of the Indian, and the Women’s National Indian Association.393

392 Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians, 7-8.

393 Alice C. Fletcher, Dividing the Reservation: Alice Fletcher’s Nez Perce Allotment Diaries and Letters, 1889- 1892, ed. Nicole Tonkovich (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2016), 3.

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Not surprisingly, the membership base of these organizations was overwhelmingly Euro-

American and Protestant, with few if any actual members of Native ancestry or individuals knowledgeable about conditions on reservations. Paradoxically, throughout her life Fletcher also concurrently worked as a field ethnologist, documenting and recording much that her fellow

Christian reformers saw as valueless if not blatantly heathen in American Indian cultures.

Fletcher first met Frederic Ward Putnam sometime in the mid-1870s, and was familiar with his anthropological work as Curator of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and

Ethnology at Harvard University.394 Appointed ethnological assistant by Putnam in the 1880s and awarded the Thaw Fellowship in 1891, she remained an employee of the Peabody Museum for the rest of her life.395 In spite of her decades-long collaborative work with the Bureau of

American Ethnology, the National Museum, and the fact that she permanently resided in

Washington, DC, Fletcher was never actually employed as a staff member of the Smithsonian

Institution, as is often reported.396

After hearing Omaha brother and sister Susette and Francis La Flesche advocate on behalf of Omaha land rights in Boston in 1879, Fletcher decided to undertake ethnological fieldwork, beginning with a study of “the life of Indian women” among the Upper Missouri

River communities.397 Eager for advice and any potential funding from the Bureau of American

Ethnology, Fletcher wrote Director John Wesley Powell soon after arriving on the Omaha

Reservation in Nebraska in 1881. “I have been introduced into Indian homes by Indians and have

394 Mark, Four Anthropologists, 64.

395 Mark, Four Anthropologists, 69; La Flesche, “Fletcher,” 1915.

396 Alice C. Fletcher, Life Among the Indians: First Fieldwork among the Sioux and Omahas, eds. Joanna C. Scherer and Raymond J. DeMallie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 52.

397 NAA, BAE, A.C. Fletcher to J.W. Powell corr., August 10, 1881.

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conformed as far as possible to Indian life,” she wrote. “The inside view has been open to me and I have tried to see it from the Indian standpoint, to get at the Indian way of thinking.”398 Her search to both understand and present Native viewpoints to the public would remain central to her anthropological work for the next four decades.

Returning from her 1881 fieldwork on the Omaha reservation, Fletcher set immediately to lobbying Congress on behalf of Native land rights. Along with fellow Christian reformers, she labored to abrogate tribal ownership of reservation lands, working for severalty or the allotment of individual plots for every Omaha Indian. Her efforts proved successful with passage of the

Omaha Act in 1882, which enacted allotment and citizenship for Omaha allottees. Following her success, Congress appointed Fletcher a “special agent” overseeing, with the aid of Francis La

Flesche, the allotment of Omaha lands, and, after passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, Ho-Chunk

(Winnebago) and Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce) tribal lands as well.399

Figure 36. Alice C. Fletcher, Meepe, and Martha, Winnebago Reservation, Nebraska, 1888 NAA, BAE GN 4439

398 NAA, BAE, A.C. Fletcher to J.W. Powell corr., November 16, 1881.

399 Temkin, “Fletcher,” 96-97.

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Although cognizant that it was “impracticable” for allotment agents to “take an Indian up by the scruff of his neck and put him where we please,” Fletcher nevertheless viewed allotment as the most immediate solution to the twin problems of Euro-American greed for Native lands, and Indian reticence toward embracing the American way of life. Native and non-Native individuals of her own day and ever since have criticized Fletcher for her stance on allotment. As a recent historian has noted, dividing up tribal lands “neither transformed the Indians into successful farmers nor gave them a secure political and economic base.”400 Rather, it unintentionally separated Native peoples from their cultures, families, and lands. Following in

Fletcher’s footsteps a half-century later, another pioneer woman anthropologist, Margaret Mead, reported on the outcome of her predecessor’s allotment work on the Omaha reservation.

According to Mead, “this was a culture so shrunk from its earlier style . . . that there was very little out of the past that was recognizable and still less in the present that was aesthetically satisfying.” Recognizing the failure of allotment, Mead wrote, “I had the unrewarding task of discussing a long history of mistakes in American policy toward the Indians and of prophesying a still more disastrous fate for them in the future.”401

Mirroring her work among the Omaha of Nebraska in the middle of the decade, by the late 1880s Fletcher traveled to , seeking to aid the Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce) through government-mandated allotment policies. There she faced a number of daunting challenges, including widespread Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce) resistance toward the enactment of federal allotment which they did not seek. Clearly unlike Fletcher’s prior work on the Omaha

Reservation where progressive leaders sought the federal government’s aid in allotment, then,

400 Temkin, “Fletcher,” 99.

401 Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 190-191.

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few if any members of the Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce) community desired a break-up of communal lands, and some actively resisted Fletcher’s efforts. Perhaps equally difficult was the presence of a large number of non-Native individuals inhabiting the neighboring area, eager to acquire, legally or otherwise, Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce) lands once they were allotted. Summarizing her situation in 1889, Fletcher wrote Putnam, “I find a people who have been sorely put upon, and annoyed, and I am as usual between two, the Indian on one hand, and the greed of the whites on the other.”402 Over two years later she wrote again to her friend and mentor Putnam, exasperated and appalled at the behavior of those seeking to acquire Native lands and property. “I never met such greed, such a determination to rob a people, as I have found here in Idaho,” she declared.403

Figure 37. James Reuben, ca. 1890 Idaho State Historical Society, Evans Papers, 63-221.86

Ever the anthropologist, Fletcher continued collecting bits and pieces of “Nez Perce culture, beliefs, rituals, legends, and histories” for the Peabody Museum while engaged as an allotment agent.404 During this period she met a young Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce) man by the name

402 Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, Frederic Ward Putnam Papers, HUG 1717.2.1, A.C. Fletcher to F.W. Putnam corr., August 2, 1889.

403 Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, A.C. Fletcher to F.W. Putnam corr., November 11, 1891.

404 Fletcher, Dividing the Reservation, 28.

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of James Reuben who agreed to serve as her ethnological collaborator. Reuben was the son of the former head chief, and according to Fletcher, had “quite a store of knowledge,” “native talent,” and ability. Accordingly, Fletcher arranged for the young man to travel to the nation’s capital to attend law school. Writing to John Wesley Powell, she hoped the BAE “may be able to employ him, and thus make it possible for him to secure his legal course of study,” thereby aiding both Reuben as well as “his deserving tribe.” In spite of Fletcher’s “enthusiastic sponsorship,” however, later historians have been unable to locate any record of James Reuben attending law school or pursuing such a course of study.405

Alice C. Fletcher maintained a close relationship with fellow reformer, assimilationist, and Carlisle Indian School founder and Superintendent Richard Henry Pratt throughout much of her professional life. Believing that the best schooling for Native Americans was “to mix and live with the white people,” she eagerly supported Pratt’s Indian School policy of assimilation through education.406 As early as 1882 Fletcher agreed to work for Pratt, recruiting Native children she met on reservations to attend Carlisle.407 Delighted over such recruiting, and equally troubled by her continued anthropological endeavors, Pratt attempted to tip the scales in his favor, suggesting that her Christian reform work would “reach farther into eternity than ethnology.” Putnam, too, competed for Fletcher’s allegiance, urging that she “must give up this

Gov. work [allotment],” and devote herself “to [ethnological] writing & study.”408 It is difficult

405 NAA, BAE, A.C. Fletcher to J.W. Powell corr., September 7, 1889; Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 436; Mark, Stranger, 213.

406 Alice C. Fletcher, “Lands in Severalty to Indians; Illustrated by Experiences with the Omaha Tribe,” Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 33 (1885): 663.

407 Fletcher, Life Among the Indians, 67.

408 NAA, MSS 4558, R.H. Pratt to A.C. Fletcher corr., May 23, 1882; NAA, MSS 4558, F.W. Putnam to A.C. Fletcher corr., July 25, 1891.

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to discern which of the two approaches had the larger impact, for better or worse, for Native

Americans: forced removal and loss of culture at Indian Boarding Schools, or exoticization and

Othering through museum anthropology.

Continuing her ethnological fieldwork among the Plains Indian peoples, Fletcher began working with the Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee) community in Oklahoma territory in the mid-

1890s. There she collaborated with James R. Murie, a Chaticks Si Chaticks (Skidi

Pawnee/Skiri Pawnee), or member of the Skidi band. Born in Nebraska territory in 1862 and educated at the Hampton Agricultural and Industrial School in Virginia, Murie was a recurring figure in the early days of museum anthropology, working with numerous anthropologists throughout his lifetime.409 Though without formal anthropological academic qualifications,

Murie left a legacy as a prolific recorder of American Indian ethnography larger than many professional anthropologists. According to one of his biographers, “most of what is known today about nineteenth-century Pawnee ethnography” is due to Murie’s lifetime of work.410

Figure 38. James R. Murie, 1907 Brooklyn Museum, Culin Archival Collection

409 Douglas R. Parks, “James R. Murie: Pawnee Ethnographer,” in American Indian Intellectuals, ed. Margot Liberty (St. Paul: West Publishing, 1978), 75-79.

410 James R. Murie, Ceremonies of the Pawnee, ed. Douglas R. Parks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), vii.

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Murie and Fletcher collaborated together extensively, both in person in Pawnee,

Oklahoma, and Washington, DC, and via paper correspondence, for approximately five years.

Together they recorded and documented a number of ceremonies, including the Calumet Ritual, the Buffalo Head ceremony, and the Hako ceremony.411 Their collaborative ethnological venture ended abruptly in 1902, though, when George A. Dorsey, anthropologist at the Field Museum in

Chicago, offered Murie “one hundred dollars per month and Expenses for four years.” Fletcher, low on funds and unable to compete, agreed that Dorsey offered the better position. In a letter to

Fletcher the following month, Murie admitted, “I could not refuse.”412

Throughout her long life, Alice C. Fletcher conducted ethnographic fieldwork among numerous Indigenous communities inhabiting North America, including Alaska. Although arguably impacting more Native peoples through her allotment and Indian Boarding School efforts, she nevertheless considered herself foremost an ethnologist.413 She joined a number of scientific societies, including the American Anthropological Association, which she cofounded, as well as the Women’s Anthropological Society, the American Folklore Society, and the

Anthropological Society of Washington. She later served as president of the latter three organizations.414 Membership and even leadership in organizations such as these illustrate

Fletcher’s role in changing the power dynamics then present in the early days of American

411 Parks, “Murie,” 79; NAA, MSS 4558, J.R. Murie to A.C. Fletcher corr., February 12, 1900; Walter Hough, “Alice Cunningham Fletcher,” American Anthropologist 25, no. 2 (April-June 1923): 255.

412 NAA, MSS 4558, J.R. Murie to A.C. Fletcher corr., April 29, 1902; NAA, MSS 4558, J.R. Murie to A.C. Fletcher corr., May 28, 1902.

413 1910 U.S. Federal Census, Washington, DC, Ancestry.com.

414 Temkin, “Fletcher,” 98.

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anthropology. Residing in Washington, DC, for the rest of her life alongside her friend and companion, Francis La Flesche, she died there in 1923 at the age of eighty-five.415

Fletcher and the Public

Perceptions of Alice C. Fletcher from both her fellow anthropologists and reformers were highly complimentary, and in some cases even quite laudatory. Recent historians have tended to view Fletcher more critically, however, especially in regard to her allotment work. In 1923, the year that she died, a BAE anthropologist declared that as an “interpreter of the Indian,” Fletcher ranked “among the highest.”416 Similarly, Charles F. Lummis, founder of the Southwest Museum in , praised her for having “done more for our scientific knowledge of the Indian, and more for the Indian himself as a human being, than any other woman.”417 Christian reformers in general tended to view anthropologists quite negatively, as is apparent in an 1886 statement from Indian Rights Association member Philip C. Garrett, when he argued that anthropology was an “impediment” to Native American civilization in its “desire to preserve the

Indian animal for study.” In spite of such derisive views about her chosen profession, Garrett commended Fletcher as an exception to the rule, stating that “her philanthropy swallowed up her anthropology.”418 Like many of her contemporaries in the anthropological field, then, Fletcher exhibited some of the fluidity which existed between different camps. Not holding herself firmly to the label of either an assimilationist or an anthropologist, Fletcher chose to exist as both.

415 La Flesche, “Fletcher,” 115.

416 Hough, “Fletcher,” 256.

417 Charles F. Lummis, “Alice C. Fletcher,” Land of Sunshine 13, no. 1 (June 1900): 20.

418 Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians, 59.

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Newspaper reporters often remarked on Fletcher’s independence as a single non-Native woman living among American Indian communities. The Sioux City Journal on January

26, 1882, for instance, informed its readers that an “educated young lady” had been living with the Omahas for the past seven months in order “to learn something of the inner life of this tribe.”419 Other columnists in Washington, DC, and Buffalo, New York, described her as possessing the “unmistakable air of a professional woman,” and highlighted her physical appearance and character. One reporter matter-of-factly equated her independent spirit with masculinity, writing that her “features” suggested “the firmness and tenacity of a man,” or at least, a woman “with no nonsense about her.”420

Recent historians have tended to be less kind in their appraisals of Fletcher, noting that her representations of Native Americans “are today politically and ideologically questionable.”421 One of her biographers summed it up simply by stating, “the tragedy of Alice

Fletcher’s life is that she was a benevolent, well-intentioned person who ended up harming the people she tried to help.” In her allotment work, she strove to prevent Native Americans from being “victimized by white people,” and to be safe on their own land.422 In this she ultimately was unsuccessful. She both underestimated Euro-American greed and duplicity in acquiring

Indian lands, and overestimated Native desires to assimilate into mainstream American society.

Native contemporaries of Alice C. Fletcher had mixed opinions on the woman and her work as well. Francis La Flesche, Fletcher’s Omaha teacher, student, collaborator, and erstwhile

419 “An Enthusiast,” Sioux City Journal, IA, January 26, 1882.

420 “Life with Poor Lo,” Buffalo Courier, NY, August 31, 1896; “Women Who Serve Science,” Washington Evening Star, DC, July 6, 1889.

421 Joy Rohde, “‘From the Sense of Justice and Human Sympathy’: Alice Fletcher, Native Americans, and the Gendering of Victorian Anthropology,” History of Anthropology Newsletter 27, no. 1 (June 2000): 9.

422 Mark, Stranger, 201-202.

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companion from their first meeting in 1879 until her death in 1923, unsurprisingly wrote only of her in good terms. To La Flesche, she was “a woman with a courageous heart, full of true sympathy for humankind,” and a “great friend of the Indians.”423 Carlisle Indian School publications written by Native students illustrate that many children who longed for assimilation also praised the work she did for them. The Indian Helper of April 1, 1887, for example, noted her “excellent advice” to the Indian youth, and three years later highlighted another of her visits to the school in which she interpreted and explained to them the importance of the Dawes Bill and allotment acts for their future.424

Other Native peoples, including the parents of Carlisle children, viewed Fletcher differently. For instance, the parents of Alice Springer, a fourteen-year-old Omaha girl who

Fletcher had recruited, and who subsequently died of illness while attending Carlisle in 1883, voiced their complaints to Pratt. In addition to requesting that their other two children be sent home, they expressed their confusion over “the necessity of sending them so far away to be educated, when we have good schools at home . . . and [can] attend to them when sick.” Alice

Springer’s mother, in particular, wrote that she did “not see why the government put so much power and confidence in Miss Fletcher,” as “she does no good to the Omahas but much harm,” and could not be trusted.425

Fletcher regularly represented Native American cultures to the public through lectures, exhibits, and publications. There is evidence that as early as 1878, before starting at the Peabody

Museum or commencing ethnographic work in the field, she had already established a lecture

423 La Flesche, “Fletcher,” 115.

424 Indian Helper, PA, April 1, 1887; Indian Helper, PA, March 28, 1890.

425 NAA, MSS 4558, A. Springer to R.H. Pratt corr., November 20, 1883.

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circuit ranging from the Upper Midwest to New England. Focusing on archaeological topics and titled “Ancient America,” her lectures received rave reviews wherever she went.426 Later lectures included public presentations on allotment, as well as Native American music, family-life, and childhood.427 She also created exhibits displaying Indigenous lifeways at most of the major

World’s Fairs of the late nineteenth century. For instance, under Bureau of Indian Affairs supervision she developed a photographic display for the World’s Industrial and Cotton

Centennial Exposition at in 1885. There she presented on her experiences among the Omaha of Nebraska, in her words, “setting forth the progress and present status reached by the Indians, by showing their past life and their present condition.”428 Eight years later she worked alongside her friend and mentor Frederic Ward Putnam as he directed the Anthropology

Department at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Specifically, she collected material culture objects for display from among those communities where she performed allotment work, including the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce), and Omaha. In addition to these two expositions, she later developed anthropological exhibits for public consumption at the 1898,

1901, and 1904 World’s Fairs that took place in Omaha, Nebraska, Buffalo, New York, and St.

Louis, Missouri, respectively.429

Fletcher did not confine herself to lectures and exhibits, but also published widely for scholarly and popular audiences. While frequently writing articles published by the Peabody

Museum and the Bureau of American Ethnology, she additionally wrote in the monthly journal

426 NAA, BAE, A.C. Fletcher to J.W. Powell corr., August 10, 1881.

427 “To Help the Red Men,” New York Times, NY, November 21, 1885; Alice C. Fletcher, “Love Songs Among the Omaha Indians,” in Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology, ed. C. Staniland Wake (Chciago: Schulte Publishing, 1894): 153; “A Woman’s Society,” Washington Evening Star, DC, February 13, 1886.

428 Fletcher, Life Among the Indians, 48.

429 Mark, Stranger, 233, 253.

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Wide Awake, geared toward children and young adult readers.430 In the prologue to her 1887 work Life Among the Indians, she hoped that these “glimpses of Indian life” would “help toward a better understanding between the two races.” She echoed similar sentiments in a letter written to Putnam three years later, commenting on her forthcoming article in Century magazine. Such articles were presented “in popular form,” she wrote, and intended “for men & women who will be wiser and kinder by knowing their fellow countryman the Indian as he is at home & in peace.”431 Her advocacy on behalf of Native peoples, easy to condemn in hindsight for her

“reformist zeal” and paternalist language, nevertheless was quite progressive for her time.

Alice C. Fletcher’s life and work were often paradoxical. More so than any of her anthropological contemporaries portrayed in this study, Fletcher best represented the self- interested, self-serving, and contradictory nature of Progressive era reform at the turn of the twentieth century.432 She strove to educate and assimilate Native peoples, in many cases against their will. But she worked equally hard to document American Indian languages, ceremonies, and songs in print, and to preserve and exhibit Native material culture objects in museums for the edification of the non-Native public. In a 1905 letter to a colleague in which she attempted to clarify her contradictory role as both assimilationist and ethnologist, Alice C. Fletcher stressed that there was “so much in [the Native American] past that should be conserved.” To properly guide American Indians toward civilization, she believed, it was necessary not to completely eliminate their previous state. Rather, “It is just here that the Ethnological student can become a

430 Alice C. Fletcher, “The Carlisle Indian Pupils at Home,” Wide Awake 18, no. 2 (January 1884): 141-144.

431 Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, A.C. Fletcher to F.W. Putnam corr., March 6, 1890.

432 McGerr, A Fierce Discontent; Hoxie, Talking Back to Civilization, viii.

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practical helper to the philanthropist,” she wrote, with the two working together to usher Native pasts into a “civilized” future.433

433 Mark, Stranger, 268.

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CHAPTER 3

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM OF

ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Figure 39. Free Museum of Science and Art, 1899 Penn, PM 10992

Less well-known than some of its counterparts such as the Smithsonian Institution,

AMNH, or Field Museum, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology nevertheless played a major role in representing American Indians to the public at the turn of the twentieth century. Founded in late 1889 by University of Pennsylvania Provost William Pepper, the

“museum” was little more than a small exhibit space in College Hall when it opened to the

Philadelphia public in January of 1890. Four years later Pepper acquired land from the city for his museum, which he renamed the Free Museum of Science and Art. Although this new name accurately reflected the institution’s mission and its open and welcoming nature to the public, the name itself did not stick, and people generally referred to it informally as the University

Museum. By 1913 museum authorities even officially adopted the latter title. More recently, this institution has changed its name yet again to that of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of

Archaeology and Anthropology, or simply known as the Penn Museum for short.434

William Pepper and his colleague , an Egyptologist and later

President of the museum from 1904 to 1905, initially intended this institution to be “nothing less

434 Alessandro Pezzati, “A Brief History of the Penn Museum,” Expedition 54, no. 3 (2012): 5-11.

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than an American version of the British Museum,” a collection of ethnological and archaeological objects representing cultures from around the world.435 Stevenson sought out the advice of museum anthropologist Franz Boas, then at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, to help her and Pepper turn their idea into a reality. In his continual push to professionalize the anthropological discipline, Boas encouraged Pepper and Stevenson to locate an academically qualified anthropologist who would not just concentrate on the work of the museum, but who would also develop greater cooperation between the museum and the university, thus utilizing both of these institutions to train the next generation of museum anthropologists.436 Steps like these taken by museum leaders and encouraged by anthropologists like Boas further illustrate the changing nature of the field at the time. As a result of Boas’s advice, then, in September of 1903 the museum hired on George Byron Gordon as Curator of

Ethnology to fill this role. Gordon was a recent Harvard University graduate, having received his

PhD in anthropology under Harvard Professor and Peabody Museum Director Frederic Ward

Putnam. By 1910 museum officials named Gordon Director, a position he retained until his death in 1927.437

Under Gordon’s leadership, museum staff conducted research around the globe, in

Africa, Asia, Oceania, and throughout the Americas.438 Gordon himself led at least two

435 Percy C. Madeira, Jr., Men in Search of Man: The First Seventy-Five Years of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1964), 26; Conn, History’s Shadow, 148.

436 Penn Museum Archives, Administrative Records, F. Boas to S.Y. Stevenson corr., May 12, 1903.

437 David L. Browman and Stephen Williams, Anthropology at Harvard: A Biographical History, 1790-1940 (Cambridge: Peabody Museum Press, 2013), 206-207; Pezzati, “Brief History,” 16.

438 Pezzati, “Brief History,” 11; Eleanor M. King and Bryce P. Little, “George Byron Gordon and the Early Development of the University Museum,” in Raven’s Journey: The World of Alaska’s Native People, eds. Susan A. Kaplan and Kristin J. Barsness (Philadelphia: The University Museum, 1986), 39.

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collecting expeditions to Alaska in 1905 and again in 1907.439 A January 21, 1907 Philadelphia

Inquirer article informed the public about the museum’s successful 1905 expedition as well as its upcoming venture to the Alaskan territory. “Dr. Gordon spent the summer of 1905 among the natives of Alaska, covering over 2000 miles in the interior of the territory and along the coast of the Bering Sea,” the newspaper noted. He reportedly visited “a large number of primitive tribes for the purpose of observing their customs and making ethnological collections for the university.” “These collections,” the anonymous reporter opined, “now form one of the most interesting exhibitions in the museum.”440

Figure 40. George Byron Gordon, ca. 1920 Penn, PM 19134

The University Museum did not exist in isolation, but rather worked cooperatively with other institutions. Foremost among these was the University of Pennsylvania itself. Even before

Pepper founded his museum, the University of Pennsylvania had already taken the lead in naming the nation’s first Professor of American Linguistics and Archaeology, Daniel Garrison

439 Browman and Williams, Anthropology at Harvard, 207.

440 “Penn Will Scour Alaska for Records,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, January 21, 1907.

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Brinton, in 1886.441 As recent scholars have noted, however, Brinton’s title was largely nominal, particularly as he neither taught any actual courses nor received a salary for this position.

Instead, he primarily disseminated information about the field of anthropology through his numerous publications and public lectures.442

When Gordon came on board in September of 1903, he worked to alter the existing relationship between museum and university, modeling his work after the efforts of Putnam at

Harvard with the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, and those of Boas at with the American Museum of Natural History.443 Within his first two months at the Free Museum of Science and Art, Gordon encouraged university officials to institute actual course offerings including instruction in archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, and physical anthropology. Four years later the university officially created a Department of

Anthropology, which soon came under the chairmanship of Frank G. Speck, an anthropologist trained under Boas at Columbia.444 Due to personality conflicts between Gordon and Speck, a sustained educational and training program did not take hold between the university and museum until many years later, in spite of the opportunities for success such cooperation promised.445

Philadelphia’s University Museum and the Public

441 Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 82; Darnell, Along Came Boas, 104.

442 Regna Darnell, ed., Readings in the History of Anthropology (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 147; Darnell, Along Came Boas, 104; Regna Darnell, “Toward Consensus on the Scope of Anthropology: Daniel Garrison Brinton and the View from Philadelphia,” in Philadelphia and the Development of Americanist Archaeology, eds. Don D. Fowler and David R. Wilcox (Tuscaloosa: University of Press), 28-29.

443 Darnell, Along Came Boas, 161.

444 Browman and Williams, Anthropology at Harvard, 206-207.

445 John Witthoft, “: The Formative Years,” in The Life and Times of Frank G. Speck, 1881-1950, ed. Roy Blankenship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 7-8; King and Little, “Gordon,” 38.

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Like its counterparts in Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC, the Free Museum of

Science and Art, later the University Museum, received widespread coverage in the local and national media. From the beginning, newspapers heralded this Philadelphia repository for its wealth of “rare and abundant exhibits” which included “relics of the remotest past.”446 In 1912

Gordon wrote in the University of Pennsylvania Museum Journal that the museum was as equally concerned with “the earlier and cruder stages of development” as it was with those more advanced, but eschewed “modern things.”447

In addition to informing the public about the mission of the museum, its holdings, and its educational offerings, newspapers also frequently covered museum expeditions to exotic locales.

On March 11, 1915, for instance, Philadelphia’s Evening Public Ledger published a piece on the

University Museum’s ethnological and archaeological work, of which “comparatively few

Philadelphians” knew the extent. The article highlighted that at the present time the museum was conducting no fewer than five expeditions into “little known regions of the earth” in order to collect material culture objects for display.448

While Native-written descriptions of the University Museum during its early years are difficult to locate, one can learn how at least some Native Americans viewed this museum based on those individuals who chose to work there at this time. One non-Native employee, J. Alden

Mason, later recalled, “Formerly the Museum made a practice of having an American Indian as

Assistant in the American Section. Dressed in his native costume, he appealed greatly to the school classes – especially to the younger grades, who listened to his talks on Indian life and

446 “Memorials to Dr. William Pepper,” North American, PA, December 20, 1899.

447 George B. Gordon, “The Extension of the Museum Building,” Museum Journal 3, no. 4 (1912): 61-62.

448 “New Explorations of the Past,” Evening Public Ledger, PA, March 11, 1915.

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customs more avidly than they would to any white teacher.” Mason further noted, “at various times and for short periods the Museum had several of these” Native employees.449 husband and wife Louis and Florence Shotridge fit this description, with Louis working a total of twenty years at the University Museum in curatorial and non-curatorial roles between 1912 and

1932.450 Other Native individuals employed there during the early decades of the twentieth century included Don Whistler, a member of the Oklahoma Sac and Fox community, who worked as an assistant in the Anthropology Department, and Chief White Feather, an Ottawa man who designed an exhibit there in 1926.451 What these individuals thought about their employment in this museum, or about how it as an institution represented Native peoples to the public, is not immediately known. Regardless, the role of these individuals illustrates that Native peoples were willing to work for this museum and others like it in order to secure gainful employment, but perhaps more importantly, also to educate and inform the public about

Indigenous communities.

449 J. Alden Mason, “Louis Shotridge,” Expedition 2, no. 2 (1960): 11.

450 Maureen Milburn, “Louis Shotridge and the Objects of Everlasting Esteem,” in Raven’s Journey: The World of Alaska’s Native People, eds. Susan A. Kaplan and Kristin J. Barsness (Philadelphia: The University Museum, 1986), 54; and Richard Dauenhauer, “Louis Shotridge and Indigenous Tlingit Ethnography: Then and Now,” in Constructing Cultures Then and Now: Celebrating Franz Boas and the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, eds. Laura Kendall and Igor Krupnik (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003), 167; “University Museum Sends Man to Alaska,” Evening Ledger, PA, June 2, 1915.

451 NMAI, Heye, J.A. Mason to M.R. Harrington corr., October 30, 1926; “The Original K.K.K.,” Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, PA, December 4, 1924; “First Indian to Hold University Museum Post,” Petaluma Daily Morning Courier, CA, January 18, 1925.

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Figure 41. Free Museum of Science and Art, North American Gallery, 1912 Penn, PM 10991

The University Museum represented Native cultures to a largely non-Native public through a variety of formats ranging from exhibitions to lectures to publications. As a free museum, it was essentially beholden to the goodwill of Philadelphia’s taxpayers, and thus made education and outreach primary components of its mission. Consequently, museum staff designed exhibits to engage and instruct the general public as well as to inform scholarly audiences.452 A 1910 Philadelphia newspaper article illustrated the museum’s success in this endeavor by noting a new display’s “splendid Indian curios,” its representation of “each phase of

Indian life and Indian tradition,” and the “absorbed spectators” who crowded the exhibition hall.453

Under Gordon’s tenure from 1910 to 1926, museum visitorship increased dramatically, due in large part to greater numbers of schoolchildren attending both educational tours and lectures.454 Curators, museum staff, and visiting scholars such as BAE anthropologist WJ McGee often lectured and presented their research for free during these public programs as well.455 One

452 King and Little, “Gordon,” 22.

453 “Splendid Indian Curios on View,” Unknown Philadelphia Newspaper, PA, February 13, 1910.

454 King and Little, “Gordon,” 51; Madeira, Men in Search of Man, 40.

455 King and Little, “Gordon,” 42; “The Origin of Language,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, May 8, 1902; “U.P. Summer School,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, June 28, 1914.

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of the hallmarks of these lectures were those geared specifically towards children and led by

Native museum employees. As museum anthropologist J. Alden Mason later wrote, American

Indian staff members appearing in “native costumes” greatly appealed to school classes, and the museum administration lost no time in utilizing this appeal to the institution’s benefit.456

Philadelphia’s University Museum was not unique in this practice either, as many anthropology and natural history museums of the day introduced similar programs in order to interest greater numbers of the public. Essentially, Native men and women, often designated as Chiefs and

Princesses and wearing Plains Indian attire rather than their own culture’s clothing, regularly addressed young museum audiences. There they frequently danced, sang songs, and taught about

Indigenous cultures and lifeways.

In correspondence from Mason at the University Museum to fellow anthropologist M.R.

Harrington at the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation in New York, Mason penned an urgent letter in October of 1926, stating that he was “gunning for an Indian.” Don

Whistler, from the Oklahoma Sac and Fox community, had until recently worked as an Assistant in the museum’s Anthropology Department. “A well educated man without much of the Indian about him,” Mason wrote, Whistler regularly “put on a good program with a good costume and with fire-making, sign-language, drumming and singing,” all of which “went over big with the school children.” Unfortunately, Whistler was busy with family business in Oklahoma during the autumn of 1926, and Mason scrambled to find a replacement. “Do you known any house-broken

Amerind who could put on a good show which would delight a gang of kiddies,” Mason asked

Harrington, utilizing racist humor. He then sketched exactly the type of individual the museum sought. “We want, of course, someone who is a real Indian and looks like one in a real Indian

456 Mason, “Shotridge,” 11.

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costume (possibly we could supply part of the costume), who can do some typical Indian stunts and explain them to the children in a simple language.”457

Although Mason did eventually locate a replacement “real Indian” for Don Whistler, his wording to Harrington reveals much about how museums and museum anthropologists chose to represent Native Americans in the early twentieth century. As with “Indian Princess” storytellers at AMNH and Native museum guides dressed in Plains Indian clothing at the Smithsonian, anthropology museums between approximately 1875 and 1925 created and perpetuated stereotyped caricatures of “real Indians” in order to give the public what they thought it wanted.

Everyday museum visitors accordingly consumed and echoed these constructed representations of Native Americans, propelling such monolithic ideas forward into the future.

In 1912 George Byron Gordon, then director of the University Museum, wrote an encouraging letter to one of his fieldworkers, reminding him of the museum’s goal. “We are trying to make this [institution] an instrument for the preservation of truthful records of the aboriginal people of America,” he wrote.458 Gordon viewed anthropology as an objective science, as did his fellow museum anthropologists across the country, and in this regard he believed the representations the University Museum promoted of Native peoples were truthful and accurate. Although the University Museum did not actively advocate on behalf of Native peoples, it did employ more than a few Indigenous men and women, incorporating their perspectives and voices into museum exhibitions, lectures, and publications consumed by visitors. Throughout much of its early existence, the University Museum struggled to find a

457 NMAI, Heye, J.A. Mason to M.R. Harrington corr., October 12, 1926.

458 Penn, G.B. Gordon to W. Van Valin corr., October 24, 1912.

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balance between “truthful,” accurate portrayals of Native cultures, and those stereotyped images of “real Indians” that the public had come to expect.

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SECTION 3-1

FRANK G. SPECK (1881-1950)

Figure 42. Frank G. Speck in his Office, ca. 1930 University of Pennsylvania Archives

The dominant figure in early twentieth-century Philadelphia anthropology, Frank

Gouldsmith Speck was born in New York City in 1881. In spite of his documented Euro-

American ancestry, stories propagated by Speck’s graduate students regarding his rumored

Native heritage have abounded for years, even continuing to the present-day. These include how as a youth Speck had purportedly lived in rural with “a distant relative, a -

Pequot widow” named who taught him the rudiments of “the Algonkian language, herbal lore, and a love of nature.”459 Although Mohegan community members and

Speck himself rejected these false origin stories, noting that Fielding and Speck did not first meet until Speck conducted fieldwork among the during his Columbia University undergraduate days, nevertheless the myth of Speck raised amongst Native peoples persists to this day in academic circles. As Abenaki museum anthropologist Margaret Bruchac points out,

459 Edmund Carpenter, Two Essays: Chief & Greed (North Andover: Persimmon Press, 2005), 60; Roy Blankenship, ed., The Life and Times of Frank G. Speck, 1881-1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 1.

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suggestions of Speck’s Native heritage and skills emerging from a fictional upbringing ultimately and lamentably obscure “the contributions of the real Indians who collaborated with him.”460

Speck matriculated at Columbia University in 1899, where he pursued anthropology under Franz Boas, receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees there, the latter in 1905.

Although he continued his doctoral studies at Columbia, he eventually received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1908, the first student to do so.461

Throughout his life Speck served in leadership roles in a number of professional organizations, including as President of the American Folklore Society, Vice President of the American

Anthropological Association, and founder of the Philadelphia Anthropological Society.462 He only married once, to Florence Insley of New York. The two married in June of 1910 and remained together for four decades, until his death in 1950.463

Speck commenced his professional career in 1907 when he accepted a fellowship in anthropology at the Free Museum of Science and Art, later the University Museum, at the

University of Pennsylvania. After receiving his doctorate the following year, he served as an assistant in the museum from 1908 until 1911. Alfred L. Kroeber and Frederic Ward Putnam at the University of California Berkeley were both aware of Speck’s qualifications, and were eager to hire him on to work with them, even offering to increase his annual salary from $1200 to

$1400. Speck refused, however, with Kroeber later lamenting to Putnam, “I wish you had

460 Melissa Jayne Fawcett, Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2000), 174; Bruchac, Savage Kin, 148-152.

461 Bruchac, Savage Kin, 140.

462 A. Irving Hallowell, “Frank Gouldsmith Speck, 1881-1950,” American Anthropologist 53, no. 1 (January-March 1951): 70.

463 Pennsylvania Death Certificates, 1906-1967, Ancestry.com.

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someone that you could turn over to us. At the present time there seem to be more places than men in anthropology.” Speck did eventually sever his relationship with the University Museum in 1911, but stayed on at the University of Pennsylvania, largely building the Anthropology

Department around himself as he advanced over the next forty-two years from Instructor to

Assistant Professor to Full Professor.464 As such, Speck, along with Frank Boas, Alfred L.

Kroeber, and many others, represented the changing nature of the field of anthropology in the early twentieth century with its transition from museums to its new home in academia.

Throughout his nearly half-century as a professional anthropologist, Speck spent a great deal of time in the field conducting ethnological work in North America. Of the many Native groups among whom he worked, a few included the Mushuaunnuat (Barren Ground Naskapi) of

Labrador, the Penobscot of Maine, and the Mohegan people of Connecticut.465 It was during

Speck’s fieldwork among the latter Native community that he first met Fidelia Fielding, and later her grandniece Gladys Tantaquidgeon, both of whom befriended him and collaborated with him on his anthropological endeavors.

As one of Speck’s primary collaborators and a museum anthropologist in her own right, it is important to bring to light the life and contributions of the largely unacknowledged Mohegan woman, Gladys Tantaquidgeon. Tantaquidgeon was born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1889.466

From a young age she already knew Speck and his family, and even regularly vacationed with

464 Peabody, MSS 999-24, A.L. Kroeber to F.W. Putnam corr., June 4, 1909; William N. Fenton, “Frank G. Speck’s Anthropology (1881-1950),” in The Life and Times of Frank G. Speck, 1881-1950, ed. Roy Blankenship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 19.

465 Brice Obermeyer, “Salvaging the Delaware Big House Ceremony: The History and Legacy of Frank Speck’s Collaboration with the Oklahoma Delaware,” Histories of Anthropology Annual 3 (2007): 184; “Indians of Maine Forced to Marry,” Washington Times, DC, May 23, 1910; Claudia Medoff, “The Frank Speck Collections and the Documentation of the Material He Collected,” in The Life and Times of Frank G. Speck, 1881-1950, ed. Roy Blankenship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 104; Fawcett, Medicine Trail, 63.

466 Bruchac, Savage Kin, 140-141.

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Frank and his wife Florence between the years 1912 and 1918. In spite of Tantaquidgeon having attended only a few years of elementary school, and with no formalized high school education, she nevertheless was accepted by the University of Pennsylvania to study anthropology, reportedly the first Native American woman to do so.467 In addition to studying under Speck, she also worked as his anthropology assistant, ultimately aiding him in his ethnographic work.

Figure 43. Janie Harmon and Gladys Tantaquidgeon, 1922 NMAI N12475

While working with Speck and studying anthropology in the 1920s and early 1930s,

Tantaquidgeon regularly visited many Native communities throughout North America. For example, she pursued ethnographic fieldwork with the Mushuaunnuat (Barren Ground Naskapi) of Labrador, the Cayuga of Ontario, the Oklahoma Delaware, and her Gay Head and Mashpee

Wampanoag “cousins” of Massachusetts, among many others.468 The Connecticut Norwich

Bulletin newspaper also frequently reported on her work closer to home. An August 28, 1920, article noted that Tantaquidgeon was one of the primary leaders in her community’s annual

Wigwam Festival celebration, a Mohegan Thanksgiving or Green Corn Festival designed “to change the ‘last of the Mohegans’ into ‘the lasting of the Mohegans.’” The article also reported

467 Fawcett, Medicine Trail, 13, 64-66; “Education,” Evening News, PA, November 21, 1924.

468 Fawcett, Medicine Trail, 78-83.

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that Tantaquidgeon was the secretary of this Native organization, whose mission included the supervision of Mohegan history, tradition, and interests.469

Acknowledging some good aspects of Euro-American society, she was purportedly fond of advising fellow community members to “remember to take the best of what the white man has to offer, and use it to still be an Indian.”470 Regarding the public, Tantaquidgeon regularly represented Native communities to largely non-Native audiences through lectures delivered at the University of Pennsylvania during her school-days, and later through publications on anthropology and ethnobotany.471 Her book A Study of Delaware Indian Medicine Practice and

Folk Beliefs, in particular, received favorable attention when it was first published.472

Figure 44. Gladys Tantaquidgeon and Russell Clark, 1922 NMAI N12424

469 Melissa Jayne Fawcett, The Lasting of the Mohegans: The Story of the Wolf People (Uncasville: The , 1995), 54; “Last of the Mohegans form Tribal Organization,” Norwich Bulletin, CT, August 28, 1920.

470 Bruchac, Savage Kin, 175.

471 Fawcett, Medicine Trail, 71; Gladys Tantaquidgeon, “Notes on the Gay Head Indians of Massachusetts,” Indian Notes 7, no. 1 (January 1930): 1-26; Gladys Tantaquidgeon, A Study of Delaware Indian Medicine Practice and Folk Beliefs (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical Commission, 1942).

472 E.H. Ackerknecht, “Review of A Study of Delaware Indian Medicine Practice and Folk Beliefs, by Gladys Tantaquidgeon,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 14, no. 1 (June 1943): 122.

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In the years after her work with Speck, Gladys Tantaquidgeon continued to assist and advocate for Native peoples in a number of ways. In the early 1930s she joined her brother and father in founding the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum in Uncasville, Connecticut, as a home for

Native material culture objects as well as an institution for the teaching of Mohegan culture.

According to Gladys, from the beginning this museum was the designated place where

“Mohegan treasures” would be kept, and it is today accorded the title of the oldest Native-run

Indian museum in the U.S. Tantaquidgeon also worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the

Indian Arts and Crafts Board in the 1930s and 1940s before returning to her Native community, where she continued to advocate for Native culture until her death in 2005 at the age of 106.473

As Abenacki museum anthropologist Margaret Bruchac has noted, in spite of Tantaquidgeon’s lifelong work in the field, she still regrettably remains a largely invisible figure in the annals of anthropology.474

Speck not only worked with Native collaborators such as Gladys Tantaquidgeon to gather linguistic, religious, and other intangible cultural heritage, but also actively collected community objects for museum acquisition. He was not beholden to any one museum in particular, and instead collected in order to fund his continued fieldwork, acquiring Native objects for

Philadelphia’s University Museum, the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, the

American Museum of Natural History, and the Art Museum, among others.475 A 1911 newspaper article summarizing Speck’s fieldwork reported that after a month’s stay in the

473 Fawcett, Lasting of the Mohegans, 27-29; Fawcett, Medicine Trail, 91, 177; “The Last of the Mohicans,” Indiana Gazette, PA, November 7, 1934.

474 Bruchac, Savage Kin, 175.

475 Ernest S. Dodge, “Speck on the North Shore,” in The Life and Times of Frank G. Speck, 1881-1950, ed. Roy Blankenship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 47; Bruchac, Savage Kin, 140.

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“freezing North” among the Lac Saint Jean Innu of Quebec, he brought back with him “two birchbark canoes, articles of domestic use, hunting implements, and many other articles of ethnological interest and importance.” All items, the article added, were marked for subsequent exhibition in the University Museum.476

Years later one of his contemporaries also remarked on Speck’s “prolific” collecting, noting that he was meticulous in recording each object’s descriptive information, “its maker, its owner, its use, its history, its symbolism, the source of its designs, etc.” This author further declared that in fifty years of museum anthropology work, he had seen “but few individuals who documented their material as well as Speck.”477 Indeed, such documentation makes it possible for today’s researchers to trace the complicated provenance of Native objects currently residing in a diaspora of sorts throughout many U.S. and international museums.478

Passionately pursuing anthropological work through his entire life, Frank Speck suddenly became critically ill while conducting fieldwork with the Seneca community in Coldspring, New

York, and had to return to Philadelphia. He died in the hospital there a few days later on

February 6, 1950. Speck was sixty-eight years old.479

Speck and the Public

Early twentieth-century newspapers often profiled Frank G. Speck for their readers, frequently magnifying the exotic nature of his fieldwork with Native communities. The

476 “Have Broth a la Mode,” St. Joseph News-Press, MO, June 3, 1911.

477 Dodge, “Speck on the North Shore,” 47.

478 Cole, Captured Heritage, 287-288; Ricardo L. Punzalan, “Archival Diasporas: A Framework for Understanding the Complexities and Challenges of Dispersed Photographic Collections,” American Archivist 77, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2014): 326-349.

479 Hallowell, “Speck,” 67; Pennsylvania Death Certificates, 1906-1967, Ancestry.com.

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Washington Times of May 23, 1910, for instance, wrote about his “discriminating study” on the politics, religion, manners, and customs of at least “fifteen different Indian Tribes” throughout the New World.480 Similarly, Connecticut’s Norwich Bulletin and Oklahoma’s Bluejacket

Gazette informed the public of Speck’s ethnographic work with the peoples of

Quebec and the Penobscot of Maine, the latter visit including Speck’s attendance at the inauguration of a new chief in 1913.481

Although he spent nearly a half-century among Native communities, there is little extant written material documenting Indigenous perspectives on Speck himself. One of his closest collaborators and colleagues, Gladys Tantaquidgeon, did, however, mention that the Mohegan elders liked him very much. Tantaquidgeon too liked Speck, and according to one of her biographers, supported his work because she found him to be more open-minded than most other anthropologists of his day. Recent scholars have painted Speck in a favorable light as well, noting his voluminous body of work, his desire to be in the field rather than the library, and his

“valued contribution to saving the Mohegan language.”482

Speck informed the public about Indigenous North American communities in a variety of ways, including primarily through lectures and publications.483 While he collected a staggering amount of material culture objects during his fieldwork, he rarely worked on the actual interpretation or exhibition of these items in museum displays. Rather, he commonly wrote

480 “Indians of Maine Forced to Marry,” Washington Times, DC, May 23, 1910.

481 “Mohegan,” Norwich Bulletin, CT, July 20, 1920; “An Indian Inaugural,” Bluejacket Gazette, OK, February 13, 1913.

482 Bruchac, Savage Kin, 140; Fenton, “Speck’s Anthropology,” 18; Fawcett, Medicine Trail, 63-64, 73.

483 “Indian Chief Speaks,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, January 14, 1914; “Describes Indian Fur Hunters in Museum Lecture,” Reading Times, PA, March 19, 1927.

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articles and books geared towards scholarly audiences as well as penning more mainstream pieces about Native rights and issues of sovereignty.

Some of his earliest writings, those composed during his undergraduate and graduate years, focused on American Indian languages and religions, while his PhD dissertation was an ethnographic study of the Euchee () peoples of Oklahoma.484 In contrast, Speck published a number of popular articles beginning in 1912 criticizing what he saw as the “too enthusiastic self-conceit of the dominant [Euro-American] race.” He defended the work of ethnologists in trying to preserve complete records of Indigenous cultures, as well as in encouraging Native peoples to stand up against the “destructive influences” of non-Native educators, missionaries, and Bureau of Indian Affairs agents.485 In his article “Conservation for the Indians,” Speck railed against the efforts of educators in the mold of Carlisle Indian School founder Richard Henry

Pratt. Pratt’s pro-assimilation followers continually called for tribal disintegration, and coerced

Native individuals to abandon their “tribal and racial” identities.486 Questioning the logic of these assimilationists, Speck asked, “By what authority are we called upon to deculturate” Native peoples, “to transform them completely to the likeness of ourselves?”487

Two years later in his article “Educating the White Man Up to the Indian,” Speck again attacked educators, policymakers, and administrators who knew “little or nothing of the quality and spirit” of Native cultures, and who were in general “much too deprecatory to the Indian.” He believed that “real Indians” ultimately knew better than the Euro-Americans who were

484 Carpenter, Two Essays, 62.

485 Frank G. Speck, “Conservation for the Indians,” Southern Workman 41, no. 6 (June 1912): 330.

486 Speck, “Conservation,” 330.

487 Frank G. Speck, “Educating the White Man Up to the Indian,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 2, no. 1 (January-March 1914): 65-66.

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“supplanting them in their own country.” Because of this, Speck argued, decisions on American

Indian policy were best left to Native peoples and the field ethnologists who lived among them, rather than to administrators who knew “only one side of a subject involving the destiny of a race.”488

It is apparent from his writings and lectures that Frank G. Speck was more than just a sympathetic or scientifically-removed observer of Native communities, as was the case with many of his fellow anthropologists. Speck, rather, was a vocal advocate for and defender of

Indigenous rights and beliefs. In 1929, for instance, he encouraged an Oklahoma Delaware friend, Fred Washington, to continue the annual Delaware Big House Ceremony in spite of growing acculturation and culture loss caused by Euro-American settlement. “It is wrong to give it up,” he wrote in a letter. “Stick to the old Delaware customs and beliefs. They are as good as any of the white man’s.”489

As one of his contemporaries wrote in Speck’s obituary, “Speck not only studied

American Indians, but was deeply attached to them. They were as much a part of his personal as his professional life. When his Indian friends were in need of material assistance, he gave generously, whether they were working for him as informants or not.”490 Speck believed that the ethnologist’s job was not just to make a “true record” of the lives and cultures of Native peoples, but also to live with and learn from them. He sincerely hoped that his anthropological works would educate the American public about Indigenous societies. Writing in the days before the

U.S. federal government at long last passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Frank G. Speck

488 Speck, “Educating,” 64.

489 Obermeyer,” Salvaging the Delaware Big House Ceremony,” 190.

490 Hallowell, “Speck,” 67.

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argued that those who desired to take part in the “administration” of Native people needed to first

“study such [anthropological] works” and learn from them before they acted.491

491 Hoxie, Final Promise, 235; Speck, “Educating,” 67.

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SECTION 3-2

LOUIS SHOTRIDGE (1883-1937)

Figure 45. Louis Shotridge, 1912 NMAI P13314

One of the longest-serving and best-known Native American employees of Philadelphia’s

University Museum, Louis Shotridge was born in approximately 1883 in Klukwan, Alaska.492

The son of a powerful and respected Chilkat Tlingit family, Shotridge attended the Presbyterian- run mission school in the neighboring village of Haines, Alaska, during his youth. Although records of his later schooling are somewhat vague, sources indicate that he attended a number of

Franz Boas’s anthropology courses at Columbia University, as well as graduating from the

Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.493

Shotridge married three times in his life, each time to a woman of Tlingit ancestry. He married Susie “Florence” Scundoo in 1902, a marriage which their parents had initially arranged

492 Mason, “Shotridge,” 11; World War I Draft Registration Card, Ancestry.com.

493 Milburn, “Shotridge,” 60-63; “Chilkat Indians Head Expedition,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, August 14, 1916; “Former Alaska Resident Talks to Travel Club,” Lancaster New Era, PA, February 12, 1915; University of Pennsylvania Alumni Book, 1917, Ancestry.com.

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when the two were still children.494 Having attended the same mission school in their youth, they later traveled throughout much of the United States together, from California to Pennsylvania and eventually back to Alaska, where Florence died of tuberculosis in 1917. In 1919 Shotridge married eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Cook, with the two soon after moving to Philadelphia.495 A

Victoria, British Columbia, newspaper article of that year reported on the “young Indian maiden’s” confusion over the tall buildings and omnipresent automobiles in her new home, but also noted that she planned to “assist her husband in his coming [anthropological] work.”496 This

Elizabeth did, in addition to raising two small children, before she too contracted tuberculosis and died in 1928. Shotridge married for a third and final time in either 1931 or 1932 to Tlingit woman Mary Kasakan in Sitka, Alaska.497

While Shotridge is primarily known for his anthropology career at the University

Museum of the University of Pennsylvania from 1912 to 1932, he and his first wife Florence also worked a number of other jobs before this date.498 A newspaper article reported that the two intended to make a tour of the country, studying “thoroughly the ways of the white man.”499 In

1905 Alaska’s territorial governor selected twenty-year-old Florence to demonstrate her weaving skills at the upcoming Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon. With Louis accompanying her, Florence effectively exhibited herself and her craft as representative of the

494 Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer, “Shotridge,” 166.

495 Milburn, “Shotridge,” 62-65.

496 “University to Give Special Recital of Indian Music,” Victoria Daily Times, British Columbia, Canada, June 7, 1919.

497 Milburn, “Shotridge,” 71-72.

498 Mason, “Shotridge,” 11.

499 “Cultured Indians Make Home Here,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, February 11, 1912.

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Tlingit community to a large number of curious onlookers. Knowing the public’s desire for

Native-made objects, Louis brought with him several dozen of Tlingit manufacture, which

George Byron Gordon of the Free Museum of Science and Art, later Philadelphia’s University

Museum, summarily purchased.500

Following their experience at the Portland World’s Fair, the Shotridges undertook similar work, joining Antonio Apache and his Indian Crafts Exhibition in Los Angeles. Records indicate that the two lived and worked alongside Apache, representing their culture to the public through the years 1908-1910, and possibly longer, with Apache as “Manager of the Indian Village” and

Louis as his accompanying “Salesman” of Native crafts.501 Before commencing anthropological work at Philadelphia’s University Museum in 1912, the Shotridges also toured the country with an Indian opera company in which Louis sang and Florence played piano.502

After their fortuitous meeting at the Portland World’s Fair in 1905, the Shotridges and

George Byron Gordon of the University Museum developed a partnership and friendship which would last for many years.503 All three understood the market potential for acquiring and exhibiting material culture objects of Northwest Coast communities otherwise inaccessible to non-Native museum anthropologists.504 According to a fellow museum employee, Gordon recognized the “peculiar qualifications and advantages that Louis had for a museum. As a Tlingit

500 Milburn, “Shotridge,” 62.

501 U.S. City Directories, Los Angeles, CA, 1908, Ancestry.com; 1910 U.S. Federal Census, Ancestry.com.

502 “Cultured Indians Make Home Here,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, February 11, 1912; “Alaskan Chief Here on Visit,” Philadelphia Sun, PA, February 10, 1912.

503 King and Little, “Gordon,” 25.

504 Milburn, “Shotridge,” 62.

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Indian of high rank and family he had the entrée to the best circles.”505 Beginning as a temporary employee in 1912, but later promoted to a curatorial role with full-time status, Louis continued at the University of Pennsylvania’s University Museum for two decades, until 1932 when the museum cut staff as a result of the Great Depression.506

Figure 46. Florence Shotridge Dressed in Plains Indian Clothing, 1912 NMAI P26788

Assisting her husband in the curation and exhibition of their cultural heritage, Florence also worked at the museum in her own right, presenting lectures to children about Native cultures, and guiding tours through the anthropological halls.507 Similar to Native American women employed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York during this time,

Florence regularly dressed in Plains Indian clothing and adopted the title of “Indian princess” in order to fit the public’s stereotyped image of a “real” Indian woman.508 According to a

505 Mason, “Shotridge,” 12.

506 Milburn, “Shotridge,” 54; 1920 U.S. Federal Census, Ancestry.com.

507 Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer, “Shotridge,” 167.

508 Moses, Wild West Shows, 1.

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Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper article from 1912, “The children were much pleased with the modern Minnehaha, who is pretty, has a soft, low voice and all the graces of an accomplished

American girl.” Importantly, the reporter added, “She is a real Indian, clad in buckskin and beads.”509

In addition to helping visitors better understand the collections through their re- description and re-arrangement of Tlingit material culture in the museum, the Shotridges also conducted ethnographic work in the field.510 For much of the next seventeen years beginning in the fall of 1915, Louis transitioned between collecting among Northwest Coast communities in

Alaska, and interpreting these collections in the museum in Philadelphia. Newspapers regularly profiled the Shotridges’ work in the field, noting the “unique feature” of Native peoples leading anthropological expeditions, and showcased headlines such as “Civilized Indians, Man and

Wife” explore the “Wilds” of Alaska.511

While in the field, this husband and wife anthropological team attended potlatches, wrote observations, and recorded numerous Tlingit songs on wax cylinders using a phonograph.512 One newspaper article reported that they had been “very successful” in their study of the “language, manners and customs of the many Chilkat tribes,” noting that the Shotridges, as fluent speakers, recorded “the native Indian tongues” in their Indigenous languages before later translating them into English for public consumption.513 Although newspapers at the time reported that Louis and

509 “Explains Indian Life to School Children,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, November 28, 1912.

510 “Cultured Indians Make Home Here,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, February 11, 1912.

511 “Chilkat Indians Head Expedition,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, August 14, 1916; “Civilized Indians, Man and Wife, About to Explore Alaska Wilds,” Daily Ardmoreite, OK, September 20, 1916.

512 Milburn, “Shotridge,” 64.

513 “Chilkat Indians Head Expedition,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, August 14, 1916.

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Florence were the first “trained American anthropologists” to have documented Native folklore in this manner, it is now known that J.N.B. Hewitt, William Jones, and Francis La Flesche also wrote some of their ethnographic notes first in their original Native languages for greater linguistic accuracy before translating them into English.514

While collecting ethnographic data in the form of traditions, beliefs, and songs, Louis also sought out ceremonial and sacred objects for the Philadelphia museum to acquire. Such actions sometimes earned him the resentment and ill-feelings of his fellow community members.515 In 1919, for instance, Shotridge attempted to convince a Tsimshian man to part with a sacred stone eagle carving. The man refused, saying “This is the only thing I have left from all the fine things my family used to have, and I feel as if I might die first before this piece of rock leaves this last place.”516 Shotridge made a more notable, perhaps notorious, acquisition ten years later when he acquired the Kaguanton shark helmet from his own Tlingit community. Of this experience he wrote,

When I carried the object out of its place no one interfered, but if only one of the true warriors of that clan had been alive the removal of it would never have been possible. I took it in the presence of aged women, the only survivors in the house where the old object was kept, and they could do nothing more than weep when the once highly esteemed object was being taken away to its last resting place.517

A New York newspaper article the same year, in reference to the Penn Museum’s recent acquisition of the Kaguanton shark helmet, quoted Shotridge as saying, “the ancient customs are

514 “University to Give Special Recital of Indian Music,” Victoria Daily Times, British Columbia, Canada, June 7, 1919.

515 Mason, “Shotridge,” 16.

516 Louis Shotridge, “A Visit to the Tsimshian Indians, continued,” Museum Journal 10, no. 3 (September 1919): 131.

517 Louis Shotridge, “The Kanguanton Shark Helmet,” Museum Journal 20, no. 4 (December 1929): 339-341. As of 2020, the Kaguanton shark helmet is still in the collections of the Penn Museum.

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being abandoned and the objects associated with them are rapidly disappearing.”518 Possibly

Shotridge, like other Native and non-Native anthropologists of his time, believed that statements such as these justified or excused his efforts to “save” Native objects otherwise believed doomed to be lost to humankind. After a lifetime of collecting and representing Native cultures, Louis

Shotridge died eight years later in 1937 in Sitka, Alaska.519

Shotridge and the Public

Newspaper reporters almost unanimously described Louis Shotridge in positive terms.

The Philadelphia Inquirer of July 29, 1913, for example, praised “this brilliant young man” for bringing “into the public limelight facts hitherto unknown to the white man” about Native cultures.520 Seneca archaeologist and lifelong museum employee Arthur C. Parker commended

Shotridge’s expertise “in judging the antiquities and artifacts of the northwest coast Indians,” qualities which made him “a valuable member of the ethnological forces” at Philadelphia’s

University Museum.521

No doubt Shotridge’s intelligence and photogenic nature endeared him to newspaper reporters eager to publish about his life and work, but no less captivating were those same attributes in his wife Florence. A Philadelphia paper described her soon after their 1912 arrival in the city as Louis’s “pretty young wife” and a “woman of excellent birth.” As a couple, the two received even greater attention from the media. The Philadelphia Sun reported that they were

518 “Old Indian Relic for Philadelphia,” Times Herald, NY, November 1, 1929.

519 Milburn, “Shotridge,” 72.

520 “Alaskan Aborigines in Their Tribal Life Had a Novel Scheme of Eugenics,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, July 29, 1913.

521 Gawasa Wanneh, “Situwaka, Chief of the Chilcats,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 2, no. 4 (October-December 1914): 280.

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both “talented and educated,” while the Philadelphia Inquirer lauded their “very good English,” indicative, the paper continued, of “every evidence of refinement and breeding.”522 Arthur C.

Parker, presenting himself as a mouthpiece for progressive-leaning American Indians throughout the country, wrote in 1914 of Louis and Florence’s “sincere love of their people,” and applauded them for “the proud manner” in which they upheld “the dignity of their race and station.”523

Recent scholars have focused more on the Shotridges’ dual identities as both Native

Americans and museum employees. Anthropologist Elizabeth Seaton, for instance, has argued that Louis and Florence were simultaneously proxies for a white cultural institution and representatives of Nativeness. She claims that the University Museum appropriated their Native identities, using them as “a living ethnographic exhibit of sorts” to benefit the museum and draw in the public.524 While not wrong, Seaton’s language implies that the Shotridges were helpless victims in this work, and obscures their agency as willing participants.525 Of course, how much the two would have altered museum representations of Native peoples if within their power, is up to debate.

Louis Shotridge represented his Tlingit community and other Native peoples to the public through a variety of formats including exhibitions, lectures, and publications. As early as 1905 he and Florence exhibited Tlingit culture and crafts to interested audiences at the Portland

World’s Fair in Oregon. Following this, they pursued similar work in California alongside

Antonio Apache and his Indian Crafts Exhibition in Los Angeles. Years later when employed at

522 “Cultured Indians Make Home Here,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, February 11, 1912; “Alaskan Chief Here on Visit,” Philadelphia Sun, PA, February 10, 1912.

523 Wanneh, “Situwaka,” 283.

524 Elizabeth Seaton, “The Native Collector: Louis Shotridge and the Contests of Possession,” Ethnography 2, no. 1 (March 2001): 37-39.

525 Cole, Captured Heritage, xii.

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the University of Pennsylvania’s University Museum they continued exhibit work, creating detailed miniature replicas of Tlingit Chilkat villages for display in the museum’s anthropological halls.526

Among the many lectures the Shotridges presented, they did not confine themselves to the same audience, but rather spoke to young and old, scholarly and lay groups alike. As both

Louis and Florence proved to be favorites among schoolchildren, museum director George

Byron Gordon arranged regular lectures with local public school groups. “The children,” one

Philadelphia newspaper reported in 1912, “were permitted to examine at first hand dolls, canoes, bows and arrows and clothing for Indian children and papooses.” Following this portion, the

Shotridges, “clad in full [Plains] Indian costume,” spoke to the “excited and eager children” about the manners and customs of “the red men,” and answered many questions.527 Speaking before a 60-member audience at the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Travel Club three years later,

Louis “dwelt largely upon the life of the Alaskan Indians, telling about their habits and customs and reciting some of the Indians’ folk lore.”528 A short two weeks after this he again represented

Native American peoples to a popular group consisting of several hundred Boy Scouts, to whom he spoke about woodcraft and “what Indian boys must endure to become first-class woodsmen.”529 In 1919 Louis even planned, in cooperation with the University of

Pennsylvania’s University Museum officials, to put on a public concert of “Indian Alaskan

526 “Chilkat Indians Head Expedition,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, August 14, 1916.

527 “Explains Indian Life to School Children,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, November 28, 1912.

528 “Former Alaska Resident Talks to Travel Club,” Lancaster New Era, PA, February 12, 1915.

529 “Boy Scouts,” Evening Public Ledger, PA, February 23, 1915.

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music,” featuring one-hundred “Indian chants and folk songs” collected by Louis in the field and recorded on a phonograph.530

In addition to his exhibitions and lectures, Louis often published about Native cultures as well. He published frequently in the University Museum’s Museum Journal, writing about his experiences performing ethnological fieldwork, and even co-authored an article with Florence in

1913 titled “Indians of the Northwest.”531 Further, during his brief collaborative work with Franz

Boas at Columbia University in 1914, the two men produced a Tlingit grammar later published in 1917 under the auspices of Philadelphia’s University Museum.532

As a Native person writing about his own community but also as a museum anthropologist, Shotridge often transitioned between the emic, or insider, and etic, or outsider, perspectives. In his co-authored article with Florence in 1913, for instance, Shotridge acknowledged that his and his wife’s statements might not always be “in accord with the observations of others who have written on the subject,” i.e., might differ from the scientific pronouncements of some non-Native anthropologists. Nevertheless, Louis and Florence found it interesting and necessary “to record the recollections of members of the tribe who were brought up according to the old traditions.”533 This example illustrates the Shotridges’ desire to publicize and record as valid the experiences and beliefs of Native peoples, even if those beliefs

530 “University to Give Special Recital of Indian Music,” Victoria Daily Times, British Columbia, Canada, June 7, 1919.

531 Louis Shotridge and Florence Shotridge, “Indians of the Northwest,” Museum Journal 4, no. 3 (November 1913): 71-100.

532 American Philosophical Society, Franz Boas Papers, MSS B.B.61, F. Boas to L. Shotridge corr., February 24, 1915.

533 Shotridge and Shotridge, “Indians of the Northwest,” 80.

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contradicted what may have been the accepted doctrine of museum anthropologists and non-

Native scholars.

In his role as a Native anthropologist, Shotridge often used convincing language to persuade Tlingit and other Northwest Coast peoples to relinquish their heirlooms. “What will become of these onetime master pieces after you have taken leave for the land of the souls,” he asked one Native man. “Shall we put them to serve our own selfish designs, or shall we place them where they will continue the part for which they had been intended, to stand as evidence of man’s claim of a place in the world of culture?”534 In spite of language such as this, Shotridge did indeed express regret and guilt over his acts as a museum anthropologist. Regarding the

Kaguanton shark helmet he took from his community in 1929, he wrote, “It is true that the modernized part of me rejoiced over my success in obtaining this important ethnological specimen for the Museum, but . . . in my heart I cannot help but have the feeling of a traitor who has betrayed confidence.”535 In many ways Louis Shotridge did try to accurately portray his people and his culture to a public that only knew of them through racist constructs and stereotypes of primitiveness. Though never truly an advocate, he and Florence, and later his second wife Elizabeth, recorded and documented Northwest Coast cultures, preserving for future generations of Native and non-Native peoples aspects of culture which might have been otherwise lost.

534 Penn, L. Shotridge to G.B. Gordon correspondence, January 27, 1923.

535 Shotridge, “Kanguanton Shark Helmet,” 343.

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EXPOSITION 2

1893 CHICAGO WORLD’S FAIR

Figure 47. Anthropological Building, Chicago World’s Fair, 1893 Goodyear Archival Collection 6.1.016

A battle of ideas over the meaning of America raged in Chicago during the summer months of 1890. Although federal officials selected the Windy City to host a World’s Fair commemorating the 400-year anniversary of Columbus’ 1492 voyage, individuals continued to clash over how best to exhibit America’s greatness at the fair itself. Frederic Ward Putnam, for instance, recently appointed Chief of the fair’s Department of Ethnology and Archaeology, asserted in the pages of the Chicago Tribune that “a perfect ethnographic exhibition of the past and present peoples of America” at the exposition would not only honor the nation, but also

“make an important contribution to science.”536 Reactions from the public to this statement were harsh, with one anonymous Chicagoan stating, “Prof. Putnam, like all those dried-up prehistoric specialists, mistakes the purpose of the Fair.” Chicago, the writer continued, had “no money to waste searching for arrow heads or skulls of the stone age,” which only a “little handful of ethnological specialists” had an interest in anyway. Instead, the unnamed editorialist concluded, the city “proposes to have a live, wide-awake, nineteenth century Fair, and to glorify Christopher

536 Frederic Ward Putnam, “American Ethnology,” Chicago Tribune, IL, May 31, 1890.

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Columbus for his great discovery.”537 Ultimately, the Columbian Exposition would contain all of these elements and more in its celebration.

In spite of some negative comments in the pages of Chicago’s newspapers, a great many people were indeed interested in the new science of anthropology, and were eager to view anthropologists’ representations of both past and present Indigenous peoples from throughout

North America. Putnam, as Chief of the department in charge of these representations, already had much experience in this line of work. In addition to his position at the Columbian

Exposition, he continued to maintain his professorship at Harvard University and curatorship at its associated Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology. Later he would go on to direct both the Anthropology Department at the American Museum of Natural History in New

York, and the Anthropology Department and Museum at the University of California, Berkeley.

Further, while Putnam and his assistant Franz Boas created anthropological exhibits for the edification of the visiting public at the World’s Fair, they were not the only ones doing so. The

Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum and Bureau of American Ethnology also arranged major displays for the exposition, including exhibits of Native American material culture objects, photographs, and life-size lay figures or mannequins showing “the red men at work and at play.”538 Putnam went a step further than his Smithsonian colleagues, however, in his inclusion of “a living exhibit” of actual Native peoples on display at the fair.539

537 “Prehistoric Crankery,” Chicago Tribune, IL, September 16, 1890.

538 Ira Jacknis, “Refracting Images: Anthropological Display at the Chicago World’s Fair, 1893,” in Coming of Age in Chicago: The 1893 World’s Fair and the Coalescence of American Anthropology, eds. Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 264; “The National Museum,” Washington Evening Star, DC, July 26, 1893.

539 Braun, “North American Indian Exhibits,” 98.

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Following in the footsteps of Spencer Baird at the 1876 Philadelphia World’s Fair,

Putnam desired to create an ethnographic village on the exposition grounds, or what he termed a

“Sub-department for the Representation of the Native Peoples of America.” Where Baird had failed due to a lack of funding, however, Putnam succeeded. During early planning sessions in

1891, Putnam stressed the need for “an exhibit illustrative of all the native peoples of America . .

. with groups of artisans – silversmiths, weavers, potters – from throughout the western hemisphere on active display.” He assured the World’s Fair organizers that such an “essential and appropriate display . . . will prove to be of the greatest popular interest.”540 Careful to make an important distinction, though, Putnam stressed, “This little colony of native peoples is not intended for a side show for the amusement of the visitor, but for a scientific study of the first historic people of America.”541 As a consequence, although Putnam fought strenuously against its incorporation at the World’s Fair, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West would later come to fill the role of

“side show” entertainment for the visitors’ amusement.

Figure 48. Buffalo Bill Cody and Unidentified Native Performers, ca. 1890 NMAI P15309

540 Curtis M. Hinsley, “Anthropology as Education and Entertainment: Frederic Ward Putnam at the World’s Fair,” in Coming of Age in Chicago: The 1893 World’s Fair and the Coalescence of American Anthropology, eds. Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 25.

541 Frederic Ward Putnam, “Ethnology, Anthropology, and Archaeology,” in The World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893, eds. Trumbull White and Wm. Igleheart (Philadelphia: P.W. Ziegler, 1893), 424.

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No stranger to entertaining the public, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody opened the first

Wild West show in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1883. Within four years the fame of the Wild West had grown so great in the United States and abroad that Cody took his fellow performers on an international tour of Europe beginning in 1887. Throughout its more than thirty year existence,

Cody’s Wild West constructed and promoted inaccurate views of Native Americans, defining

“real Indians” as those who lived in tipis, rode horses, and wore feather headdresses.542 Due in part to the large number of individuals Cody hired out of Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Wild West audiences grew to identify the Oglala Lakota (Oglala Sioux) in particular as the “prototypical”

American Indians.543

Along with their stereotyped portrayal of Native Americans, Cody and his partners also maintained that they gave the public a “remarkably accurate idea of life on the plains.”544

Whether accurate or not, though, for millions of people around the world Cody’s representation of the American West became a reality.545 Seeking to legitimate their performances through an association with the scientific field, Cody’s Wild West also repeatedly billed itself as either an

“Ethnological” or “Anthropological Congress,” just as P.T. Barnum had done on a number of occasions in the previous half-century.546

542 Moses, Wild West Shows, 4, 22.

543 David R.M. Beck, “Fair Representation? American Indians and the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition,” World History Connected 13, no. 3 (October 2016).

544 “How the Wild West Show Has Developed,” New York Times, NY, April 7, 1901.

545 Richard White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” in The Frontier in American Culture: An Exhibition at the Newberry Library, August 26, 1994-January 7, 1995, ed. James R. Grossman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 34-35.

546 Moses, Wild West Shows, 144; “Advertisement,” New York Times, NY, April 11, 1863; John Rickards Betts, “P.T. Barnum and the Popularization of Natural History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20, no. 3 (June-September, 1959): 359-360; Bluford Adams, “‘A Stupendous Mirror of Departed Empires’: The Barnum Hippodromes and Circuses, 1874-1891,” American Literary History 8, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 35-36.

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Nearly a decade after first opening in 1883, Cody clearly recognized the financial benefits of exhibiting his Wild West performance at the Chicago World’s Fair. Unfortunately for him, a number of exposition organizers including Putnam and Commissioner of Indian Affairs

Thomas J. Morgan were adamantly opposed to the fair’s inclusion of “anything bordering on a wild west show.” For Morgan and Putnam, the incorporation of Cody’s Wild West into their proposed “Indian Exhibit” was both “derogatory to the Indian and to the Columbian Exposition” itself.547 Years earlier, Morgan had fumed in the New York Herald over the “misleading” nature of exhibiting Native Americans “in a savage state,” and the consequences to the public of doing so. “When the lowest type of Indian, with his war dances, paint and blanket is exhibited,”

Morgan averred, “the public mind accepts him as typical of the Indians of today.”548 Morgan and

Putnam both voiced similar concerns in the Chicago Tribune in the months leading up to the fair, with Putnam declaring, “the prime object of ‘Wild West’ exhibition is to make money by a display of the savage and repulsive features of Indian life.” “None of this,” he asserted, “will appear in the Indian exhibit.”549

Figure 49. Wild West Native Performers, Staten Island, New York, 1888 NMAI P14512

547 Diane Dillon, “Indians and ‘Indianacity’ at the 1893 World’s Fair,” in George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings, ed. Nancy K. Anderson (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2008), 115.

548 Herald, NY, August 6, 1889.

549 “Will Have No ‘Wild West’ Show,” Chicago Tribune, IL, February 14, 1892.

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In spite of Putnam and Morgan’s repeated objections, however, Cody persisted. As savvy businessmen, Cody and his partners simply leased a fourteen-acre parcel of land technically outside of the official exposition grounds, but directly bordering on the fair’s main entrance.

There they constructed stands to accommodate eighteen thousand spectators, and during the

Columbian Exposition’s run, they put on a record 660 performances, enjoying their most profitable single season.550

The Chicago Exposition and the Public

Despite the best intentions of the fair’s organizers, the Columbian Exposition celebrating the 400-year anniversary of Columbus’ 1492 voyage did not actually take place in 1892 as originally planned, but instead officially opened to the public in May of 1893. Few of those in attendance seemed to mind the delay, however. Indeed, according to admissions totals kept at the time, over twenty-seven million people visited the fair during its seven-month run from May until October of 1893.551

Of those millions of visitors, exact records were not kept on how many people personally inspected the anthropological exhibits or attended the ethnological and archaeological lectures on

Native American cultures. As later recorded in the scholarly journal American Anthropologist, the exposition hosted a “Congress of Anthropology” in which were featured readings of scholarly papers. A number of leading and novice American anthropologists presented their research there, including Franz Boas on the “Physical Characteristics of the American Indians,”

Alice C. Fletcher on “Love Songs of the Omahas,” and Frank Hamilton Cushing on “The Cliff

550 Beck, “Fair Representation”; Moses, Wild West Shows, 134, 140.

551 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 40.

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Dwellers.”552 Although these lectures were geared more specifically towards scholarly audiences, many of the object displays and certainly the “living exhibit” of Native peoples captured the attention of both scholarly and popular audiences alike. Notably, though, not all of the fair’s visitors were particularly pleased with how the exposition chose to characterize Native

American lives, cultures, and histories.

Simon Pokagon, Chief of the Pokagon Band of people of Michigan, was one of the most vocal of the numerous individuals upset by the fair’s representation of Native peoples. An elder by the time of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, Chicago newspapers labeled him the “Redskin poet,” and “the only man yet discovered who has seen the World’s Fair and doesn’t approve of it.” As a form of protest, Pokagon published a short work titled Red Man’s

Rebuke which he printed on birch bark and sold to fair visitors. Styling himself the spokesperson for American Indians everywhere, Pokagon wrote in his Rebuke, “I hereby declare to you, the pale-faced race that has usurped our lands and homes, that we have no spirit to celebrate with you the great Columbian Fair now being held.”553

In scathing language, Pokagon declared Columbus’s “discovery of America,” what non-

Native peoples considered a joyous event, to be the collective funeral of American Indians.

“Your hearts in admiration rejoice over the beauty and grandeur of this young republic,” he chided his readers, reminding them that “this success has been at the sacrifice of our homes and a once happy race.”554 Lamenting the absence of Native voices included in the exposition, in

552 , “The World’s Fair Congress of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 6 (October 1893): 423-431.

553 “Pokagon the Poet,” Chicago Tribune, IL, October 4, 1893; Peyer, American Indian Nonfiction, 241; Simon Pokagaon, The Red Man’s Rebuke (Hartford: C.H. Engle, 1893), 1.

554 Pokagon, Red Man’s Rebuke, 1-2.

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October of 1893 he wrote a letter to Chicago’s mayor which was later published in city newspapers. In this letter Pokagon stated, “We wish to talk for ourselves . . . We wish to show the world that we are the men and brothers worthy to be called Americans and fit for citizenship.”555

Simon Pokagon was not alone in his call for increased recognition of Native Americans in this national celebration. During the fair’s planning days in 1891, members of the Pine Ridge

Indian Reservation in South Dakota requested to come to Chicago to be a part of the fair. They stipulated, however, that they be treated “like men and human beings,” not “like children with somebody to watch them and keep them back, [and] not like cattle for people to pay money to come and look at.”556 Dignified as this request was, the overwhelming majority of representations of Native peoples at the Columbian Exposition were not created by American

Indians or through any consultation with them. Instead, these representations were constructed and perpetuated by non-Native anthropologists, Bureau of Indian Affairs employees, and showmen such as Buffalo Bill.

Some non-Native peoples also protested against the fair’s depictions of Indigenous communities. Emma Sickles, for instance, a political appointee who worked briefly on Putnam’s staff in Chicago, reported to the New York Times in October of 1893 of a “scheme” by the fair’s organizers to “discredit the Red Man and rob him of his rights.” “Every effort has been put forth,” Sickles claimed, “to make the Indian exhibit mislead the American people. It has been used to work up sentiment against the Indian by showing that he is either savage or can be

555 “Chief Pokagon Wants an Even $2,000,” Chicago Tribune, IL, October 15, 1893.

556 J.C. Star, “Miss Emma C. Sickles’ Address,” Cherokee Advocate, OK, December 7, 1892; Beck, “Fair Representation.”

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educated only by Government agencies.”557 Richard Henry Pratt, founder and Superintendent of the Carlisle Indian School, sounded a similar alarm when he claimed that by displaying

“aboriginal housing, dressing, and curios,” the federal government’s exhibitions at the fair sought to “keep the nation’s attention and the Indian’s energies fixed upon his valueless past.”558

A committed assimilationist who coined the phrase “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,”

Pratt throughout his life fumed against anything smacking of anthropology, which he considered a path for backsliding into savagery.559 Recalling the Columbian Exposition years later, Pratt stated that World’s Fairs simply exhibited American Indians in order to “catch the crowd,” encouraging educated Indians to paint their faces and dress in primitive costumes.560

Figure 50. Smithsonian Institution Exhibit, Chicago World’s Fair, 1893 NAA INV 09709500

Other visitors to the fair tended to have fewer negative reactions to the anthropological exhibits. Some, such as an anonymous writer for the Chicago Sunday Herald, used mocking, but not particularly caustic language, to describe the work of Putnam, Boas, and others. “Be it

557 “Miss Sickels Makes Charges,” New York Times, NY, October 8, 1893.

558 Richard H. Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867-1904, ed. Robert M. Utley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 303.

559 Pratt, “Advantage of Mingling,” 50.

560 “Our Duty,” Jamestown Evening Journal, NY, August 25, 1904.

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known in the first place that the Anthropological Building is the most serious place on the face of the earth,” this writer cautioned potential visitors, warning, “The man who enters there leaves fun behind.” A more favorable review appearing in The Nation reported that the Anthropology

Building contained “the most interesting collections exhibited under any single roof in the grounds,” despite it being “a cheap structure . . . in an obscure corner of the Park.”561

Public reactions to the representation of living Native Americans at the fair, specifically in the anthropological village and as performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, not surprisingly tended to reinforce negative stereotypes and prejudices already present before the fair’s opening. A Chicago newspaper reviewing the use of plaster casts or life masks of Native men and women on display in the anthropological exhibit noted their “thoroughly realistic” appearance. The faces reportedly looked “quite terrible enough to belong to live Indians,” and were “calculated to give timid people a nervous start.”562 Further, a reporter for Scribner’s

Magazine utilized particularly racist language in his fictional depiction of an American Indian man walking through the Columbian Exposition. “As he stalks about among the dazzling structures of the Fair,” the reporter wrote, “he tries, or more likely, does not try, to grasp the innumerable wonders of art and science that only annoy and confuse him.” Playing up the then prevalent idea of Native Americans as less intelligent than Euro-Americans, the Scribner’s reporter concluded that it would no doubt require “a too exhausting mental effort” for this man

“to recall the fact that his own grandfather very likely pursued the bounding buffalo over the waste of prairie now covered by the city of Chicago.”563

561 Chicago Sunday Herald, IL, September 12, 1893; William H. Dall, “The Columbian Exposition: Anthropology,” Nation 57, no. 1474 (September 28, 1893): 225.

562 “World’s Fair Doings,” Inter-Ocean, IL, March 24, 1893.

563 J.A. Mitchell, “Types and People at the Fair,” Scribner’s Magazine 14 (August 1893): 186.

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Views such as these, prevalent in newspapers, popular magazines, and scholarly journals, illustrated the failure on the part of exposition anthropologists to significantly alter the non-

Native public’s perception of Native peoples. Racist ideas of American Indians as mentally inferior, evolutionarily backward, or simply as an undifferentiated monolithic people continued long after the closure of the Columbian Exposition in October of 1893. In some cases, what the public saw and heard at the fair only further perpetuated these stereotyped characterizations rather than ameliorating them.

Frederic Ward Putnam, like his predecessor Spencer Baird at the 1876 Philadelphia

World’s Fair, frequently walked a fine line between sympathy and paternalism in his representation of Native Americans. During exposition planning, for instance, Putnam wrote that he intended “the presentation of native life [to] be in every way satisfactory and creditable to the native peoples . . . [noting] no exhibition of a degrading or derogatory character will be permitted.” Despite such pronouncements, Putnam nevertheless viewed Native peoples as vanishing and in need of the “benefits of civilization.” Further, by representing North America’s

Indigenous peoples as existing in a timeless ethnographic present, Putnam conveniently ignored entire centuries of change and adaptation that Native peoples had experienced since Columbus’s fateful fifteenth-century arrival in the Western Hemisphere.564

Putnam, along with Buffalo Bill Cody and the majority of anthropologists who worked at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, tended to view American Indians as anachronistic, as belonging to an earlier stage of history. Supposed experts on Native American cultures, these anthropologists subsequently exhibited Native peoples as relics of a collective human past,

564 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 63; Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, “Draft of Speech to Committee on Liberal Arts,” September 21, 1891; Putnam, “Ethnology, Anthropology, and Archaeology,” 424; Hinsley, “Anthropology as Education and Entertainment,” 29.

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disseminating such beliefs to a diverse museum-going and exposition-visiting public. What the

Columbian Exposition’s anthropological exhibits ultimately accomplished, rather than showcasing similarities which united all of humankind, was to exaggerate real and imagined differences “between aboriginal customs and the splendors of modern civilization.”565 The

World’s Fairs to follow in Omaha in 1898, St. Louis in 1904, and San Diego in 1915 touted a similar message of Euro-American progress while simultaneously highlighting the backwardness of Native American communities.566

565 Beck, “Fair Representation”; “Man and His Works: Ethnological Exhibit at the Fair,” Chicago Herald, IL, March 18, 1893.

566 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 236.

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CHAPTER 4

FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Figure 51. Field Museum, 1907 Field, CSGN 19387

As early as May of 1890, a full three years before the Columbian Exposition officially opened, Frederic Ward Putnam was already calling for the creation of a museum to be the eventual repository of collections exhibited at the future 1893 World’s Fair. In the pages of the

Chicago Tribune Putnam declared that “such a collection would form a grand beginning for a permanent ethnological museum.” He supported this claim by noting that due to the imminent disappearance of Native American cultures, a collection of this nature would only grow in importance and value as mainstream American society inevitably absorbed the remaining members of “the present American tribes.”567

Of course, not everyone was as sanguine as Putnam about Chicago becoming the intended home for the World’s Fair collections, least of all those who lived outside of the

Midwest. A particularly partisan reporter for the DC-based Washington Evening Star, for instance, asked newspaper readers why Chicago should retain such a tremendous amount of valuable material, when it would “more properly be in place at the National Museum” in

567 Putnam, “American Ethnology,” Chicago Tribune, IL, May 31, 1890.

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Washington, DC.568 Despite this back and forth, a number of Chicago business leaders recognized the cultural potential of such an undertaking and immediately set to work. By 1893, before the exposition itself had even ended, the Windy City’s “cultural barons,” including department store magnate Marshall Field, founded the Chicago Columbian Museum, later to become the Field Museum of Natural History.569

As Chief of the exposition’s Department of Ethnology and Archaeology, Putnam and his assistant Franz Boas spent much of November and December of 1893 packing and transferring the anthropological collections to the Columbian Museum’s slated home, the Palace of Fine Arts, now the site of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.570 In spite of their hard work and extensive knowledge of the anthropological collections, neither Putnam nor Boas retained any long-term positions with the new museum. In fact, feeling slighted at the museum board of directors’ decision to hire Bureau of American Ethnology anthropologist William Henry Holmes instead of himself as the Curator of Anthropology, Boas left Chicago for New York in 1894, eventually accepting a position at the American Museum of Natural History working again under

Putnam’s supervision.571 Holmes did not remain long either, and in 1896 Putnam’s former student and the first recipient of an anthropology PhD from Harvard University, George A.

568 “The National Museum,” Washington Evening Star, DC, July 26, 1893.

569 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 69; Stephen E. Nash and Gary M. Feinman, eds., Curators, Collections, and Contexts: Anthropology at the Field Museum, 1893-2002 (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 2003), 7.

570 Hinsley, “Anthropology as Education and Entertainment,” 71.

571 Susanne Belovari, “Invisible in the White Field: The Chicago Field Museum’s Construction of Native Americans, 1893-1996, and Native American Critiques of and Alternatives to Such Representations,” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997), 137; Curtis M. Hinsley and Bill Holm, “A Cannibal in the National Museum: The Early Career of Franz Boas in America,” American Anthropologist 78, no. 2 (June 1976): 310-311.

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Dorsey, became the Field Museum’s new Curator of Anthropology.572 There Dorsey remained for the next two decades, vastly increasing the museum’s anthropological collections and shaping the direction of its fieldwork for years to come.

Dorsey sought to fill “gaps” in the Field Museum’s collections, and accordingly purchased Native-made objects from collectors throughout North America and beyond, as well as conducting ethnological work in the field himself for extensive periods of time. The museum’s Annual Reports from this time include lists of objects acquired from the Northwest

Coast of Canada and the U.S., and extending into California’s numerous inland and coastal

Native communities. Additionally, Dorsey had a particular interest in developing the museum’s

Plains Indian collections, and subsequently employed Native collaborators Cleaver Warden,

Richard Davis, and James R. Murie to work among their own Inunaina (Arapaho),

Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne), and Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee) communities, respectively.

Dorsey also recognized the importance of reaching out to his anthropological colleagues across the country, including undertaking a joint expedition with BAE anthropologist James Mooney in his ethnological work with members of the Kiowa nation.573 Beginning around 1907, Dorsey largely shifted the Field Museum’s collecting focus from North America to Africa, Asia, and

Australasia. His successor as Curator of Anthropology, Berthold Laufer, a specialist on East

Asian languages, maintained this transition away from the Western Hemisphere during his tenure over the following two decades.574

572 Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks, “George A. Dorsey and the Development of Plains Indian Anthropology,” in Anthropology, History, and American Indians: Essays in Honor of William Curtis Sturtevant, eds. William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 60.

573 Field Museum of Natural History, 1905 Annual Report, 355, 372.

574 Nash and Feinman, Curators, Collections, and Contexts, 7-8; “Field Museum is Visited by Million During 1928,” Pantagraph, IL, December 31, 1928.

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The Field Museum and the Public

Throughout the early years of its existence, particularly under the curatorship of George

A. Dorsey, the Field Museum penetrated deeper into the everyday life of the Native peoples it studied and exhibited. A number of Native American men and women chose to go beyond simply informing Dorsey and his anthropological staff about their Native cultures, and, as employees of the Field Museum, actively sought out tangible and intangible cultural heritage materials for the museum’s collections.575 In addition to Dorsey’s collaborators, Cleaver Warden,

Richard Davis, and James R. Murie, Native anthropologist William Jones also came to work for the Field Museum during this period. In spite of his personal, academic, and professional training in ethnological work with North America’s Indigenous peoples, though, Jones ultimately accepted an anthropological assignment from the museum to work in the beginning in 1907.576 Two years later, in 1909, the man whom Chicago newspapers labeled “the most promising student of ethnology in this country” was killed by members of the Ilongot tribe on the

Philippine island of Luzon. In equal parts praise and lamentation, the Chicago Inter-Ocean newspaper noted that Jones’ death “added one more name to the long list of modest heroes who have perished in the cause of science.”577

While all four of these Native men and countless unnamed others chose to work with the

Field Museum in order to document and preserve their cultures, few if any of them ever recorded

575 Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R.M. Beck, City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 54.

576 Barbara Stoner, “Why Was William Jones Killed?” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin 42, no. 8 (1971): 10.

577 “Another Martyr to the Cause of Science,” Chicago Inter-Ocean, IL, April 4, 1909.

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their reasons for doing so. Daily battling against entrenched notions of Euro-American superiority and racism, these Native individuals documented, and no doubt corrected, much of the museum records which existed about them at this time. Although rarely acknowledged for their contributions, to a considerable extent they informed the non-Native museum-going public about their own cultures.

Figure 52. Field Museum, North American Ethnology Hall, ca. 1896 NAA INV 09708500

The Field Museum, like its counterpart institutions across the country, represented Native

American cultures to a largely non-Native public via the mediums of publications, lectures, and most visibly, exhibitions. Annual Reports and Museum Guides published during the first decades of the museum’s existence detail the numerous American Indian exhibits displayed there.

Among the dozens depicting the Indigenous peoples of America’s territorial holdings, there were halls representing the “Iroquois tribes” in the east to California’s “mission Indians” in the west, and from the “Eskimo of the north” to the “Hopi of Arizona” in the south.578 Not surprisingly, exhibit halls and alcoves were also packed with displays devoted to the ethnology of “the tribes of the Plains,” incidentally teeming with material culture objects gathered by the museum’s

578 Field Museum of Natural History, 1910 Annual Report, 140.

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Native collaborators.579 One notable exhibit even included a life-size figure “representing a cannibal dancer of the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia,” a favorite from years earlier at the

Chicago World’s Fair.580

Figure 53. Field Museum, Hopi House Diorama with Mannequins, ca. 1900 Field, CSA 1271

Despite the Anthropology Department’s greater focus on Africa and Asia in the early

1900s, the museum still continued to exhibit and frequently offer lectures on North American

Indian cultures, entertaining and educating future generations of museum visitors on these topics throughout the twentieth century. During Dorsey’s tenure as Curator of Anthropology, he regularly lectured on Native American topics, with members of the public listening to his discourses on “The Explanation of Indian Ceremonies” and “The Decorative Art of the North

American Indians.” Like many other Natural History museums of the early twentieth century,

Chicago’s Field Museum offered free tours and lectures to the area’s schoolchildren. Attendance numbers were continually high, with young audiences enjoying the museum’s use of motion

579 “Field Museum of Natural History,” Science 26, no. 678 (December 27, 1907): 915.

580 Field Museum of Natural History, 1896 Museum Guide, 140.

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pictures, stereopticon slides, and Lumière autochrome plates to supplement talks about “Indian

Winter in Labrador” and “Pagan People in the Painted Desert.”581

While seeking to entertain and educate Chicago’s residents and visitors, the Field

Museum of Natural History in its first half-century largely perpetuated stereotypes of Native peoples as inferior to non-Natives. As noted in the museum’s self-published 1894 Guide to collections, the Anthropology Department’s collections were “intended mainly to illustrate the more primitive or uncivilized phases of the development of the human race.”582 Just as in the

1893 World’s Fair exhibitions, anthropologists at its successor Field Museum sought to display

Native Americans as largely existing in a timeless past. These anthropological representations tended to either romanticize or exoticize American Indians, introducing members of the public to the idea that contemporary Native peoples did not exist. As a result, social concern or even any thought expended on the colonial status of America’s wards was negligible at best.

581 Field Museum of Natural History, 1905 Annual Report, 339; Field Museum of Natural History, 1930 Annual Report, 32-38.

582 Field Museum of Natural History, 1894 Museum Guide, 121.

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SECTION 4-1

GEORGE A. DORSEY (1868-1931)

Figure 54. George A. Dorsey, 1907 Brooklyn Museum, Culin Archival Collection

The leader of Chicago museum anthropology at the turn of the twentieth century, George

A. Dorsey was born in central Ohio in 1868. He attended Denison University there, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1888. The following year he traveled to Massachusetts, where studying under Frederic Ward Putnam, he received in 1894 the first doctorate in anthropology granted by

Harvard University. As such, Dorsey’s educational path represents a point of transition and professionalization in which the anthropological field began to rely more heavily on the attainment of graduate and doctoral degrees, rather than simply on natural talent and passion, as had previously been the case with anthropologists like Frank Hamilton Cushing, James Mooney,

Matilda Coxe Stevenson and others then employed at the Bureau of American Ethnology.

Dorsey married twice, first to Ida Chadsey in 1892. After their divorce in 1915, Dorsey married Sue McLellan, who eventually outlived him. He engaged with his fellow anthropological peers by joining a number of professional organizations, serving as a co-founder and first

Secretary of the American Anthropological Association in 1902, and as President of the

Anthropology section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 1903

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to 1904.583 Leadership positions such as these help to illustrate Dorsey’s position of power within the field of early American anthropology as an educated Euro-American male, as well as the influence he would later have as a proponent of Native sovereignty and Indigenous rights.

Following the success of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and subsequent founding of the

Field Museum there the following year, the museum’s board hired Dorsey as Assistant Curator in 1896. With the sudden departure of William H. Holmes that same year, Dorsey rose to become Curator of Anthropology in a mere matter of months.584 He would remain in this position until 1915, essentially controlling museum representations of American Indians in the

Midwest for two decades.

Soon after beginning in this new role, Dorsey initiated a series of anthropological expeditions to fill gaps in the ethnographic coverage of the museum.585 In his own words, it was during this time that he became “profoundly interested in the social organization of the Pawnee,

Arapaho, and Cheyenne,” and “used such time as I could spare in making observations on these subjects.”586 In this work, Dorsey’s “observations” included gathering information on Native

American material culture, society, religion, and language, as well as the collection of objects for display.587

In the first decade of the twentieth century Dorsey met and collaborated with three Native

American men whose work proved highly important to early U.S. museum anthropology. These

583 DeMallie and Parks, “Dorsey,” 59.

584 DeMallie and Parks, “Dorsey,” 60.

585 DeMallie and Parks, “Dorsey,” 60.

586 Field Museum Archives, G.A. Dorsey to F. Skiff corr., March 4, 1905.

587 Tristan Almazan and Sarah Coleman, “George A. Dorsey: A Curator and His Comrades,” in Curators, Collections, and Contexts: Anthropology at the Field Museum, 1893-2002, eds. Stephen E. Nash and Gary M. Feinman (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 2003), 88.

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three men were Cleaver Warden, Richard Davis, and James R. Murie. All had previously attended Indian Boarding Schools at either Carlisle or Hampton in the 1880s, and each directly or indirectly shaped the wider public’s understanding of Plains Indian cultures.

Figure 55. Cleaver Warden, 1895 NAA INV 06089400

Dorsey first met Cleaver Warden while conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Oklahoma at the turn of the century. Warden was Southern Inunaina (Arapaho), and born in 1867 in what is now the state of Oklahoma.588 At the age of thirteen he traveled to Carlisle, and there, under the instruction of school founder and Superintendent Richard Henry Pratt, he remained as a student until 1887.589 He later married at least three times throughout his life. His first wife Bertha

Yellowman died relatively soon after their 1888 marriage. In 1902 he married fellow Inunaina

(Arapaho) woman Eva Rogers, who aided him in his ethnographic work. Cleaver and Eva

588 Almazan and Coleman, “Dorsey,” 96.

589 Marsha C. Bol, “Collecting Symbolism among the Arapaho: George A. Dorsey and C. Warden, Indian,” in The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway, eds. Marta Weigle and Barbara Babcock (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1996), 111-112.

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divorced less than three years later, and by 1906 he married another Inunaina (Arapaho) woman known as Traveler.590

Due to his skills learned at Carlisle, Warden later served as the official interpreter to at least four Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency delegation visits to Washington,

DC.591 These linguistic abilities also enabled him to take on ethnographic work. As early as 1891 he aided Bureau of American Ethnology staff person James Mooney in his collection of materials related to the Ghost Dance.592 Less than a decade later Alfred L. Kroeber, then a PhD student at Columbia University under the tutelage of Franz Boas, sought out Warden’s aid for

Kroeber’s dissertation research on the Northern and Southern Inunaina (Arapaho).593 It was around this time that Dorsey and Warden first became acquainted. Dorsey was impressed enough with Warden’s abilities and anthropological acumen that in early 1901 he offered to employ him on a temporary basis at $40.00 per month. Dorsey wrote, “I want you to begin to collect and write down . . . everything relating to Dance Societies,” specifically “the legend of these societies, everything relating to their costumes, dances, to their paraphernalia, to their songs, etc.”594

Warden worked for Dorsey primarily among the Southern Inunaina (Arapaho) in

Oklahoma, but also traveled to the Northern Inunaina (Arapaho) in Wyoming to collect museum objects and ethnological information, on at least one occasion with his wife Eva accompanying

590 Field, C. Warden to G.A. Dorsey corr., September 1, 1902; Field, C. Warden to G.A. Dorsey corr., July 31, 1905; Field, C. Warden to G.A. Dorsey corr., December 24, 1906.

591 Bol, “Collecting Symbolism,” 118.

592 Mooney, “Indian Ghost Dance,” 171-172.

593 Bol, “Collecting Symbolism,” 111.

594 Field, G.A. Dorsey to C. Warden corr., January 27, 1901.

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and aiding him in this work. Due to changes in the Field Museum’s collecting policies, Dorsey and Warden’s joint ethnographic labors gradually tapered off by 1907.595 Warden continued working with anthropologists for many years, however, including alongside BAE anthropologist

Truman Michelson over two decades later in 1928. Paralleling and overlapping his ethnographic work, Warden also sought to preserve and promote Inunaina (Arapaho) culture in other ways.

The former he achieved by serving as Vice-President of the General Counsel of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, and the latter through his membership in the progressive-leaning Society of

American Indians.596 In speaking of his lifetime of ethnological work and collaboration with anthropologists, Warden stated in 1918 that he had made a “careful study” of his people in a manner similar to that practiced by ethnologists. In particular, he recorded that he focused on his community’s “mode of life” and the proper way of carrying out their customs and rituals.597

Thus, Warden continued to document and preserve accurate depictions of his Native community for future generations after his work with Dorsey had ended.

Figure 56. Richard Davis, 1904

595 Almazan and Coleman, “Dorsey,” 96.

596 Bol, “Collecting Symbolism,” 118; Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 3, no. 4 (October- December 1915): 374.

597 “Peyote Hearings,” 191.

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As with Dorsey and Warden’s working relationship, Dorsey also first engaged Richard

Davis as a Native collaborator in Oklahoma around 1902. Davis was born in 1867 at Sand Creek,

Colorado territory, the son of Bull Bear, a Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne) Dog Soldier chief.598

Among the first class to attend Carlisle in 1879, Davis remained there until 1891. In 1888, while still a student, Davis married fellow student and Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee) woman Nannie

Aspenwall. After finishing school Richard and Nannie returned west, where in the summer of

1894 the Bureau of Indian Affairs selected Richard as “District Farmer” of the Cheyenne and

Arapaho Sub-Agency in Arapaho, Oklahoma. Writing to Carlisle Superintendent Richard Henry

Pratt soon after “taking charge” of this new position, Davis deplored the outcomes of the federally-mandated allotment of tribally owned Indian lands. “The fact is that all of these Indians are in a lower & poorer condition than they were before they received lands in allotments,” he wrote. He did not blame the federal government, he said, but rather “certain whites,” local to the area, who cheated and “skinned these Indians to the bones.”599 Pratt later referred to Davis as

“one of the very finest products of the Carlisle School.” Notably, this was before Davis took up ethnological work with museum anthropologists, whom Pratt vehemently opposed, even referring to BAE founding Director John Wesley Powell as his “enemy.”600

By 1902 Davis was in contact with a number of anthropologists, including Dorsey, striving to more accurately depict Native cultures and to preserve and protect Native lands.

Writing to BAE Ethnologist-in-Charge, WJ McGee, Davis railed against those “Indian

598 Chief Thunderbird, “Two Boys from El Llano Estacado,” Masterkey 50, no. 1 (1976): 68.

599 Yale, Beinecke, MSS S-1174, R. Davis to R.H. Pratt corr., January 22, 1895.

600 “Peyote Hearings,” 142-146.

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Educators” and assimilationists who “want our people to become extinct as soon as possible because they think it is better for us.” In forceful language he declared, “They may vanish our tribal laws, but we as a race is not one that can be wiped out in a short time.”601

That summer Dorsey engaged Davis to work for the Field Museum collecting and writing out Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne) stories in English. Dorsey instructed him, “When you get hold of a good story teller, get everything he knows before you go to another man.” He also added, perhaps as an afterthought, “Do not fail to get stories from women as well as from men.” Two years later Dorsey expressed the importance of Davis’s work for the museum in disseminating such information to the public via exhibitions and publications. “It is to your interest and that of your whole tribe that this account be thoroughly trustworthy, accurate, and complete.”602

As Dorsey and the Field Museum changed their ethnological focus soon after this, Davis and Dorsey’s collaborative endeavors did not extend much beyond 1906 or 1907. Davis did, however, continue writing to Dorsey asking for work, even doing so as late as 1914.603 He reportedly signed on as a “Show Indian” for the 1911 season of the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch

Real Wild West, a competitor of Buffalo Bill’s more popular Wild West show.604 By the early

1920s Davis had moved to California, taken to using the name Thunder Bird, and was writing a book about Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne) culture and history. In later days he reportedly worked with an Indian troupe of theater performers who appeared on stage and in motion pictures.605

601 NAA, BAE, R. Davis to WJ McGee corr., March 19, 1902.

602 Field, G.A. Dorsey to R. Davis corr., September 6, 1902; Field, G.A. Dorsey to R. Davis corr., August 20, 1904.

603 Field, R. Davis to G.A. Dorsey corr., December 29, 1914.

604 Moses, Wild West Shows, 182.

605 NAA, BAE, R. Davis to M. Stirling corr., April 8, 1924; Thunderbird, “Two Boys,” 68.

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Dorsey’s third Native collaborator during this period, and perhaps the one most influential to the history of museum anthropology, was James R. Murie. Murie was born in the

Nebraska territory in 1862, a member of the Skidi Chaticks Si Chaticks (Skidi Pawnee/Skiri

Pawnee) community, and attended the Hampton Institute from 1879 until 1883. Returning west to Pawnee, Oklahoma, after finishing school, he married Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee) woman

Mary Esau in 1887. After more than thirty years of marriage they divorced in 1915, and he married another Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee) woman, Josephine Walking Sun, the following year.606

Murie began his ethnological career working alongside Peabody Museum anthropologist

Alice C. Fletcher in the mid-1890s. Around 1902, when Dorsey began to take a more active interest in Plains Indian cultures, he approached Murie about working with him instead. Murie wrote to Fletcher, asking her advice. Dorsey “wants to have me for two years,” he wrote in April of 1902. “He wants to take these Indians one at a time to Chicago and get all he can out of them

– Do you think I had or not?” Though loyal to Fletcher, he wrote of Dorsey’s persistence, informing Fletcher the following month, “He made me an offer, and was at my house [so] often, that I could not refuse.”607 For Murie, badgered by a Euro-American male in a position of authority who promised greater financial benefits than Fletcher could meet, it is not surprising that he ultimately made the decision that he did.

606 Parks, “Murie,” 76-77, 85; U.S. Indian Census Rolls, 1885-1940, Ancestry.com.

607 NAA, MSS 4558, J.R. Murie to A.C. Fletcher corr., April 2, 1902; NAA, MSS 4558, J.R. Murie to A.C. Fletcher corr., May 28, 1902.

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Figure 57. James R. Murie, 1905 NAA INV 02920903

Beginning that summer and continuing for the next five years, Murie and Dorsey collaborated on the collecting of Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee) and Sahnish () objects, and the recording of ceremonies and ritual songs throughout Oklahoma and North Dakota. Their normal practice, typical of anthropological fieldwork at the time, was for Murie to collect and write out ethnographic data, and then send it to Dorsey for editing and eventual use in publications and exhibitions. Unusual, however, was the fact that the Field Museum’s board of directors agreed to pay for Murie to travel to Chicago on repeated occasions in order to consult with exhibit design, construction, and interpretation of Native displays.608

As with both Cleaver Warden and Richard Davis, Dorsey ended his ethnographic partnership with James R. Murie around the year 1907. In spite of this, though, Murie went on to work with other leading anthropologists for another fifteen years, including Frederick Webb

Hodge at the Bureau of American Ethnology, and Clark Wissler at the American Museum of

Natural History. In sum, Murie made significant contributions to American anthropology, and produced a prodigious amount of material in his lifetime. As a Native writer, informant,

608 DeMallie and Parks, “Dorsey,” 68; Parks, “Murie,” 80-84; Field, G.A. Dorsey to F. Skiff corr., April 2, 1905.

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intermediary, and collaborator, Murie effectively “shaped the record of Pawnee culture,” and helped to shape the public’s understanding of Native peoples.609

Dorsey shifted his focus from studying Plains Indian cultures in or around the year 1907 with the abrupt termination of his relationship with numerous Native collaborators. Within a few years he altered the museum’s collecting policies even more so, halting North American research to instead commence anthropological collecting expeditions abroad, particularly in the

Philippines and China. Dorsey eventually resigned from the Field Museum in 1915, thus ending his career as a museum anthropologist. Nevertheless, he continued to write and to popularize the anthropological field as a whole, publishing the well-received book Why We Behave Like Human

Beings in 1915.610 He died unexpectedly in New York in 1931 at the age of fifty-three.

Dorsey and the Public

George A. Dorsey today holds an interesting place in the history of anthropology. His zeal in collecting North American Indian ethnographic materials in the first decade of the twentieth century led to the accumulation and preservation of massive amounts of cultural heritage items and information. Further, his success in these endeavors, and his subsequent popularization of Native American cultures through lectures, publications, and exhibitions, also greatly aided the growth and reputation of the Field Museum in its early days. Nevertheless, the style of Dorsey’s ethnographic collecting, referred to as salvage anthropology within the discipline today, also had dire consequences for Native American communities. In spite of anthropologists’ efforts to preserve physical and cultural materials of what they perceived to be

609 Murie, Ceremonies of the Pawnee, vii.

610 DeMallie and Parks, “Dorsey,” 71.

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vanishing American Indian cultures before it was too late, many now recognize that these very actions contributed to the loss of traditional ways of life. Through the rapid accumulation or even theft of large numbers of ethnological materials, anthropologists unintentionally created a void in

Native American which still persists to this day.611

As previously noted, Dorsey strove to ensure that the result of extensive anthropological research and collecting was the dissemination of this information to the public. Thus, he frequently lectured, oversaw exhibitions, and published articles and books on Native American topics. According to statistics kept on the Field Museum’s lecture series, Dorsey presented at seventeen speaking events between the years 1897 and 1910.612 For public display of recently acquired objects, he purchased new cases, exhibiting Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee) and

Inunaina (Arapaho) collections, and directed the creation of miniature dioramas illustrating sacred ceremonies.613

Figure 58. George A. Dorsey, ca. 1915 Field, A108072

Recent historians argue that Dorsey set a new standard with his publications and the inclusion of detailed photographic images of Native dances and rituals. In 1903 he published the

611 Almazan and Coleman, “Dorsey,” 97; Cole, Captured Heritage, 310.

612 Almazan and Coleman, “Dorsey,” 91.

613 DeMallie and Parks, “Dorsey,” 71-72.

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results of his research conducted with Cleaver Warden, a two-volume set titled The Arapaho Sun

Dance and Traditions of the Arapaho. Two years later he likewise published the results of his research with Richard Davis, again released in two parts, The Cheyenne: Ceremonial

Organization and The Cheyenne: Sun Dance.614 Surprisingly, Dorsey acknowledged the aid of his Native collaborators in undertaking these ethnographic projects, something fairly atypical for an anthropologist of this period to do.

Something else unique to Dorsey’s anthropological and publishing work during the early twentieth century was his decision in 1903 to take a partial leave of absence from the Field

Museum and relocate temporarily to Albuquerque, New Mexico. There he conducted anthropological research on the Indigenous peoples of the Southwest for the Fred Harvey

Company’s Indian Department.615 The Fred Harvey Company was a distinctive conglomeration of restaurants, hotels, and an ethnological museum, conveniently partnered with the Santa Fe

Railway. The express goal of both was to increase tourism to the U.S. Southwest.616 To do so, these two companies worked together to transform the idea of this region from that of a “harsh, dangerous frontier” populated by “hostile and degenerate savages,” to an “exotic, safe, alluring oasis filled with colorful, friendly natives.”617 Eminent anthropologists such as George A.

Dorsey lent the marketing venture an air of “authenticity and prestige,” while simultaneously

614 DeMallie and Parks, “Dorsey,” 64, 66, 72.

615 Diana F. Pardue, “Marketing Ethnography: The Fred Harvey Indian Department and George A. Dorsey,” in The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway, eds. Marta Weigle and Barbara Babcock (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1996), 101.

616 “More About the Museum,” Albuquerque Journal-Democrat, NM, March 7, 1902.

617 JoAllyn Archambault, “Indian Imagery and the Development of Tourism in the Southwest,” in The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway, eds. Marta Weigle and Barbara Babcock (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1996), 141; Marta Weigle and Barbara Babcock, eds., The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1996), 67-68.

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earning a salary of “much greater magnitude” than otherwise available in typical museum institutions.618 Thus, in 1903 Dorsey published his 223-page Indians of the Southwest, a joint promotional-scholarly work conveniently paid for and distributed by the Passenger Department of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway System.619 This work illustrates better than most the notion of anthropologists popularizing particular representations of Native Americans. While

Dorsey was still head of the Field Museum’s Anthropology Department, he was also simultaneously an employee of the Fred Harvey Company, paid to write this book and smaller catalogues, helping to increase attendance on the Santa Fe Railway line, and to promote tourism at Harvey Hotels throughout the Southwest.

Dorsey, though not an activist for Native American causes, was nevertheless a sympathetic figure who frequently advocated for American Indian rights and the freedom for

Native peoples to practice their beliefs. The object of his ire more often than not were Bureau of

Indian Affairs agents posted to Native Reservations. In a letter to Commissioner of Indian

Affairs Francis A. Leupp in July of 1907, for example, Dorsey asked him to explain why an agent at the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency was allowed to interfere with Native religious observances. “The sun dance like other Indian ceremonies will die a natural death,” he conceded.

But it made him “indignant to find certain agents in the West attempting to dictate to the Indian his religious beliefs.”620 Writing to Faustinus White Antelope, a Northern Inunaina (Arapaho) collaborator from the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, Dorsey stated that in regard to practicing their ceremonies, he could only give this advice.

618 Pardue, “Marketing Ethnography,” 102; Field, G.A. Dorsey to F. Skiff correspondence, January 1, 1904.

619 George A. Dorsey, Indians of the Southwest (Chicago: Passenger Department, Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway System, 1903).

620 Field, G.A. Dorsey to F. Leupp corr., July 13, 1907.

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Go ahead and have them when the time comes without waiting to ask permission from your agent. You Indians are not slaves to do the bidding of the Indian agent. As long as you do not violate the laws of Wyoming he can not touch you. The laws of this country which are supposed to make for freedom are as much for the freedom of you as of the white man . . . The Arapaho ceremony is a kind of worship, as much so as a Methodist camp meeting, and the Indian agent has no moral or legal right to stop you.621

Importantly, many Native peoples, being fully aware of their colonized status on and off of reservations, chose to utilize the few paths to limited freedom available to them. One of these paths was the intervention of sympathetic anthropologists like James Mooney or George A.

Dorsey who were willing to advocate for the continuation of Native dances and ceremonies. In

May of 1905, for instance, Richard Davis wrote to Dorsey informing him of a Sun Dance scheduled to take place that summer in Oklahoma. In urging him to help, Davis wrote, “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 the BIA agents.622 In this way, anthropologists like Dorsey, Mooney, and others served an important function, essentially using, and simultaneously being used by, Native communities for the perpetuation of ceremonies and activities Euro-American society deemed illegal or immoral.623 Contradicting countless Christian reformers, assimilationists, and BIA agents who pushed for the “civilizing” of Native peoples, George A. Dorsey summed it up simply when he said: “My experience with the Indian leads me to believe that he does not want our methods of life or our standards.”624

621 Field, G.A. Dorsey to F. White Antelope corr., November 11, 1906.

622 Field, R. Davis to G.A. Dorsey corr., May 8, 1905.

623 Moses, Wild West Shows, 253.

624 Red Man, PA, February 1900.

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SECTION 4-2

WILLIAM JONES (1871-1909)

Figure 59. William Jones, 1907 Brooklyn Museum, Culin Archival Collection

The first academically trained Native American museum anthropologist, William Jones’s life and work represent a notable shift in the field. Unlike his contemporary Native anthropologists J.N.B. Hewitt, Francis La Flesche, Louis Shotridge, and Amos Oneroad who possessed Native American ancestry and a passion for ethnological work, Jones also attained the requisite doctoral qualifications to fit the changing and professionalizing anthropological world.

Jones was born on the Sac and Fox Reservation in the Oklahoma Territory in 1871 to a father of

Fox ancestry, Henry Clay Jones, and a non-Native mother, Sarah Penny.625 After Jones’s mother died while he was still an infant, his Native grandmother took him in and raised him for the next decade. Jones would later recall her as his “poor, simple-minded, and possibly pagan grandmother.”626 While he no doubt loved and fondly remembered this woman, such loaded language in describing Native peoples was typical of Jones for the remainder of his life. Though sympathetic to members of Indigenous communities, he was also a progressive-leaning Native

625 Almazan and Coleman, “Dorsey,” 94.

626 Rideout, William Jones, 10.

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man, influenced by assimilationist and Christian reform thought predominant in Indian Boarding

Schools.

Beginning at a young age, Jones attended numerous boarding schools and educational institutions, including a Quaker school in Wabash, Indiana, followed by the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, arriving at the latter in 1889.627 After graduating from

Hampton three years later, he then attended the Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts until 1896. Following this, he matriculated at Harvard University, intending to pursue a medical degree. After a meeting with Harvard Anthropology Professor Frederic Ward Putnam early the next year, however, he declared, “I am afraid my dreams of ever becoming a doctor are all thrown aside.” Noting that “our little meeting couldn’t have been more pleasant or successful,”

Putnam reportedly sent Jones’s mind “drifting in another direction” to anthropology, a field

“certainly wide” open with professional opportunities.628 Still questioning his decision in the immediate aftermath of meeting with Putnam, though, Jones wrote in a letter to a friend, “Either

I must drive everything possible in the way to the Medical School,” or instead “familiarize myself with everything that is Indian.” The best way to achieve the latter course was “to go West and be among Indians.” As a former schoolmate recalled after Jones’s death, he did indeed choose anthropology over medicine, ultimately deciding to return “to the Indians not as a healer, but as the historian of their legends, the recorder of their language, and the interpreter of their most reverent beliefs.”629

627 Almazan and Coleman, “Dorsey,” 94; Rideout, William Jones, 24.

628 Rideout, William Jones, 41-42.

629 Rideout, William Jones, 44-48.

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Jones continued his studies under Putnam, writing a thesis on the “Massachusetts

Indians,” and graduating with his bachelor’s degree in 1900.630 According to a recent historian,

Jones was the first documented Native American individual to graduate from Harvard in 235 years, his predecessor being Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck who graduated in 1665, when Harvard still promoted an active “Indian College.”631 Directly after receiving his undergraduate degree,

Jones relocated to Columbia University in New York, where he studied anthropology under

Franz Boas, receiving his master’s degree there in 1901. During this year he also became affianced to a non-Native woman employed at the Hampton Institute by the name of Caroline

Andrus.632 Jones subsequently received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia in 1904, the first Native American in the country to do so.

Figure 60. Henry Clay Jones, Father of William Jones, 1869 NAA INV 02891301

Throughout his career Jones conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Native communities in the U.S. Midwest, upper , New England, parts of Canada, and eventually the

630 Rideout, William Jones, 70-71.

631 Browman and Williams, Anthropology at Harvard, 261; Donal F. Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877- 1923 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 174.

632 Rideout, William Jones, 77.

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recently acquired U.S. territory of the Philippines. While he did not definitively decide on anthropology as a profession until meeting with Putnam at Harvard in 1896, he nevertheless displayed an interest in the field years earlier. While still a student at the Phillips Andover

Academy, for example, Jones sent correspondence to John Wesley Powell in 1895 and again in

1896, attempting to secure work at the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington, DC.

Being sure to make note of his Native heritage, he wrote Powell that his home was “among the

Mississippi River Band of Sacs and Foxes in Oklahoma,” and he was eager to undertake ethnological work “among these Indians.”633 Later during the summer months of his Columbia graduate years he traveled to the states of Iowa and Oklahoma, working among the ,

Sac and Fox, and related .634 Laboring under the joint auspices and funding of the American Museum of Natural History and the Bureau of American Ethnology, Boas directed

Jones to “collect as much information on the language and customs of the Sac and Fox,” and also to “obtain as many specimens as you can illustrating the ethnology of the people.”635

In addition to gathering tangible and intangible Native cultural material from Plains communities in the Midwest, Jones also worked among the Anishinaabe (Chippewa/Ojibwa) near Lake Superior. There he collected a large amount of information on their folklore and customs, acquired a thorough knowledge of the “Ojibway dialect,” and was thus able to record a vast amount of material in “the native tongue.” In collecting linguistic and other ethnographic

633 NAA, BAE, W. Jones to J.W. Powell corr., February 13, 1895; NAA, BAE, W. Jones to J.W. Powell corr., April 16, 1896.

634 Kiara M. Vigil, “The Death of William Jones: Indian, Anthropologist, Murder Victim,” in Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, eds. Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 214; Franz Boas, “William Jones,” American Anthropologist 11, no. 1 (January-March 1909): 138.

635 Rideout, William Jones, 72-73.

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information, Jones did something quite unique among anthropologists. When unable to travel long distances due to scarcity of funds, he would journey the much shorter route to the Carlisle

Indian School in Pennsylvania, where he collected stories and information from the Native students there. In February of 1903, for instance, he recorded “having a pleasant time . . . with the Sauks and Kickapoos. They are extremely cordial . . . and I learned volumes of things I had not known before.”636

In spite of Jones’s collecting success, securing stable and gainful employment as an anthropologist proved more challenging. By 1905, one year after receiving his PhD, he faced continued uncertainty and disappointment in the job market. He hoped to retain his focus on

Algonquian languages, and further, to earn such a living to finally be able to marry his fiancée,

Caroline Andrus. In November of that year he wrote, “If what I know and what I can do is of any value, I ought by spring to get some sort of a position.”637 Unfortunately, no such position was forthcoming. Both the AMNH and the BAE, although willing to fund fieldwork of short duration, were unable financially to hire on another ethnologist position. It was at this time that

George A. Dorsey entered the picture.

Dorsey, Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History, offered Jones a position working for him in Chicago. Inexplicably, given Jones’s experience in Native North

American fieldwork, Dorsey gave him the choice of working in one of three places: Africa, the southern Pacific, or the Philippines.638 In Dorsey’s defense, it was during this time that the Field

Museum’s anthropology department transitioned from a focus on U.S. Plains Indian

636 Rideout, William Jones, 92-93.

637 Rideout, William Jones, 125.

638 Almazan and Coleman, “Dorsey,” 94.

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communities to a broader global emphasis, primarily collecting among the Indigenous colonized peoples of Africa and Asia. Jones, with few options, eventually accepted, intending to travel to the Philippines in 1907. Boas, Jones’s mentor and behind-the-scenes promoter, in learning of this, was both surprised and disappointed. Writing to Jones in September of 1906, he urged the younger man to reconsider, stating “I hope that you are not committed to accept this work, which

I am sure is not the right thing for you.” A resigned Jones replied a few days later, “My only reason for entering upon this entirely new field was due to the fact that at present there was no outlook for the kind of work I wanted to do in Algonkin” languages.639 He relocated to Chicago in the latter part of 1906, working long, busy hours in the Field Museum, near which he had his lodgings.640 After nearly a year of making his preparations, Jones said goodbye to friends, family, and his fiancée, and sailed aboard the Aki Maru from Seattle to Manila in August of

1907.641

Of his fieldwork in the Philippines little is relevant here, concerning as it does the Native peoples of that island nation rather than anthropologists’ representations of North American

Indians. Jones conducted an extended anthropological expedition, lasting nearly two years, before being killed by members of the Ilongot tribe on the island of Luzon in March of 1909.642

According to one of his biographers, the Ilongot tribesmen murdered him after he “lost his temper with one of them.”643 A recent historian elaborated more fully that Jones’s death was

639 APS, MSS B.B.61, F. Boas to W. Jones corr., September 18, 1906; APS, MSS B.B.61, W. Jones to F. Boas corr., September 21, 1906.

640 Rideout, William Jones, 127.

641 Stoner, “Why Was William Jones Killed,” 10.

642 Stoner, “Why Was William Jones Killed,” 10.

643 Almazan and Coleman, “Dorsey,” 94.

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community retribution for him laying hands on and disrespecting the authority of a tribal elder.

By doing so, Jones “overstepped his bounds,” acted as “an agent of empire,” and “crossed a line which no Ilongot could let go unrevenged.”644 His death was a shock to the young anthropological community in the U.S., with Boas writing in Jones’s obituary that he “fell a victim to his devotion to science.”645 The New York World newspaper published an account of his murder with the accompanying headline, “Tribesmen Kill Noted Scientist in Philippines.”646

Soon after learning of his demise, Boas and Dorsey commiserated over the young man’s tragic death. They further wrote of the need to find someone with equal talent and familiarity with

Anishinaabe (Chippewa/Ojibwa) language and culture who could continue collecting this material. According to Boas, the individual whom the AMNH selected for such work, Alanson

Skinner, was not “particularly capable of being Jones’s successor in this field.” William Jones died at age thirty-eight, and his body was buried in the Municipal Cemetery of Echague in the

Philippines.647

Jones and the Public

Perceptions of William Jones among his Native and non-Native contemporaries were highly flattering. Franz Boas, in correspondence with Columbia University’s president in 1901, praised the younger man’s excellent personal character, great energy, and persistence.648 Two years later in a letter to Charles D. Walcott at the Smithsonian Institution, Boas recommended

644 Stoner, “Why Was William Jones Killed,” 13; Vigil, “Death of William Jones,” 210.

645 Boas, “Jones,” 139.

646 “Tribesmen Kill Noted Scientist in Philippines,” New York World, NY, March 31, 1909.

647 APS, MSS B.B.61, F. Boas to G.A. Dorsey corr., April 19, 1909; Stoner, “Why Was William Jones Killed,” 13.

648 American Museum of Natural History, Dept. of Anthropology, F. Boas to N. Butler corr., March 19, 1901.

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Jones for an anthropological expedition taking place among “Western Algonquin” speakers.

According to Boas, Jones was not only “cut out for that special work,” but was simply the “best man for a thorough study of that important stock.”649 Native contemporaries also wrote approvingly of Jones and his work. The Carlisle Indian School publication, The Red Man and

Helper, reporting on Jones’s 1903 visit to the school to gather ethnographic data among the students, described him as possessing “the air of a gentleman and a scholar,” and able to make friends wherever he went.650

In writing of Jones’s difficulties securing gainful employment in the years before accepting Dorsey’s offer at the Field Museum, some recent scholars have posited that Jones’s position in anthropology remained “marginal” due to his race. Historian Kiara M. Vigil, in particular, argues that “As an Indian, he could have little hope of receiving permanent employment at either a university or the bureau [of American Ethnology].”651 While seemingly plausible, there is absolutely no evidence that Jones did not secure a position due to his race, or that because of his race he could not receive permanent employment. Undoubtedly, race influenced some peoples’ decisions about hiring, just as gender did, but there were still numerous

Native Americans able to locate these positions. A few of Jones’ Native contemporaries, all conspicuously male, who did so, included J.N.B. Hewitt, Tuscarora Ethnologist hired on full- time at the BAE in 1886; Francis La Flesche, Omaha Ethnologist hired on full-time at the BAE in 1910; Louis Shotridge, Chilkat Tlingit Assistant Curator hired on full-time at Philadelphia’s

University Museum in 1915; and Amos Oneorad, Sisitonwan Dakota (Sisseton Sioux) Assistant

649 APS, MSS B.B.61, F. Boas to C. Walcott corr., December 7, 1903.

650 Red Man and Helper, PA, March 6, 1903.

651 Vigil, “Death of William Jones,” 214-215.

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Ethnologist hired on full-time at the Museum of the American Indian in 1918.652 The more likely reason for Jones’s difficulties was not his race, but rather that these positions were still few and far between during professional anthropology’s infancy.

As the first academically qualified and professionally trained Native American anthropologist, William Jones was unique among his non-Native peers. When referring to him, his colleagues frequently remarked on the “clearness of his understanding of the thoughts and ideas of the Indians” due to his Native heritage.653 Boas noted that in addition to his learning and special training, Jones also reportedly carried “unusual sympathetic insight and understanding” toward “his own people.” Other anthropologists, including Clark Wissler at AMNH, also viewed

Jones’s ability to gain “insight into Indian life not otherwise easily obtained” as a particular asset to ethnological work.654 From Jones’s published and personal writings, however, it does not appear that he wished to be considered different on account of his Fox ancestry.

Repeatedly throughout his life Jones objected to receiving special treatment due to being

American Indian. In the spring of 1892, when about to be named valedictorian of his graduating class at the Hampton Institute, he declined this honor on the grounds that he “was more white than Indian,” having “at best only a fourth title to any such distinction.” He felt that other students with a greater claim to Native heritage were more deserving of this accolade and the scholarship prize which accompanied it. A few years later while attending the Phillips Andover

Academy and applying to Harvard, he confided that he hoped to earn a scholarship to help defray

652 Tooker and Graymont, “Hewitt,” 75-76; NAA, BAE, F.W. Hodge to F. La Flesche corr., August 10, 1910; Milburn, “Shotridge,” 63; MAI, 1918-1919 Annual Report, 4.

653 Boas, “Jones,” 138.

654 Franz Boas, “William Jones Obituary,” Southern Workman 38, no. 5 (May 1909): 263; Clark Wissler, “Dr. William Jones,” American Museum Journal 9, no. 5 (May 1909): 123.

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the costs of attending this august institution. However, he declared, “I will not pose as an Indian” in order to receive financial help. “I will not take a cent on that score. It isn’t fair” to other Native applicants, and “besides,” he wrote, “it would be uncomfortable.”655 It is obvious, then, that

Jones clearly wrestled with issues of Native and non-Native identity. Deciding on pursuing a profession which further shone a spotlight on and at times aggrandized such differences only exacerbated this subject for him. In the end, though, he knew all along that whatever career he chose, whether as a physician or as an ethnologist, he wanted to help American Indians.

William Jones was sympathetic toward the plight of Indigenous peoples in the U.S., if not to the same extent toward colonized individuals in the Philippines and elsewhere. His sympathy never extended to the level of advocacy, however. Throughout his life, he was influenced by and espoused the language of assimilation and reform for Native Americans. While still a student in

Massachusetts he composed a letter to former Native classmates at the Hampton Institute about current reform efforts on reservations. “We hear of Indian problems and schemes for solving them. Many of those who originate these schemes are friends of the Indian, but know little or nothing of what he really needs,” Jones wrote. “But we who come from the reservations know how the Indians are living, and perhaps if we should try we might find some way of showing them how to live better.” He concluded that “because we have seen and been taught” in the

Indian Boarding Schools, he and his fellow Western-educated youth could help their relatives and neighbors “on to the better way.”656 This “better way” was, for better or worse, a departure from the traditions of their Native pasts, and an acceptance of Euro-American society.

655 Rideout, William Jones, 27, 32.

656 Rideout, William Jones, 30-31.

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CHAPTER 5

AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Figure 61. Frederic Ward Putnam in his Office, 1896 NAA INV 02881100

Despite exhibiting Native American materials since its founding in 1869, New York’s

American Museum of Natural History did not establish a formal Department of Anthropology until four years later, in 1873. Further, during the first two decades of its existence, the AMNH

Anthropology Department failed to employ a standard acquisitions policy, with one recent historian referring to its early holdings as a “chaotic jumble of collections.”657 This all changed in 1894 when the museum hired on Frederic Ward Putnam as the new Chair of the department.

At the time Putnam was the Curator of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and

Ethnology and a Professor of Ethnology at Harvard University, both positions which he continued to hold simultaneously while an employee of the AMNH. Most recently, Putnam had also just finished organizing and directing the Columbian Exposition’s Anthropology

Department at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago as well as setting in motion the founding of the

Field Museum there.658

657 Freed, Anthropology Unmasked, Vol. I, xvi, 59.

658 Boas, “Putnam,” 331.

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Radically altering the museum’s standard practice of purchasing collections from private owners, Putnam initiated expeditions in which AMNH ethnologists collected objects and cultural information from Native peoples in the field.659 This new practice mirrored the work of their colleagues in similar anthropology museums around the country, including at the Field Museum in Chicago, the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,

DC. Starting with Putnam’s arrival in 1894, a number of prominent figures chaired the AMNH

Anthropology Department, raising it to eminence in less than a generation.660 These men included Putnam, who served as Chair from 1894 to 1903, Franz Boas, who served from 1904 to

1905, and Clark Wissler, who served as Chair from 1905 until his retirement in 1942.661

Under the leadership of Putnam, Boas, and later Wissler, and with the financial backing of Museum President Morris K. Jesup, the AMNH instituted a broad collecting policy, sending expeditions throughout North America and beyond. The first major fieldwork undertaken, the

Jesup North Pacific Expedition, commenced in 1897 with the goal of determining the “relations between the peoples of northeastern Asia and northwestern America.”662 Beginning around 1900, the museum also initiated fieldwork among a number of Plains Indian communities, including the A’aninin (Gros Ventre), Apsáalooke (Crow/Absaroke), Dakota (Eastern Sioux), Inunaina

(Arapaho), Minitari (), Numakiki (), Pikuni Blackfeet (Piegan), and

659 Freed, Anthropology Unmasked, Vol. I, 394.

660 Douglas Cole, Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858-1906 (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1999), 185.

661 Ira Jacknis, “In the Field/En Plein Air: The Art of Anthropological Display at the American Museum of Natural History, 1905-30,” in The Anthropology of Expeditions: Travel, Visualities, Afterlives, eds. Joshua A. Bell and Erin L. Hasinoff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 121.

662 Cole, Franz Boas, 240; “Opening of the Anthropological Collections in the American Museum of Natural History,” Science 12, no. 306 (November 9, 1900): 721.

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Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne).663 According to Wissler, “During this time practically every Plains tribe was visited, to the end that the Museum might have a comprehensive collection.”664 That same year the scholarly journal Science reported on AMNH museum staff working in both

California and Oregon, where a number of “almost unknown tribes” were “fast disappearing” or on the “verge of extinction.”665 Always an area of interest to the public with its paradoxical allure of both beauty and austerity, the AMNH also sent expeditions to the U.S. Southwest, collecting there among the Apache, A:shiwi (Zuni), and Hopi peoples.666

Figure 62. Franz Boas, ca. 1910 NAA, Photo Lot 33

The American Museum of Natural History did not exist in isolation, but rather cooperated on a regular basis with a number of other anthropological museums, universities, and even local elementary and high schools. It supplied learning materials for all grades of education, from kindergarten to graduate level, and consistently provided lectures and tours to groups of

663 Freed, Anthropology Unmasked, Vol. I, 404-407.

664 Clark Wissler, “Man as a Museum Subject,” Natural History 23, no. 3 (May-June 1923): 251.

665 “Opening of the Anthropological Collections,” 721-722.

666 Freed, Anthropology Unmasked, Vol. I, 409.

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schoolchildren.667 During Boas’s time at the museum he developed a close association between it and Columbia University, where he held a professorship in the Anthropology Department. In a

1902 letter to Columbia University’s President, Boas urged for greater collaboration between the two institutions, writing, “I consider it desirable that the co-operation between the University and

Museum be as close as possible.” His successor Wissler continued this arrangement, providing practical work at the museum to complement student’s classroom education at Columbia.668

While Putnam and Boas as Anthropology Department Chairs received wide support under AMNH President Morris K. Jesup’s tenure, his successor, Henry Fairfield Osborn, was not as passionate about the department, or it receiving such a large share of the museum’s overall funding. When Osborn became AMNH President in 1908 he shared his opinion on the new field, declaring, “Much of anthropology is merely opinion, or the gossip of natives.” “It is many years away from being a science,” he wrote. Regarding the AMNH’s expenditures on a field he considered largely based on hearsay and conjecture, Osborn further concluded, “Mr. Jesup and the Museum spent far too much money on anthropology.”669 As the new Chair of the AMNH

Anthropology Department under Osborn, Clark Wissler did his best to continue the tradition of scholarly research, popular education, and community cooperation that his predecessors began, leading the museum well into the mid twentieth century.

667 Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Fifty Years of the American Museum of Natural History,” Science 49, no. 1273 (May 23, 1909): 480.

668 George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911 (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 292; Sydel Silverman, ed., Totems and Teachers: Perspectives on the History of Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), xii.

669 J.M. Kennedy, “Philanthropy and Science in New York: The American Museum of Natural History, 1868-1969,” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1968), 163.

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The AMNH and the Public

Media coverage of the American Museum of Natural History was widespread, with newspapers and periodicals regularly informing the public about the science of anthropology, developments in the field, and the acquisition of new collections or exhibitions. The New York

Evening Post of April 5, 1895, for instance, reported to its readers that “Anthropology, or the study of man,” could answer such questions as why “some races have become great, while others have not yet passed out of barbarism.”670 Via this medium, the public also learned of the opening of the museum’s east wing in 1896 which displayed recently collected “busts, photographs, and skulls and skeletons” of North American Indians. In fact, the anthropological collections grew so rapidly that three years later the journal Science reported the opening of five new halls exhibiting

Native American material culture objects.671

Although many newspaper stories perpetuated racist stereotypes of Indigenous peoples as

“savage,” “bloodthirsty,” or “semi-barbarous,” a few actively sought to curb such prejudiced views.672 A reporter for the New York Herald in July of 1897, for example, lamented how the had “misrepresented, traduced, maligned and otherwise unfairly dealt with” Native

Americans. Fortunately, the reporter continued, “the work of the anthropologists of the Museum has changed all this, and the interested person who goes there with the intention to learn will learn much.”673 Perhaps surprisingly, some Native Americans, too, had kind things to say about

670 “Museum of Natural History,” New York Evening Post, NY, April 5, 1895.

671 “Opening of the East Wing of the American Museum of Natural History,” Science 4, no. 102 (December 11, 1896): 851; “Opening of the Anthropological Collections in the American Museum of Natural History,” Science 12, no. 306 (November 9, 1900): 720.

672 “Fierce Kwakiutls, Who Practice Cannibalism in North America, as Seen by Dr. Boas,” New York Herald, NY, October 31, 1897; Dall, “The Columbian Exposition,” 225.

673 “Preserving the Indian,” New York Herald, NY, July 1897.

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the AMNH and the work of its anthropologists. One example is a 1914 letter from Seneca archaeologist Arthur C. Parker to Clark Wissler, in which Parker on behalf of the Society of

American Indians congratulated the museum “upon the detailed and extensive investigations” the museum undertook for the preservation of “the culture of the native American.”674 Another instance is a recollection from Wissler in which a Native man allegedly said to him,

Now I pass in peace. You have written down our history; you have put away in a safe place the things of the old people. Our grandchildren can read and see what their ancestors did. Otherwise all would be lost. It is good that you came before it was too late.675

While glowing recommendations, both of these examples importantly represent only the voices of a tiny sliver of those Native peoples willing to even collaborate with museum anthropologists in the first place.676 They provide no voice for the vast numbers of American Indians who consciously chose not to sell or allow their cultural belongings to be taken from them and exhibited in far-off museums, or to have their sacred beliefs and ceremonies written down and published for public consumption.

674 Larner, SAI, A.C. Parker to C. Wissler corr., January 3, 1914.

675 Wissler, “Man as a Museum Subject,” 251.

676 Verne Harris, “The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa,” Archival Science 2, no. 1 (March 2002): 63-86.

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Figure 63. AMNH, Niitsitapii (Blackfoot/Blackfeet) Tipi Display with Mannequin, ca. 1910 NAA INV 09708700

The AMNH represented Native American cultures to a diverse public through a variety of formats, including exhibitions, lectures, and publications. Its exhibits at the turn of the century were reportedly “immense,” where one could “study there the native life of almost every existing tribe,” from the “Eskimo of the extreme North to the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego.”677 One newspaper reporter commended the research and studies of Professor Putnam and his staff, for the “busts and figures, groups and implements” on display illustrated “more plainly than words could do the history of the primeval man of this continent.”678 Regarding the exhibits, Wissler later wrote that to make them both effective and authentic, it was necessary to send “duly qualified men” to visit “the out-of-the-way places of the earth.” These men, and occasionally women, were specially trained, one magazine editor noted, to closely observe cultural phenomena and to record the things they saw and heard while in the field. After compiling their

677 “The Work of Clark Wissler Among the Sioux,” American Indian Magazine 5, no. 4 (December 1917): 265; “Museum of Natural History,” New York Evening Post, NY, April 5, 1895.

678 “Preserving the Indian,” New York Herald, NY, July 1897.

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observations, the museum later published these reports as scholarly papers, providing

“descriptions of Indian tribal life” invaluable to students.679

Complementing these exhibitions and publications, the museum also hosted regular lectures geared towards different audiences. Perhaps most notable for their representation of

American Indians were the children’s lectures. A number of these programs in the 1920s featured women of Native ancestry who sang for the children and told them stories. Princess

Watahwaso (Lucy Nicolar), a Penobscot woman, Princess Chinquilla (Mary C. Newell), a

Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne) woman, and Princess Te Ata (Mary Frances Thompson), a

Chickasaw woman, each dressed in “authentic Indian costumes” and frequently performed songs and dances for their young audiences. Princess Watahwaso, in particular, did not confine herself to her own Penobscot community, but provided “songs and stories and dances from various tribes of America” as well, including from the “Ojibway, Sioux, and Zuni” peoples.680 In addition to their work at the AMNH, all of these women were also Native performers and activists who fought for the equal rights and citizenship of their fellow American Indian peoples.

Lamentably, though perhaps not surprisingly, each also frequently dressed in Plains Indian attire and attached to themselves identities as “Indian princesses” in their public personas and performances. In some ways then, these individual women, though advocates for Native peoples, also perpetuated the popular monolithic construct demanded by the museum-going public of

“real Indians” as living in tipis and wearing feather bonnets.681

679 Wissler, “Man as a Museum Subject,” 254; “Clark Wissler Among the Sioux,” 265.

680 AMNH, DR050 Education Lecture Booklets, Spring 1924, Autumn 1924, Autumn 1929.

681 Moses, Wild West Shows, 1; Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 219-220.

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The American Museum of Natural History’s founding charter of 1869 stipulated that the people and city of New York pay for the land, the building, and its maintenance. Because of this,

Museum Presidents and their staff over the years were beholden to the people, “compelled to attract the city’s masses” if they wanted to be assured of financial support, as one recent scholar noted.682 Neither the public nor the museum administration were likely to forget this fact, either, as an 1895 newspaper reporter reminded everyone that the museum was founded “not for the education of the few, but for the delight of the many.”683 When Frederic Ward Putnam became

Anthropology Department Chair, he intended to fulfill the dual missions of both educating and entertaining the public, and thus also keeping the New York City taxpayers happy. As the museum was dependent upon the city for its building, he wrote in 1894, “it must give a good return to the public and to the city by interesting the people, and through their interest, instructing them.” Apparently, the museum did just that, as statistics published in 1919 recorded that the average number of visitors during the decade of 1909 to 1919 was over 800,000 individuals annually, with over 1,000,000 schoolchildren impacted annually through tours, lectures, and museum materials distributed in classrooms.684

Clearly the AMNH had a major impact on the residents of New York City, as well as on the endless stream of tourists and visitors to the metropolis. Within the museum’s walls the public strolled through exhibits depicting Native American objects, clothing, and even human remains, while children and their parents enjoyed lectures, songs, and dances performed by

682 Ira Jacknis, “Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method of Anthropology,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed., George W. Stocking, Jr., (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 83.

683 “Museum of Natural History,” New York Evening Post, NY, April 5, 1895.

684 AMNH, Anthropology, F.W. Putnam to M. Jesup corr., November 8, 1894; Osborn, “Fifty Years,” 478.

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“Indian princesses.” Outside of the walls, newspaper readers and scholars learned of new collections acquired and new expeditions funded. Some of these museum-goers wished to learn more about the history and cultures of North American Indian communities, while others sought only brief entertainment or respite from their daily workaday lives. Common to all though, the representations which they consumed were largely, almost wholly, created by non-Native peoples. Some representations perpetuated racist stereotypes, relegating non-Euro-Americans to the lowest rungs of the social evolutionary ladder. Other representations, and indeed more than a few created with the aid of Native collaborators and Native anthropologists, combatted

Eurocentric notions of progress, instead viewing cultural differences and the idea of

“civilization” as relative.685

Overall, the American Museum of Natural History between the years 1875 and 1925 was quite similar to many other anthropology and natural history museums in its representation of

Native Americans. While never an advocate for the contemporary plight of Native peoples, and often scientifically removed from the peoples’ lives it exhibited, the AMNH did occasionally represent American Indians in a sympathetic, if not always accurate, light. Many members of the public, as consumers of these museum representations, tended to elicit similar views toward

Native peoples as a consequence.

685 Franz Boas, “Museums of Ethnology and Their Classification,” Science 9, no. 228 (June 17, 1887): 589.

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SECTION 5-1

FRANZ BOAS (1858-1942)

Figure 64. Marie Krackowizer and Franz Boas, 1887 APS U5.1.4

Undoubtedly the most influential figure in early twentieth-century American anthropology, Franz Boas was born in Germany in 1858. There he attended Heidelberg

University, Bonn University, and the University of Kiel, the latter where he received his doctoral degree in physics in 1881. Boas immigrated to the United States in 1887, and that same year married American Marie Krackowizer in New York City.686

Boas’s earliest ethnographic work consisted of a twelve-month expedition to Baffin

Island, Canada, in 1883 and 1884. There he proposed to investigate the “fundamental question” of the extent of environmental influence on human populations, and believed the Indigenous peoples of Baffin Island the most suitable subjects of study.687 While living among the

Baffinland Inuit (Baffinland Eskimo), twenty-five-year-old Boas gained a different perspective on their culture, as well as on his own. He gave voice to these thoughts in his diary, writing “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possesses over that of the ‘savages,’ and

686 Cole, Franz Boas, 16, 63-64, 105.

687 Cole, Franz Boas, 65.

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find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them.”688 This experience altered Boas’s outlook on so-called primitive or savage peoples, and also altered the future of his career, from the study of physics and geography to that of anthropology. Locating gainful employment, however, even with his advanced education, proved challenging.

For much of the first decade of his life in the U.S., from 1887 until approximately 1895,

Boas struggled to find a solid footing where he could truly begin his anthropological career. In

January of 1887 he accepted the position of Assistant Editor with the New York-based weekly periodical Science, compiling an “Ethnological Notes” column in many issues.689 Two years later he quit this position to commence work as a Docent in the Psychology Department at the newly opened Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.690 Although he retained this position less than three years, resigning in 1892, Boas still managed to train and confer the first PhD in anthropology in the U.S. to one of his students, A.F. Chamberlain. The following year Boas traveled to Chicago to work as Frederic Ward Putnam’s Chief Assistant in organizing the

Anthropology Department at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. When the World’s Fair ended,

Boas stayed on to direct the transfer of the anthropological collections to the recently created

Field Museum of Natural History, the successor institution and inheritor of Putnam and Boas’s exposition work. Feeling slighted and overlooked by the museum’s board of directors, however,

Boas did not remain long, and ultimately resigned in the spring of 1894.691

688 APS, MSS B.B.61, F. Boas diary entry, December 23, 1883.

689 Cole, Franz Boas, 107.

690 Stocking, Franz Boas Reader, 58.

691 Hinsley and Holm, “Cannibal in the National Museum,” 310-311.

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Meanwhile Boas’s friend and mentor Putnam had secured for himself the position of

Chair of the Anthropology Department at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, and in 1895 he was able to bring Boas on board as well. There Boas remained for the next decade, increasing the museum’s object collections through expanded ethnographic fieldwork, and further developing the American anthropological field as a whole.692 Probably his greatest undertaking at the AMNH was leading the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. Named in honor of the Museum’s President, Morris K. Jesup, and financed largely through the President’s coffers as well, the expedition was a thorough and exhaustive examination of both coasts of the North

Pacific Ocean, intended to settle the “vexed question” of the relations between the peoples of northeastern Asia and northwestern America.693 Although having met and worked with both men previously, it was during this systematic study in British Columbia that Boas undertook more extensive ethnographic projects with Native collaborator George Hunt, and non-Native collaborator James Teit.694

Figure 65. George Hunt, 1898

692 Freed, Anthropology Unmasked, Vol. I, 446.

693 “Opening of the Anthropological Collections in the American Museum of Natural History,” Science 12, no. 306 (November 9, 1900): 721.

694 “Origin of the Indians,” The Butte Weekly Miner, MT, May 27, 1897.

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AMNH 11854

George Hunt was born in 1854 in Fort Rupert, British Columbia, the son of a British

Hudson’s Bay Company employee and a Tlingit noblewoman from Tongass, Alaska.695

Although Tlingit by birth, Hunt considered himself Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), and twice married into this community, first to Lucy Homikanis, who died in 1908, and later to Tsukwani

Francine ‘Nakwaxda’xw. Fluent in English, Kwak’wala, and Tlingit, and with virtually unlimited access to First Nations traditional knowledge thanks to his marriages and family relations, Hunt was an ideal partner in ethnographic collaboration.696 He first began anthropological collecting and interpreter work for the British Royal Navy in 1877. Two years later Hunt performed similar labor for Israel Powell, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for

British Columbia. However, it was in 1888 that Boas and Hunt commenced a professional and personal relationship lasting forty-five years.697 In 1891 Boas and Putnam engaged Hunt to

“collect all necessary illustrative specimens, and to induce a number of Indians” to attend the

Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, with Hunt as the anthropological supervisor. For this, Hunt received ninety dollars per month for the duration of his stay in Chicago.698

695 Ira Jacknis, “George Hunt, Collector of Indian Specimens,” in Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch, ed., Aldona Jonaitis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 177.

696 Margaret M. Bruchac, “My Sisters Will Not Speak: Boas, Hunt, and the Ethnographic Silencing of First Nations Women,” Curator: The Museum Journal 57, no. 2 (April 2014): 155.

697 Freed, Anthropology Unmasked, Vol. I, 190; Judith Berman, “‘The Culture as It Appears to the Indian Himself’: Boas, George Hunt, and the Methods of Ethnography,” in History of Anthropology, Vol. 8: Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed., George W. Stocking, Jr., (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 217, 235.

698 Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, “Monthly Report for the World’s Columbian Exposition,” October 1891; Jacknis, “George Hunt,” 181-183.

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Figure 66. George Hunt and Family with Franz Boas, Fort Rupert, British Columbia, 1894 APS U5.1.28

In addition to the Native objects Hunt acquired for the Chicago World’s Fair, which subsequently became part of the Field Museum collections, he also later collected for the

Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the

Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. Due to such massive collecting projects for anthropology museums during this time, recent historians consider Hunt the “largest single

Kwakiutl collector,” and argue that he may have assembled the majority of “extant Kwakiutl specimens” in the world’s museums.699 His collecting was not met without resistance, however, as family and other community members frequently disapproved of his anthropological endeavors. Further, recent historians have drawn attention to Hunt and Boas’s intentional marginalization of “non-literate Indigenous female sources,” including Hunt’s wives and sisters, thereby obscuring the “female authorities in Hunt’s own household.”700 This practice of privileging scientific approaches and male perspectives in ethnographic fieldwork, though lamentable, was quite common, and something not unique to either of these men alone. Hunt and

699 Jacknis, “George Hunt,” 222.

700 Bruchac, “My Sisters Will Not Speak,” 156.

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Boas would continue their “epistolary ethnography” from across the continent for nearly fifty years, until George Hunt’s death in 1933.701

It was during the AMNH-funded Jesup Expedition that Boas also commenced a working relationship with James Teit. Born in the Shetland Islands off the north coast of Scotland in

1864, at a young age Teit immigrated to Canada, eventually settling at Spences Bridge, British

Columbia. There he married a Nlaka’pamux (Thompson River Salish) woman named Susanna

Lucy Antko in 1892, and while living among this community, became “thoroughly conversant with their language and customs.” Teit collected widely and published frequently on the natural history and ethnology of British Columbia, supplying museums throughout the U.S. and Canada with material culture objects.702 An article in Science in 1896 commended Teit for such work, with the Nlaka’pamux (Thompson River Salish) objects soon to go on exhibit at the AMNH.

“The material is very valuable, since it is the only representation of a culture which has almost entirely disappeared.” Playing up the idea of the “vanishing Indian race,” the article’s author stated, “the Indians during the last twenty years have rapidly adopted customs and costumes of the whites.”703

701 Cole, Franz Boas, 202.

702 Cole, Franz Boas, 199; Berman, “Culture as It Appears,” 222; Franz Boas, “James A. Teit,” American Anthropologist 24, no. 4 (October-December 1922): 490.

703 “Opening of the East Wing of the American Museum of Natural History,” Science 4, no. 102 (December 11, 1896): 852.

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Figure 67. James Teit and Susanna Lucy Antko, Spences Bridge, British Columbia, 1897 AMNH 11686

According to Boas, the last years of James Teit’s life were occupied with unceasing labor for the welfare of the First Nations communities of British Columbia. Writing Teit’s obituary,

Boas recorded, “He became more and more interested in the difficulties against which the

Indians have to contend, and his warm sympathy for their suffering led him to undertake the organization of the Indian tribes into an association for the protection of their rights.”704 In 1919 the Allied Indian Tribes of British Columbia appointed Teit their Special Agent to speak on their behalf with the Canadian government on issues of land-rights.705 He continued such advocacy for the next two years before dying among his adopted community and family in 1922 at the age of fifty-eight.

Beginning in 1896, alongside his work at the American Museum of Natural History, Boas also accepted the position of Lecturer in Anthropology at Columbia University, later becoming a

Professor in 1899.706 Although he terminated his AMNH curatorship in 1905, Boas remained a professor at Columbia for more than four decades. There he wielded the largest influence on the

704 Boas, “Teit,” 491.

705 Wendy Wickwire, At the Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019), xiii-xiv.

706 Cole, Franz Boas, 212-214.

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future of American anthropology through instructing his undergraduate and graduate students with his views on the four-field approach of academic anthropology: cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology. As noted by a recent historian, between

Putnam at Harvard and Boas at Columbia, these two men “trained the overwhelming majority of the succeeding generation of anthropologists.”707 As such, Putnam, Boas, and many of their students like Alfred L. Kroeber and Frank G. Speck represented a shift in the field of anthropology, transitioning from museums to universities. In addition to the large number of notable Euro-American students who studied under him, Boas also, like Putnam before him, encouraged Native men and women to enter the field of anthropology.

William Jones, the first Native American to receive his PhD in anthropology, did so under Boas at Columbia University in 1904, specializing in .708 Jones subsequently worked for both the AMNH and then the Field Museum before dying unexpectedly in the Philippines in 1909 while conducting fieldwork there. In later years Boas also worked closely with Nakota (Yankton Sioux) anthropology student Ella Cara Deloria, urging her to collaborate with him on a “Dakota ethnography” and grammar.709 At the time, she was already at work informing the non-Native public about her culture through lectures in schools and a

“programme of songs, dances, and stories.”710 By 1929 Boas had also engaged twenty-five-year- old Archie Phinney to preserve his culture’s Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce) myths and stories for posterity. Phinney, a fluent speaker of his Native language, voiced the difficulties he experienced

707 Freed, Anthropology Unmasked, Vol. I, 112.

708 Boas, “Jones,” 137.

709 APS, MSS B.B.61, F. Boas to E.C. Deloria corr., April 6, 1927; Melville J. Herskovits, Franz Boas: The Science of Man in the Making (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 63.

710 APS, MSS B.B.61, E.C. Deloria to F. Boas corr., November 17, 1927.

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in recording this ethnographic material, and wondered how much more challenging, and more open to inaccuracies, were the records created by non-Native anthropologists. Later Phinney moved to Leningrad where he conducted comparative anthropological studies between the colonial policies of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States toward their Native peoples.711 His mentor and the man who encouraged him and so many others in such work, Franz Boas, died in New York City in 1942, at the age of eighty-four.

Boas and the Public

Even in his early years in anthropology, Franz Boas’s Native and non-Native contemporaries considered him a leader in the field. Seneca archaeologist and Rochester

Museum director Arthur C. Parker thought him “one of the greatest anthropologists” in America, while museum anthropologist Frederick Webb Hodge went one step further, declaring Boas “the greatest American anthropologist of his time.”712 Putnam, in encouraging the Field Museum’s

Director to retain Boas in the immediate aftermath of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, highlighted Boas’s education and experience. “He is the man the Museum should have,” Putnam wrote, “and I advise you not to lose him.”713 Perhaps not surprisingly, newspaper reporters of the day tended to focus on the exotic nature of Boas’s work, declaring that he had “fooled around with the top knot of medicine men and toyed with the war paint of bloodthirsty Indians.”714

711 APS, MSS B.B.61, F. Boas to A. Phinney corr., November 27, 1929; APS, MSS B.B.61, A. Phinney to F. Boas corr., September 25, 1929; APS, MSS B.B.61, A. Phinney to F. Boas corr., August 8, 1933.

712 Arthur C. Parker, “Inferior or Only Different?,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 2, no. 4 (October-December 1914): 268; Hodge, “Frederick Webb Hodge,” 210. Emphasis added.

713 Field, F.W. Putnam to E. Ayer corr., December 21, 1893.

714 Worcester Daily Telegram, MA, March 5, 1891.

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Figure 68. Franz Boas, 1893 APS U5.1.22

It was future generations of scholars though, those anthropologists and historians who came after Boas’s early twentieth-century rise to prominence, who wrote most glowingly of the man and his impact on the field. George Stocking, Jr., for instance, a biographer of Boas and one of the first to chronicle the history of anthropology, wrote that he was “the most important single force in shaping American anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century.”715 Many of

Boas’s former students considered him the “father of American anthropology,” with one arguing that he restructured the discipline and its branches, and another describing him as a “legendary fixture” in the field.716 More recently, however, Boas and his work have come under fire from scholars of Indigeneity and Postcolonial Studies. Audra Simpson, for example, points to his

“inability to see or read Indigenous sovereignty” in any form other than “the reduced, the primitive, or the ethnographically classic.” Such myopia and cultural arrogance on Boas’s part,

Simpson argues, allowed him to work in concert with a settler state which sought to eradicate

715 Stocking, Franz Boas Reader, 1.

716 Freed, Anthropology Unmasked, Vol. I, xv, 72; Lesser, “Boas,” 5.

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“Indian life and land,” assimilating those deemed different, and ushering in a desired “normative sociopolitical order.”717

One of the hallmarks of Franz Boas’s approach to museum anthropology was his emphasis on both educating and entertaining the public. “They come to admire, to see, and to be entertained,” he wrote in a 1905 letter to AMNH President Morris K. Jesup. “We instruct them almost against their wish and will.”718 In his article “Some Principles of Museum

Administration” published two years later, Boas further elaborated on this point. “Museums may serve three objects. They may be institutions designed to furnish healthy entertainment, they may be intended for instruction, and they may be intended for the promotion of research.” Regarding museums as “healthy entertainment,” Boas believed “every attraction that counteracts the influence of the saloon and of the race-track is of great social importance.” He did not harbor any romantic notions about the object of the visiting public, noting that the majority did not want anything beyond entertainment. “The visitor of this class does not go to the museum to study the exhibits case by case and to follow a plan carefully laid out by the curator.” Instead, “he strolls through the halls examining something that attracts his attention here and there without much plan or purpose.”719 Though expressed in fairly transparent classist language, Boas nevertheless still believed strongly in the importance of museums and museum exhibits as tools of education.

Within a few years, however, after he had resigned his curatorship at AMNH to focus solely on academic anthropology at Columbia University, Boas viewed museum exhibits and

717 Audra Simpson, “Why White People Love Franz Boas: or, The Grammar of Indigenous Dispossession,” in Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, eds., Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 167, 178.

718 AMNH, Anthropology, F. Boas to M. Jesup corr., April 29, 1905.

719 Franz Boas, “Some Principles of Museum Administration,” Science 25, no. 650 (June 14, 1907): 921-922.

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education as less effective. In this, he represented a new train of thought then emerging in anthropology, shifting from museums and material culture objects to universities and a focus on theory.720 What he considered more important were the intangible “thoughts that clustered around” museum objects on display, those cultural aspects more difficult to perceive physically, including languages, institutions, religions, and customs. For Boas, and indeed for many ethnologists, these “immaterial” aspects of Native cultures could be expressed “only inadequately by labels in glass cases.” While still advocating the function of anthropological museums and objects, through his university work Boas focused more on collecting

“bibliographies, grammars, collections of texts and myths.” He instilled his students with this focus on the “immaterial side of the culture of American tribes” as well, and many of his former students subsequently helped to usher in anthropology’s transition in the early twentieth century more solidly into academia.721

A fundamental distinction between Boas and the generation of anthropologists who directly preceded him, men such as Daniel Garrison Brinton, Lewis Henry Morgan, and John

Wesley Powell, was Boas’s dismissal of social evolutionist thought and scientific racism pervading much of these men’s work. Boas argued that the social evolutionary themes which divided the world’s peoples into savage, barbarian, and civilized categories were artificial constructs claiming universal, scientific validity. As with his recognition of the equality if not superiority of the Baffinland Inuit (Baffinland Eskimo) he met in 1883 and 1884, Boas published an article as early as 1887 espousing “civilization” as relative. He argued, not that Euro-

Americans represented the apex of the evolutionary scale, but rather “that our ideas and

720 Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects, 31-32.

721 Boas, “Bureau of American Ethnology,” 828-829; Cole, Franz Boas, 253.

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conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.”722 This broadmindedness was something Boas would return to again and again throughout his long career, and also something that he emphasized to both his students and to the public.

While a Curator at the AMNH, Boas labored to illustrate to the museum-going public that

“our people are not the only carriers of civilization,” but instead that “the human mind has been creative everywhere.” In his publications he delivered a similar message, arguing that anthropology and the intensive study of foreign cultures broadens the historical point of view of humankind, providing freedom from cultural prejudice.723 In other words, anthropological exhibits, lectures, and publications offered insight into the world’s shared humanity instead of focusing on physical differences, as previous generations of anthropologists had done. Although

Boas clearly advocated for his version of liberal anthropology and for the physical and mental equality of the world’s peoples, he nevertheless remained shockingly silent on the plight of contemporary American Indians.

In sum, Franz Boas was neither an activist nor a reformer. According to one of his biographers, “civic and social concerns of the day” were largely absent in Boas’s writings, and he never made an “active commitment to reform causes or to political parties.” Although he advocated for immigrants’ rights and African American equality in scientific journals, Boas effectively took no stand to change or ameliorate the living conditions of contemporary Native peoples. As historian Douglas Cole wrote, Boas’s emphasis was on the urgency of work, of salvaging Native cultures before they “passed away,” not on aiding actual American Indian communities. Instead, he chose to represent the individuals he spent a lifetime working and

722 Richard Handler, “ and the Critique of American Culture,” American Quarterly 42, no. 2 (June 1990): 254-255; Boas, “Museums of Ethnology,” 589.

723 Cole, Franz Boas, 276; Herskovits, Franz Boas, 100.

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living with as a “vanishing” people, frozen in an ethnographic present, and thus outside the temporal bounds of modern society.724

724 Cole, Franz Boas, 204, 278; Deloria, Playing Indian, 93-94.

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SECTION 5-2

ALANSON SKINNER (1886-1925)

Figure 69. Alanson Skinner and Wife, Possibly Gladys Macrae, ca. 1918 NMAI P27198

A passionate and sympathetic anthropologist whose career was cut short, Alanson

Skinner was born in New York state in 1885. Although born in Buffalo, his parents moved when he was still quite young, and he spent his formative years in Staten Island.725 Throughout his relatively short life, Skinner married three women, and subsequently suffered much loss as a result.

In October of 1916 he married Gladys Macrae, a fellow denizen of Staten Island.726 Soon after the marriage she accompanied him on archaeological research work in and Costa

Rica. Their time together was brief, however, as she died less than two years later in childbirth, losing the baby as well.727 In December of 1919 Skinner married Esther Florence Allen in

725 Amos E. Oneroad and Alanson B. Skinner, Being Dakota: Tales and Traditions of the Sisseton and Wahpeton, ed., Laura L. Anderson (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2003), 37.

726 New York Marriage Licenses, Ancestry.com.

727 Oneroad and Skinner, Being Dakota, 44.

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Keshena, Wisconsin. Esther was the daughter of non-Native Bureau of Indian Affairs bureaucrat,

Indian Boarding School Superintendent, and Indian Inspector Edgar Allen, and of Ida Johnson, a

Native woman of Wyandot ancestry. Esther grew up on the Agency in Oklahoma, and later spent two weeks with Skinner conducting ethnographic fieldwork on the Wisconsin

Menominee Reservation in 1921. She died that autumn in childbirth, though her daughter Esther

Mary Skinner survived. Alanson Skinner married for a third and final time to Dorothy Preston in

1923. Like his second wife, Dorothy was also of Wyandot ancestry, and grew up on the Quapaw

Agency in Oklahoma. The two, along with his daughter Esther Mary, lived in New York, New

Jersey, and Wisconsin during their two short years together.728 Dorothy eventually outlived her husband after his untimely death in 1925.

Figure 70. Alanson Skinner Holding Daughter Esther Mary Skinner, ca. 1922 NMAI 001_271_09_001

Skinner attended both Columbia and Harvard Universities, receiving a fellowship in anthropology at the latter for the 1911-1912 school year. At these prestigious schools he studied

728 Oklahoma, County Marriage Records, Ancestry.com; Quapaw Agency, Oklahoma, Indian Census Rolls, Ancestry.com; Dennis P. Carey, “Alanson B. Skinner (1886-1925),” August 31, 1980, 10-15. Unpublished biography in NMAI, Heye Foundation Records.

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under a number of leaders in the field, including Franz Boas and Frederic Ward Putnam.729

While many of Skinner’s biographers noted his attendance at these schools, they all remained silent on the actual degrees he pursued. According to historian David L. Browman, although

Skinner did take courses at both Harvard and Columbia, he never actually finished a degree at either university. In addition to his schooling, Skinner was also active in a number of anthropological organizations, including life membership in the American Museum of Natural

History, and a member of the American Anthropological Association.730 He additionally served as Associate Secretary of the Folklore Society, and as the “New York Examiner” of the Society of American Indians, of which he was reportedly “a most zealous” associate member.731

Although familiar with the work and staff of the AMNH since at least his high school years, Skinner did not become a paid assistant in the Anthropology Department there until approximately 1907.732 Employed as a staff member of the AMNH until 1916, this arrangement nevertheless did not prevent him from exploring his professional options, as when he wrote to

Frederick Webb Hodge at the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1912, seeking employment there.733 Indeed, four years later in 1916 Skinner abruptly resigned from the AMNH, giving only two days’ notice before his departure. In his letter of resignation to the Chair of the AMNH

Anthropology Department, Clark Wissler, Skinner wrote that he believed his services for some

729 M.R. Harrington, “Alanson Skinner,” Indian Notes 2, no. 4 (October 1925): 250-251.

730 Browman and Williams, Anthropology at Harvard, 270; M.R. Harrington, “Alanson Skinner,” American Anthropologist 28, no. 1 (January-March 1926): 276.

731 Arthur C. Parker, “Sekosa, the Weasel: Being an Account of an Adopted Menomini,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 3, no. 2 (April-June 1915): 126; Larner, SAI, A.C. Parker to A. Skinner corr., October 22, 1914.

732 Harrington, “Skinner,” 275; Carey, “Skinner,” 4.

733 NAA, BAE, A. Skinner to F.W. Hodge corr., June 12, 1912.

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time past had not been “adequately compensated.” Further, his advancement at AMNH seemed

“to be finally barred.”734

So it was that in 1916 Skinner joined the staff of the Museum of the American Indian,

Heye Foundation. There he again worked alongside his good friend and fellow anthropologist

M.R. Harrington whom he had known from early days at the AMNH and the Peabody Museum.

Skinner remained with the Heye Foundation until 1920, when he accepted a position as Assistant

Curator, and later Curator, in the Anthropology Department at the Public Museum.

Although he stayed in Milwaukee only a few years, Skinner enjoyed the work immensely, and declared his supervisor, Samuel A. Barrett, “the best Museum Director in the United States, bar none.” In spite of his affections for Barrett, however, in June of 1924 Skinner returned to New

York and to the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, in whose employ he remained until his sudden death the following year.735

Beginning in 1904 and continuing for more than two decades, Skinner conducted ethnographic fieldwork throughout the United States and Canada. He primarily worked among

Great Lakes and Plains Indian communities, including the Baxoje (Iowa), Oto, Potawatomi,

Sauk, Sisitonwan Dakota (Sisseton Sioux), and most notably the Menominee. He first undertook ethnological work accompanying M.R. Harrington on a 1904 Peabody Museum-funded expedition to the Seneca peoples on the Cattaraugus Reservation in western New York.736

Skinner would later write extensively about his experiences developing relationships with

Native collaborators. His words help to shed light on anthropologists’ approaches and

734 AMNH, Anthropology, A. Skinner to C. Wissler corr., January 13, 1916.

735 Carey, “Skinner,” 14; Harrington, “Skinner,” 251.

736 AMNH, Anthropology, A. Skinner to C. Wissler corr., June 21, 1923; Harrington, “Skinner,” 249.

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methodologies in their fieldwork. “On the various reservations that I have visited in the United

States and Canada it is true that I have seen quite a number of non-progressive Indians who keep up the old customs,” Skinner wrote. “In fact, my business has been to ferret them out to work with.”737 In a 1913 published report for the AMNH, he elaborated that he strove to become

“intimately acquainted with most of the headmen of the pagan party.” “With a feeling of mutual confidence established,” Skinner wrote, “it was possible to obtain for the museum examples of the sacred bundles and their rituals, as well as information about the lesser religious and other concepts.” Further, in regard to museum object collecting, he recorded, “It was my custom to canvass every pagan house on the Reserve at intervals, looking for specimens of old Indian work for the Museum.”738 Skinner, then, explicitly sought out Native cultural heritage materials in order to acquire them and place them in museums, where they would be admired, but where they would also be disconnected from their Native creators and users.

Figure 71. John V. Satterlee, 1923 NMAI P10350

737 Alanson Skinner, “Red Men in ‘Movies,’” New York Times, NY, June 4, 1914.

738 Carey, “Skinner,” 5; Alanson Skinner, “Recollections of an Ethnologist Among the Menomini Indians,” Wisconsin Archaeologist 20, no. 2 (April 1921): 53.

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Importantly, Skinner was not alone during these exchanges or while conducting ethnographic fieldwork in general. In addition to his spouses who occasionally accompanied him into the field, he also hired on or befriended Native community members. Foremost among these were his adopted brother among the Sisitonwan Dakota (Sisseton Sioux), Amos Oneroad, and his adoptive uncle among the Menominee, John V. Satterlee. While not meeting Oneroad until an opportune encounter in New York City in 1914, Skinner and Satterlee first met years earlier during the young anthropologist’s initial fieldwork with the Menominee in 1910.739

Satterlee was no stranger to ethnographic or interpretive labor-for-hire. Born in 1852 to a non-Native Army doctor, Valentine Satterlee, and a Menominee woman, Kishigkokiu, John V.

Satterlee began work as a government interpreter in 1899. Ten years later Bureau of American

Ethnology physical anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička visited the Menominee Reservation in order to study the spread of tuberculosis there, and hired Satterlee as his interpreter. While employed as the Chief of Indian Police on the reservation the following year, Satterlee agreed to assist

Skinner in his ethnological collecting.740 For much of the next decade the two men continued to communicate and collaborate on anthropological topics, in spite of Skinner shifting his institutional base between three different museums over these years.

Satterlee married at least twice, first to Elizabeth Saw’anakwut in 1873, and after her death in 1890, to Mary Gauthier. Regarding his collecting work, Skinner wrote that Satterlee

“aided greatly in the making of extensive Ethnological collections.” Many of these objects

Skinner and Satterlee would later deposit in the American Museum of Natural History, the

Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, and the Milwaukee Public Museum.

739 Oneroad and Skinner, Being Dakota, 26; Harrington, “Skinner,” 250-251.

740 Alanson Skinner, “John Valentine Satterlee,” Wisconsin Archaeologist 19, no. 4 (November 1920): 209-212.

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Correspondence between these two men illuminates the role of Native collaborators in gaining access to sensitive or restricted information and to sacred objects. For example, in a 1911 letter, Skinner asked Satterlee if he would be willing to join “the mitawin,” or Menominee

Medicine Lodge, in order to procure sacred information for future publication. “It would be better for you to join,” Skinner advised, as there would be “less opposition to telling you anything than there would be to telling me – a white man.” If Satterlee was willing to do so “for the purpose of science and the museum,” Skinner and the AMNH would furnish him with any money and backing necessary, provided that Satterlee supplied the museum with “full information on the subject.” In closing his letter, Skinner offered his friend a way out, reminding

Satterlee that he was not obligated to take on this work, as “we do not wish to urge you to do anything which would put you in a dangerous or uncomfortable position.” Based on Skinner’s later publication “Medicine Ceremony of the Menomini, Iowa, and Wahpeton Dakota,” in which the identity of the Menominee collaborator remained anonymous, it appears that Satterlee eventually acquiesced to Skinner’s request.741

Two years later, in addition to collecting among the Menominee, Satterlee also conducted ethnographic work on behalf of Skinner among neighboring Native communities. “I should like to have you . . . study the manners and customs of the Potawatomi for about a month,” Skinner wrote in 1913. Following the anthropologist/collaborator practice of the time, Skinner continued,

“I will prepare a big list of questions for you to ask them and I would like to have you inquire carefully of the oldest men and women and find out what you can and write it down.”742

741 AMNH, Anthropology, A. Skinner to J.V. Satterlee corr., September 23, 1911; Alanson Skinner, “Medicine Ceremony of the Menomini, Iowa, and Wahpeton Dakota,” Indian Notes and Monographs 4 (1920).

742 AMNH, Anthropology, A. Skinner to J.V. Satterlee corr., April 2, 1913.

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John V. Satterlee continued ethnological work among the Menominee and Potawatomi of

Wisconsin for many more years, even describing himself in the 1920 federal census as a “Curio

Collector.”743 He co-authored with Skinner a publication on behalf of the AMNH titled “Folklore of the Menomini Indians,” and lived a long life, dying in 1940 at the age of eighty-eight.744 Years earlier, in speaking of his friend and collaborator, Skinner described Satterlee as “a faithful, honest, hard working man of great intelligence and capability.” In recollections published later,

Skinner recalled Satterlee as “more perfectly” knowledgeable of American Indian ways and languages “than any other interpreter I ever had anywhere.”745

Alanson Skinner died suddenly and tragically in an automobile accident while collecting in the field in 1925. Amos Oneroad, also in the car, survived, and accompanied Skinner’s remains back to New York where fellow anthropologists M.R. Harrington and Arthur C. Parker served as pallbearers at the funeral. In Skinner’s obituary, Harrington wrote, “gone forever was that wonderful memory, that bubbling humor, that active mind, that radiant, cheerful personality.” Skinner died at age thirty-eight.746

Skinner and the Public

Perceptions of Alanson Skinner among his non-Native peers in the anthropological field were somewhat mixed. While Harrington spoke of him as a “sympathetic and appreciative friend of the Indian race, learned student of Ancient America, [and] prolific author of scientific works

743 Skinner, “Satterlee,” 212; 1920 U.S. Federal Census, Ancestry.com.

744 Alanson Skinner and John V. Satterlee, “Folklore of the Menomini Indians,” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 13, pt. 3 (1915); “John Satterlee, 88, Menominee Indian, Is Taken By Death,” Shawano County Journal, WI, February 29, 1940.

745 Skinner, “Satterlee,” 213; Skinner, “Recollections of an Ethnologist,” 53.

746 Carey, “Skinner,” 15; Harrington, “Skinner,” 248.

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on Indian subjects,” Franz Boas, his Columbia University professor, expressed misgivings about

Skinner’s linguistic competence.747 After anthropologist William Jones’s sudden death in 1909,

Boas wrote to George Dorsey about the “young fellow, Skinner,” whom the AMNH selected to continue Jones’s work among the Anishinaabe (Chippewa/Ojibwa). “I have not been able to discover any quality that makes him particularly capable of being Jones’s successor in this field,”

Boas concluded.748

Contemporary newspapers, however, tended to paint Skinner and his work in a more favorable light. For instance, a popular Wisconsin newspaper, when learning of Skinner’s resignation from the Milwaukee Public Museum in 1924, lamented the loss of “one of the foremost authorities on Indian life” who had done so much active research within the local

Native communities. The following year, in announcing Skinner’s upcoming lecture titled

“Adventures among the Indians,” the Staten Island Advance declared that “Few living men have lived among so many Indian tribes as Skinner, and none has a more interesting manner of presenting his experiences.”749

Skinner’s Native contemporaries, at least those who left a written record of the man, also wrote of him in positive terms. The Carlisle Indian School publication, The Carlisle Arrow, lauded his work with Native communities in Wisconsin, and announced his stated intention to study “Indian military societies and their ceremonials” in Oklahoma the following year. Seneca archaeologist Arthur C. Parker wrote that Skinner was a “fast friend of the red man,” who had won their hearts through his earnest manner, his sincerity and courage, and his contagious mirth.

747 Harrington, “Skinner,” 248.

748 APS, MSS B.B.61, F. Boas to G.A. Dorsey corr., April 19, 1909.

749 “A.B. Skinner Quits as Museum Curator,” Unknown Milwaukee Newspaper, WI, May 20, 1924; Staten Island Advance, NY, February 18, 1925.

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Harrington, too, spoke of his friend’s ability to win over the trust of Native peoples, thus allowing him to better perform his collecting and ethnological duties. Harrington argued that

American Indians loved Skinner, and willingly gave or sold to him what they might withhold from other ethnologists, due to both his admiration for their ideals, and his sympathetic understanding of their problems. Finally, Parker claimed that it was a combination of Skinner’s scientific skill, prolific writings, and “love of his red brothers” that allowed him to advance in the anthropological field.750

Interrelated with Skinner’s admiration of Native Americans and their reputed love for him was the decision to adopt him into the Menominee community soon after he commenced fieldwork there. Not an insignificant factor in this decision, however, was that this adoptive act allowed for the transfer of sacred teachings and items otherwise forbidden to non-community members. John Saint Baptist Perrote, a Menominee elder and Indian Court Judge who wished to instruct Skinner, stated “I believe you can be trusted. You have never betrayed anyone who has sold or told you a sacred thing.” If Perrote revealed these teachings to an outsider, though, he would be exposing himself to the potential wrath of other community members, possibly endangering his own life. According to Skinner, Perrote solved this dilemma by invoking the sacred powers by name, wherein he announced to them “that in order to obviate any difficulty which might arise from his telling these sacred things to a white man, he then and there adopted me as his nephew.” Thereafter Skinner was known by the name of Little Weasel or Seko’sa, “a name which clung to him until the end.”751 This incident provides another example of Native community members ceremonially adopting anthropologists in order to serve the community’s

750 “Indian Military Societies,” Carlisle Arrow, PA, September 18, 1914; Harrington, “Skinner,” 276; Parker, “Sekosa,” 125-126.

751 Skinner, “Recollections of an Ethnologist,” 47-48; Harrington, “Skinner,” 250.

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needs. In this case, the adoption of Skinner permitted Menominee individuals to reveal or sell privileged information or objects without fear of spiritual or physical retribution.

Figure 72. John Saint Baptist Perrote and Wife, Menominee Reservation, Wisconsin, ca. 1912 NMAI P28337

Skinner represented North American Indian communities through his frequent lectures and publications, and through his work on exhibitions while employed at a number of different museums. He directed his lectures and publications, in particular, at both scholarly and popular audiences, striving to inform the widest public as possible about the lives, cultures, and histories of Native communities as he understood them. For example, he lectured on his ethnographic work to a number of church groups, cultural societies, and philanthropic organizations in New

York and Philadelphia between the years 1908 and 1915.752

In addition to lecturing before scholarly groups, as many of his museum colleagues did,

Skinner also presented children’s lectures on Native American topics at the American Museum of Natural History.753 While publishing extensively in scholarly journals, he, more than most other anthropologists, also endeavored to reach a diverse populace through his writings. In The

752 Carey, “Skinner,” 4-14; Larner, SAI, A.C. Parker to A. Skinner corr., April 8, 1915.

753 Oneroad and Skinner, Being Dakota, 41.

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Frontier, a popular monthly periodical of the early twentieth century aimed at adolescent boys,

Skinner wrote at least eight articles on regional American Indian communities for the year 1925 alone. Illustrative of his desire to inform a largely Euro-American audience about Native peoples, he stated his goal in one publication, noting that these sketches were “intended to show the Menomini as the author found him, a living, breathing, warm-blooded human being, in no way fundamentally different from the white man.”754 In this way, Skinner presented for public consumption the idea of Native Americans as equal to non-Native peoples, not as something savage or primitive.

Alanson Skinner was undoubtedly a sympathetic observer of and occasional advocate for

Native peoples, especially in comparison to his anthropological peers. He worked to document, preserve, and publicize those things he treasured in American Indian cultures, but also advocated for contemporary progressive Indian causes, believing that the “old life of the Indians” was passing away.755 He, along with a few other non-Native anthropologists of this era including

Frank Hamilton Cushing, M.R. Harrington, and James Mooney, best exhibited the practice of in their fieldwork. This approach enabled the anthropologist to rely on

“empathy, subjectivity, and close contact with one’s subjects.”756 Not surprisingly, those anthropologists who were willing to act as participant observers during fieldwork, and thus who were more sympathetic to the plight of American Indians in their midst, stood in stark contrast to the scientifically removed, supposedly objective anthropologists typified by Franz Boas, Alfred

L. Kroeber, or John Wesley Powell.

754 Skinner, “Recollections of an Ethnologist,” 41.

755 Parker, “Sekosa,” 127.

756 Deloria, Playing Indian, 93.

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Figure 73. Alanson Skinner and Amos Oneroad Dressed in Native Clothing, ca. 1920 NMAI P28540

Cushing, Harrington, Mooney, Skinner, and many others frequently wore Native dress, spoke in Native languages, and referred to themselves by their adopted Native names, even when away from Native communities. Harrington and Skinner, however, tended to blur the lines between participant observation and what Philip J. Deloria terms “playing Indian,” in which non-

Native peoples simulate and appropriate the customs, manners, and lifeways of Native groups.

Both men had relationships with and later married women of Native ancestry. Notably,

Harrington recorded that although Skinner was “without Indian ancestry of his own, it was his pride that Wyandot blood” flowed in the veins of his wife, Dorothy, and his daughter, Esther.757

Further, in correspondence with John V. Satterlee about his adopted Menominee community,

Skinner repeatedly utilized language of ownership when he spoke of making “a great collection

757 Deloria, Playing Indian; Harrington, “Skinner,” 276.

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of the relics for your people and my people,” and of the need to preserve the voices of “the old people about our history.”758

In spite of these examples, it is conceivable that these actions on the part of Harrington and Skinner demonstrate nothing more than the passion of two men of Euro-American ancestry interested in learning about other cultures, rather than intentional . Possibly their donning of Native clothing and speaking in Native languages reflected only their respect and admiration for Indigenous communities. And perhaps their marriages to American Indian women simply illustrated their love for women who happened to be of Native ancestry, or maybe even a willingness on their parts to stand for equality. The historical records do not appear to contain further insight into these men’s perspectives on matters such as this.

Other individuals’ perspectives that could shed some light on this issue of participant observation versus cultural appropriation are lamentably silent as well. Foremost would be

Harrington and Skinner’s wives, but also their collaborators and friends, such as Amos Oneroad and John V. Satterlee, would prove helpful. An important question posed by Philip J. Deloria in his book Playing Indian is relevant here: “How have Indian people reacted to Europeans doing bad imitations of native dress, language, and custom?”759 How did Native ethnologists and collaborators, men and women like Ella Cara Deloria, William Jones, James R. Murie, Amos

Oneroad, or John V. Satterlee feel about this appropriation of their cultures? Did they view it as possibly beneficial in terms of dissemination of Indigenous lifeways? Did they accept it silently as part and parcel of the colonial landscape around them? Unfortunately, their voices and perspectives on this issue are largely nonexistent.

758 AMNH, Anthropology, A. Skinner to J.V. Satterlee corr., January 25, 1913; AMNH, Anthropology, A. Skinner to J.V. Satterlee corr., April 2, 1913. Emphasis added.

759 Deloria, Playing Indian, 8.

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Figure 74. Esther Florence Allen and Alanson Skinner Dressed in Native Clothing, ca. 1920 NMAI P27202

In his writings and presentations Skinner provided occasional glimpses into why he performed the work he did, and why it was important to him. In addressing a group in

Philadelphia, he once stated, “My interest in the old-time Indian springs from the fact that the old life must be known to science and be faithfully described.” He continued, “I like this work because I find Indians genuine friends and full of interesting philosophy.”760 Skinner’s advocacy, though less frequent, nevertheless emerged from time to time as well. In June of 1914, for instance, he published a piece in the New York Times, attacking the film industry’s “constant misrepresentation of Indian life, history, and character.” “From the standpoint of a student,”

Skinner wrote, “most of the picture plays shown are grotesque farces,” replete with inaccuracies of Indigenous dress and dwellings. “More serious,” he protested, were the portrayals “of the ‘red man’ as a sneak, a thief, and a murderer,” characterizations which influenced and prejudiced the popular mind.761

760 Parker, “Sekosa,” 127.

761 Alanson Skinner, “Red Men in ‘Movies,’” New York Times, NY, June 4, 1914.

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Skinner voiced a similar concern in a letter to his friend Amos Oneroad written ten years later regarding Christian reformers’ misrepresentations of “the old-time Indian dances and ceremonies.” “Whatever may be one’s feelings about these ancient ceremonies, no-one, whether or not in favor of them, can really approve of the systematic campaign of lying and defamation of character which is being carried on against the Indian throughout our country,” Skinner wrote.

“It hurts the Indian in every way,” he declared, “and you know, and I know, that, from our own contact with the Indians, there are no immoral, obscene, nor degrading ceremonies practiced by them in North America.”762 Such writings illustrate that although Skinner never took up

American Indian advocacy on a major political stage, he still worked to represent the cares and concerns of these communities. Ultimately, Native Americans were not solely a subject of study for Alanson Skinner. They were integral to his life, his identity, and over time became part of his family.

762 Autry, MSS 201, A. Skinner to A. Oneroad corr., October 29, 1924.

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SECTION 5-3

CLARK WISSLER (1870-1947)

Figure 75. Clark Wissler, ca. 1930 AMNH 338063

Later to lead the AMNH Anthropology Department for much of the first half of the twentieth century, Clark Wissler was born in eastern Indiana in 1870, not far from the birthplace and childhood home of his contemporary, Bureau of American Ethnology anthropologist James

Mooney. Unlike Mooney though, as a youth Wissler never intended to make a career out of studying Native American peoples. Rather, he pursued both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in experimental psychology at Indiana University, graduating in 1897 and 1899 respectively.763

Following this, he moved to New York where he studied psychology at Columbia University, receiving his doctorate in 1902. Wissler married Etta Viola Gebhart, a fellow Indiana resident, in

June of 1899, and the two remained together for nearly the next half-century, until Clark’s death in 1947.764

763 Stanley A. Freed and Ruth S. Freed, “Clark Wissler and the Development of Anthropologist in the United States,” American Anthropologist 85, no. 4 (December 1983): 802; “James Mooney,” 209.

764 Wayne County, Indiana, Marriage Licenses, Ancestry.com.

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Wissler came to know Franz Boas through their Columbia University connection, and by

1902 Boas hired him on as an assistant in the Anthropology Department at the American

Museum of Natural History. Largely abandoning his psychology work, Wissler became a fixture at this museum, moving quickly up the ladder from Assistant, to Acting, to Curator of

Anthropology in 1907, a position he held for the next thirty-five years. Although Wissler’s professional fieldwork was limited, he contributed to the AMNH and the anthropological profession in a major way through his administrative and theoretical labors. For example, under his direction the AMNH initiated a number of field projects among several Northern Plains

Indian communities, making that region the best-known ethnographic area in North America at the time. Even more important was Wissler’s development of the culture area concept, one of the organizing principles of modern ethnography.765 This concept applied the term “culture area” to a group of Native communities with similar cultures occupying an area where ecological conditions were generally uniform. In essence, Wissler’s theoretical contribution altered the focus of study from individual, isolated Native communities to a cross-cultural perspective that highlighted the process of cultural influence and diffusion throughout the subject area and its neighboring communities.766

Wissler’s direct experience with fieldwork consisted largely of three years spent among

Northern Plains Indian communities soon after joining the staff of the AMNH. In 1902 Boas selected him to conduct ethnological fieldwork with the A’aninin (Gros Ventre), Dakota (Eastern

765 Freed and Freed, “Wissler,” 804, 810; Herskovits, Boas, 21.

766 Stanley A. Freed, Anthropology Unmasked: Museums, Science and Politics in New York City, Vol. II: The Wissler Years (Wilmington: Orange Frazer Press, 2012), 625-626; Clark Wissler, The American Indian: An Introduction to the Anthropology of the New World (New York: Douglas C. McMurtrie, 1917), 242; Freed, Anthropology Unmasked, Vol. II, 626.

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Sioux), and Niitsitapii (Blackfoot/Blackfeet) communities in North Dakota and Montana.767 It was there on the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana, in 1903, that Wissler first met

David Charles Duvall, who would become his Native collaborator among the Pikuni Blackfeet

(Piegan) peoples for the next eight years.

David Charles, or D.C., Duvall was born in 1877 to a non-Native fur trader employed at

Fort Benton named Charles Duvall, and a Pikuni Blackfeet (Piegan) woman named Yellow Bird.

Duvall attended the Indian Boarding School in Idaho in his youth, after which he worked first as an Industrial Assistant at Fort Shaw, and then as an Assistant Mechanic before setting up his blacksmith shop in Browning, Montana.768 Duvall married twice in his short life, both times to Pikuni Blackfeet (Piegan) women. He first married a woman named Gretchen in

1900, and after their divorce in 1908 or 1909, he married Cecile Trombley. D.C. and Cecile had separated by the time of his death in July of 1911, and had only been married approximately six months.769

Soon after meeting in 1903, Wissler engaged Duvall first as his interpreter, and later as his collaborator, collecting narratives and statements from elders on the Blackfeet Reservation.

Wissler directed the younger man to gather “more of the old stories,” and to write them “as nearly in the Indian style as possible.” Among the people from whom Duvall collected, many were middle-aged men between forty and sixty years of age who had lived through the last days

767 Clark Wissler and D.C. Duvall, Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians, ed. Alice Kehoe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), v-vi; Freed and Freed, “Wissler,” 810.

768 Wissler and Duvall, Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians, vi-vii; Clark Wissler, “Social Organization and Ritualistic Ceremonies of the Blackfoot Indians,” AMNH Anthropological Papers 7 (1912): ii; U.S. Register of Civil, Military, and Naval Service, 1863-1959, Ancestry.com.

769 Montana, U.S. Indian Census Rolls, Ancestry.com; Wissler and Duvall, Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians, vi- vii.

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of independent, pre-reservation life. Essentially, Duvall’s informants needed only to be reasonably respected, articulate adults.770 Nevertheless, in 1910 he wrote to Wissler of his difficulties in locating proper individuals, as many of the “old men have past [sic] a way that we know that were good,” and who were the carriers of such knowledge. Eventually Duvall’s efforts proved successful, and he collected several hundred pages’ worth of information from Three

Bears, Old Chief, Red Plume, and other community members. Indeed, Duvall even wrote to

Wissler requesting that the museum send “one of those talking machines,” a phonograph, in order to record the songs known by Red Plume relating to the local Medicine Lodge and other ceremonies.771

In addition to documenting and recording the songs, customs, folklore, and religious beliefs of his Native community, Duvall also collected material culture objects of a sensitive or sacred nature for museum acquisition. In March of 1911, for instance, he wrote to Wissler of the opportunity to purchase a medicine bundle, a collection of sacred objects which provided the owner with spiritual power. He reported that the Native seller was “a little afraid to just turn over the bundle to me,” for fear of either human or divine retribution. “The people are afraid to sell these sacred bundles now,” Duvall wrote, “and they won’t even talk about selling to a white man.”772 The solution agreed upon was to “transfer” the medicine bundle from the owner to

Duvall in a special ceremony, thus avoiding the potential wrath of community members or divine powers. Such an example illustrates another highly important function of the Native collaborator,

770 Wissler, “Social Organization,” ii; Wissler and Duvall, Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians, vii-viii; AMNH, Anthropology, C. Wissler to D.C. Duvall corr., January 27, 1906.

771 AMNH, Anthropology, D.C. Duvall to C. Wissler corr., October 3, 1910; Wissler, “Social Organization,” ii; AMNH, Anthropology, D.C. Duvall to C. Wissler corr., November 21, 1910; AMNH, Anthropology, D.C. Duvall to C. Wissler corr., January 2, 1911.

772 AMNH, Anthropology, D.C. Duvall to C. Wissler corr., March 23, 1911.

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that of Native receiver of objects which otherwise were prohibited to be sold or given to non-

Native individuals, such as anthropologists.

D.C. Duvall’s name did not occur often in the historical record among his Native or non-

Native contemporaries. He co-authored with Wissler one work, “Mythology of the Blackfoot

Indians,” part of the AMNH Anthropological Papers released in 1908. One of the few non- scholarly publications to refer to Duvall, the Carlisle Indian School’s The Red Man and Helper, noted simply his appointment as the new Assistant Mechanic on the Blackfeet Agency in

1901.773 Descriptions written by Wissler in the years after Duvall’s 1911 death provide a more complete picture of the man, however. Days following this event, Wissler declared him one of the most productive non-resident field workers the AMNH had in its employ. In a memorial address written the following year, Wissler referred to Duvall’s “considerable linguistic ability” and “investigating turn of mind,” recording that almost from the start he took an unusual interest in the work. Later, in a semi-fictionalized account of his ethnographic labors published in 1938,

Wissler described Duvall as a bright pupil, having done fairly well in school, who “enjoyed taking me about and took an intelligent interest in helping me with my notes.”774

Duvall committed suicide in his home on the Blackfeet Reservation on July 10, 1911. At the time, he and his wife of less than half a year, Cecile Trombley, were separated. Many then and now have suggested different reasons for Duvall’s actions. Duvall’s nephew, James Eagle

Child, in writing to Wissler of the incident, believed it was due to “trouble over his wife.” A

773 Clark Wissler and D.C. Duvall, “Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians,” AMNH Anthropological Papers 2 (1908): 1-163; Red Man and Helper, September 20, 1901.

774 AMNH, Anthropology, C. Wissler to F. Lucas corr., July 21, 1911; Wissler, “Social Organization,” ii; Clark Wissler, Indian Cavalcade or Life on the Old-Time Indian Reservation (New York: Sheridan House, 1938), 235- 236.

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more recent historian pointed to Duvall being “an unhappy man” and childless.775 While written more than twenty-five years after the fact, and doubtless romanticized for his reading audience,

Wissler in his semi-fictionalized account recorded Duvall as seeming “melancholy.” “You are a white man,” Duvall’s character states to Wissler in his 1938 publication. “You have a place among your people, you count for something. Around us here are Indians, they revere their past, they have the respect of their fellows. Here I am, neither an Indian nor a white man – just nothing.”776

Having left no note or explanation for his suicide, such conjecture on the part of Wissler and other later historians is largely moot. While Duvall did indeed refer to himself as a “breed” or half-breed, and thus not a full-blood member of the Pikuni Blackfeet (Piegan) community, he also saw himself as a chronicler of his people. He strove to become the most accurate translator of his Native language into English, and after eight years of accumulating manuscript notes about his Native culture, language, and history, he considered these papers, numbering more than

750 pages, his most important contribution. Wissler later recorded D.C. Duvall’s untimely death a “distinct loss” to anthropology and to his Native community members.777

Within approximately one year of Duvall’s death, Wissler commenced a working relationship with another Native collaborator, James R. Murie. This relationship quickly became a personal friendship which would last until Murie’s death nearly a decade later. Murie was a member of the Skidi Chaticks Si Chaticks (Skidi Pawnee/Skiri Pawnee) community of

Oklahoma, born in Nebraska territory in 1862, and educated at the Hampton Agricultural and

775 AMNH, Anthropology, J. Eagle Child to C. Wissler corr., July 18, 1911; Freed, Anthropology Unmasked, Vol. II, 634.

776 Wissler, Indian Cavalcade, 236.

777 AMNH, Anthropology, D.C. Duvall to C. Wissler corr., March 23, 1911; Wissler, “Social Organization,” ii, 70.

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Industrial Institute in Virginia.778 Returning to Oklahoma after his education, he married twice in his life, both times to Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee) women. He married Mary Esau in 1887, and after their divorce in 1915, he married Josephine Walking Sun, who died in September of

1919.779

Figure 76. James R. Murie and Unidentified Child, 1904 NAA, BAE Neg. 1679

A recurring figure in the history of museum anthropology, Murie worked as a Native collaborator with several notable ethnologists including Alice C. Fletcher from the Peabody

Museum, George A. Dorsey from the Field Museum, and Frederick Webb Hodge from the

Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. Accordingly, in August of 1912

Wissler received a letter from Murie, informing him, “Sometime ago one of your men [AMNH anthropologist ] was here to visit me. While here he spoke of you wanting me to do

778 Parks, “Murie,” 76-77.

779 AMNH, Anthropology, J.R. Murie to C. Wissler corr., June 15, 1915; Oklahoma, U.S. Indian Census Rolls, 1885-1940, Ancestry.com.

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some work for you about the Pawnee Indians.” Murie readily acknowledged, “The work he outlined would suit me.”780

As he had done with previous anthropologists, Murie gathered both tangible and intangible cultural heritage material from his Native community members for deposit in museums. He used language typical of his non-Native ethnologist colleagues when collecting such information from his Native informants, writing that he wanted “to open up” one man, and intended to “drain” another in order to acquire and preserve these men’s cultural knowledge.781

Ever desirous of “saving” or preserving his community’s customs and beliefs, as early as 1911

Murie began recording Native “ceremonies, rituals, and songs” via phonograph for his ethnographic work with the BAE. The following year he requested “a good Kodak” in order to more accurately document these ceremonies.782

Murie also regularly collected Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee) material culture objects, some of a sensitive or sacred nature, including medicine bundles. Collections of objects such as these were both rare and priceless, and thus highly desired by museum anthropologists. As

Wissler urged his AMNH superiors in a 1915 letter, it was incumbent on their institution to purchase these “great tribal bundles” located by Murie. “We can scarcely afford to let these bundles go by,” Wissler stressed. Further, he added, if they did not act immediately the owner of the bundles intended to sell them to either George A. Dorsey at the Field Museum or George

Gustav Heye at the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. “If I do not beat Dorsey

780 AMNH, Anthropology, J.R. Murie to C. Wissler corr., August 9, 1912.

781 AMNH, Anthropology, J.R. Murie to C. Wissler corr., March 3, 1916; AMNH, Anthropology, J.R. Murie to C. Wissler corr., June 10, 1916.

782 NAA, BAE, J.R. Murie to F.W. Hodge corr., January 23, 1911; NAA, BAE, J.R. Murie to F.W. Hodge corr., February 20, 1911; NAA, BAE, J.R. Murie to F.W. Hodge corr., May 31, 1912.

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and Heye in this deal it will be because the Museum will not stand by me,” Wissler stated emphatically.783 Such an account illustrates not only the complicated nature of museum acquisition, but also the common practice of museums outbidding and competing with each other for objects.

Although not particularly well-known or often mentioned in the media of his day, Murie did occasionally receive recognition for his anthropological work. For instance, Murie’s contemporary and Seneca archaeologist, Arthur C. Parker, praised the older man in The

Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians. In the April-June 1915 issue, Parker described Murie as “a Pawnee Indian who has done much work . . . for students and writers on

Pawnee history.” He wrote that Murie’s 1914 publication, “Pawnee Indian Societies,” was an important contribution, and proved “the immense influence that ceremonialism played in the life of the Pawnee.”784

While publications such as these from Murie were relatively limited, he nevertheless impacted and influenced the anthropological field in a major way through his lifetime of collaborative ethnographic work. As Murie often reiterated, he was more interested in accurately portraying his Native community to outsiders than anything else. In a 1920 letter written to

Wissler, Murie employed an informal tone when he urged, “Now Doc, I want you and me to do good work on Pawnee stuff so we can get fine work out – better than any that’s been out on

Indians.”785 Murie spent decades doing just that, correcting inaccurate and racist depictions of

783 AMNH, Anthropology, C. Wissler to F. Lucas corr., June 30, 1915.

784 Arthur C. Parker, “Book on Secret Societies Written by an Indian,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 3, no. 2 (April-June 1915): 134.

785 AMNH, Anthropology, J.R. Murie to C. Wissler corr., July 12, 1915; AMNH, Anthropology, J.R. Murie to C. Wissler corr., December 22, 1920.

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Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee) and other Native peoples represented in the anthropological literature. In fact, he intended to travel to New York to lecture and present ethnological films of his community to AMNH audiences when he suffered a fatal heart attack in November of 1921.

He died at age fifty-nine and was buried in Pawnee, Oklahoma. His friend and colleague Wissler died over a quarter-century later in New York at the age of seventy-six.786

Throughout their nearly ten years of collaborative work together, Clark Wissler and

James Murie developed more than just a working relationship; they also developed a friendship.

While their correspondence tends to display the accustomed formality typical of this time period, it also provides glimpses of warmth and compassion between these two men. For several consecutive years Wissler offered, and Murie accepted, the invitation to visit him in his summer house in his home-state of Indiana. There the two worked together for weeks at a time, comparing notes and drafting manuscripts on Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee) language, ceremonies, and culture. Murie treasured his friendship with the Wissler family to such a degree that in 1916 he chose to name his newborn daughter in honor of Wissler’s wife, as Viola Gebhart

Wissler Murie. Clearly such an act displayed a closer relationship than that ordinarily cultivated between Native collaborator and museum anthropologist. Indeed, Wissler referred to just such a rare occurrence when writing years later of the relationship between museum staff and Native collaborators in the field. Anthropologists often live “for brief intervals with the Indians,” he wrote, “making notes and observations and often receiving intensive instructions from old sages

786 Parks, “Murie,” 82; Freed and Freed, “Wissler,” 802.

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as to the Indian’s philosophy of life.” Wissler further added, perhaps thinking of his friend James

R. Murie, “Sometimes life friendships have sprung up in this way.”787

Wissler and the Public

Clark Wissler’s contemporaries and later historians have tended to view him positively, if not in the most lively of terms. Franz Boas, often reserved in praise of his anthropological colleagues, described Wissler in 1903 as “a man of unusual efficiency and remarkable adaptability to circumstances.” A recent historian painted him as “quiet, reserved, a compromiser, [and] not a charismatic figure.”788 Wissler’s Native contemporary Arthur C.

Parker, in perhaps the most glowing depiction of the man, wrote that he was “a genial, earnest gentleman whose devotion to his subject” was that “of a true scientist.” Speaking as a Native person, Parker added his hope that Wissler would continue his ethnographic work for years to come, because then “the American Indian, especially the Plains people, shall have had a most accurate and painstaking student to thank.”789

Throughout his forty years as an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural

History, Wissler represented Native American cultures to largely non-Native audiences through the mediums of exhibits, lectures, and publications. Among the latter, he co-authored with

Native collaborators D.C. Duvall and James R. Murie two influential texts, “Mythology of the

Blackfoot Indians” in 1908, and “Pawnee Indian Societies” in 1914. Probably his most

787 AMNH, Anthropology, J.R. Murie to C. Wissler corr., June 10, 1916; AMNH, Anthropology, J.R. Murie to C. Wissler corr., October 24, 1916; Clark Wissler, “Man as a Museum Subject,” Natural History 23, no. 3 (May-June 1923): 251.

788 APS, MSS B.B.61, F. Boas to C. Walcott corr., December 7, 1903; Freed and Freed, “Wissler,” 801.

789 “The Work of Clark Wissler Among the Sioux,” American Indian Magazine 5, no. 4 (December 1917): 266-267.

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celebrated work though, even named the “Book of the Year” by American Indian Magazine, was his 1917 publication The American Indian: An Introduction to the Anthropology of the New

World. In this work Wissler first presented his theory of the culture area concept, and a subsequent reviewer correctly predicted that this book would remain the standard reference work on American anthropology for many years.790

In a popular article titled “The Universal Appeal of the American Indian” published in

1930, Wissler touched on a number of issues of major importance to the field, including the rise of Pan-Indianism, non-Native perceptions of Native Americans, and anthropologists’ attempts to combat such monolithic views. “So fixed . . . is the notion that the real Indian must wear feathers and live in a tipi that, when Indians appear for the entertainment of white people, they feel it necessary to assume such a costume and sometimes to carry a tomahawk,” Wissler wrote. “The feather headdress and its accompaniments have become the conventional dress suit of all

Indians,” belying the incredible cultural diversity of the Indigenous peoples of North America.791

In spite of such statements, however, Wissler was hardly an advocate for Native Americans.

Ultimately, he was quite similar to the majority of his non-Native anthropological colleagues: scientifically removed, occasionally sympathetic, but rarely if ever willing or desirous of fighting for the rights of the people he made a career out of studying.

790 “The Book of the Year,” American Indian Magazine 5, no. 4 (December 1917): 273.

791 Clark Wissler, “The Universal Appeal of the American Indian,” Natural History 30, no. 1 (January-February 1930): 33-40.

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EXPOSITION 3

1898 OMAHA WORLD’S FAIR

Figure 77. Omaha World’s Fair, Indian Congress, Sham Battle, 1898 NMAI P27482

Following in the wake of Chicago’s wildly successful 1893 World’s Fair, organizers in

Omaha, Nebraska, sought to reap similar financial benefits by hosting their own exposition five years later. In particular, they hoped to replicate and even expand upon one of Chicago’s big draws, its crowd-pleasing “ethnographic exhibition of past and present peoples of America.”792

Officially known as the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, from the start newspaper reporters informed readers that the Omaha fair “would undoubtedly be the last gathering” of American Indian tribes before they ultimately succumbed to Euro-American civilization and traveled to the “happy hunting grounds,” i.e., before they died. Journalism such as this reinforced and marketed itself on the widely-held belief that Native Americans were a vanishing or “dying race,” doomed to imminently and inevitably disappear.793 Even President

William McKinley desired to witness the spectacle of Native peoples on display before they vanished, informing friends at his October 1898 visit to the fair that the Indian Exhibit was “the

792 F.W. Putnam, “American Ethnology,” Chicago Tribune, IL, May 31, 1890.

793 Dippie, Vanishing American, 137-138; “History of the Indian,” Omaha Daily Bee, NE, August 16, 1897.

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one feature of the exposition that he did not wish to miss.”794 By the year’s end, the President and nearly three million other visitors got their wish, having attended the exposition in Omaha and consuming the anthropological representations of Native Americans on display there.

Planning for the fair commenced in 1895, and in addition to the usual agricultural, industrial, and civic-themed displays, the Omaha Daily Bee newspaper reported that plans also included “an extensive exhibit illustrative of the life, customs and decline of the aboriginal inhabitants of the western hemisphere.” Use of the word “decline” is notable here, as exposition planners relied on social evolutionist thought to inform fairgoers about perceived racial differences in society. Not surprisingly, the fair’s exhibits emphasized various “stages of development” which all humankind supposedly underwent, comparing “the heroic march of civilization and the progress of American development” to the “primitive” and “crude” stage occupied by America’s aborigines.795 Such social evolutionist thought was pervasive in World’s

Fairs across the globe at this time, and would return in even starker display in the ethnological exhibits at both the 1904 St. Louis and 1915 San Diego Expositions.

Like the Philadelphia and Chicago World’s Fairs’ organizers who preceded them, the

Omaha Exposition planners hoped to display both Native American material culture objects and living Native Americans themselves. As at Philadelphia, fair organizers adhered to strict requirements on exactly what “types” of Indians they hoped to display to the public. According to the Omaha Daily Bee newspaper of April 5, 1898, selected individuals had to be “full bloods .

. . of good morals and habits,” and, most importantly of all, they had to be “strictly temperate.”

Further, it was desired that these groups consist of families, “made up of man, wife and one or

794 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 121; “Great Father and Indian,” Omaha Daily Bee, NE, October 13, 1898.

795 “History of the Indian,” Omaha Daily Bee, NE, August 16, 1897; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 118.

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two (never more than three) minor children.”796 As an anonymous reporter noted in Scientific

American later that year, fair organizers desired only those Native Americans they deemed interesting “from an aboriginal standpoint.” Other Indigenous communities, including “the

Creeks, Choctaws, , and ” had become too civilized to add any interest from an ethnological point of view. In one reporter’s words, the most important American Indian communities invited to the fair were those whom the U.S. government had “conquered with the greatest amount of bloodshed,” e.g., predominantly Plains Indian groups.797

In the months leading up to the exposition, agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs received a circular from their headquarters in Washington, DC, informing them that the proposed

Indian encampment at Omaha was to be “as thoroughly aboriginal in every respect as practicable,” and that “the primitive traits and characteristics of the several tribes” would be

“distinctly set forth.”798 Organizers accordingly hired Bureau of American Ethnology anthropologist James Mooney to oversee the Indian Exhibit in which approximately thirty-five

Native communities were expected to be represented, with over 500 individual American Indians on display. Members of the public, fair organizers, and Mooney himself anticipated a wondrous exposition, abounding with ethnological exhibits “expected to add very greatly to [the fair’s] scientific interest and value.”799

The Omaha Exposition and the Public

796 “Indian Bureau Is Active,” Omaha Daily Bee, NE, April 5, 1898.

797 “The Omaha Exposition and the Indian Congress,” Scientific American 79, no. 16 (October 15, 1898): 248.

798 James Mooney, “The Indian Congress at Omaha,” American Anthropologist 1, no. 1 (January 1899): 128.

799 Moses, Wild West Shows, 145; “Omaha Exposition,” 248; Albert Shaw, “The Trans-Mississippians and Their Fair at Omaha,” Century 56, no. 6 (October 1898): 851-852.

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By the time the Omaha Exposition officially opened to the public in June of 1898,

Mooney’s expectations for a truly all-encompassing display of the Indigenous peoples of North

America had dwindled severely. Of great disappointment to him was the absence of large numbers of Native communities distinct from “the ordinary tipi tribes of the plains” so often romanticized and stereotyped by the public. “The wood carvers of the Columbia [River], the shell workers and basket makers of Oregon and California, the Navaho weavers . . . the tribes of the gulf states . . . and the historic Iroquois of the long-house,” lamented Mooney, “were unrepresented.”800 Further, the ethnological exhibits which did exist were few and far between, consisting mainly of a grass house built by several Wichita women, and a miniature display of

Kiowa tipis and shields curated by Mooney.801

As for the living exhibit, what Mooney originally envisioned as an Indian Congress or great Indian council, fair organizers quickly reduced to the level of a midway performance in order to boost ticket sales.802 Captain William A. Mercer, Director of the Indian Congress, decided to give the public what he believed they wanted. He summarily altered the schedule from the performance of a few “tribal ceremonies” into “staged sham battles” enacted three times per week, with Native performers “hideously, fantastically or ridiculously attired.” Mooney later described these battles as consisting of a great deal of shooting and yelling, at which point about fifty Native performers would “roll around on the ground and pretend to be dead.” Complaining to a fellow anthropologist of the Indian Exhibit’s unexpected transformation into what was

800 Mooney, “Indian Congress,” 130.

801 Moses, Indian Man, 113-120; Mary Alice Harriman, “The Congress of American Aborigines at the Omaha Exposition,” Overland Monthly 33, no. 198 (June 1899): 511-512.

802 Mooney, “Indian Congress,” 146-147; Moses, Indian Man, 119; Richard H. Pratt, The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Its Origins, Purposes, Progress and Difficulties Surmounted (Carlisle: Cumberland County Historical Society, 1979), 40-41.

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essentially a Wild West show, Mooney further noted “in this place an ethnologist’s time is wasted & his labor lost.”803

Figure 78. Omaha World’s Fair, Indian Congress, Sham Battle, 1898 NMAI P27483

James Mooney was hardly the first or the last anthropologist to complain about Wild

West shows and their tendency to attract crowds by cloaking themselves in scientific language as either “ethnological parades” or “ethnological events.”804 Carlisle Indian School founder Richard

Henry Pratt, on the other hand, though highly opposed to the “degenerate” sham battles and Wild

West atmosphere of the Omaha World’s Fair, nevertheless labeled its Indian Congress as both

“highly ethnological and scientific.” From Pratt, with his lifelong antipathy towards anthropology and his advocacy of forced Native American assimilation into mainstream society, such a remark was anything but a compliment. In the press, Pratt regularly attacked ethnologists and Wild West show leaders like Buffalo Bill Cody, arguing that any events wherein “Indians were paid to paint their faces and dress in primitive costumes” ultimately brought “discredit upon

803 Moses, Indian Man, 119; “Great Father and Indian,” Omaha Daily Bee, NE, October 13, 1898; NAA, BAE, J. Mooney to WJ McGee corr., September 27, 1898.

804 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 119-120.

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the educated Indian,” and further degraded and deceived “the public mind in regard to Indians generally.”805

Many contemporary American Indians also voiced similar criticisms of World’s Fairs,

Wild West shows, and popular representations of Native cultures. Chauncey Yellow Robe, for instance, a Carlisle Indian School graduate of Sicangu Lakota (Rosebud Sioux) heritage, asked what benefit Native Americans had derived from Wild West shows. “None, but what are degrading, demoralizing and degenerating,” he answered. Expounding on the “commercializing” of American Indian peoples, Yellow Robe also accused Wild West showmen of teaching young and old audiences alike that “the Indian is only a savage being.”806

Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca museum anthropologist and founding member of the Society of American Indians, likewise railed against Wild West shows for deceiving the public. In addition to compelling Native peoples to “act the white man’s idea of an Indian,” Parker believed such performances lumped all Indigenous cultures into one monolithic group, making “most persons think that every Indian of whatever tribe wears . . . the Sioux war bonnet.” Yellow Robe,

Parker, and many other Native peoples viewed such performances as those staged by Captain

Mercer at the 1898 Omaha World’s Fair nothing but “burlesque,” “deception,” and “injurious fakery.”807 For a great number of non-Native fair-goers, however, such entertainment was exactly what they wanted and expected.

805 Pratt, Indian Industrial School, 40-41; “Our Duty,” Jamestown Evening Journal, NY, August 25, 1904.

806 Chauncey Yellow Robe, “The Indian and the Wild West Show,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 2, no. 1 (January-March 1914): 39; Chauncey Yellow Robe, “The Menace of the Wild West Show,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 2, no. 3 (July-September 1914): 224-225.

807 Arthur C. Parker, “The Menace of the Fraudulent Wild West Show,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 2, no. 3 (July-September 1914): 175-176; E.H. Gohl, “The Effect of ,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 2, no. 3 (July-September 1914): 226.

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Countless paying customers thoroughly enjoyed the sights and sounds of the Omaha

World’s Fair Indian Congress, with one pronouncing it “spectacular in feature and vivid in color.”808 Several individuals remarked on the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity afforded to compare “the various Indian tribes” and “to study their characteristics and tribal traits.” While comparisons of this nature unfairly and inaccurately relegated Native peoples into different stages of Western-imposed civilization, to some extent they also helped to belie the ever-popular construct of the Wild West’s monolithic Plains Indian. Numerous attendees, for instance, spoke of the notable differences in dress, dwelling, and even physique of the various Indian communities on display, naming the Omaha “the most civilized Indians at the encampment.”809

“From every standpoint it was a grand opportunity to see and study Northern Crow and

Southern Ute, the once treacherous Sioux and implacable Apache, to compare Assinaboine with

Zuni,” wrote one observer. Another fair-visitor used terms such as “good” and “bad” to classify and rank Native peoples, remarking, “The Assiniboins are considered particularly good Indians, and cause little disturbance. They boast that they never fought white men.”810 Apaches, on the other hand, and in particular Geronimo, who was on display at the fair, were known for their

“craftiness,” “treachery,” and “cunning.” Interestingly, one visitor wrote of her “surprise” and shock in finally witnessing Apache peoples first-hand after years of only reading of their depredations in the press. “Their pleasant smiles, revealing perfect teeth, were hardly compatible” with the writer’s “preconceived notions” of the Apaches’ rumored “devilish cruelty.” This same visitor even noted that the Apache women on display, “really pretty, good-

808 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 117.

809 “Omaha Exposition,” 248; Harriman, “Congress of American Aborigines,” 509-510.

810 Harriman, “Congress of American Aborigines,” 507; “Omaha Exposition,” 249.

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natured, and plump,” exhibited “better natures than many white women.” Additionally, at least one attendee, though perhaps not representative of the exposition’s nearly three million visitors, came away from the Omaha World’s Fair and its Indian Congress with the idea that American

Indians were “not wholly bad.”811

Omaha’s Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition lasted approximately six months, from June until November of 1898. In terms of its anthropological representations of

Native peoples, the Omaha fair stands about half-way between the earlier exhibitions at

Philadelphia and New York, and those to follow in St. Louis and San Diego. By the time of the

Omaha Exposition, fair-goers expected to see Native peoples on display. Many or perhaps most of these visitors also wanted to have their beliefs validated that American Indians were physically, mentally, and morally inferior to Euro-Americans. The Indian Congress’s “sham battles” in which Native peoples portrayed torture, scalping, and even burning at the stake, seemed to validate these suspicions.812

Whether or not James Mooney, Buffalo Bill Cody, or the fair’s organizers consciously conceived of it in these terms, for many visitors the exposition symbolized “the triumph of the

Anglo-Saxon pioneers” over the Indigenous peoples of North America.813 Twentieth-century historian Robert Rydell echoes a similar note, arguing that World’s Fairs in general and the

Omaha Exposition in particular illustrated to the American public how far the young nation had already come in terms of westward expansion and Anglo-Saxon racial development, and where it was going in terms of the country’s imperial policies. An anonymous magazine writer reflected

811 Harriman, “Congress of American Aborigines,” 510-513.

812 Pratt, Indian Industrial School, 40-41; “Great Father and Indian,” Omaha Daily Bee, NE, October 13, 1898.

813 Shaw, “Trans-Mississippians,” 851.

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on the Omaha World’s Fair days before it closed in November of 1898, noting the “curious and interesting fact” that less than half a century had passed since war had waged with “tomahawk and arrow” on the site of the exposition grounds. To this reporter, the presence of subdued or even vanished Native peoples in Omaha was “gratifying proof of the triumphal march of civilization.”814

814 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 108; “Omaha Exposition,” 249.

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CHAPTER 6

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BEREKELEY, ANTHROPOLOGY MUSEUM

Figure 79. Anthropology Museum at the Affiliated Colleges, San Francisco, California, 1911 Hearst Museum

By 1901 academic anthropology had established a foothold in California, becoming the first outpost of the young discipline west of Chicago.815 In that year philanthropist Phoebe Hearst established the University of California, Berkeley, Anthropology Museum and its affiliated

Anthropology Department. To properly run her new creation, Hearst appointed recent Columbia

University PhD and Franz Boas-trained anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber as the museum’s

Curator and as Instructor in the Anthropology Department. Similarly, she also funded Frederic

Ward Putnam’s dual positions overseeing Kroeber’s work, respectively as both Director of the

Anthropology Museum and Chair of the university academic department.816

815 Ira Jacknis, “The Creation of Anthropological Archives: A California Case Study,” in Anthropology, History, and American Indians: Essays in Honor of William Curtis Sturtevant, eds. William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 211-21.

816 Burton Benedict,” Anthropology and the Lowie Museum,” Museum Anthropology 15, no. 4 (November 1991): 26; Boas, “Putnam,” 331.

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The location of the UC Berkeley Anthropology Museum changed several times in its early years, quickly overflowing its first two buildings on the Berkeley campus. By 1903 the university agreed to move the entire collection into an unoccupied law school building at the

Affiliated Colleges of the University of California in San Francisco. There, at the corner of

Second and Parnassus Avenues, the museum remained for the next three decades, physically removed from the rest of the UC Berkeley campus. In October of 1911 the museum officially opened to the public with Hearst hosting a reception of 400 honored guests. Although Kroeber fretted to Putnam about the building’s “somewhat out of the way” location, he nevertheless was happy to be “before the public,” where they could interest people and “expedite the further development of the Museum.”817

Beginning soon after its founding, the Anthropology Museum initiated an extensive survey of the Indigenous communities of the state. Accordingly, individual museum staff became associated with particular California regions and peoples. Samuel A. Barrett, for instance, a student of Kroeber’s and the first person to receive a PhD in anthropology from UC Berkeley, worked primarily among the . The year after receiving his PhD, Barrett served briefly as an ethnologist for George Gustav Heye before accepting a position as Curator and later Director of the Milwaukee Public Museum.818 Another Anthropology Museum staff member, Pliny

Goddard, worked among Native communities in Oregon, California, and Arizona between 1901 and 1909. After leaving for a higher salary at the American Museum of Natural History in New

York, Kroeber and Putnam tried to convince anthropologist Frank G. Speck to replace him, but

817 Benedict, “Lowie Museum,” 27; Peabody, MSS 999-24, “Museum Guide of Unusual Interest,” 1920; Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1 A.L. Kroeber to F.W. Putnam corr., October 5, 1911.

818 David W. Peri and Robert W. Wharton,” Samuel Alfred Barrett: 1879-1965,” Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 33 (1965): 4-9.

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Speck would not consent to leave Philadelphia and its Free Museum of Science and Art.819 A third staff member of note was T.T. Waterman who conducted fieldwork among Washington,

Oregon, and California Indigenous peoples, and who is best remembered for first meeting Ishi,

“the last Yahi,” and bringing him to San Francisco in 1911.820

With Kroeber and his academically-trained staff dominating so much of the West Coast’s ethnographic field, it is no surprise that they incurred the enmity of local amateur ethnologists and archaeologists, including men such as Charles F. Lummis, founder of the Southwest

Museum in Los Angeles.821 In spite of the influence wielded by Lummis in Los Angeles and later Edgar L. Hewett in San Diego, however, UC Berkeley’s Anthropology Department and

Museum continued to control the discourse of academic and museum anthropology in California for the next half-century.

The UC Berkeley Anthropology Museum and the Public

National newspapers and journals frequently informed the public about the UC Berkeley

Anthropology Museum, its mission, and its staff. Within days of the museum’s founding in the fall of 1901, the journal Science published a short article celebrating this recent development, noting that the museum’s major undertaking would consist of “a study of the many Indian tribes of California,” along with specific ethnological research on “their languages, myths and customs.”822 Ever in the shadow of its more illustrious and well-known counterparts further east,

819 Putnam and Kroeber, Department of Anthropology, 11; Jacknis, “Anthropological Archives,” 215; Peabody, MSS 999-24, A.L. Kroeber to F.W. Putnam corr., June 4, 1909.

820 Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 9.

821 Ira Jacknis, “Museum Anthropology in California, 1889-1939,” Museum Anthropology 17, no. 2 (1993): 4-5.

822 “Anthropology at the University of California,” Science 14, no. 355 (October 18, 1901): 619.

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reporters could not help but make comparisons between these various institutions of education and anthropological entertainment. For example, one anonymous journal editor in 1911 wrote that “only the great general museums in New York and Chicago, and the National Museum in

Washington, surpass the [California] university’s museum in size.”823 Even the UC Berkeley

Anthropology Museum itself seized on these comparisons, highlighting in its 1918 Museum

Guide that it was “the largest museum of its kind west of Chicago, and one of the most complete collections of anthropology in the world.”824

Early twentieth-century newspapers also regularly focused on the notion of the

“vanishing Indian,” reporting in a June 11, 1906, issue of the San Francisco Call that museum staff were hard at work preserving records of Indigenous “tongues that are fast dying.” Such important work needed to happen right away, the article’s author emphasized, “so that when the

Indians have entirely died away and their tongues have perished with them, the world will have preserved” a record of their existence.825 Notably, as this article illustrates, the recording and preservation of tangible and intangible Native cultures were meant to be a record for future generations of Euro-Americans, not for Native peoples themselves, who were assumed to be dying off. Several Native California community members, however, would not accept such a racist and foregone conclusion, and agreed to work collaboratively with Alfred L. Kroeber and his staff to document their cultures as an historical record for everyone, both Native and non-

Native alike.

823 “The Museum of Anthropology of the University of California,” Science 34, no. 884 (December 8, 1911): 794.

824 Peabody, MSS 999-24, UC Berkeley, Anthropology Museum Guide Flyer, 1918.

825 “Seek to Learn Tribe Secrets,” San Francisco Call, CA, June 11, 1906.

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Ralph Moore, a member of the Yuki peoples of northern California, was one of the first

Native collaborators to travel to San Francisco and work with Kroeber and his staff. Although the purpose of Moore’s 1902 visit was to correct inaccuracies in the anthropologists’ depictions of his culture, local newspapers nevertheless focused on the seemingly humorous notion of “an

Indian . . . who could teach the University professors a thing or two.” According to the San

Francisco Call of March 16, 1902, Moore wanted to “set the Department of Anthropology right about some matters that it did not understand.” In addition to dictating and recording Yuki songs and stories onto wax cylinders via a phonograph machine, Moore also reportedly “taught the scientists the use of the relics which they had gathered” for the museum collections. Although

Ralph Moore’s exact feelings about the museum and its representation of his culture are not known, the San Francisco Call reported that he took “an immense pride in making permanent the lore of his tribe.”826

At least one Native California community member who was less pleased with the work of the UC Berkeley Anthropology Museum was Dick Ruddick, a leader of the Yokayo Pomo peoples of northern California. After members of Kroeber’s staff excavated a Yokayo Pomo burial ground and removed several skeletons to the museum in 1906, Ruddick sought legal counsel, accusing the anthropologists of grave-robbing. Perhaps surprisingly, a number of the local San Francisco Bay area newspapers agreed with the Yokayo Pomo community. The San

Francisco Call on September 9th of that year reported that “certain learned anthropologers” of the University of California had been accused of “lawless and inconsiderate digging in the Indian burial grounds of the Northern Coast Range Mountains.” The anonymous reporter further noted

826 Frederick Alexander Long, “‘The Kingdom Must Come Soon’: The Role of A.L. Kroeber and the Hearst Survey in Shaping California Anthropology, 1901-1920,” (MA thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1998), 39; “An Indian Who Gave Our College Professors Pointers,” San Francisco Call, CA, March 16, 1902.

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that the museum contained “whole rooms filled to the ceiling with Indian skulls, the spoil of

California graveyards.” “How many funerals go to the making of a museum,” the reporter asked newspaper readers. “It seems that nothing is safe or sacred from the accursed greed of science.”

Public reaction and the threat of legal action eventually convinced the Anthropology Museum staff to return the Yokayo Pomo peoples’ ancestors, along with payment covering reinterment of the dead.827

The actions of the UC Berkeley Anthropology Museum staff in this instance were hardly unprecedented. Though not a common occurrence, stories depicting anthropologists as grave- robbers did occasionally surface in the media. Franz Boas, for instance, was known to have angered a number of First Nations communities in British Columbia in 1888 for collecting human skulls. In spite of considering it “repugnant work,” Boas justified his actions by accepting the belief that “someone has to do it.” He subsequently had a photographer distract the local villagers while he collected their ancestors’ remains for sale to museums around the globe.828

Similarly, the founder of the Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Heye, was arrested in 1914 and fined $100 on a charge of “robbing and desecrating the old Indian graves in the Minisink Burying Ground” in Sussex County, . Although Heye appealed the case, arguing his work constituted “scientific investigation and research,” the fine was imposed, and he eventually paid the amount.829 Years later, in 1929, the Decatur Herald published a related piece on a group of University of Illinois anthropologists “desecrating the dead and disturbing the rest” of the ancestors of “Chief Clement Bear of the Winnebagoes.” The article’s author

827 “The Scientific Grave Robber,” San Francisco Call, CA, September 9, 1906; Long, “Kingdom Must Come Soon,” 105.

828 Cole, Franz Boas, 112.

829 “Heye Indian Relics To Be Brought Here,” New York Times, NY, September 28, 1916.

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opined that Clement Bear “should be treated with consideration and his objections respected.”

The author then closed by supplying readers with the thought, “Grave robbery, even in the interest of scientific and historic research, is a rather dubious business.”830 Media accounts such as these illustrate that although the public generally favored ethnological research and museum representation of contemporary American Indians, by the early twentieth century at least some non-Native peoples saw the anthropological collecting and exhibition of Native human remains as problematic, if not decidedly wrong.

The University of California, Berkeley, Anthropology Department and Museum represented Native American cultures to the public in a number of ways, including via academic teaching, scholarly and popular publications, lectures, and museum exhibitions. The

Anthropology Department offered courses on American Ethnology and Linguistics as early as the 1901-1902 academic school year. The department’s stated aim in this instruction included first, the training of professional anthropologists, and second, presenting a general knowledge of the subject to those desirous of such, but who chose not to pursue a career in the field. By 1909 a typical anthropology course syllabus included required readings by familiar names in the discipline such as Franz Boas, Frank Hamilton Cushing, George A. Dorsey, James Mooney, John

Wesley Powell, and Clark Wissler.831 Enrollment increased so rapidly within the first decade of the department’s existence that by 1911 the Anthropology faculty could boast of 120 students in the introductory course, “all that our room will accommodate,” noted Kroeber enthusiastically.

Hand in hand with academic instruction were the department’s publications representing Native peoples. By November of 1914 works currently in press awaiting publication included those by

830 “More Grave Robbing,” Decatur Herald, IL, September 16, 1929.

831 Putnam and Kroeber, Department of Anthropology, 35; Peabody, MSS 999-24, UC Berkeley, Anthropology Department Syllabus, 1909.

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anthropology staff members Alfred L. Kroeber, Pliny Goddard, and T.T. Waterman, among others.832

Lectures were also an early component of the Anthropology Department and Museum’s efforts to reach a wide public. Both Frederic Ward Putnam and Alice C. Fletcher delivered talks soon after the department’s founding in September of 1901 on “Methods of Anthropological

Research” and “Ethnological Study of the Indians,” respectively.833 One decade later Kroeber reported to Putnam the massive uptick in museum attendance, specifically due to an arrangement between museum staff and the local Superintendent of schools. Each week between 150 and 200 area schoolchildren visited the museum for a thirty-minute illustrated lecture, followed by a guided educational tour through the exhibition halls. In addition to student visitors, Kroeber also wrote of the museum’s “regular clientele,” eager to attend weekly lectures offered on Sundays.

In little more than three years after its official 1911 opening, then, museum attendance held steady at approximately 25,000 people per year. What drew in the largest number of visitors, however, were the museum’s exhibition halls, full of displays of exotic objects of “unusual interest.”834

Since the Anthropology Museum’s inception in 1901, its mission of surveying the

Indigenous communities of California was ultimately directed towards collections and exhibitions.835 By 1920 the museum included exhibition halls displaying material culture objects

832 Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, A.L. Kroeber to F.W. Putnam corr., October 5, 1911; Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, A.L. Kroeber to F.W. Putnam corr., November 11, 1914.

833 “Anthropology at the University of California,” 619.

834 Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, A.L. Kroeber to F.W. Putnam corr., October 5, 1911; Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, A.L. Kroeber to F.W. Putnam corr., November 11, 1914; Peabody, MSS 999-24, “Museum Guide of Unusual Interest,” 1920.

835 Putnam and Kroeber, Department of Anthropology, 21.

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of various regions throughout North America. A published “Guide to Selected Objects of

Unusual Interest” highlighted these regions and included a few of the more notable objects exhibited in each. For instance, while the “Alaskan Indian Collection” contained a toboggan- style dog sleigh, the “Plains Indian Collection” displayed a complete working model of a tipi, and not far away, a “White girl’s scalp, taken and mounted by an Indian.” Similarly, the

“Southwestern Indian Hall” exhibited a stone mill purportedly used by one of Geronimo’s wives, as well as the skull of a “Cliff-Dweller child.”

Perhaps the biggest public draw of the different Native American exhibition halls was that devoted to the Indigenous peoples of California. In addition to plaster life masks and busts taken of living American Indians, the “California Indian Hall” also contained “famous feathered baskets of the Pomo Indians” described in the guide as “a superb and distinctive local product.”

Finally, exhibited just a few short years after his death, this hall also featured several

“implements” and arrowheads created by Ishi, “the last Yahi,” during his residence as a boarder in the UC Berkeley Anthropology Museum between 1911 and 1916.836

Through its actions and representations, the University of California, Berkeley,

Anthropology Museum was neither an advocate for, nor particularly sympathetic towards, Native peoples. Like its counterparts further east in Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC, the San

Francisco-based Anthropology Museum regularly represented American Indians as living in a timeless ethnographic present, separated from modern society in a nebulous pre-European contact age. Because of this, when the public consumed these anthropological representations via academic instruction, publications, lectures, and exhibitions, they resultingly ignored or

836 Putnam and Kroeber, Department of Anthropology, 33; Peabody, MSS 999-24, “Museum Guide of Unusual Interest,” 1920.

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misunderstood the suffering and deplorable living conditions of contemporary Native peoples.

They were not taught, and thus did not fully understand, the contextual linkages between the arrival of Euro-American settlers onto Native lands, and the slaughter and theft of land which ensued, resulting in the continued discrimination and oppression of Native peoples into their twentieth-century world. To many of these non-Native consumers of anthropology, Native

Americans existed in a remote, romanticized past, absent from the ’s recent settlement, and equally absent from the present.

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SECTION 6-1

ALFRED L. KROEBER (1876-1960)

Figure 80. Alfred L. Kroeber, ca. 1900 UC Berkeley, BANC PIC 1978.128

Later to become the dominant figure in California anthropology, Alfred Louis Kroeber was originally born in 1876 in Hoboken, New Jersey, but raised from a young age in New York

City. The eldest son of a financially well-to-do family of German ancestry, he received private tutoring before matriculating at Columbia University in 1892 at the age of sixteen. Studying there under Franz Boas, Kroeber received Columbia’s first PhD in anthropology in 1901.837 He married twice in his life, first in 1906 to Henriette Rothschild whom he had met at a meeting of the Folklore Society some months earlier. Henriette contracted tuberculosis soon after they were married, and died a few years later in 1913.838 Kroeber married for a second time in 1926 to

837 Ira Jacknis, “The First Boasian: Alfred Kroeber and Franz Boas, 1896-1905,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 2 (June 2002): 520-521; Jacknis, “Anthropological Archives,” 211-212.

838 Theodora Kroeber, Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 77; Julian H. Steward, “Alfred Louis Kroeber, 1876-1960,” American Anthropologist 63, no. 5 (October 1961): 1046.

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Theodora Kracaw, one of his former students and a woman twenty-one years his junior.839 The two spent the next thirty-four years together, until Kroeber’s death in 1960.

Kroeber’s professional anthropological work essentially consisted of employment at only two institutions throughout his entire life: the American Museum of Natural History in New

York during his graduate years at Columbia University, and the University of California,

Berkeley’s Anthropology Department and Museum from 1901 until his retirement in 1946. Due to Franz Boas’s dual positions at both Columbia and the AMNH during these years, Boas not only supervised Kroeber’s classroom and dissertation work at the former, but was also his direct superior at the latter. While in the employ of the AMNH, Kroeber conducted ethnographic fieldwork with a number of Plains Indian communities. For instance, in 1899 he traveled to the

Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation in Oklahoma where he first met Cleaver Warden, a Southern

Inunaina (Arapaho) man and Carlisle Indian School graduate. Warden had previously worked with Bureau of American Ethnology anthropologist James Mooney, and would later go on to collaborate with George A. Dorsey at the Field Museum in Chicago as well.840 The following year Kroeber visited the Northern Inunaina (Arapaho), Northern Ute, Bannock, and Northern

Shoshone peoples of Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah, and in 1901 conducted fieldwork with the

A’aninin (Gros Ventre) and communities of Montana.841

After receiving his PhD from Columbia in 1901, Kroeber accepted a position as

Instructor at the recently created University of California, Berkeley, Anthropology Department

839 Grace Wilson Buzaljko, “Theodora Kracaw Kroeber,” in Women Anthropologists: Selected Biographies, ed., Ute Gacs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 187-189; California Marriage Records, 1850-1941, Ancestry.com.

840 Bol, “Collecting Symbolism,” 111; Mooney, “Indian Ghost Dance,” 171-172; Almazan and Coleman, “Dorsey,” 96.

841 Jacknis, “First Boasian,” 522.

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and Museum, funded by philanthropist Phoebe Hearst. According to Kroeber, among other responsibilities, this employment opportunity included “collecting the language and ethnology of the Indians” of California, as well as instructing undergraduate and graduate classes.842 Later the

Berkeley-based Daily Californian newspaper also reported Hearst’s appointment of Frederic

Ward Putnam as Professor in the university’s Anthropology Department and Director of its

Anthropology Museum. The article noted that by securing “one of the foremost men in the

United States,” the university strengthened the Anthropology Department and endowed it with

“great prestige.” Despite his acceptance, Putnam could devote only a few months each year to the administration of anthropology at Berkeley, as he still retained his positions at both Harvard

University and the Peabody Museum, and had until quite recently also chaired the Anthropology

Department at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.843 Due to their long- distance working relationship, then, Kroeber and Putnam resorted to frequent communication via letters sent from one side of the country to the other.

Soon after accepting his new West Coast position, Alfred L. Kroeber wrote to John

Wesley Powell, Director of the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution, and requested to know what linguistic and ethnological material the BAE had previously collected in California, so as to “avoid useless duplication of work already done.”844 Under

Putnam’s direction, Kroeber instituted surveys of Indigenous communities throughout the state, modeling his efforts after the work undertaken by Powell’s BAE staff in recent decades.

842 “New Professors for University,” San Francisco Call, CA, August 26, 1901; NAA, BAE, A.L. Kroeber to J.W. Powell corr., October 4, 1901.

843 “University Secures the Services of Prof. Putnam,” Daily Californian, CA, September 10, 1903; Boas, “Putnam,” 331.

844 NAA, BAE, A.L. Kroeber to J.W. Powell corr., October 4, 1901.

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Throughout his nearly half-century of anthropological work on the West Coast, Kroeber collaborated with a large number of Native men and women who sought to represent and document their cultures for present and future generations. Among these individuals, three of the most notable over the years were Ishi, Juan Dolores, and Robert Spott.

Figure 81. Ishi When First “Captured” in Oroville, California, August 1911 UC, San Francisco, Library, University Archives

Ishi, popularly known as “the last Yahi,” “the last aborigine,” or “the last wild Indian in

North America,” was a member of the Yahi people who lived in Tehama County, in northern

California, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As his Native name was sacred and unable to be spoken by non-Yahi people, Kroeber dubbed him Ishi, or “man,” in the Yana language.845

According to a 1912 publication by Kroeber, Euro-American settlers in the wake of the

California “practically exterminated” the Yahi community in the year 1865. The remaining five survivors of this “massacre,” two men, two women, and the child Ishi, reportedly took refuge in an inaccessible canyon near Deer Creek in Tehama County where they spent the

845 Robert F. Heizer and Theodora Kroeber, eds., Ishi the Last Yahi: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Alfred L. Kroeber, “Ishi, the Last Aborigine,” World’s Work 24 (July 1912): 304-308; Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds, 127-128.

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next four decades hiding from the invaders of their ancestral homeland. By 1911 the other members of Ishi’s family had all died, and while out seeking food, or perhaps companionship, local residents near Oroville “captured” him and held him in the Butte County jail until staff of

UC Berkeley’s Anthropology Department arrived.846

Without family or a home to return to, an emaciated Ishi agreed to travel to San

Francisco, where he lived for the remaining five years of his life. Though initially unable to communicate with each other, Kroeber, Ishi, and other members of the Anthropology Museum staff eventually succeeded in making themselves understood. Accordingly, soon after Ishi’s arrival in the city, the Bureau of Indian Affairs detailed a special agent to help plan for Ishi’s future, offering to either return him to Deer Creek in Tehama County, or to instead live among other Native peoples under the federal government’s care. Ishi responded to the BIA agent via his interpreter, “I want to stay where I am. I will grow old here, and die in this house [meaning the museum].” When asked why he did not wish to return to his home near Deer Creek, Ishi replied that everyone there was dead, there was not enough food to eat, and only evil spirits remained in that place. Relatedly, however, Ishi was also said to have had some “misgivings” about residing in the museum, primarily due to the presence of skeletons and other human remains contained in the building’s anthropological collections.847

In spite of his “misgivings,” Ishi chose to remain a resident in the museum, where

Kroeber referred to him as a “permanent boarder.” Within a month of Ishi’s arrival at the museum, Kroeber wrote to Putnam, apprising him that although he and his staff were “still in the

846 Kroeber, “Ishi, the Last Aborigine,” 304; Philip H. Kinsley, “Untainted Life Revealed by Aborigine,” San Francisco Examiner, CA, September 6, 1911.

847 Kroeber, “Ishi, the Last Aborigine,” 306; Saxton T. Pope, “The Medical History of Ishi,” University of California Publication in American Archaeology and Ethnology 13, no. 5 (1920): 178-198.

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dark in regard to many matters about him,” Ishi was “very happy and contented,” and notably,

“getting fat.” Further, as Ishi had declared “that he wants to stay with us the rest of his life,”

Kroeber was confident that they would have “ample time and opportunity to pump him” for more ethnographic information later. On March 18, 1912, Kroeber wrote again to Putnam, informing him that Ishi “earns his living, at least partially, by acting as assistant to Poyser [the custodian] in cleaning up” the museum.848 In addition to his janitorial work, of course, Ishi was also quite busy as a museum attraction himself.

Figure 82. R.B. Dixon and Ishi in Front of the Museum at Affiliated Colleges, San Francisco, California, ca. 1914 NMAI P07734

Soon after his arrival in San Francisco, Ishi visited the museum’s “specimens of the

Indian tribes of California,” and was reportedly delighted with the collection, of which he gave interesting bits of information, correcting the original anthropological record in many cases. Ishi also regularly demonstrated his skills at archery and at chipping arrowheads before an enthusiastic group of lay and scholarly visitors who closely observed him day in and day out.

848 Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, A.L. Kroeber to F.W. Putnam corr., October 5, 1911; Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, A.L. Kroeber to F.W. Putnam corr., March 18, 1912.

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The latter group took particular advantage of Ishi’s residence at the museum as a rare research opportunity. A reporter from the San Francisco Examiner likened the situation to one in which the museum staff put Ishi “under the microscope” for examination. This reporter further remarked that the anthropologists carried notebooks and jotted down everything Ishi did, studying him “as a new species of insect.” A recent historian has similarly described Ishi’s existence at the UC Berkeley Anthropology Museum as though he was under an extreme form of surveillance. “Every aspect of his behavior,” this historian noted, “his gestures, his posture, the way he ate, the way he walked – was observed, described and documented.”849 After a little less than five years of this new life, Ishi contracted tuberculosis and died suddenly in March of 1916.

He was approximately fifty-five years old.

Not surprisingly, popular newspapers and scholarly journals alike frequently published stories about Ishi beginning from the moment of his emergence into the public limelight near

Oroville, California, in 1911 until his death in San Francisco five years later. For example, on

August 29, 1911, the Oroville Register reported, “An aboriginal Indian . . . was taken into custody last evening . . . Not a single word of English does he know . . . Where he came from is a mystery.” The following week the San Francisco Examiner quoted Kroeber in describing Ishi as

“the most uncivilized and uncontaminated man in the world today,” and further declaring Ishi’s

“capture” as of the utmost importance to science.850 Importantly, although Kroeber often used words such as “wild” and “primitive” to characterize Ishi, he also stressed in his public interviews that there was “nothing undeveloped about him.” Confronting negative stereotypes of

849 “Tribe Survivor Counts to Five, But That’s All,” San Francisco Call, CA, September 7, 1911; Kinsley, “Untainted Life Revealed by Aborigine,” San Francisco Examiner, CA, September 6, 1911; Long, “Kingdom Must Come Soon,” 159-163.

850 Oroville Register, CA, August 29, 1911; Kinsley, “Untainted Life Revealed by Aborigine,” San Francisco Examiner, CA, September 6, 1911.

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Ishi then circulating in the press, Kroeber wrote in the July 1912 issue of the popular periodical

The World’s Work, “Ishi himself is no nearer the ‘missing link’ or any antecedent form of human life than we are.” Rather, Kroeber insisted, Ishi was “thoroughly normal.”851 Unfortunately, not all depictions of him in the popular press were as favorable.

The day after Ishi revealed himself to the citizens of Butte County in 1911, the local

Oroville Register tellingly labeled the massacre of Ishi’s community as simply an expected outcome of the Yahi peoples’ “frequent depredations upon the white settlers” of the area. The newspaper made no mention of the Euro-Americans’ never-ending desire for more land, or their rampant abuse of Native peoples. Much more overt, however, was the language utilized by the

Chico Record newspaper in the days immediately following Ishi’s death. On March 28, 1916, a featured piece in this paper alleged that although “Ishi, the man primeval” had “furnished amusement and study to the savants at the University of California for a number of years,” the article’s author did not see Ishi as “the marvel that the professors would have the public believe.”

Instead, Ishi was “just a starved-out Indian from the wilds of Deer Creek who, by hiding in its fastnesses, was able to long escape the white man’s pursuit.”852 Such negative views, though rare in the extant records about Ishi, nevertheless reveal an underlying antipathy and racism towards the Indigenous peoples of California still felt by many non-Native Americans in the early twentieth century.

Another of Alfred L. Kroeber’s Native collaborators during his many years of anthropological work in California was Juan Dolores. Also known as Juan Lolorias, Dolores was

851 Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, A.L. Kroeber to F.W. Putnam corr., October 5, 1911; Kroeber, “Ishi, the Last Aborigine,” 308; Alfred L. Kroeber, “It’s All Too Much for Ishi, Says the Scientist,” San Francisco Call, CA, October 8, 1911.

852 Oroville Register, CA, August 29, 1911; “Ishi’s Death – A Chico Commentary,” Chico Record, CA, March 28, 1916.

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a Tohono O’odham (Papago) man born in either northern Mexico or southern Arizona in June of

1880. In his youth he attended Indian Boarding Schools in New Mexico and Kansas before entering the Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1898. Dolores graduated from the latter in either

1900 or 1901. He married at least once in his life, though was divorced at the time of his death in

1948.853

Figure 83. Juan Dolores, ca. 1930 UC Berkeley, BANC PIC 1978.128

By 1909 Dolores lived in the San Francisco area, where he first met Alfred L. Kroeber.

Interested in documenting the “culture and speech of his people,” Dolores worked as a collaborator for the UC Berkeley Anthropology Museum, largely collecting texts and linguistic data.854 In a March 1912 letter to Putnam, Kroeber mentioned having already worked several times with Juan Dolores, “a Papago Indian” who aided the work of the museum staff. Six years later, in 1918, Dolores worked as a university Research Fellow, conducting fieldwork among the

Tohono O’odham (Papago) communities near Tucson, Arizona. He reportedly recorded “the

853 Alfred L. Kroeber, “Juan Dolores, 1880-1948,” American Anthropologist 51, no. 1 (January-March 1949): 96; “Returned Indians,” Southern Workman 39, no. 3 (March 1910): 191; Arizona, Death Records, 1887-1960, Ancestry.com.

854 Kroeber, “Dolores,” 96; Long, “Kingdom Must Come Soon,” 169-172.

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tongue of the Papagoes” via a phonograph machine, and also transcribed his people’s stories, customs, and songs. Dolores continued to work for the UC Berkeley Anthropology Department and Museum for the next several decades, including as both a security guard and later a

“Museum Preparator,” before retiring in 1948.855 At the end of his life, Dolores moved back to

Arizona, where he died on July 19, 1948, at the age of sixty-eight, less than a month after retiring.

Juan Dolores’s name, unlike that of his Native contemporary Ishi, did not often occur in the popular media of his day. Among the few references to the man and his work are those written by Kroeber himself, as well as a small number of newspaper articles published over the years. In Dolores’ obituary appearing in the American Anthropologist of 1949, Kroeber described him as “steady” and “completely loyal to old friends.” Typical of Kroeber and his generation of museum anthropologists who largely proved unable to distance themselves from racial generalizations, Kroeber also noted Dolores’ “Indian temperament,” which made him

“thoroughly suspicious or at least watchful of what was new.”856

The San Francisco Call newspaper of February 18, 1909, also published a short piece on

Dolores’s ethnographic work, wherein the anonymous reporter described Dolores as “well educated,” and a “chieftain of the [Tohono O’odham (Papago)] tribe.” Revealing an inherent bias toward Native peoples and their belief systems, the reporter poignantly wrote that Dolores had been “weaned away from the usual superstitions of the red man” during his education at the

Hampton Institute.857 This same article celebrating Dolores and his work with the UC Berkeley

855 San Francisco, U.S. City Directories, 1822-1995, Ancestry.com; 1940 U.S. Federal Census, California, Ancestry.com; Kroeber, “Dolores,” 97.

856 Kroeber, “Dolores,” 97.

857 San Francisco Call, CA, February 18, 1909.

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Anthropology Museum was picked up and later re-published by a number of popular media outlets throughout the country including the National Indian Association’s The Indian’s Friend, and the Hampton Institute’s monthly journal The Southern Workman.858

Figure 84. Robert Spott, 1933 NAA INV 01511500

The third of Kroeber’s Native collaborators who chose to work with him during this period was Robert Spott. Spott, also known as Robert Frank Spott or Robert Frank, was a member of the Yurok community of northern California, and was born in Weitchpec, Humboldt

County, in August of 1888. Though at the time not considered deserving of U.S. citizenship due to his Native heritage, Spott nevertheless served in World War I, later stating, “I did make up my mind in the war that I am American and I went across overseas to fight for this country.”859

Despite fighting in the trenches and being “gassed” in , Spott survived and received the

Croix de Guerre for exceptional bravery upon his return. He never married or had any children,

858 “The Papago Language to Be ‘Canned,’” Indian’s Friend 21, no. 11 (July 1909): 8; “Returned Indians,” 191.

859 California, Index to Census Rolls of Indians, 1928-1933, Ancestry.com; Robert Spott, “Address,” Transactions of the Commonwealth Club of California 21, no. 3 (1926): 133.

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but was a leader of his people, serving for a number of years as Chairman of the Yurok Tribal

Council.860

Spott first met Alfred L. Kroeber in 1900, and worked with him on a number of ethnographic projects throughout the years, including their co-authored Yurok Narratives, published in 1942. Spott was not alone among the Yurok people to collaborate with Kroeber in documenting his culture, as he followed in the footsteps of his father, uncle, and various friends who lived along the Klamath River. Kroeber later wrote in Spott’s obituary that he was known to every anthropologist who visited the Yurok. Alfred’s widow, Theodora, penned in her husband’s biography that they all considered Spott a close family friend, with him visiting often before his death in 1953 at the age of sixty-five.861

Both Alfred and Theodora Kroeber later wrote of Spott after his death, informing the public of his “sensitivity,” “sympathy,” and devotion to his community. Theodora recalled that

Spott was “passionately and committedly interested in understanding and knowing everything which was part of the Yurok world,” and, notably, was willing to share this knowledge with non-

Yurok and non-Native peoples. Alfred recorded that although much knowledge of his people died with him, Spot also communicated much through his ethnological endeavors. Perhaps not surprisingly, though, Kroeber also utilized racist and generalized language to describe Spott, noting that in spite of his Yurok heritage, he was remarkably free of his peoples’ “tendency to irascibility, envy, or vindictiveness.” Such wording mirrors that used by Kroeber five years earlier in his description of Juan Dolores in the latter’s obituary.862

860 Kroeber, Alfred Kroeber, 159-160; Alfred L. Kroeber, “Robert Spott, 1888-1953,” American Anthropologist 56, no. 2 (April 1954): 282.

861 Kroeber, “Spott,” 282; Kroeber, Alfred Kroeber, 159-160.

862 Kroeber, “Spott,” 282; Kroeber, Alfred Kroeber, 159-160; Kroeber, “Dolores,” 97.

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Robert Spott, like fellow Native collaborators Ishi and Juan Dolores, chose to work with non-Native anthropologists in order to accurately portray and represent their Indigenous cultures to the public. Spott, however, went a step further in being a vocal advocate for the welfare and rights of his community members. In a 1926 address before the Commonwealth Club of

California in San Francisco, Spott informed his audience that the California Indians were “almost at the end of the road.” Critical of the poor agricultural land the U.S. government allotted to the

Yurok people, Spott attacked depictions of Native laziness, stating that he and his people would willingly farm if the land was any good, declaring, “We cannot raise anything upon rocks or in gravel.” He argued that something had to be done immediately, or there would be “hardly any

Indians left upon the Klamath River” in four or five years’ time. Spott closed his address by urging his fellow audience members and friends to aid him in winning his country back. “I am not looking out for myself only,” he said. “I am looking out for the rest of the tribe.”863

These three Native men represented just a fraction of the number of Indigenous peoples with whom Alfred L. Kroeber worked in an anthropological career that spanned six decades.

After retiring from the UC Berkley Anthropology Department and Museum in 1946, Kroeber continued to pursue cultural anthropology and archaeology, in addition to teaching and attending professional academic conferences. A few weeks after chairing a symposium on

“Anthropological Horizons” in Austria, Kroeber died on October 5, 1960, at the age of eighty- four, while he and his wife Theodora were vacationing in , France.864

Kroeber and the Public

863 Spott, “Address,” 133-135.

864 John Howland Rowe, “Alfred Louis Kroeber,” American Antiquity 27, no. 3 (January 1962): 395; Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, Ancestry.com.

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While few Native-written descriptions of Alfred L. Kroeber exist in the historical record, the media, his non-Native contemporaries, and later historians have portrayed Kroeber and his anthropological work in a generally positive light. As early as August of 1901, the San Francisco

Call newspaper reported on this “eminent anthropologist” and recently appointed “instructor in

Indian anthropology” who was working “to rescue the folklore and languages of the American

Indians before they perish absolutely.” Embracing the notion of the “vanishing Indian,” both museum anthropologists and newspapers impressed upon the public the need for greater and immediate study, simultaneously fueling the salvage anthropology movement at the turn of the century.865

Not known to often dole out praise of others, Kroeber’s former professor and mentor,

Franz Boas, commended Kroeber’s ethnographic and linguistic capabilities, and in one letter referred to him as “a painstaking and industrious worker.”866 More effusive than Boas, anthropologist Julian Steward wrote in Kroeber’s obituary that the latter had developed one of the world’s great research museums. In addition, Steward also claimed that Kroeber had played a major role in making American anthropology a “coherent, scientific, and academic discipline,” a decided change from the “random endeavors of amateurs and self-trained men” it had been when

Kroeber first entered the field. More recent historians have focused on Kroeber’s relationship with his anthropological forebears and mentors, Frederic Ward Putnam and Franz Boas, and how these three men largely instituted anthropology as an academic discipline across the country, from Massachusetts, to New York, and eventually to California, in little more than a decade.867

865 “New Professors for University,” San Francisco Call, CA, August 26, 1901; Dippie, Vanishing American, 233.

866 APS, MSS B.B.61, F. Boas to C. Walcott corr., December 7, 1903; AMNH, Anthropology, F. Boas to Low corr., February 28, 1900.

867 Steward, “Kroeber,” 1039; Jacknis, “First Boasian,” 524.

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Although Kroeber regularly curated museum exhibitions and presented lectures to the public, he was best known for his academic teaching and his frequent publications on the

Indigenous peoples of the Americas. In this way, Kroeber represented a new generation of anthropologists who were trained in universities under the likes of Franz Boas, rather than simply possessing natural talent and a passion for ethnology, as many of the earlier generation had been who were employed at the Bureau of American Ethnology. Beginning as an Instructor in the UC Berkeley Anthropology Department in 1901, Kroeber trained future generations of professional anthropologists as well as educating thousands of undergraduate and graduate students during the next four decades of his career. Kroeber did not confine himself to teaching and publishing for scholarly audiences, however. He also regularly published in popular periodicals and newspapers, representing Native American cultures to a diverse public.868 For instance, during Ishi’s residency at the Anthropology Museum from 1911 to 1916, Kroeber wrote numerous articles geared for a general audience ostensibly about Ishi, but also intended to popularize anthropology. One of Kroeber’s most grandiose plans, though, was the publication of his Handbook of the Indians of California, modeled after the Bureau of American Ethnology’s earlier Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico. In correspondence with the editor of the

BAE’s work, Frederick Webb Hodge, Kroeber emphasized that the California Handbook should be specialized enough for anthropologists, but general enough for the public.869

Although occasionally sympathetic towards the suffering and marginalization of contemporary Native Americans, Alfred L. Kroeber was hardly an advocate for their causes or rights. Following in the footsteps of Franz Boas and John Wesley Powell, Kroeber viewed

868 Alfred L. Kroeber, “At the Bedrock of History,” Sunset 25, no. 3 (September 1910): 255-260.

869 Noelke, “Origin and Early History,” 240; Long, “Kingdom Must Come Soon,” 198.

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himself as a scientifically-removed scholar, or as one recent historian described him, an adherent of the Boasian canon of objectivity. Although he and his fellow anthropologists strove to create an enduring archive of Native American cultures, their intended audience was other scholars, not

Native peoples themselves. That is not to say that Kroeber was always cold or uncaring towards those American Indians with whom he worked closely. A notable illustration of his personal feelings towards Ishi, for instance, occurred in the immediate wake of Ishi’s death. When medical professionals wanted to perform an autopsy on his body, Kroeber purportedly replied,

“If there is any talk of the interests of science, say for me that science can go to hell. We propose to stand by our friends.”870

Aside from his concern over Ishi’s remains, and later some isolated work defending

Indian land claims in the 1950s, Kroeber largely remained silent regarding issues affecting those in Indian Country.871 More long-lasting, though, were Kroeber’s representations of Native peoples consumed by a largely non-Native public. By classifying Indigenous peoples into anthropological types and depicting them as existing in a timeless ethnographic present, Kroeber and many other museum anthropologists negated Native individuality and the historical context which led to the current state of affairs on many Indian Reservations.872 The public, accordingly, consumed these representations, accepting the idea that Native peoples were equal to non-

Natives, as in the case of Ishi, but also different, living “outside the temporal bounds of modern society.”873 In essence, Alfred Kroeber depicted Native peoples via his academic teaching,

870 Buckley, “Little History,” 277; Jacknis, “Anthropological Archives,” 217; Kroeber, Alfred Kroeber, 92.

871 Buckley, “Little History,” 275-276.

872 Thomas Buckley, “Suffering in the Cultural Construction of Others: Robert Spott and A.L. Kroeber,” American Indian Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Autumn 1989): 439.

873 Deloria, Playing Indian, 93-94.

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exhibitions, lectures, and publications as free from contemporary suffering and colonial oppression. The hundreds of thousands of Americans who consumed Kroeber’s representations over the years ended up believing likewise. As a result, vast numbers of the American public disregarded the centuries of conflict and abuse which still continued up to the present day.

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EXPOSITION 4

1904 ST. LOUIS WORLD’S FAIR

Figure 85. U.S. Indian School Band, St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904 NAA, BAE Neg. 15582

“Here we have the biggest aggregation of Indians ever consummated, the greatest of anthropological exhibitions to educate you, the grandest of savage spectacles to amaze you, and all for half a dollar!”874 Such was the cry of the barker on the main thoroughfare of the 1904 St.

Louis World’s Fair. Much like the expositions which had proceeded it in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Omaha, “progress” was the catchword of the day, and this World’s Fair, commemorating the centennial of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, highlighted all that the young nation had accomplished over the past century. Accordingly, the fair’s exhibits reflected Euro-American progress, domination, and superiority over much of the North American continent, including the land and its Indigenous inhabitants.

The President of the St. Louis World’s Fair, David R. Francis, emphasized this idea of humankind’s linear progress, lauding the fair’s anthropological exhibitions for displaying “actual human development from savagery and barbarism toward enlightenment.”875 WJ McGee, Chair

874 “Savage and Civilized Indians on Show at St. Louis,” Sun, NY, July 31, 1904.

875 David R. Francis, The Universal Exposition of 1904 (St. Louis: Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company, 1913), 524.

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of the fair’s Anthropology Department, echoed similar comments when declaring that the aim of the anthropological exhibit was “to represent human progress from the darkness of the earliest ages to the highest enlightenment, from savagery to civic organization, from egoism to altruism.”876 Statements such as these provided new scientifically-backed pronouncements on

Euro-American racial dominance at the turn of the twentieth century, while simultaneously reinforcing popular racial stereotypes already held by large segments of the American populace.

It surprised few fairgoers, therefore, to learn that Native Americans, African Americans, and various other “primitive” peoples of the earth occupied those stages of development closest to

“savagery,” while Euro-Americans represented the pinnacle of civilized society.

Figure 86. U.S. “Anthropology Days” Performance in Front of U.S. Indian School, St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904 NAA, BAE Neg. 15608

Fair organizers hired two men to oversee the combined Native American and anthropology exhibits. Samuel McCowan, career Bureau of Indian Affairs employee and ardent assimilation advocate, directed the government’s model Indian School, while WJ McGee, former

Bureau of American Ethnology anthropologist and current American Anthropological

Association President, oversaw the Ethnological Village. McCowan’s exhibit consisted of an operational government Indian School, complete with 150 Native American students on display,

876 “The Development of Man,” Standard Union, NY, August 10, 1903.

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symbolizing “the wisdom” of federal Indian administrative and educational policies. In

McCowan’s words, this exhibit not only exemplified the government’s Indian School system, but also, by contrasting exhibits of “the old Indian and the young, the old life and the modern,” the

Indian School exhibit illustrated the stages of evolution Native American societies were currently undergoing.877

As an educator charged by the government with assimilating American Indian youth into mainstream society, McCowan sought to distance himself and his pupils from anthropological exhibits, dances, sham battles, or anything at the fair resembling a Wild West show. He informed newspaper readers in 1903 that the Indian School exhibit would display “the Indian exactly as he is, and not as fiction has painted him.”878 Wild West shows, McCowan believed, only gratified idle curiosity and pandered to “a desire for sensationalism” while retarding Indian civilization generally, and serving as a positive detriment to Indians who took part in them, specifically.879 In spite of McCowan’s objections, fair organizers, desirous of obtaining the crowds and profits experienced by Chicago at the 1893 World’s Fair, likewise sought out a Wild West show to accompany the exposition. Determining that Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West was too expensive, in the end Colonel Frederick T. Cummins’ “Wild West Show, Indian Congress, and Rough

Riders of the World” set up shop just outside the fairgrounds, where it drew in huge crowds daily.880

877 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 136-137; Samuel M. McCowan, “The Indian Exhibits at the St. Louis Exposition,” in Commissioner of Indian Affairs: Annual Report of the Department of the Interior, Indian Affairs, Part I, for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1904 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905), 54.

878 “Indian Display at World’s Fair Is to Be the Most Elaborate Ever Made,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, MO, November 21, 1903.

879 McCowan, “Indian Exhibits,” 54.

880 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 239-241.

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WJ McGee gained prominence in the late nineteenth century as a leader in the rapidly professionalizing field of anthropology. Working for the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American

Ethnology from 1893 until 1903, he served in a supervisory role as BAE Director John Wesley

Powell’s proxy during the latter’s final years of ill health.881 Additionally, with his efforts to become the voice of American anthropology, and due to his connections with anthropological leaders like Franz Boas and George A. Dorsey, it was not surprising that fair organizers chose

McGee as Chair of the Anthropology Department for the 1904 St. Louis Exposition.882

Figure 87. WJ McGee, 1900 NAA INV 02861200

McGee’s views on racial progress and social evolutionist thought aligned well with those of the fair’s organizers and much of the public at the time.883 Reflecting the nineteenth-century teachings of his forebears Lewis Henry Morgan and John Wesley Powell, McGee believed that

“the world’s tribes and peoples” illustrated concrete steps in the development of “intelligent man.” Thus, through his anthropological exhibits, he sought to teach the ordinary fairgoer that

881 Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 231.

882 Yale, Beinecke, MSS S-1174, WJ McGee to R.H. Pratt corr., August 25, 1902; “Ethnological Pique,” Red Man and Helper, PA, May 27, 1904; Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 35.

883 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 47-48.

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there was an identifiable course of progress running from lower to higher humanity, with the different stages of progress marked by various physical and cultural types. The result of this scientific exhibit, McGee believed, would not only benefit the “intelligent observer” by informing “our half of the world how the other half lives,” but would also ultimately benefit those being exhibited. According to McGee, the less advanced would profit by association with the more advanced, eventually adopting or assimilating aspects of civilization absent in their own societies.884

Espousing that the leading aim of anthropology was “to classify the peoples of the world in convenient and useful ways,” McGee sought the expertise of James Mooney from the BAE and George A. Dorsey from the Field Museum to aid him in this endeavor.885 McGee later detailed his plans with Mooney and Dorsey to create an appropriate display of “primitive peoples” that highlighted Native dress and dwellings, and would also include the performance of

Indigenous ceremonies, games, and athletic competitions known as “Anthropology Days.”886

McGee eventually gathered more than 300 Native American representatives from fifteen different communities, consisting of both individuals and families. Plains Indian communities were most heavily represented, with fifty Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee), thirty-five

Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne), and thirty-five Sicangu Lakota (Rosebud Sioux) individuals on display, but the exhibit also included representatives from more distant North American

884 WJ McGee, “Anthropology at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” Science 22, no. 573 (December 22, 1905): 821-826.

885 McGee, “Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” 813.

886 NAA, BAE, WJ McGee to W.H. Holmes corr., July 1, 1904; Burton Benedict, “World’s Fairs and Anthropology,” Museum Anthropology 5, no. 2 (April 1981): 5-6; Francis, Universal Exposition, 523.

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communities, such as the Akimel O’odham (Pima) in Arizona, Chippewa in Minnesota, and

Yokayo Pomo in California.887

McGee was not content to exhibit North America’s Indigenous peoples alone, however.

To represent progress and social evolution on a truly global scale, McGee also gathered Ainu representatives from Japan, “Pygmies” or Mbuti and Twa peoples from central Africa,

Patagonian “giants” from South America, and examples of “true savages” from the United

States’ most recently acquired territory, the Philippines.888 Throughout the duration of the

Louisiana Purchase Exposition from April until December of 1904, many of these individuals lived on the fairgrounds. There they existed as objects of entertainment, education, and as foils against which to compare Euro-American progress and biological superiority. Public consumption of these views perfectly aligned with McGee’s ultimate goal of assembling “human types,” not only as a source of attraction, but to serve “serious ends” for the edification of the

American public.889

The St. Louis Exposition and the Public

Although unable to match the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair in terms of attendance figures, the 1904 St. Louis Exposition was still wildly successful, numbering nearly twenty million total admissions over a seven-month period. In short, the public loved the fair, and a great many specifically remarked on the “interesting” and “instructive” anthropological exhibits. Visitors to

887 Jacknis, Storage Box of Tradition, 89; Samuel M. McCowan, “United States Government Indian Exhibit,” in Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 344.

888 Jacknis, Storage Box of Tradition, 89; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 163, 172.

889 Eric Breitbart, A World on Display: Photographs from the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 11-12; McGee, “Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” 811, 826.

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the fair, largely unaware of the true diversity of American Indian communities, mistakenly spoke of the exhibit’s representation of “nearly all of the North American tribes of Indians.” In fact, journalists and fairgoers alike couldn’t help but compare the Louisiana Purchase Exposition’s extensive display of Native Americans to those of previous World’s Fairs, such as the “Indian

Congress” at the 1898 Omaha World’s Fair and the “Last Great Congress of the Red Man” on view at the 1901 Buffalo World’s Fair.890

Like the expositions at Philadelphia, Chicago, and Omaha before it, the St. Louis World’s

Fair informed the public that Native American communities were fast disappearing, and in order to see them before they “vanished,” everyone was encouraged to visit the fair. Even before the exposition officially opened, newspapers from as far away as Bridgeport, Connecticut, and

Washington, DC, published articles about the impending “Tribes’ Last Stand,” a solemn pageant and final gathering of “the chieftains and tribes of a dying race.”891 Not surprisingly, both romanticized and exoticized perspectives of American Indian communities came to the fore in newspapers of the day. The Philadelphia Public Ledger of January 23, 1904, for instance, consigned Native peoples to existing in a timeless ethnographic present when it advertised the opportunity for fairgoers to witness “the remnants of the people who lived on earth when the world was yet in its youth.” Another reporter in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of June 19, 1904, compared Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee) Indians to “prehistoric human creatures” who

890 McGee, “Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” 826; William E. Curtis, “Things on the Pike: Where the Freaks o the St. Louis Fair are Kept,” Washington Evening Star, DC, October 22, 1904; “The Racial Exhibit at the St. Louis Fair,” Scientific American 91, no. 24 (December 10, 1904): 412; Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 7.

891 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 10-11; W.C. M’Carty, “The Tribes’ Last Stand,” Bridgeport Herald, CT, December 6, 1903; “Pageant of Red Men,” Washington Post, DC, December 27, 1903.

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burrowed in the ground, in an article about “Pawnee earth lodges” on display in the Ethnological

Village.892

Figure 88. Goyathlay (Geronimo), on Display at the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904 NAA, BAE Neg. 15792

Despite these racist and demeaning characterizations of Native peoples in the anthropological exhibits, at least some fairgoers appeared to have taken away the message that not all American Indians were the same. One visitor writing for Century Magazine, for example, remarked on personality differences between notable Native figures on exhibit, comparing “the fierce Geronimo” of the Chiricahua Apache with “the gentler ” of the Nimi’ipuu

(Nez Perce).893 Likewise, a reporter for the New York Sun utilized social evolutionist language to describe differences in the habits and manners of the Native Americans on display. “Some of these human exhibits talk with you intelligently in faultless English diction,” the reporter wrote,

“while others only grunt in response to the ‘Hows?’ like brainless brutes. Some eat at tables politely with knives, forks and spoons . . . while others sit on their haunches, feed themselves

892 “Note and Comment,” Public Ledger, PA, January 23, 1904; “World’s Fair Earth Lodge Built by Pawnees,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, MO, June 19, 1904.

893 Walter Williams, “Round the World at the World’s Fair: Strange and Curious Sights at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” Century Magazine 68, no. 5 (September 1904): 801.

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hand to mouth, and are watched like beasts at food in a menagerie.”894 Notably, descriptions of this nature reveal as much about those on display as they do about the voyeurism and prejudices of those doing the watching.

Figure 89. Non-Native Visitors Observing Native Americans at St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904 NAA, BAE Neg. 15610

Visitors to the fair absorbed and echoed WJ McGee’s anthropological pronouncements on race, social evolution, and progress about human populations around the globe. For instance, one anonymous fairgoer recorded that after strolling through the Native American exhibits, they were “impressed” by the superiority of North America’s Indigenous peoples over “the average savage tribes of the world,” particularly the “pygmies . . . from the Congo Free State” who were

“intellectually far below the average American Indian.”895 Another gentleman by the name of

Edmund Philibert recorded in his diary his impressions of those on display. While relegating all other people far below the station of Euro-Americans, Philibert did determine that the Ainu representatives from Japan “were not as dirty nor nearly as lazy looking as the Patagonians.”896

Not surprisingly, the public’s jeers and catcalls eventually proved too much for many

Native peoples on display in the anthropological exhibits. Adding to their growing anger and

894 “Savage and Civilized Indians on Show at St. Louis,” Sun, NY, July 31, 1904.

895 “Racial Exhibit,” 414.

896 Missouri Historical Society Archives, Philibert Family Papers, 1852-1930, A1212, Edmund Philibert Diary.

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resentment was the proliferation of handheld Kodak cameras carried by many of the fair’s visitors. As early as July of 1904, only three months after the exposition’s opening, the St. Louis

Republic newspaper reported that cameras were “barred in [the] Indian Village” with visitors

“not permitted to photograph the savage tribes of peoples at the World’s Fair.” According to this article, “the Indians, especially,” were getting cross and had lost their patience with fairgoers’ incessant picture-taking. Native representatives on display reportedly asked the fair’s organizers for protection from “the Kodak fiends.”897

An illuminating example of one such “Kodak fiend” and his unwanted picture-taking is included in Sam P. Hyde’s memoirs from his days at the fair. Writing of “the vicissitudes of

Kodaking,” and imitating the language of big game hunters, Hyde recollected carrying “the

Kodak about all the morning” and not having done “much business,” when suddenly, he spied an

“old savage in all his glory of bead and feather.” “I well knew the antipathy of the Indian to having his picture taken,” Hyde wrote, “but this was such a fine specimen I determined to take the chances.” “I followed him a few paces,” Hyde continued, “and running quickly ahead, passed him and touched the button at the supreme moment.” Unfortunately for Hyde, the object of his attention had seen the camera and heard the shutter snap, whereupon, “the old fellow” stopped in his tracks, glared at the would-be photographer, and uttered “savage grunts like a hog.” After a few moments, however, the unidentified Native man resumed his path, Hyde recalled, “and I escaped with my prize.”898 Incidents such as this give some impression of the daily trials experienced by Native peoples on display, yet they fail to convey the inner thoughts or

897 “Cameras Barred in Indian Village,” St. Louis Republic, MO, July 7, 1904.

898 Missouri Historical Society Archives, Sam Hyde Album: Louisiana Purchase Exposition, P0168.

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motivations as to why these individuals agreed to be part of the anthropological exhibits in the first place.

Of the more than 300 Native Americans who ultimately took part in the St. Louis

World’s Fair, at least three Native men specifically requested that they and their families be included in the anthropological displays. Richard Davis, James R. Murie, and Cleaver Warden had each previously worked as Native collaborators with museum anthropologists, acquiring cultural heritage objects and gathering ethnological information for preservation in museums across the country. Their experiences at the St. Louis Exposition allow us to glimpse some of the reasoning behind their decisions to take part.

Richard Davis, for example, wrote to WJ McGee as early as 1901 and again in 1902, desiring the government to allow “some tribes of the American Indians to attend the St. Louis

Exposition.” According to Davis, these expositions were a benefit to Native peoples, as they brought them “in contact with the latest civilization.” There they would “learn more during their stay. . . than they would in 50 years time on an allotment or reservation, where they are confined and do not see much of the world.”899 Davis’s words echo so closely McGee’s idea of “less advanced” peoples benefiting from association with those “more advanced,” that it may be safe to assume Davis was cajoling McGee in order to get permission for his community members to leave the reservation and possibly earn some money at the fair.900

899 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 115-116; NAA, BAE, R. Davis to WJ McGee corr., March 19, 1902.

900 McGee, “Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” 821.

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Figure 90. Richard Davis Photographed at the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904 Field, Neg. 15426

In tandem with George A. Dorsey from the Field Museum, for whom they were already engaged in anthropological work, Richard Davis, James R. Murie, and Cleaver Warden recruited a large number of friends and relatives from the Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne), Chaticks Si

Chaticks (Pawnee), and Inunaina (Arapaho) communities, respectively. In fact, according to records maintained of Native representatives on exhibit at the fair, Davis was accompanied by his wife and eight children, Warden by his wife Eva and his son George, and Murie by his wife, three children in the Ethnological Village, and another daughter, Caroline, who took part in the model Indian School exhibit.901 Working both before and after the fair as amateur ethnologists to collect tangible and intangible Native cultural heritage in the field, each of these men was motivated by more than a simple desire for money.902 All of them, to a greater or lesser extent, strove to accurately represent Native cultures to a largely non-Native public, often correcting the anthropological record from what had previously existed.

901 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 86-88, 405-407.

902 Field, Anthropology, C. Warden to G.A. Dorsey corr., October 10, 1904; Field, Anthropology, G.A. Dorsey to C. Warden corr., December 17, 1904.

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Figure 91. Cleaver Warden, 1898 NAA INV 029114.03

In spite of these men’s laudable work, however, there were always critics who railed against anything which looked favorably upon the “old-time ways” of American Indians.

Richard Henry Pratt, for instance, a life-long opponent of anthropology and the Superintendent of the Carlisle Indian School, complained in the Jamestown Evening Journal of August 25, 1904, of the “educated Indians” at the St. Louis Exposition impersonating “old-time Indians” and misrepresenting their people. Both Davis and Warden, as former students of Pratt at Carlisle, incurred his particular enmity. As one of the most vocal proponents of Native American assimilation, Pratt pushed for the inclusion of Native peoples into the American workforce and away from the fair’s “primitive illustration of the Indian.” Pratt predicted that if society chose to keep the American Indian “on the ethnological anthropological basis, as a freak to ‘catch the crowd’ at national expositions and in wild west shows, he will remain industrially useless.”903

According to Pratt, Native peoples could prove the equal of any Euro-American, but the way for

903 Moses, Wild West Shows, 182; “Our Duty,” Jamestown Evening Journal, NY, August 25, 1904.

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them to do so was to lay down their “primitive ideas” and become civilized. In Pratt’s infamous words this slogan became, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”904

A microcosm of this larger national debate over the rapidity with which Native peoples could assimilate to Euro-American society was the ongoing war of words between Pratt and WJ

McGee. Pratt fired the initial salvo on July 4, 1902, in an editorial he penned for the Carlisle

Indian School’s newspaper The Red Man and Helper. Pratt argued, perhaps correctly, that ethnologists studied “the Indian” because he was “different and peculiar” from non-Native peoples. If American Indians assimilated to mainstream society, Pratt conjectured, they would lose their Native identity, and ethnologists would lose their source of occupation and income.

Thus, concluded Pratt, “it is to be expected that the ethnologist will find fault with a system of education and training calculated to lose the Indian as an Indian and make him a commonplace citizen.”905 McGee, never one to back down from a perceived slight, responded the following month with a repudiation of Pratt’s charge. He argued that he and other ethnologists did not oppose “the education and civilization of the Indian,” as indeed they welcomed Indian citizenship, but simply wished to record and document “the old arts and beliefs and customs” before they disappeared.906

Two years later, during the run of the St. Louis Exposition, the two irascible opponents were at it again. In the February 12, 1904, issue of The Red Man and Helper, Pratt claimed that ethnologists, “in all they do, persuade the Indian to remain in and exaggerate his old Indian life.”

McGee responded with a detailed list of his and other ethnologists’ efforts to “raise the Indian to

904 Eastman, Pratt, 194-195; Pratt, “Advantage of Mingling,” 260-261.

905 “There Can Be But One Good Reason,” Red Man and Helper, PA, July 4, 1902.

906 Yale, Beinecke, MSS S-1174, WJ McGee to R.H. Pratt corr., August 25, 1902.

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the lofty place of American citizenship.” However, calling into question the educational methods of BIA agents, Indian Boarding School teachers, and Christian missionaries, McGee retorted that ethnologists preferred to do so “constructively rather than destructively, through knowledge rather than ignorance, through sympathy rather than intolerance.” Finally, in scathing language,

McGee concluded his defense by declaring that if Pratt did not print a retraction of his most recent libel, McGee would deem him “a pusillanimous slanderer.”907 No further correspondence exists between the two men, and there is no evidence that Pratt ever issued a retraction.

As the Chair of the Anthropology Department at the Louisiana Purchase Centennial

Exposition, WJ McGee was widely responsible for the message of racial progress which predominated there. As noted, McGee was hardly alone in these views, but as the face of anthropology at the fair, he lent scientific credibility to racist notions of Euro-American superiority and Native American savagery. In fact, as a number of recent scholars have noted,

McGee’s views on race, biological development, and progress not only permeated much of the fair itself, but as a result also influenced large numbers of the American public for years to come.908

Change came more quickly within the discipline of anthropology itself, however. While

McGee’s views reflected those of previous nineteenth-century anthropologists, many of his contemporaries in the field, notably Boas, Dorsey, and Mooney, disagreed with him. Their voices and their push for a more liberal approach to understanding Native cultures, largely

907 Red Man and Helper, PA, February 12, 1904; “Ethnological Pique,” Red Man and Helper, PA, May 27, 1904.

908 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 47-48.

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influenced by Franz Boas, signaled a distinctive shift from nineteenth-century anthropology to that practiced and taught in the twentieth century.909

909 Darnell, Along Came Boas, 296-297.

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CHAPTER 7

ANTONIO APACHE AND THE INDIAN CRAFTS EXPOSITION (ca. 1870-1938)

Figure 92. Antonio Apache, ca. 1892 Peabody Museum Archives

One of the most intriguing figures in turn of the twentieth-century anthropology, Antonio

Apache’s life is shrouded in a combination of both mystery and falsity. Little verifiable documentation exists regarding his date of birth, place of birth, education, employment, marriage, and perhaps most importantly, his Native ancestry or lack thereof. The documentation that does exist to piece together Apache’s life consists almost wholly of early twentieth-century newspaper articles, a smattering of his correspondence, and a few federal records.

A number of Apache’s Native and non-Native contemporaries branded him an

“impostor,” arguing that he was in actuality Tony Simpson, an African American man who posed as a member of the Apache community for financial gain.910 Many recent historians have likewise labeled Apache a “fraud,” one who used his appropriated cultural identity for both fiscal and professional advantage, simultaneously forcing the exclusion of other qualified Native

910 “An Impostor,” Red Man and Helper, PA, January 11, 1901; “Society’s Pet Red-Man a Negro Painters Say,” San Francisco Examiner, CA, July 3, 1907.

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peoples from these opportunities.911 Then and now, though, doubts continue to surface over

Antonio Apache’s true identity, with him arguing until his last breath that he was indeed who he claimed to be.

According to a newspaper account from the year 1892, Antonio Apache originally said that he was born in the White Mountains of Arizona in 1870. Five years later, however, he claimed in the San Francisco Call newspaper that 1873 was the year of his birth.912 For several years in the early twentieth century, he documented his birth as 1878, and by the time of his death he had modified his birth year yet again to 1884.913 A strikingly similar pattern emerges regarding Apache’s supposed “capture” by U.S. military personnel stationed in Arizona, as well as with the dates and locations of his education.

In later newspaper interviews Apache variously averred that he had been captured by men of the U.S. Army while still a small child in Arizona in the year 1872, but consistently switched this date over the years to 1879, 1880, or 1881.914 Notably, as with his changing birth year, the date of Apache’s supposed capture changed depending on the year he was interviewed in order to better match his professed birth year and current age. Contingent on the years in question, then, Antonio Apache claimed either to have been captured by men under General

Oliver Otis Howard in the 1870s, or later, by men under General George R. Crook in the

911 David R.M. Beck, Unfair Labor? American Indians and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 65.

912 “A. Apache, Esq.,” Arizona Republican, AZ, October 6, 1892; “Grandson of Chief ,” San Francisco Call, CA, September 17, 1897.

913 Passenger Lists, January 11, 1906, Ancestry.com; 1910 U.S. Federal Census, Los Angeles, California; California Death Index, 1938, Ancestry.com.

914 “Society’s Pet Red-Man a Negro Painters Say,” San Francisco Examiner, CA, July 3, 1907; “Antonio Apache,” Arizona Silver Belt, AZ, November 11, 1897; Antonio Apache, “Address,” Proceedings of the Lake Mohonk Conference 14 (1896): 38; “A Fine Indian Is Mr. Apache,” Buffalo Evening News, NY, May 1, 1900.

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1880s.915 In some tellings, Apache reported that he had been raised by a well-to-do family in

Massachusetts, and in other versions, by either a wealthy family in New York City, or vaguely, by a “wealthy lady” who lived along the East Coast.916

Antonio Apache informed journalists and many others curious about his past that he received his primary education at the Hampton Institute beginning in 1877, or conversely, the

Carlisle Indian School beginning in approximately 1880.917 Likewise, one of his major claims to educational excellence was his professed attendance at Harvard University, though the

Albuquerque Morning Journal of December 6, 1905, instead reported his alma mater as

Cornell.918 Although Apache often referred to having graduated with honors from Harvard

University, neither Hampton, Carlisle, Cornell, nor Harvard maintain any records documenting the attendance of either an Antonio Apache or a Tony Simpson at their facilities during these years. In spite of Apache resigning from Chicago’s newly founded Field Museum in 1896 for his intended purpose of entering “on a course of study in Harvard University,” the only recorded instance of his educational instruction was later that year at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New

Hampshire. According to records maintained there, Apache neither graduated nor continued class work after his first year due to poor academic performance.919 Although he married at least

915 “Antonio Apache,” Arizona Silver Belt, AZ, November 11, 1897; “A Fine Indian Is Mr. Apache,” Buffalo Evening News, NY, May 1, 1900.

916 “Society’s Pet Red-Man a Negro Painters Say,” San Francisco Examiner, CA, July 3, 1907; “Is He Red or Black?,” Holbrook Argus, AZ, July 23, 1907; “An Educated Apache,” Coconino Weekly Sun, AZ, December 22, 1892.

917 “A. Apache, Esq.,” Arizona Republican, AZ, October 6, 1892; “Apache Indian Visits Fair,” St. Louis Republic, MO, March 9, 1904.

918 Anna Cox Stephens, “An Apache Harvard Man,” San Francisco Examiner, CA, February 23, 1896; “Interesting Indian Visitors,” Red Man, PA, April 1897; “Antonio Apache Has Novel Project in California,” Albuquerque Morning Journal, NM, December 6, 1905.

919 Field, Director, A. Apache to F. Skiff corr., April 28, 1896; Browman and Williams, Anthropology at Harvard, 251.

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once, in Los Angeles in 1919 to Mary Cota Weed, a nurse of Native ancestry, their marriage did not last long. Weed sought an annulment the following year on the grounds of fraud, charging that Apache “falsely represented himself as a member and spokesman for the Apache

Indians.”920

Figure 93. Frederic Ward Putnam and Members of Chicago World’s Fair Staff including Antonio Apache, ca. 1892 Peabody Museum Archives

Apache’s employment history, though also difficult to accurately pinpoint, proves easier to document with some certainty than that of his adolescence. As early as 1892 Frederic Ward

Putnam, Harvard University professor, Director of the Peabody Museum, and Chief of the

Anthropology Department at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, hired Antonio Apache as one of his assistants.921 In the year prior to the Chicago Exposition’s opening, Putnam specifically tasked Apache with collecting anthropological “specimens” and Indian “curios” in Arizona and

New Mexico to exhibit at the fair. Notably, Putnam also encouraged Apache to “arouse tribes in the great Exposition,” if possible convincing individual members of Southwest Indian communities to accompany him back to Chicago where they would be displayed as

920 California, County Birth and Marriage Records, 1849-1980, Ancestry.com; U.S. City Directories, Los Angeles, California, 1916, Ancestry.com; “Nurse Freed From Negro Who Posed As Apache Chief,” San Francisco Examiner, CA, February 16, 1921; Kathleen L. Howard, “Creating an Enchanted Land: Curio Entrepreneurs Promote and Sell the Indian Southwest, 1880-1940,” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2002), 184.

921 “Will Have No ‘Wild West’ Show,” Chicago Tribune, IL, February 14, 1892.

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anthropological types in the ethnological exhibits.922 “I was required by Prof. F.W. Putnam,”

Apache later wrote, “to interest the Indians of the Apache and Navajo Tribes . . . to come to

Chicago and remain during the 6 months of the Expo, to live in a habitation, to dress and use the same utensils, and work at their same arts such as weaving blankets and making silverwork.” In this endeavor Apache proved at least partly successful, bringing five Diné (Navajo) men and women with him to the fairgrounds in the summer of 1892.923 Newspapers identified the two men as Cherno and Peshinki, and the three women as Chiquita, Kimizin, and Marietta.924 Within months of their arrival at the fair, the three Diné (Navajo) women reported harassment and mistreatment by Apache, but Putnam came to his defense, arguing that problems were in fact due to another man. No further information appears to exist regarding these allegations of abuse. For his services as interpreter and caretaker of these individuals, Apache agreed to receive $50 per month, but the money was never paid in full.925

Although Antonio Apache’s lifelong employment history straddled many different career paths, with leather worker, Carlisle Indian School recruiter, and publicity agent numbering among them, the bulk of his professional work gravitated around the emerging field of anthropology.926 Indeed, in the years immediately following the celebrated Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, Apache secured employment with the recently founded Field Museum, working in the

922 “A. Apache, Esq.,” Arizona Republican, AZ, October 6, 1892; Howard, “Enchanted Land,” 169.

923 Field, Director, A. Apache to F. Skiff corr., February 1894; Howard, “Enchanted Land,” 170-171.

924 “Savage Life Illustrated,” Inter-Ocean, IL, June 27, 1893; Howard, “Enchanted Land,” 169; Beck, Unfair Labor, 117. Beck identifies the five as Peshloki or Peshlakai, Ned Manning, Cheeno, Mrs. Walker, and Lucy Manning.

925 Field, Director, A. Apache to F. Skiff corr., February 1894; Beck, Unfair Labor, 118.

926 “Antonio Apache,” Arizona Silver Belt, AZ, November 11, 1897; Howard, “Enchanted Land,” 177; U.S. City Directories, Los Angeles, California, 1920, Ancestry.com.

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Anthropology Department there until 1896.927 In 1897 he continued his collecting work, employed on behalf of the New England Sportsmen’s Association to acquire material culture objects of the Indigenous peoples of Maine and eastern Canada, which he summarily exhibited the following year in Boston. Possibly through the influence and friendship of Field Museum anthropologist George A. Dorsey, Apache began working with the Fred Harvey Company’s

Indian Department based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico, soon after this.928

Figure 94. Antonio Apache Working for Fred Harvey Company, ca. 1900 Heard Museum RC1 272

The Fred Harvey Company was a distinctive early twentieth-century conglomeration of restaurants, hotels, and an ethnological museum, conveniently partnered with the Santa Fe

Railway. The express goal of both was to increase tourism to the U.S. Southwest. Accordingly, the Fred Harvey Company promoted stereotyped and romanticized representations of

Southwestern Native communities to draw in the public, and regularly sought the credibility of

927 “Apache Indian Visits Fair,” St. Louis Republic, MO, March 9, 1904; U.S. City Directories, Chicago, Illinois, 1896, Ancestry.com; Field, Director, A. Apache to F. Skiff corr., April 28, 1896.

928 “Grandson of Chief Cochise,” San Francisco Call, CA, September 17, 1897; Pardue, “Marketing Ethnography,” 107.

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anthropologists like George A. Dorsey and Antonio Apache to aid in its marketing and advertising ventures. As with his experiences at the Chicago World’s Fair and later with the New

England Sportsmen’s Association, Apache found the collecting and selling of Native material culture objects to be particularly profitable. Arizona’s Holbrook Argus newspaper of February

21, 1903, reported that Apache transported “three Indian girls to Albuquerque” from their home in Whiteriver on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation. In Albuquerque, the article continued, these young women would “weave baskets in Fred Harvey’s curio store” for the entertainment of tourists. The women were later photographed by Karl Moon at their work in the Harvey

Company’s Indian Building, and Apache himself appeared in at least one photograph dressed in

Diné (Navajo) clothing holding silversmith tools.929 By March of 1904 Arizona newspapers informed the public that Antonio Apache had severed his connection with the Fred Harvey

Company, and the following year he appeared as a resident and alleged “mining expert” in Los

Angeles, California.930

While extant records do not explicitly reveal the details of their business arrangement, in

1905 or 1906 railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington loaned Antonio Apache the sum of $50,000 to construct an Indian Crafts Exposition at Eastlake Park, now Lincoln Park, in Los Angeles, conveniently located on Huntington’s Pacific Electric Railway. The Albuquerque Morning

Journal ran a story on Apache’s “novel project,” reporting that the exposition was planned to be both “an Indian settlement and curio collection,” with Indian dwellings and cultures representing

“all the native tribes of Alaska, and the northwest, the west and southwest.” This newspaper

929 Holbrook Argus, AZ, February 21, 1903; Howard, “Enchanted Land,” 179-180; Pardue, “Marketing Ethnography,” 102.

930 Holbrook Argus, AZ, March 19, 1904; “Antonio Apache Has Novel Project in California,” NM, Albuquerque Morning Journal, December 6, 1905.

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further informed the public that Apache’s anticipated Indian Village would be “one of the most interesting and expensive ethnological displays in the country,” rivaling anthropology museums in the Midwest and on the East Coast.931

Apache’s Indian Village entertained and educated the Los Angeles public with representations of Native American life for approximately six years, from its opening in 1906 until its closure in 1912. To first create the Indian Village, Apache built upon his experiences as an employee with the Chicago World’s Fair and later the Fred Harvey Company, as well as his observations of ethnological displays at museums and other World’s Fairs he visited, including the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, the 1904 Louisiana Purchase

Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, and the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland,

Oregon.932 At each of these venues, Apache observed how anthropologists exhibited Native cultures, how the public consumed these representations, and how he could do likewise in order to earn a profit. Not only did he emphasize the display of “authentic” dwellings constructed throughout the Indian Village, but like his anthropological contemporaries at many World’s

Fairs, Apache also sought out Native artists and craftspeople to live and work there. In this way, non-Native visitors could view Indigenous people making their wares, and could additionally purchase these objects, thus providing an income for both the Native artists and for Apache as the Indian Crafts Exposition’s Manager.933

931 Howard, “Enchanted Land,” 160-161; “Antonio Apache Has Novel Project in California,” NM, Albuquerque Morning Journal, December 6, 1905.

932 “A Fine Indian Is Mr. Apache,” Buffalo Evening News, NY, May 1, 1900; “Apache Indian Visits Fair,” St. Louis Republic, MO, March 9, 1904; “Noted Indian Scientist Comes Here on a Mission,” San Francisco Call, CA, May 26, 1905.

933 “An Educated Apache and His Wise Plan,” Minneapolis Journal, MN, November 19, 1905; “Redskins Show Peaceful Arts,” Los Angeles Herald, CA, December 7, 1906.

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Apache’s “wise plan” of gathering Native basket makers, blanket weavers, silversmiths, and canoe builders into a permanent self-supporting ethnological village proved successful during its half-decade existence. Within its first year, it boasted thirty-eight employees, all

Native, and included Tlingit husband and wife Louis and Florence Shotridge, who would later go on to work as Anthropology Department staff at Philadelphia’s University Museum.934 By 1907, however, questions of Antonio Apache’s identity began to surface in newspapers across the country, and media attention quickly shifted from highlighting the ethnological attractions of the

Indian Village to focusing on Apache himself.

Figure 95. Louis Shotridge and Florence Shotridge Dressed in Plains Indian Clothing, 1912 NMAI P28181

In early July of 1907 U.S. newspapers big and small published stories attacking Antonio

Apache’s claim to Native ancestry. Indeed, one paper labeled Apache “the most fantastic faker that ever fooled New York.”935 Within days of each other, the Washington Times, New York

934 “An Educated Apache and His Wise Plan,” Minneapolis Journal, MN, November 19, 1905; “Redskins Show Peaceful Arts,” Los Angeles Herald, CA, December 7, 1906; 1910 U.S. Federal Census, Los Angeles, California, Ancestry.com; “Cultured Indians Make Home Here,” Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, February 11, 1912.

935 Howard, “Enchanted Land,” 185.

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Times, and San Francisco Examiner reported that Apache was in fact a Louisiana-born African

American man by the name of Tony Simpson who tinted his skin with bronze paint and wore a wig of straight black hair. His accusers included two well-known painters of Native American life, Edwin Deming and William Cary, who claimed that they had learned of Apache’s subterfuge when he worked as an artist’s model for them two decades previous. Arguing against

Deming and Cary, though, many others rallied to Apache’s defense, including Western novelists, painters, and businessmen.936

When approached for a response to the accusations against him, Apache replied, “There is not a drop of negro blood in my veins.” He further commented, “This story is all new to me, and I cannot understand the motive behind it.”937 In spite of Apache’s claim that this was a new story, however, questions surrounding his identity had been in circulation since at least 1900 if not earlier. Richard Henry Pratt, for example, former employer of Apache when the latter worked briefly as a recruiter for the Carlisle Indian School, wrote to a Native friend as early as

February of 1900 stating that he believed Apache to be an impostor.938 The following year

Carlisle’s newspaper, The Red Man and Helper, ran a short piece titled simply “An Impostor.”

The anonymous author apprised the paper’s readers,

We are credibly informed that the man calling himself Antonio Apache is not an Indian; that he wears a wig of straight, stiff, black hair; that the real hair when permitted to grow is curly; that the Apache Indians where he claims origin disclaim all knowledge of him . . . His claim to graduate from ‘Harvard class ‘95’ or any other class is false. We believe

936 “Apache Flatly Denies Having Negro Blood,” Washington Times, DC, July 3, 1907; New York Times, NY, July 4, 1907; “Society’s Pet Red-Man a Negro Painters Say,” San Francisco Examiner, CA, July 3, 1907; “Antonio Apache a Negro,” Daily Arizona Silver Belt, AZ, July 10, 1907.

937 “Apache Flatly Denies Having Negro Blood,” Washington Times, DC, July 3, 1907.

938 LaPier and Beck, City Indian, 58.

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him to be an impostor, but are willing to admit a mistake whenever we have the evidence.939

No evidence supporting Apache’s claim to Native ancestry ever surfaced.

In spite of many similar newspaper articles which trailed Apache the rest of his days branding him a faker, fraud, and impostor, such headlines had surprisingly little adverse impact on his professional career.940 He continued as Manager of the Indian Crafts Exposition for several more years, before eventually closing the ethnological village in 1912. For the next quarter-century he worked a number of jobs in the Los Angeles area, including as a miner and a real estate and oil development promoter, yet always considered himself foremost an anthropologist. Apache died at a medical facility known as Rancho Los Amigos, the former Los

Angeles County Poor Farm, in 1938. Up until his dying moment, he still steadfastly clung to his identity as Antonio Apache, allegedly born to an Apache mother and father among his people in the White Mountains of Arizona.941

Antonio Apache and the Public

While Antonio Apache’s reception by the media took a slight downturn in 1907 when questions surfaced regarding his identity, contemporary newspapers portrayed him in highly complimentary language both before and surprisingly even after this date. Various papers described him in physical terms as handsome, tall, and as a first-class conversationalist.942 The

Carlisle Indian School’s newspaper in April of 1896, years before publishing its 1901 “impostor”

939 “An Impostor,” Red Man and Helper, PA, January 11, 1901.

940 Browman and Williams, Anthropology at Harvard, 253.

941 U.S. Passport Application, 1919, Ancestry.com; Howard, “Enchanted Land,” 183-186.

942 “Grandson of Chief Cochise,” San Francisco Call, CA, September 17, 1897; “A. Apache, Esq.,” Arizona Republican, AZ, October 6, 1892.

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piece, labeled Apache as “one of the shining examples of the Indian race,” a scientist, a polished man of the world, and one of the most charming men in the country.943 Entranced by the young man, a reporter for the Boston Herald wrote, “Apache’s voice is low and musical, his English pure and scholarly, his bearing dignified, yet affable, and his character so noble that all who know him are proud of his friendship.”944 Depictions such as these support the idea of Apache as a charismatic figure, able to simultaneously deceive and charm those within his orbit. His accusers and more recent scholars, however, have viewed Apache in a different light.

According to the painters Edwin Deming and William Cary, Apache had made deception an art-form, enabling himself to “exploit the credulity” of people across the country. Present-day anthropologist David L. Browman sounds a similar refrain, labeling Apache a “consummate con artist.” Historians Rosalyn Lapier and David R.M. Beck go a step further in their portrayal of

Apache, arguing that impostors and Indian impersonators of his kind posed a serious threat to the livelihood of Native Americans. According to these scholars, Apache and other non-Native peoples who appropriated Native identities, “whether for their own gain or to fulfill romantic dreams of playing Indian,” not only effectively misrepresented Native cultures to the mainstream public, but also prevented actual American Indians from earning a living.945

Throughout his nearly half-century career in and out of the realm of anthropology,

Antonio Apache represented Native peoples to a largely non-Native public through a variety of mediums including publications, lectures, and most significantly, exhibitions. His publications

943 “A Story-Telling Contest between Two Famous Generals and an Indian at Our School,” Red Man, PA, April 1896.

944 “Grandson of Chief Cochise,” San Francisco Call, CA, September 17, 1897. Reprinted from the Boston Herald.

945 “Society’s Pet Red-Man a Negro Painters Say,” San Francisco Examiner, CA, July 3, 1907; Browman and Williams, Anthropology at Harvard, 253; LaPier and Beck, City Indian, 56-58, 154.

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were not the typical academic pieces written by anthropologists and published in scholarly journals. Rather, his few articles which represented Native cultures to the reading public existed in magazines and popular periodicals, and focused on issues of Native rights, education, assimilation, and citizenship.946 In this way, he used the power and influence of turn of the century magazine culture to promote and disseminate his views among the public.947 His lectures, similarly, were few and far between and ranged over the same topics. Venues for his speaking engagements included the Carlisle Indian School and the St. Louis World’s Fair early in his career, and in later years, presenting on anthropological topics before civic committees such as the Los Angles Business Women’s Association and the Women’s Club of Laguna

Beach.948 However, it was Apache’s work exhibiting Native cultures at museums, World’s Fairs, and Craft Expositions which impacted to the largest extent how members of the non-Native public saw and understood Indigenous peoples in North America.

If Antonio Apache truly was of Native ancestry, as he and his defenders repeatedly claimed, then his organization and representation of Native cultures on such a large scale would have stood as something quite unique in the annals of early American anthropology. He essentially took what he had learned from several leading anthropological figures of his day, such as Frederic Ward Putnam, Franz Boas, and George A. Dorsey, and turned the world on its head. Instead of adhering to the basic anthropological foundation of non-Native anthropologists representing Native peoples, Apache would have created a world and an anthropological stage in

946 “Society’s Pet Red-Man a Negro Painters Say,” San Francisco Examiner, CA, July 3, 1907; Apache, “Address,” 38; M. Salzman, “Geronimo the Napoleon of Indians,” Border 1, no. 5 (March 1909): 7.

947 Ohmann, Selling Culture.

948 “Interesting Indian Visitors,” Red Man, PA, April 1897; “Antonio Apache Talks of Influence of Arts,” Los Angeles Herald, CA, May 29, 1907; Malcolm S. MacLean, “Laguna Women Elect Club Officers,” Santa Ana Daily Register, CA, February 8, 1922.

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which Native peoples represented themselves to a largely non-Native public. As historical evidence indicates, though, it is highly unlikely that Antonio Apache had any amount of Native ancestry, and instead was an African American con-artist posing as an American Indian.

In spite of the almost certain absence of Native ancestry, however, Apache throughout his entire life was a vocal advocate for American Indian peoples, often to a much greater degree than many of his non-Native anthropological peers. For example, addressing a group of Christian reformers at the 1896 Lake Mohonk Conference in New York, Apache told his audience “I have found some good hearts under a buckskin shirt. The great trouble is there has been too little justice given to the Indians,” concluding, “troubles arise from disturbances occasioned by the white people in the [Indians’] vicinity.” The following year he informed a class of Native

Carlisle students that it upset him that some people believed “the Indian good only for exhibition purposes.”949 It is somewhat ironic then, that Apache built much of his career out of exhibiting

Native peoples himself, notably at the Indian Village in Los Angeles. Of course, Apache knew how to market this financial and ethnological venture, telling newspaper reporters that his actions were for the “uplifting and advancement of his people.”950 Responding to his charm and charismatic nature, newspapers accordingly labeled him “the hero of his own race,” writing that he stimulated interest in Native wares and furnished “honest employment for a number of Indian families.”951

In the end, the man who called himself Antonio Apache remains a complicated figure in the history of museum anthropology. Overwhelmingly the historical evidence points to Apache

949 Apache, “Address,” 38; “Interesting Indian Visitors,” Red Man, PA, April 1897.

950 “Redskins Show Peaceful Arts,” Los Angeles Herald, CA, December 7, 1906.

951 “Antonio Apache Talks of Influence of Arts,” Los Angeles Herald, CA, May 29, 1907; “An Educated Apache and His Wise Plan,” Minneapolis Journal, MN, November 19, 1905.

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as an impostor who appropriated other peoples’ cultures, lied to the public, cheated Native individuals out of gainful employment, and allegedly harassed and abused otherwise voiceless women who were in his care.952 Further, in spite of his claims of being an anthropologist, he had no verifiable academic qualifications, no real professional training in the field, and little significant employment history in actual museums; the last, despite the proximity of his Indian

Crafts Exposition to the nascent Southwest Museum in Los Angeles and the Anthropology

Museum at UC Berkeley. Nevertheless, Antonio Apache proved adept at using the new field of anthropology as a platform to represent, accurately or not, Native cultures for nearly a half- century across the length of the country.

Like many of his anthropological contemporaries, although he occasionally advocated for

American Indian rights and causes, Antonio Apache’s representations of Native peoples largely perpetuated facile and romanticized stereotypes of static cultures either frozen in time or fast disappearing. The public who paid for the pleasure of viewing these Native stereotypes in person at World’s Fairs and in Apache’s Indian Crafts Exposition accordingly consumed these constructs, later repeating them for future generations. Due to a combination of the existence of such representations and the public’s willingness to turn a blind eye to what they didn’t want to see, many in mainstream America remained oblivious to the oppression and deculturation of contemporary Native peoples continuing to exist in their own backyard.

952 Beck, Unfair Labor, 118.

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EXPOSITION 5

1915 SAN DIEGO WORLD’S FAIR

Figure 96. Postcard of Indian Arts Building at the San Diego World’s Fair, 1915 John Earl Collection, Panama-California Exposition Digital Archive

In the leadup to the 1915 San Diego Exposition newspapers across the country proclaimed the “Painted Desert,” the fair’s anthropological exhibit of Native communities from the Southwestern U.S., “the most important Indian exhibit which has ever been staged,” and “a flawless reproduction of real pueblo Indian life.” Complete with “red men weaving their rugs and blankets, shaping their pottery, and pounding out metal ornaments,” the Painted Desert replicated much from the anthropological exhibits of earlier World’s Fairs, as at Chicago in

1893, Omaha in 1898, and St. Louis in 1904.953 Like these previous incarnations, the San Diego

Exposition also emphasized the “primitive nature” of Native peoples, couching perceived racial differences in scientific language in order to elevate Euro-American society over all others.954

A few years earlier, having witnessed the success of many U.S. cities in hosting World’s

Fairs over the previous quarter century, both San Diego and San Francisco put in separate bids to do likewise for the coming year of 1915. Aware of the financial benefits for California as a

953 “A Trip through the San Diego Exposition, Picture and Story,” Times-Advocate, CA, December 11, 1914; “1915 Panama-California Exposition 1915,” National City News, CA, October 3, 1914.

954 Redman, Bone Rooms, 64.

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whole, and wishing to connect their fairs to the planned 1914 completion of the Panama Canal, city leaders agreed that each exposition would maintain a slightly different focus in order to avoid direct conflict between the two. Accordingly, on March 29, 1910, the San Diego Union newspaper announced that San Francisco’s “Panama-Pacific International Exposition” would emphasize commerce and industry in California, while the “Panama-California Exposition” in

San Diego would highlight the region’s culture, art, and education. UC Berkeley anthropologist

Alfred L. Kroeber, interested in any potential anthropological displays at either fair, wrote to his colleague and mentor Frederic Ward Putnam in March of 1912, informing him that San Diego planned to follow in the footsteps of previous World’s Fairs with the inclusion of an “exhibit of living peoples,” while San Francisco would “keep out of the [anthropological] field.”955

The President of San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, David C. Collier, reportedly desired a theme that would educate the fairgoer and leave a “lasting and useful impression.” He eventually settled on the topic of human evolution and anthropology. To properly illustrate “The

Story of Man Through the Ages,” Collier sought to create exhibits of material culture objects, human remains, and even living Native American peoples.956 President Collier summarily selected Edgar L. Hewett, a prominent figure in Southwestern archaeology, to organize and oversee these various anthropological exhibits.

Hewett was the former President of the New Mexico Normal School, and at the time was the Director of both the Santa Fe branch of the School of American Archaeology and the

955 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 209; Vickie Ann Prado, “The History of the San Diego Museum of Man,” (MA thesis, University of San Diego, 1997), 5; Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, A.L. Kroeber to F.W. Putnam corr., March 7, 1912.

956 “Exposition’s Scope, Intense Loyalty of City Amazes Visitors,” San Diego Union, CA, May 18, 1913; Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling, and Kimberly D. Pelle, Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 69; Barton Wright, “San Diego Museum of Man,” American Indian Art Magazine 5, no. 4 (Autumn 1980): 50-51; Prado, “San Diego Museum of Man,” 6.

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Museum of New Mexico.957 To implement their vision of exhibiting human evolution to the public, in 1912 Collier and Hewett contacted Aleš Hrdlička at the Smithsonian Institution, who was the foremost American physical anthropologist of the early twentieth century. Hrdlička proposed, and eventually created, a physical anthropology exhibit more comprehensive than any previously attempted at a World’s Fair. He collected human skeletal remains, took photographs, and created busts and life masks of, in his words, “the most primitive living peoples in different parts of the world” in order to chart humankind’s historical and evolutionary progress.958 Not surprisingly, Hrdlička’s displays were laden with statements about race and evolutionary potential, and advanced the notion of Euro-American biological superiority over all other peoples. Through these displays, Hrdlička indoctrinated the public with ideas of evolutionary- based racism presented in the guise of scientific objectivity.959 Not surprisingly, Hrdlička’s work mirrored many of the precepts of the eugenics movement dominant in the U.S. at the time.

Figure 97. Aleš Hrdlička, 1927

957 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 465-466.

958 Prado, “San Diego Museum of Man,” 7; Stephen Loring and Miroslav Prokopec, “A Most Peculiar Man: The Life and Times of Aleš Hrdlička,” in Reckoning with the Dead: The Larsen Bay Repatriation and the Smithsonian Institution, eds. Tamara L. Bray and Thomas W. Killion (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 38; Aleš Hrdlička, A Descriptive Catalog of the Section of Physical Anthropology: Panama-California Exposition 1915 (San Diego: National Views Company, 1915), 5.

959 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 323; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 223.

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In addition to Hrdlička’s physical anthropology exhibit, Hewett also envisioned a display of living peoples that would educate and entertain fairgoers. The Santa Fe Railway and the Fred

Harvey Company, two of the most powerful and influential employers in the region, willingly supplied funds in excess of $100,000 to build the exhibit which would simultaneously promote their Southwest tourism businesses.960 Both of these companies were already well familiar with the field of anthropology, having previously employed anthropologists George A. Dorsey and

Antonio Apache as experts on Native American cultures who lent credibility to their tourist ventures. Finally, by 1914 Hewett and the Santa Fe Railway also hired anthropologist Jesse

Nusbaum to supervise construction of the exhibit which came to be known as the Painted

Desert.961

Figure 98. Jesse Nusbaum with Unidentified Child, ca. 1915 NMAI P09534

With Native Americans continually viewed as “the vanishing race,” Hewett desired the

Painted Desert exhibit to be “as careful a representation of the fast disappearing culture of the

960 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 387; “1915 Panama-California Exposition 1915,” National City News, CA, October 3, 1914; Ronald Joseph Womack, “The San Diego Museum of Man: Its Historical and Architectural Significance,” (MA thesis, University of San Diego, 2003), 89.

961 Lynn Adkins, “Jesse L. Nusbaum and the Painted Desert in San Diego,” Journal of San Diego History 29, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 87.

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[Southwest] American Indians” as possible.962 In this Hewett mirrored the goals of Santa Fe

Railway executives, who wanted an exhibit showing “the great tribes” of the region, including approximately “seven or eight hundred of the redmen, their squaws and papooses,” who would live and work in “a veritable city built of mud” for the duration of the fair.963 Although considerably less than the executives’ anticipated number, by the time the San Diego Exposition opened in January of 1915, the Painted Desert exhibit consisted of nearly 300 individuals from various Apache, Diné (Navajo), and Pueblo communities. Further, instead of a city built of mud,

Jesse Nusbaum and a contingent of Native craftsmen constructed replica cliff dwellings and multistory pueblo buildings imitative of those at Taos and Zuni in New Mexico. Replicating the

Ethnological and Indian Villages of past expositions, Native families lived in these dwellings, where they decorated pottery, made jewelry, wove blankets, and performed dances and ceremonies for curious onlookers.964

The San Diego Exposition and the Public

Visitors to the 1915 Panama-California Exposition enthusiastically received all that the fair had to offer, with the physical anthropology display and the Painted Desert two of the most popular destinations. Indeed, while the fair also emphasized southern California’s art and culture, one magazine reporter informed his readers that archaeology and ethnology held the place of

962 Weigle and Babcock, Great Southwest, 40.

963 “Indian Tribes Will Be Brought to Exposition to Live and Work in Replicas of Their Real Homes,” San Diego Union, CA, August 21, 1913.

964 Adkins, “Nusbaum,” 87; Weigle and Babcock, Great Southwest, 36; Richard W. Amero, Balboa Park and the 1915 Exposition (Charleston: The History Press, 2013), 164. Nusbaum would later go on to work for George Gustav Heye at the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, before beginning a career with the .

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honor at the fair. Reviewing Hrdlička’s “evolution of man” exhibit housed in the fair’s Science and Education Building, fairgoer William Templeton Johnson noted that Hewett and Hrdlička presented the subject “scientifically, graphically, and with a wealth and accuracy of detail never before attempted.” After Johnson visited the Indian Arts Building where resided material culture objects of “all the primitive peoples of America, from the country of the Eskimos to Patagonia,” he further declared them the most complete collections of Native American life outside of those at the National Museum in Washington and the Field Museum in Chicago.965

Figure 99. Construction of Painted Desert, San Diego World’s Fair, 1915 Jesse Nusbaum Collection, Panama-California Exposition Digital Archive

Although the fair was initially planned to last only one year, organizers, wishing to increase revenue and ticket sales, extended the exposition until January of 1917. Following in the footsteps of the planners of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, city leaders in San Diego likewise aspired to found a permanent museum to house the anthropological collections gathered for the exposition. Hewett summarily oversaw the transfer of these materials to the museum, and in

1921 the San Diego Museum, later to be renamed the San Diego Museum of Man, opened to the public, displaying many of the original objects from the fair’s physical anthropology exhibit in

965 Weigle and Babcock, Great Southwest, 36; Geddes Smith, “California’s County Fair,” Independent Magazine (July 1915): 120; William Templeton Johnson, “The Panama-California Exposition and the Changing Peoples of the Great Southwest,” Survey 34, no. 14 (July 3, 1915): 307.

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the museum’s new Science of Man building. Perhaps surprisingly, the San Diego Museum also maintained and continued to use the Painted Desert living exhibit. Hewett believed the site had much to offer the public, particularly in the education of schoolchildren about Southwest Native cultures. For many years following, then, numerous troops of Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and

Campfire Girls used this location to host events and camping trips.966 There they learned to admire the histories and cultures of American Indian peoples, while simultaneously consuming social evolutionist doctrine about Native American primitiveness and Euro-American superiority.

While countless historical records document the voices of non-Native fairgoers at the

1915 San Diego Exposition, few contemporary sources remain to illuminate how Native representatives felt about the depictions of their cultures in the anthropological exhibits. To better illustrate the concept of Euro-American evolutionary progress, fair organizers characterized Southwest Native communities’ adherence to their cultural practices and beliefs as unchanging, and thus more developmentally primitive. A 1915 Painted Desert exhibit brochure, for instance, advertised Southwest Native life as virtually untouched since the coming of the

Spanish Empire, and continuing in the same way to the present. This was a practice both the

Santa Fe Railway and Fred Harvey Company had been following for years as a means to increase tourism, painting the Southwest in romantic terms as an “exotic, safe, alluring oasis, filled with colorful, friendly natives.” As other historians have since pointed out, this representation of Native peoples as frozen in time essentially denied them a contemporary social

966 Womack, “San Diego Museum of Man,” 89; Prado, “San Diego Museum of Man,” 10-13; “Indian Ceremonials Mark Re-Opening of Painted Desert,” San Diego Union, CA, March 6, 1919; Amero, Balboa Park, 174.

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presence, thus making it easier for non-Native peoples to ignore nineteenth- and twentieth- century struggles for equality and citizenship in Indian Country.967

The 1915 San Diego World’s Fair, then, though separated from the 1876 Philadelphia

Exposition by the length of a continent and nearly four decades, largely propagated the same middle-class Euro-American Christian values and ideas of progress, race, culture, and evolution which were on exhibit at the latter, and which continued to be perpetuated at Chicago in 1893,

Omaha in 1898, and St. Louis in 1904.968 Although few anthropologists still broadcast the notion of disappearing or vanishing American Indians by the time of the 1915 San Diego exposition, many nevertheless continued to represent North America’s Indigenous peoples as romanticized, exoticized, primitive, and backward.969 Through these anthropological representations, the

American public learned that they had little reason to concern themselves with the conditions of life for American Indians on reservations, or even those living among them in major U.S. cities.

967 Archambault, “Indian Imagery,” 141; Weigle and Babcock, Great Southwest, 41.

968 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 4-7.

969 Dippie, Vanishing American, xii; Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 261.

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CHAPTER 8

GEORGE GUSTAV HEYE AND THE MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN,

HEYE FOUNDATION

(1874-1957)

Figure 100. George Gustav Heye, 1938 NMAI P37467

The Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, was conceived, founded, directed, and controlled by a wealthy New Yorker, George Gustav Heye, from the day it was established until his death. George Gustav Heye was born in New York City in 1874 to a wealthy family of German background. He attended Columbia University, and there received his bachelor’s degree from the School of Mines, the predecessor to today’s Earth and Environmental

Engineering Department, in 1896. Heye married three times throughout his life. He first married

Blanche Agnes Williams in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1904, with the two eventually divorcing nine years later. Two years after this, in 1915, he married Thea Kowne Page, a woman fourteen years his junior.970 By all accounts their marriage was a happy one, with both sharing a passion for ethnology and archaeology, so much so that later writers described Thea as George’s

970 Massachusetts Marriage Records, 1904, Ancestry.com; New York Passenger Lists, Ancestry.com.

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“anthropologophilic,” or anthropology-loving, wife. After Thea died in 1935, Heye married for a third and final time to Jessica Peebles Standing in New York in 1936. The two divorced four years later in 1940.971

Heye had neither academic training nor any particular interest in anthropology during his early life. It was not until 1897, while working in Arizona, that he purchased a deerskin shirt from a local Diné (Navajo) woman. According to Heye, “Naturally when I had a shirt I wanted a rattle and moccasins. And then the collecting bug seized me and I was lost.”972 The foundation of the Museum of the American Indian, though not its formal establishment, began with that first shirt. By the time of Heye’s death sixty years later, the museum included more than 700,000 material culture objects plus photographs and archival items representing Indigenous cultures across the Western Hemisphere.973

In 1904 Heye made inroads into the scholarly anthropological world, meeting a number of leading figures including Frederic Ward Putnam at the Peabody Museum of American

Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Franz Boas at New York’s

American Museum of Natural History.974 During this time Heye also made the acquaintance of

Marshall Saville, Professor of American Archaeology at Columbia University, and George H.

Pepper, Assistant Curator of Archaeology at the AMNH. It was these two men who not only

971 Kevin Wallace, “A Reporter at Large: Slim-Shins’ Monument,” New Yorker 36 (November 19, 1960): 6; New York, Extracted Marriage Index, 1936, Ancestry.com; J. Alden Mason, “George G. Heye, 1874-1957,” Leaflets of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation 6 (1958): 27-28.

972 Mason, “Heye,” 11.

973 Ann McMullen and Maria Galban, “Lost and Found: Re-establishing Provenance for an Entire Museum Collection,” in Collecting and Provenance: A Multidisciplinary Approach, eds., Jane Milosch and Nick Pearce (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 230.

974 NMAI, Heye, F.W. Putnam to G. Heye corr., July 2, 1904; NMAI, Heye, F.W. Putnam to G. Heye corr., October 20, 1904.

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introduced him to the likes of Putnam and Boas, but who also first taught him the importance of systematic collecting, scientific recording, and preservation of anthropological items.975

1904 was additionally the year that Heye first ventured “into the field,” accompanying wealthy friend and American Indian enthusiast Joseph Keppler, Jr. to the Haudenosaunee

(Iroquois) reservations at Onondaga, Tonawanda, and Cattaraugus. Of this experience Heye wrote, “I learned more about real Indians in those few days than it is possible to do reading from books for many months.” The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peoples “continue all of their old customs,” Heye added, noting that through Mr. Keppler’s kind assistance, Heye was able to witness “four of their ceremonies” otherwise off limits to non-Native visitors. Additionally, Heye collected a number of objects from these communities, obtaining “some beautiful specimens” which included masks, broaches, cooking utensils, beadwork, and three strings of wampum.976

As his private Native American collections grew, Heye considered the idea of creating an independent anthropological museum separate from those already in existence in East Coast cities. As early as 1906 he wrote to a friend, concerned over what he viewed as the “absolutely inactive” level of work performed by the AMNH to increase and display their Native American holdings. He suggested that if such inactivity continued into the future, perhaps “the work should be actively taken up by a younger and more interested group of enthusiasts” from outside the confines of that particular museum.977

975 Freed, Anthropology Unmasked, Vol. II, 656; Clara Sue Kidwell, “Every Last Dishcloth: The Prodigious Collecting of George Gustave Heye,” in Collecting Native America, 1870-1960, eds., Shepard Krech III and Barbara Hail (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), 235-236; NMAI, Heye, G. Pepper to F.W. Putnam corr., June 28, 1904.

976 NMAI, Heye, G.G. Heye to G. Pepper corr., November 22, 1904.

977 NMAI, Heye, G.G. Heye to A. Huntington corr., January 11, 1906.

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Two years later, in November of 1908, Heye proposed to George Byron Gordon, Curator of Ethnology at Philadelphia’s Free Museum of Science and Art, the notion of depositing his sizable collections there for exhibit and research.978 By the following January the museum’s

Board of Managers had accepted Heye’s “generous offer” to loan his ethnological and archaeological objects. From 1910 until 1917, then, “outstanding specimens from the Heye collection” remained on exhibit in the Philadelphia museum, attracting wide attention.979 Many of the museum’s Board of Managers believed, as did Gordon, that their museum would ultimately become the permanent repository for such materials. Sadly for Gordon and his colleagues, however, this was not to be, as in less than a decade Heye launched his own museum wholly separate from those already established in Cambridge, New York, Philadelphia, and

Washington, DC.

Figure 101. Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation Staff, 1917 NMAI P37554

On May 10, 1916, George Gustav Heye officially founded the Museum of the American

Indian, Heye Foundation, in New York City.980 According to its first Annual Report, the MAI was to be “a museum for the collection, preservation, study and exhibition of all things

978 King and Little, “Gordon,” 32.

979 Mason, “Heye,” 14.

980 NMAI, 1917 Annual Report.

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connected with the anthropology of the aboriginal people of North, South and Central

Americas,” specifically containing “objects of artistic, historic, literary and scientific interest.”981

Although many applauded Heye’s new creation, there were some who were less than pleased.

George Byron Gordon, now Director of the recently renamed University of Pennsylvania

University Museum, was reportedly “devastated” upon receiving word from Heye that he would be removing his collections from Philadelphia. For Gordon, Heye’s loaned collections had been the centerpiece of the University Museum’s American Indian holdings, and their removal undid

“years of careful planning and thoughtful purchasing.”982

Franz Boas, by 1916 a Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, was also shocked and dismayed on learning of Heye’s plan to found his own museum. In a letter that year from Boas to Heye, the former wrote, “It is of course obvious that nobody can deny that you have the right to do with your money as you please.” Yet, Boas continued, “the interests of science, the interests of education, and those of the city, would best be subserved if a way could be found of uniting your efforts with those of the American Museum of Natural History.”983

Heye’s succinct response a few days later summed up his feelings on the matter:

Rather than go into a long and useless discussion, I will fall back on the sentence in your letter which I hereby quote “It is obvious that nobody can deny that you have the right to do with your money as you please.” So, in view of this conceded point, allow me to state that after giving due thought to all phases of the question, my mind is fully made up in regard to the future disposal of my collections, and therefore so far as I am concerned the discussion is ended.984

981 NMAI, Minutes and Annual Reports, Vol. I, 1916-1927, 3.

982 King and Little, “Gordon,” 44.

983 NMAI, Heye, F. Boas to G.G. Heye corr., January 7, 1916.

984 NMAI, Heye, G.G. Heye to F. Boas corr., January 10, 1916.

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While Heye appreciated the expertise of Boas and other anthropologists like him, he certainly did not care to have anyone dictate to him what he should do with his collections.

Although the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, itself did not officially open to the public until 1922, Heye had employed anthropologists to collect materials in the field since the earliest years of the twentieth century, and had likewise made his collections available to researchers and interested members of the public.985 For instance, leading anthropologists

Franz Boas, William Henry Holmes, Alfred L. Kroeber, Frances La Flesche, and Alanson

Skinner had each conducted research in Heye’s private collections between the years 1911 and

1913, before many of these objects were even publicly accessible or yet on display.986 Skinner, like several other well-known anthropologists of his day, later also worked for Heye, collecting from throughout the Americas to supplement the MAI’s growing collections.

Annual Reports from the early years of the museum list the many anthropologists and field collectors Heye employed, specifically identifying the regions and Native communities with whom the all-male field-staff worked. One of the most notable for his collecting prowess was

M.R. Harrington, a former pupil of Boas’s at Columbia. Harrington travelled extensively for

Heye between the years 1908 and 1928, collecting ethnological and archaeological material from

Canada in the north to Cuba in the south, and from New York in the east to California in the west.987 Other staff and their areas of ethnological fieldwork included Skinner among the

Menominee of Wisconsin, Amos Oneroad among the Dakota (Eastern Sioux) communities of

985 U. Vincent Wilcox, “The Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation,” American Indian Art 3, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 44; Kidwell, “Every Last Dishcloth,” 252.

986 NMAI, Heye, “Book Containing Names and Dates,” undated.

987 “History of the Museum,” Indian Notes and Monographs – Miscellaneous Series no. 55 (1964): 8; M.R. Harrington, “Reminiscences of an Archeologist: VI,” Masterkey 38, no. 3 (July-September 1964): 108.

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South Dakota, William Wildschut among the Apsáalooke (Crow/Absaroke) of Montana, and

Donald Cadzow among many First Nations peoples of Canada such as the Plains Cree (Prairie

Cree) of Saskatchewan and the Apatohsipipiikani (Northern Piegan) of Alberta.988

Cadzow, in particular, copied down in one of his field notebooks Heye’s “Golden Rule” for collecting, giving an insider’s view to Heye’s personal thoughts. “Material must be old,” the

Golden Rule began, clarifying that particular attention should be paid to the following types of objects: “Hunting outfits, Fishing outfits, Costumes, Masks & ceremonial objects, also dance outfits, Household utensils, particularly stone & pottery dishes & lamps, Talismans, hunting charms, [and] all ivory carvings (old).” Heye’s Golden Rule for collecting ended with the emphatic reminder, “NO TOURIST MATERIAL.”989 Similarly, Frederic Ward Putnam also informed collectors in his employ, “It is the real old native things that I am after.” Further specifying, Putnam noted that he desired only those items which related to “the life and customs of the Indians before their art was ruined by contact with the whites.”990 These directives from

Heye and Putnam were common ones, repeated by nearly every museum director or anthropologist of this era. Museum ethnologists were seeking to document what they perceived to be not only static cultures, but also vanishing ones. As adherents of salvage anthropology, these individuals strove to collect, by honorable means or otherwise, all Native objects which they viewed to be “pure,” i.e., those untouched by non-Native “civilization.”991

988 “History of the Museum,” 9-12.

989 NMAI, Heye, D. Cadzow Field Notes, 1917.

990 Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, F.W. Putnam to M. Riddle corr., July 24, 1891.

991 Jacob Gruber, “Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 72, no. 6 (December 1970): 1294; Dippie, Vanishing American, 233.

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Such massive and wide-scale collecting came to a sudden halt for the MAI in the late

1920s with the death of two of the museum’s major benefactors in 1928, and with the stock market crash the following year.992 As a result, and in order to survive the economic downturn,

Heye summarily dismissed the bulk of his museum staff. Although he continued to purchase collections, Heye drastically reduced the number of ethnological and archaeological expeditions into the field. The Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, continued with Heye as

Director until his death in 1957 at the age of eighty-two.993 Years of fiscal mismanagement followed until the eventual incorporation of the insolvent MAI into the larger Smithsonian

Institution in 1989, resulting in the creation of the National Museum of the American Indian.

“Heye’s monument” continues today, though instead of solely representing Native cultures through anthropologists’ interpretations, as the museum formerly had done, it now serves as both a multitribal museum and as a venue for “Native insiders to present their cultures to non-Native outsiders,” with the former having a deciding say in the conception and running of the museum.994

Heye, the MAI, and the Public

992 Ann McMullen, “Reinventing George Heye: Nationalizing the Museum of the American Indian and Its Collections,” in Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives, ed., Susan Sleeper-Smith (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 78.

993 Mary Jane Lenz, “George Gustav Heye: The Museum of the American Indian,” in Spirit of a Native Place: Building the National Museum of the American Indian, ed., Duane Blue Spruce (Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, 2004), 109; S.K. Lothrop, “George Gustav Heye: 1874-1956,” American Antiquity 23, no. 1 (July 1957): 66.

994 McMullen, “Reinventing George Heye,” 78; Ira Jacknis, “A New Thing? The National Museum of the American Indian in Historical and Institutional Context,” in The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations, eds., Amy Lonetree and Amanda J. Cobb (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 31-32.

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George Gustav Heye’s reception by the media, by his non-Native contemporaries, and by later scholars has been quite mixed. Newspapers of the day generally described Heye and the

Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, in favorable terms, however. The New York

Tribune, for instance, considered Heye an Indian expert, writing in 1922 that he probably knew more about the American Indian than anyone else in New York.995 Other newspapers used language typical of the time to notify the public of the museum’s Native American holdings. One

Philadelphia paper claimed that the collections told the story of “the vanishing race,” while another declared that the MAI was devoted to solving the great mystery of the origin of “the prehistoric races” of the Western Hemisphere.996

While some among Heye’s non-Native contemporaries painted him as a difficult or even a “rugged character,” Donald Cadzow, M.R. Harrington, and other MAI employees found him to be just the opposite. Cadzow stated that the museum staff “worked with George Heye, and not for him,” while Harrington found Heye “a wonderful man to work for,” fondly recalling that due to his height and weight, the staff jokingly referred to him as “heye, wide, and handsome.”997

Many of these men were drawn to Heye’s “new dream museum” as an institution that collected

“the best anthropologists as well as the best artifacts.”998 Perspectives on Heye’s collecting, however, tended to be more varied.

During Heye’s initial forays into acquiring Native American objects, contemporary anthropologists at the American Museum of Natural History regarded him as “enthusiastic,” but

995 “Young Boswell Interviews George Gustav Heye,” New York Tribune, NY, December 21, 1922.

996 “Splendid Indian Curios on View,” Unknown Philadelphia Newspaper, PA, February 13, 1910; “Museum of Indians Will Cost $250,000,” New York Times, NY, May 6, 1916.

997 Mason, “Heye,” 21, emphasis added; NMAI, Heye, M.R. Harrington, “Memories of My Work with George G. Heye,” undated; M.R. Harrington, “Reminiscences of an Archeologist,” Masterkey 36, no. 2 (April-June 1962): 142.

998 Lothrop, “Heye,” 66; Wallace, “Reporter at Large,” 105.

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noted that he needed “a certain amount of initial guidance” in order to get off on the right foot.999

Similarly, men working with Putnam at the Peabody Museum in Massachusetts gave their opinion of Heye: “While his likes and dislikes are strong, at the same time he is very clear headed and has a balanced judgement on most questions.” Regarding Heye’s collecting in particular, Putnam’s associate continued, “Every month now sees his interest growing stronger” in the work of museum anthropology.1000

In spite of Heye’s clear interest in the work, though, the financial largesse which allowed him to purchase objects in great quantities also rankled some of his competitors in the field. One anonymous early twentieth-century museum anthropologist labeled Heye a “boxcar collector” who’s true desire was nothing more than “to own the biggest damned hobby collection in the world.”1001 Even Frederick Webb Hodge, an employee of both the Smithsonian’s Bureau of

American Ethnology and later of Heye’s Museum of the American Indian, complained late in life, “Heye was acquisitive. He didn’t care about any information after the collections were found. Specimens were his great object in life. Information respecting them didn’t concern him.”1002 Hodge, among other detractors, argued that Heye was more interested in acquiring

Native American material culture objects than in preserving the objects’ related contextual information – a stinging criticism for any professional anthropologist.

More recent scholars have tended to focus on Heye’s larger than life personality, telling and retelling tales of his “obsessive” collecting, multiple marriages, and gustatory feats, rather

999 NMAI, Heye, G. Pepper to F.W. Hodge corr., June 30, 1904.

1000 Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, T. Hyde to F.W. Putnam corr., December 19, 1905.

1001 Wallace, “Reporter at Large,” 106-107.

1002 Hodge, “Frederick Webb Hodge,” 169.

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than examining his scholarly and professional pursuits.1003 One academic, for instance, writing two decades after Heye’s death, opined that Heye was “not a true scholar,” but rather sought to obtain simply the “largest and best collection of its kind,” arguing that such a pursuit was a

“rather selfish dream.”1004 Museum Anthropologist Ann McMullen, however, has shown convincingly that rather than just the output of a “passionate collector,” the MAI and its scholarly exhibition and publication work under Heye were comparable if not superior to any produced by contemporary anthropology and natural history museums throughout the country.1005

While there are few recorded Native American perspectives on Heye and the MAI during this time, there do exist a number of early twentieth-century newspaper articles openly critical of the federal government’s efforts to deculturate and marginalize the Native peoples of North

America. Notably, many of these pieces coincided with the formal opening of the MAI in New

York in late 1922, forcing a re-examination of those Native Americans who continued to exist in the U.S., despite ceaseless reports of “vanishing Indians.” Cincinnati’s Times-Star newspaper of

November 7th, for instance, lamented the ironic nature that “now that the Indian tribes have been so reduced in numbers and changed from their original character, the redman is deemed worthy of occupying an enduring place in a museum.”1006

1003 McMullen, “Reinventing George Heye,” 66; Carpenter, Two Essays, 24-25; Wallace, “Reporter at Large,” 106.

1004 Wilcox, “Museum of the American Indian,” 42-43.

1005 Ann McMullen, “‘A New Dream Museum’: 100 Years of the (National) Museum of the American Indian (1916- 2016),” (In Press, 2020), 4.

1006 “Almost An Irony,” Times-Star, OH, November 7, 1922.

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Figure 102. MAI Exhibit Displaying Collections from California, Pacific Northwest, and Southwest U.S., 1921 NMAI P02972

Both the New York Evening Post and the Telegram also published pieces in 1922 on the country’s violent past with American Indian peoples, equally saddened by Euro-American culpability for these actions, yet buoyed by Heye’s efforts to render the life of the various tribes

“vivid, definite, and accurate.” Views on American Indians had now changed, the New York

Telegram proclaimed, writing, “the poor Indian . . . must be consoled by the fact that his fellow

Americans are taking a great interest in him and his ways.”1007 While these statements were true to a certain extent, and while the MAI and the AMNH did regularly display anthropologists’ representations of Native cultures, there was little if any mention of the actual living conditions of present-day Native peoples in the U.S. Hundreds of thousands continued to exist in deplorable conditions on and off of reservations, living as colonized wards rather than citizens, while anthropologists continued to romanticize and exoticize their cultures in the nation’s museums.

The Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation represented Native American cultures to the public via lectures, publications, and exhibitions. Beginning with its founding year

1007 “Red Men and Their History,” Evening Post, NY, November 15, 1922; “Our Indian Museum,” Telegram, NY, November 15, 1922.

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of 1916, the MAI sought to “promote the public welfare” via the issuing of educational publications.1008 An article in the Geographical Review from that year announced that the museum would host lectures and present publications on the results of archaeological excavations, ethnological studies, and field explorations.1009 In 1918 Heye hired Frederick Webb

Hodge, editor of the Bureau of American Ethnology’s massive The Handbook of American

Indians North of Mexico, to work for him at the MAI and organize the museum’s publications.1010 Soon after starting, Hodge requested that staff produce and submit to him regular scholarly reports on their work. As a result, the museum published thirty-seven books and pamphlets, totaling nearly 3,000 pages for just the years 1921 to 1923 alone.1011 While

Hodge performed an admirable job in organizing the MAI’s publications work, the exhibitions remained the main drawing factor for much of the museum-going public.

Heye regularly emphasized in newspaper interviews, in correspondence, and via publications that the Native American objects he had collected served multiple audiences, including both scientists and students, and were open to everyone without cost.1012 Museum staff reportedly displayed these objects in such a way to “appeal to the general public as well as to the scientist” who equally sought free entertainment and instruction.1013 According to a Philadelphia newspaper, exhibitions of Heye’s Native American materials drew in hundreds, with crowds of

1008 NMAI, Minutes and Annual Reports, Vol. I, 1916-1927, 3-4.

1009 George H. Pepper, “The Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation,” Geographical Review 2, no. 6 (December 1916): 417-418.

1010 Kidwell, “Every Last Dishcloth,” 247; Hodge, “Frederick Webb Hodge,” 108-109.

1011 Carpenter, Two Essays, 36.

1012 Carpenter, Two Essays, 105.

1013 Pepper, “Museum of the American Indian,” 417; “Indian Museum Lights Amaze,” Herald, KY, December 10, 1922.

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“scientific men” and “absorbed spectators” alike in attendance.1014 Indeed, one anonymous visitor detailed his changed perspective on the American Indian past as a result of viewing the

MAI exhibits. “With surprise and pleasure,” he wrote in the museum’s guest book on February

20, 1923, “I learn today that the prehistoric people of America were in no way inferior – and in some ways superior – to the prehistoric folk of Europe and Asia.”1015 While examples such as these illustrate how Heye and his MAI staff represented historical Native American cultures to the general public, it is also important to examine how Heye and the MAI viewed and represented contemporary Native peoples with whom they worked day in and day out.

Simply put, neither George Gustav Heye nor the Museum of the American Indian as a whole advocated for Native American rights, causes, or citizenship during the early years of the twentieth century. This does not come as a surprise, as few in the anthropological field did at this time. Regarding Heye in particular, many of his peers and later scholars have characterized him as having shown little interest in the wellbeing of living Native peoples, and of being neither overly sympathetic nor unsympathetic.1016 One anonymous contemporary even claimed that

Heye “didn’t give a hang about Indians individually, and he never seemed to have heard about their problems in present-day society.”1017

More than anything, though, there is in Heye’s writing virtually no mention of actual living Native Americans. On the few occasions when he did write of contemporary Native

1014 “Splendid Indian Curios on View,” Unknown Philadelphia Newspaper, PA, February 13, 1910.

1015 NMAI, Heye, Visitor Book, 1922.

1016 Natasha Bonilla Martinez, “An Indian Americas: NMAI Photographic Archive Documents Indian Peoples of the Western Hemisphere,” in Spirit Capture: Photographs from the National Museum of the American Indian, ed., Tim Johnson (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 56; Wilcox, “Museum of the American Indian,” 78.

1017 Wallace, “Reporter at Large,” 108.

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peoples, he wrote vaguely of the debt the people of the United States owed to the American

Indians for their “marked influence upon our own culture.”1018 In speaking of the founding of the

MAI, Heye later wrote that it was his intention to create a “sympathetic” institution which could preserve those objects sacred to Native peoples, but which had fallen into disuse and danger of destruction.1019 Importantly, a few notable staff including Alanson Skinner, Amos Oneroad, and

M.R. Harrington did support Native peoples with whom they lived, worked, and intermarried.

Skinner in particular even battled against the “constant misrepresentation of Indian life, history, and character” in popular culture, film, and the media.1020

Ultimately, the Museum of the American, Heye Foundation, in general, and George

Gustav Heye in particular, were quite similar to their counterpart anthropology and natural history museums in representing/misrepresenting Native peoples. By the time of the founding of the MAI in 1916, social evolutionist thought relegating Native Americans to the lowest rung of physical and mental development had largely faded. Notions of North America’s Indigenous peoples as primitive, backward, or incapable of imaginative thought still continued, however, partly as a result of the pronouncements, publications, and exhibitions by the men and women believed to be the experts on American Indian peoples – anthropologists.1021 Large numbers of the public, as consumers of museum representations of Native Americans, repeated such stereotyped constructs as unquestionable facts. As a result, many non-Native museum visitors continued to perpetuate the romantic idea of the nineteenth-century Plains Indian they learned

1018 “May Discover Red Man Origin,” Herald, NY, October 21, 1922.

1019 Carpenter, Two Essays, 105.

1020 Alanson Skinner, “Red Men in ‘Movies,’” New York Times, NY, June 4, 1914.

1021 “Young Boswell Interviews George Gustav Heye,” New York Tribune, NY, December 21, 1922.

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about in these educational institutions, remaining largely unaware or willfully ignorant of the suffering of living Native peoples in their midst.

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SECTION 8-1

M.R. HARRINGTON (1882-1971)

Figure 103. M.R. Harrington Dressed in Native Clothing, ca. 1905 NMAI P28198

Though now less well-remembered, Mark Raymond, or M.R., Harrington, was a prominent twentieth-century anthropologist who worked for many of the leading anthropological museums of his day. Born in Michigan in 1882, M.R. and his family moved several times across the U.S. before settling down in Mt. Vernon, New York, during his teenage years. There he first came into contact with the staff of the American Museum of Natural History, launching his more than sixty-year career in the field of anthropology. Although initially matriculating at the

University of Michigan, Harrington later transferred to Columbia University in New York where he studied under Franz Boas, receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in anthropology in

1907 and 1908.1022 Throughout his professional career he joined numerous scientific and

1022 NMAI, Heye, M.R. Harrington, “Memories of a Mis-Spent Life,” 1952.

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anthropological organizations, in addition to maintaining his Associate Member status in the progressive-leaning and Native American-controlled Society of American Indians.1023

Harrington’s marital life was marked by repeated sadness. He eventually married four women, with the first three all preceding him in death. In approximately 1903 he and Alma Cock married in Niagara Falls, New York. She died just over ten years later on July 20, 1914. On

September 6, 1916, Harrington married a second time, to Anna Alexander Johns, also in New

York.1024 After ten years of marriage together and the birth of one child, Johns Heye Harrington,

Anna died of respiratory illness on August 13, 1927.1025 That same year Harrington and Edna

(Endeka) Parker Carpenter, a Seneca woman originally from New York, married in Sacramento,

California.1026 Edna was also the sister of Harrington’s good friend and fellow anthropologist

Arthur C. Parker. After more than twenty years of marriage together, Edna too passed away, in

Los Angeles, in 1948. In 1949 Harrington married for a fourth and final time, to Marie Toma

Walsh, a woman twenty-five years his junior, who survived him after his death in 1971 at the age of eighty-eight.1027

While living in New York in the 1890s and working under Frederic Ward Putnam’s direction at the American Museum of Natural History, Harrington had the good fortune to meet

1023 Larner, SAI, A.C. Parker to M.R. Harrington corr., July 14, 1915; Arthur C. Parker, “M. Raymond Harrington, Explorer,” American Indian Magazine 5, no. 3 (July-September 1917): 176.

1024 New York, Marriage Index, 1881-1967, Ancestry.com.

1025 Bruchac, Savage Kin, 87; New York, Death Index, 1852-1956, Ancestry.com.

1026 Marie Harrington, “The Life and Times of M.R. Harrington,” in The Westerners Brand Book, Number 12, ed., LeRoy R. Hafen (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Corral, 1966): 181.

1027 California, Death Index, 1940-1997, Ancestry.com; Harrington, “Life and Times,” 184; Frederick J. Dockstader, “Mark Raymond Harrington, 1882-1971,” Indian Notes 8, no. 1 (Winter 1972): 26-27.

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like-minded individuals Harriet Maxwell Converse and Joseph Keppler, Jr.1028 Though not anthropologists by profession, Converse and Keppler were passionate about the study of Native

American cultures, and were also adopted members of the Seneca community.1029 Unlike many of their peers in the anthropological field, they actively championed the rights of living Native

Americans, with Converse lobbying Congressional representatives on behalf of Haudenosaunee

(Iroquois) land rights, education, and freedom to practice their religious beliefs.1030 Through their

New York City gatherings and salons at the turn of the twentieth century, Keppler and Converse influenced many budding anthropologists of the era, instilling in them a sense of sympathy, understanding, and equality toward Native peoples that remained throughout their lives and careers. Among the attendees at these gatherings were a young Arthur C. Parker, later a Seneca archaeologist and Director of New York’s Rochester Museum, M.R. Harrington, and a number of Native American men and women that Harrington remembered as making their living in New

York as actors or artists’ models.1031

Harrington’s professional anthropological career consisted of employment at several of the leading museums of his day. These institutions included Harvard University’s Peabody

Museum, New York’s American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of the American

Indian, Heye Foundation, Philadelphia’s University Museum, and later, the Southwest Museum

1028 M.R. Harrington, “Reminiscences of an Archeologist: II,” Masterkey 37, no. 1 (January-March 1963): 22-23; Harrington, “Life and Times,” 179.

1029 “Big Chiefs Mourn Great White Mother,” Brooklyn Union, NY, November 23, 1903; George Frederick Kunz, “Harriet Maxwell Converse: The Indian’s Friend,” American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society (1905): 194.

1030 Rosa Sonneschein, “The White Chief,” American Jewess 1, no. 5 (August 1895): 234-235; “Among Indians,” Buffalo Courier, NY, July 6, 1899; “Keppler Now a Big Chief,” New York Sun, NY, January 20, 1900; Harriet Maxwell Converse, “A Plea for the Rights of Empire State Indians,” Washington Times, DC, March 21, 1902.

1031 Harrington, “Reminiscences: II,” 22-23; Hazel W. Hertzberg, “Arthur C. Parker,” in American Indian Intellectuals, ed., Margot Liberty (St. Paul West Publishing, 1978), 131.

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in Los Angeles.1032 While still a teenager Harrington first began work as Frederic Ward

Putnam’s assistant at the AMNH in 1899. Working there over the next four years he made the acquaintance of well-known fellow anthropologists Frank Hamilton Cushing, famous for his work among the A:shiwi (Zuni) people in the late nineteenth century, as well as George H.

Pepper, Marshall Saville, and Franz Boas.1033

In spite of his connections and early exposure to the field, Harrington nevertheless experienced trouble locating gainful employment on the completion of his master’s degree from

Columbia. After seeking and finding no positions “where the remuneration was sufficient” at either the Peabody, the AMNH, or the Bureau of American Ethnology, Harrington eventually accepted a job collecting Native American material culture objects for Covert’s Indian Store on

Fifth Avenue in New York City.1034 Covert’s, like many other novelty shops of the time, made a lucrative business acquiring and selling “curios” and other “Indian relics” sought by museum collectors and the general public. It was there at Covert’s that Harrington first met George

Gustav Heye who not only hired him on in 1908, but for whom he would continue to work for the next two decades.

While Harrington’s early large-scale collecting work was among the Haudenosaunee

(Iroquois) and Munsee-Delaware First Nations communities of Canada, as time went on he ultimately worked in almost every region of the United States, including as far afield as Mexico

1032 NMAI, Heye, Harrington, “Memories of a Mis-Spent Life,” 1952.

1033 Harrington, “Reminiscences,” 141.

1034 NMAI, Heye, F.W. Putnam to M.R. Harrington corr., September 26, 1906; AMNH, Anthropology, M.R. Harrington to H. Bumpus corr., February 6, 1905; NAA, BAE, M.R. Harrington to W.H. Holmes corr., April 10, 1907; Harrington, “Reminiscences,” 141.

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and the Caribbean.1035 Working among such a large number of distinct Indigenous communities,

Harrington not surprisingly faced more than a few challenges. In Florida in 1908, for instance, he struggled to make his seemingly-bizarre collecting work adequately understood by a Seminole family. He explained that he sought to purchase “their old-style utensils, tools, weapons, clothing and ornaments,” with the goal of storing them “forever in a building that would not burn down.”

Such a building, Harrington further elaborated, would allow “future generations of whites and

Indians” to observe the “beautiful things the oldtime Seminoles made and used.”1036 Whether or not they truly understood or accepted Harrington’s avowed purposes, many in this Florida community ultimately agreed to part with their more quotidian objects.

Two years later, while working among the in Oklahoma, Harrington confronted a different obstacle. Apparently at least one vocal member of the local Osage community disliked Harrington’s collecting work, and urged other families not to sell him anything. “If we sell all our old things,” the anonymous Osage man warned, “we shall no longer be Indian.”1037 Although Harrington provided no further information about this incident, the unidentified Osage man’s words still ring true today – the loss of Native cultural heritage materials in the past is directly tied to the diminution or absence of many peoples’ cultural identity in the present. Poignantly, museum anthropologists practicing salvage anthropology at the time, individuals such as Harrington, were the biggest culprits of this identity loss.

1035 Harvard, HUG 1717.2.1, M.R. Harrington to F.W. Putnam corr., November 7, 1907; Dockstader, “Harrington,” 26.

1036 M.R. Harrington, “Reminiscences of an Archeologist: V,” Masterkey 38, no. 1 (January-March 1963): 32.

1037 M.R. Harrington, “Reminiscences of an Archeologist: VII,” Masterkey 39 (1965): 30.

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Figure 104. Bill Skye, 1908 NMAI P23479

Not all of Harrington’s collecting work proved so difficult, however, thanks in large part to a number of American Indian friends and collaborators he made along the way. One Native man with whom he continued to work over the years was Bill Skye, a Peoria chief from

Oklahoma. Skye worked for Harrington as his guide and assistant on an archaeological expedition along Oklahoma’s Grand River in 1914, and continued collecting work among Peoria,

Shawnee, and Oklahoma Delaware communities until at least 1921.1038 Skye and dozens of other

Native American men and women like him made conscious decisions to regularly collaborate with Harrington, informing him about the intangible aspects of their cultures while simultaneously placing sacred and profane objects into his care. While the scope of Harrington’s collecting work was largely unprecedented and should not be downplayed, his acquisition of ethnological and archaeological materials would not have been possible without these willing individuals.

Harrington and the Public

1038 M.R. Harrington, “Reminiscences of an Archeologist: VIII,” Masterkey 39 (1965): 150; NMAI, Heye, M.R. Harrington to B. Skye corr., August 5, 1920; NMAI, Heye, B. Skye to M.R. Harrington corr., January 10, 1921.

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M.R. Harrington worked with more Native communities, at more museums, and for a longer period of time than many of his colleagues in the anthropological world. In spite of this, it is rare to come across a single negative statement or critical characterization of the man. This, even after examining the voluminous correspondence of his peers, countless contemporary newspaper articles written about him, and the more recent writings of current scholars.

Harrington’s reception by the media and by his Native and non-Native colleagues then and now has been almost universally laudatory. Newspapers and popular periodicals of his day labeled him an “anthropologist of note,” “a prolific and distinguished writer,” and a “widely-known expert on Indian history and legend.”1039 A fellow museum anthropologist wrote soon after

Harrington’s death of his “remarkable memory for detail, depth of knowledge of the Indian, and a superb sense of humor which endeared him to all who had the privilege of his acquaintance.”1040

Figure 105. Arthur C. Parker in his Office, 1942 NMAI P16218

1039 Neosho Times, MO, December 9, 1920; “Mark R. Harrington . . . Author,” Los Angeles Corral 49 (June 1959): 10; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, MO, September 23, 1928.

1040 Dockstader, “Harrington,” 27.

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His Seneca friend, colleague, and future brother-in-law Arthur C. Parker described

Harrington in even more glowing terms. According to Parker, Harrington was a devoted friend, having “loved the Indian people and defended them from every angle of attack” since his early boyhood days.1041 Similarly, present-day scholar and Abenaki museum anthropologist Margaret

Bruchac has recently praised Harrington as “a determined researcher with an inclusive and egalitarian bent.”1042 Like many other anthropologists of his time, Harrington accepted an official place in the family of the people he studied, remembering fondly his adoption by “an elderly matron of the Turtle Clan” of the Onyota’a:ka (Oneida) First Nation community in Canada in

1908.1043 Such an adoption reflected in many ways the similar experiences of his non- anthropologist mentors Harriet Maxell Converse and Joseph Keppler, Jr. among the Seneca communities of New York.

Throughout his long career as an anthropologist, Harrington sought to represent Native

American cultures in a variety of forms, in this way both entertaining and educating the broader

American public. While his anthropological work spanned museum exhibits and lectures, his major contribution was through the publication of over 300 articles and books on Native

American lives and cultures. These publications varied between ethnological and archaeological topics, and also differed depending on the intended audience. While Harrington published many pieces in scholarly journals such as the American Anthropologist and the Journal of American

Folklore, he also wrote for newspapers and popular periodicals, and even tried his hand at

1041 Parker, “Harrington,” 176.

1042 Bruchac, Savage Kin, 86.

1043 Harrington, “Reminiscences: VI,” 108.

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ethnological children’s books, including Dickon among the Indians and The Iroquois

Trail: Dickon Among the Onondagas and Senecas.1044

M.R. Harrington was a product of his time. While he was roundly praised by both Native and non-Native peoples for his anthropological life’s work, he still represented, consciously or not, U.S. settler colonial culture as an educated Euro-American male from the metropolis of New

York. In spite of his sympathy for Native life-ways and histories, he, like his teachers Putnam,

Boas, and Heye, believed American Indian life was quickly passing away and that it was his responsibility to capture it before it vanished forever.1045 Although his sympathy for the suffering of contemporary Native peoples is unquestioned, the fact remains that there is no evidence that

Harrington fought or advocated for Native rights, for their citizenship, or for their equality on any major political stage. Perhaps he believed the best route open to him was through educating the American public about Native American cultures within the realm of museum anthropology.

This he did through his publications, lectures, and exhibitions, just as he did by “saving” Native

American ethnological, linguistic, and material culture objects in museums. Like his friend and colleague Alanson Skinner, Native Americans were more than simply a subject of study for M.R.

Harrington. They were integral to his life, his identity, and over time became intimate members of his family.

1044 Dockstader, “Harrington,” 27; “Harrington . . . Author,” 10.

1045 Dockstader, “Harrington,” 26.

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SECTION 8-2

AMOS ONEROAD (1884-1937)

Figure 106. Amos Oneroad, ca. 1920 NMAI P27203

One of the few full-time Native American anthropologists to enter the early twentieth- century museum anthropology world, Amos Oneroad was born on the Lake Traverse

Reservation in the in 1884. A member of the Sisitonwan Dakota (Sisseton

Sioux) community, Oneroad attended both the Goodwill Presbyterian Mission School and the

Sisseton Agency School before enrolling at the Haskell Institute, an Indian Boarding School in

Lawrence, Kansas, in 1905. He graduated from the latter in 1909 at age twenty-five with a specialization in agricultural sciences. Four years later, at the urging of his father and grandfather, Oneroad matriculated at the Bible Teachers’ Training School in New York, later renamed the New York Theological Seminary, and graduated in 1917.1046 It was during this period that he first visited the American Museum of Natural History, developed a passion for

1046 Oneroad and Skinner, Being Dakota, 22-23.

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anthropological work, and started a close friendship with ethnologist Alanson Skinner which would last more than a decade.

Oneroad married twice in his life, both times to Native women. He and Etta Ortley married in April of 1919, with her dying not long after, in May of 1922. Oneroad married again in 1926 to Emma Wantawa, who would eventually outlive him.1047 In addition to his church and his anthropological organizations, Oneroad also served as a member of the progressive-leaning,

Native American-founded and controlled Society of American Indians. He was aware of, though unable to attend, the annual conference in Columbus, Ohio in 1912, and held membership in this organization in 1913, if not earlier.1048

Soon after his arrival in New York City in 1913, Oneroad began visiting the American

Museum of Natural History, where he proved “an interesting and interested visitor.” As he possessed a “surprising amount of knowledge concerning the customs of the Eastern Dakotas,”

AMNH anthropologists Skinner and Robert Lowie commenced ethnological studies with him, taking notes from his dictation.1049 In March of 1914 Skinner wrote to a friend that he had been working “for quite a while with a Sioux Indian” living in the city. He added, “I got from him a whole lot” about his community’s Medicine Lodge ceremony, what Skinner called the “Wakan watchoopi,” among other religious practices and ceremonies.1050

These initial meetings in late 1913 and early 1914 touched off an anthropology career which would consume much of the next decade of Oneroad’s life, and lead to his employment at

1047 South Dakota, Marriage Records, 1905-2016, Ancestry.com.

1048 Larner, SAI, A. Oneroad to A.C. Parker corr., October 19, 1913.

1049 “Museum Notes,” American Museum Journal 14, no. 3 (March 1914): 119.

1050 AMNH, Anthropology, A. Skinner to J.V. Satterlee corr., March 24, 1914.

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three of the major anthropology museums in the country. He worked in some capacity, as an assistant, collaborator, or full-time ethnologist, at the American Museum of Natural History from

1914 to 1916, the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation from 1918 to 1919 and again from 1924 to 1925, and the Milwaukee Public Museum from 1922 to 1924.1051 Notably, his employment at these various museums was intertwined with and mirrored Alanson Skinner’s work trajectory during these years.

In addition to aiding staff ethnologists in the creation of anthropological manuscripts,

Oneroad also undertook ethnographic and even archaeological fieldwork while under the auspices of these three museums.1052 As early as the summer of 1914 Skinner and Oneroad were in the field together, collecting folklore and material culture items among the Dakota (Eastern

Sioux) communities in South Dakota. Skinner wrote to AMNH staff that they were “beginning to get the stuff,” and reportedly “having a bully time” staying with Oneroad’s family.1053 The two men returned to collect from these communities a number of times over the ensuing years, including while working for the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation in 1918, and again while employed by the Milwaukee Public Museum in 1922.1054

Oneroad and Skinner’s relationship was close from the beginning. Perhaps because the former was without family or community in New York City, Skinner informally “adopted” him as his brother-in-law in May of 1914. They referred to each other as such for the remainder of their days, often using the Dakota word for brother-in-law, “tahan,” in their correspondence.

1051 “Indian Gets Post at Milwaukee Museum,” Milwaukee Sentinel, WI, July 29, 1922; NMAI, 1918-1919 Annual Report; NMAI, 1919-1920 Annual Report; Carey, “Skinner,” 14.

1052 Oneroad and Skinner, Being Dakota, 25.

1053 AMNH, Anthropology, A. Skinner to B. Weitzner corr., August 6, 1914.

1054 AMNH, Anthropology, A. Skinner to C. Wissler corr., November 2, 1918; AMNH, Anthropology, A. Skinner to C. Wissler corr., June 21, 1923.

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Skinner’s close friend and fellow anthropologist M.R. Harrington also considered Oneroad his brother-in-law, as is evidenced in the three men’s letters.1055 Despite the absence of civil or legal recognition of their ties together, these men considered themselves family, which only made

Skinner’s sudden death in 1925 that much harder to bear.

Figure 107. Alanson Skinner and Amos Oneroad Sitting in Field, ca. 1920 NMAI P27199

On August 17, 1925, Oneroad and Skinner traveled together to conduct fieldwork near what was then the Devils Lake Reservation in Tokio, North Dakota. Due to muddy roads from recent rains, the car Oneroad was driving skidded down an embankment and toppled over, crushing and killing Skinner instantly.1056 Though physically unharmed other than a few bruises,

Oneroad struggled through self-described “mental shock” for months afterward. He wrote to his colleagues at the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, in New York that he had difficulty sleeping at night, and hoped to “recover soon and be my real self again.” Three months later Oneroad was still plagued with the “after effects” of the accident, and questioned “Why was

1055 AMNH, Anthropology, A. Skinner to J.V. Satterlee corr., May 14, 1914; Oneroad and Skinner, Being Dakota, 26; AMNH, Anthropology, A. Skinner to M.R. Harrington corr., February 23, 1915.

1056 Oneroad and Skinner, Being Dakota, 33.

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I spared?” He closed his letter with the thought that he might never find another friend like

Alanson Skinner.1057

Paralleling Oneroad’s anthropological avocation throughout these years was his true vocation to Christian ministry and missionary work. While enrolled at the Bible Teachers’

Training School in New York, he maintained close relations with his family and his church on the reservation in South Dakota. In 1914 Oneroad accepted the office of Vice President of the

Dakota Missionary Society, and in 1917, following his graduation from the seminary, he became an ordained and licensed Presbyterian minister. Between his work for the Museum of the

American Indian, Heye Foundation in 1919 and that of the Milwaukee Public Museum in 1922,

Oneroad accepted a position with the Office of Evangelism of the Dakota Presbytery, traveling throughout Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Utah. Following Skinner’s death in 1925,

Oneroad traveled with his new wife Emma and undertook missionary work among the Dakota peoples living in exile in Canada in the early part of 1926. Three years later, he accepted an appointment at the Yankton Agency church in Greenwood, South Dakota. Amos Oneroad died there in 1937, at the age of fifty-three, and was buried among his congregation.1058

Oneroad and the Public

Although Amos Oneroad’s name does not appear as frequently in the historical record as do some of his museum colleagues, one can still glean how his Native and non-Native contemporaries perceived him based on the extant sources. The AMNH’s American Museum

Journal in March of 1914, for instance, noted “this young Wahpeton Sioux’s” recent arrival in

1057 NMAI, Heye, A. Oneroad to F. Utley corr., September 18, 1925; NMAI, Heye, A. Oneroad to G.G. Heye corr., November 7, 1925.

1058 Oneroad and Skinner, Being Dakota, 24-26, 35-37.

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the city, particularly highlighting his knowledge of “war customs, terms of relationship, social usages and ceremonials” among his own community.1059 All of this information, incidentally, proved immensely helpful to the museum’s anthropologists and researchers. Similarly, the

Milwaukee Sentinel of July 29, 1922, in announcing Oneroad’s acceptance of a position aiding

Alanson Skinner at the Milwaukee Public Museum, described Oneroad as “an experienced field man,” and reported that the museum was “very fortunate to obtain his assistance.”1060

Newspapers directed toward Native audiences, such as The Carlisle Arrow, also mentioned

Oneroad by name, but tended to focus more on his church-affiliated rather than anthropological labors.1061

Equally important as the public’s perceptions of Oneroad were his representations of

Native peoples for public consumption. Again due to his limited time as a member of the anthropological profession, these representations are not particularly prolific. Nevertheless, there is a record of Oneorad delivering educational lectures on Native topics to audiences at both the

AMNH and the YMCA while dressed in “full Siouan costume.”1062 Likewise, Oneroad co- presented at least one lecture with Skinner on the “Cree, Ojibway, and Menomini” peoples at the

Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1914.1063 However, no doubt the anthropological work most important to Oneroad was his collaborative manuscript written with Skinner on

Dakota (Eastern Sioux) folklore and ethnology. It represented in a very literal way Oneroad’s

1059 “Musem Notes,” 119.

1060 “Indian Gets Post at Milwaukee Museum,” Milwaukee Sentinel, WI, July 29, 1922.

1061 “Represents the Indian Race at Missionary Exposition,” Carlisle Arrow, PA, September 5, 1913; “General School News,” Carlisle Arrow, PA, October 2, 1914; “General School News,” Carlisle Arrow, PA, March 19, 1915.

1062 Oneroad and Skinner, Being Dakota, 24.

1063 Carey, “Skinner,” 14.

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family, as it included the stories and traditions of his friends, relatives, and other community members.1064 Sadly, this work was not published during either Oneroad or Skinner’s lifetime.

Amos Oneroad did not leave a record justifying or explaining his reasons for first undertaking anthropological museum work in 1914. To some extent he was financially motivated, living as he was as a student in an expensive city. But as a Native man writing about and collecting his own culture’s materials, one may also safely assume that over time he started working to preserve this history for future generations.1065

As an ordained Presbyterian minister, however, he was also fully aware of, if not exactly a zealous advocate for, the U.S. government’s policies of Christianization and civilization of

American Indian peoples. In 1882 the federal government established the Courts of Indian

Offenses, effectively banning the possession of Native religious objects and the performance of dances or ceremonies, those “savage and barbarous practices of the Indians.”1066 Although some reservation agents were more lax than others about these “offenses,” the official ban still stood during Oneroad’s day.

When faced with the option of either destroying sacred objects and erasing cultural memories, or transferring such belongings to Skinner and Oneroad, many American Indians living on reservations chose the latter course. Such a situation provides another example of a case in which Native peoples were willing to sell or give their cultural history to anthropologists to store in museums far from their home-communities, rather than see them destroyed. No doubt

Oneroad’s status as both a community member and a Native anthropologist influenced this

1064 Oneroad and Skinner, Being Dakota, 3.

1065 Oneroad and Skinner, Being Dakota, 33-34.

1066 Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians, 295.

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decision. Ultimately, Amos Oneroad’s descendants believe that he struck a balance between the poles of anthropology and the ministry, between preserving cultural beliefs and replacing them.1067

1067 Oneroad and Skinner, Being Dakota, 33-34.

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CONCLUSION

Over the fifty-year period between 1875 and 1925 the field of American anthropology, and to a certain extent its representation of Native peoples, showed discernible levels of change.

With his push for the creation of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879, for instance, John

Wesley Powell helped to professionalize the young discipline, re-shaping what until then had largely been an avocation for moneyed amateurs and dilettantes.1068 In the following years, the anthropological field experienced a number of other shifts and transitions as well, in its professional make-up, its focus on social evolutionary theory, and in its institutional base.

Although never a large component of early American anthropology, the number of women involved in the discipline, specifically as field ethnologists, actually decreased over the half-century examined in this study. While issues of “male bias,” sexism, and the absence of adequate professional and academic training had been persistent factors in women’s low numbers in the anthropological field from the start, the presence of women involved in late nineteenth-century ethnology should actually be seen as more of an aberration rather than the norm when viewing the anthropological field as a whole.1069 Indeed, the only permanent women field ethnologists working during this period were Alice C. Fletcher at the Peabody Museum and

Matilda Coxe Stevenson at the BAE. Erminnie Smith and Frances Densmore’s positions at the

BAE were part-time contract work, as was the position later held by Florence Shotridge at

Philadelphia’s University Museum. Notably, there do not appear to have been any full-time women ethnologists employed at the AMNH, Field Museum, UC Berkeley Anthropology

Museum, or the MAI, Heye Foundation, until at least the second quarter of the twentieth century.

1068 Zedeno, “BAE Anthropology,” 275; Boas, “Museums of Ethnology,” 597; Mark, Four Anthropologists, 10.

1069 Ute Gacs, ed., Women Anthropologists: Selected Biographies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), xiii.

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Despite their small numbers and the fact that the discipline has often left these women

“unmentioned” in its histories, non-Native and Native women played some of the most influential and pioneering roles during the field’s early years, changing how the public understood both anthropology and Native Americans.1070

Anthropology’s focus on evolution and social progress, or how the field incorporated evolutionary science into its views of society, also significantly changed over this fifty-year period. For example, this study opened in 1875 with the anthropological field’s wide acceptance of Lewis Henry Morgan’s stages of social progress from savagery to barbarism, eventually culminating in civilization.1071 Many in the field’s early days echoed these views, wholly or in part, and included John Wesley Powell, WJ McGee, Matilda Coxe Stevenson, and Alice C.

Fletcher, among others. Although few and far between, there were at least some late nineteenth- century anthropologists who actively confronted and eschewed the idea of Native Americans as in any way inferior to Euro-Americans. James Mooney, for one, was among this latter camp. By the early twentieth century the “heyday of evolutionary anthropology” had passed, with then- current practitioners viewing such previous notions of social progress as “crude and unscientific.”1072 Replacing it were theories on cultural relativism advocated by Franz Boas,

Alfred L. Kroeber, Frank G. Speck, and others, who, importantly, began to make universities rather than museums their institutional homes.

Soon after immigrating to the United States in the 1880s, Boas challenged ideas of Euro-

American superiority which dominated much of anthropological thought during the Progressive

1070 Gacs, Women Anthropologists, xiii.

1071 Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880, 8-9.

1072 Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 250.

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era. Combatting the anthropological practice of setting Euro-American society as the standard against which other cultures should be measured, Boas encouraged his students at Columbia

University to put aside the opinions and emotions of their own cultures and instead to become thoroughly familiar with “the ways of thinking and feeling of foreign tribes and peoples.”1073 As his students subsequently went on to direct anthropological departments of their own at universities across the nation, Boas’s views on cultural relativism became standard and accepted tenets of academic anthropology.1074 Simultaneously, it was during this burgeoning

“academization of Americanist anthropology” that universities became the desired institutional homes of newly trained young anthropologists as the number of non-museum anthropology positions increased.1075 While not specifically decreasing, the number of museum anthropology positions could not adequately compete, and tended to trail those at the fast-growing universities.1076

Directly related to the increase in university anthropology positions were the decrease in professional anthropology positions held by women and Native anthropologists. Notably, this transition from the museum to the university also significantly reduced the space for Indigenous peoples to play a role in the cultural preservation and documentation of their communities. In other words, rather than illustrating a diversification of the field, this study reveals that if anything, the discipline of anthropology became more Euro-American male dominated as it professionalized and moved into academia.

1073 Cole, Franz Boas, 275.

1074 Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 401.

1075 Darnell, Along Came Boas, xi.

1076 Donald Collier, “Museums and Ethnological Research,” Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 25 (1961): 149.

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By the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century, then, universities had largely supplanted museums, and the era known as the “Golden Age of American Anthropology” had ended.1077 Anthropological thought largely but not completely transitioned from a focus on material culture objects to that of theory, and those anthropologists who continued on in museums similarly altered how they collected, exhibited, and constructed meaning out of anthropological objects and anthropological knowledge for public consumption.1078

Significantly, however, while anthropologists no longer confined Native peoples to strict stages of evolutionary development and social progress, they nevertheless continued to place the

Indigenous peoples of North America outside of contemporary history, and thus, importantly, outside the concerns of the American public.

Congress’s passage of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, long overdue and not wholly implemented in some states and territories, did not significantly alter the public’s conception of

Native American peoples or their representations in museums around the country.1079 Much of the change that did eventually occur came from American Indians themselves who in the second half of the twentieth century became more visible and more vocal opponents of anthropological representations of their cultures displayed in museums. Native American intellectual Vine

Deloria, Jr., for example, argued in his 1969 book that anthropologists’ attempts to “capture real

Indians in a network of theories” contributed substantially to the invisibility of present-day

American Indian peoples. Advocating change in the current power structure, Deloria in his

1077 Mead and Bunzel, Golden Age of American Anthropology.

1078 Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 106-107; Donald Collier and Harry Tschopik, “The Role of Museums in American Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 56, no. 5 (October 1954): 774-775.

1079 Holm, Great Confusion in Indian Affairs, 182.

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Indian Manifesto called for anthropologists “to get down from their thrones of authority . . . and begin helping Indian tribes instead of preying on them.”1080

The turn to the twenty-first century subsequently witnessed the passage of a host of laws and policies protecting Native rights and implementing the return of Indigenous cultural heritage materials held in non-Native repositories. These laws did not emerge overnight, to be sure, and in many cases were due more to the advocacy of Native peoples than from anthropologists or museums. Some of this legislation included the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the 1989 National Museum of the American Indian Act and the 1990 Native American Graves

Protection and Repatriation Act, the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of

Indigenous People, and more recently, the Society of American Archivists’ endorsement of the

Protocols for Native American Archival Materials. Much of this legislation enacted in the last half-century illustrates a concerted effort to reshape the power imbalance and historically fraught relationship between museums and Native peoples. Sadly and perhaps ironically, though, if not for the attempts from non-Native reformers, assimilationists, and salvage anthropologists to deculturate Native American communities between 1875 and 1925, the world a century later would not have many of these safeguards now in place to protect the rights and cultural heritage of Indigenous peoples.

Relatedly, while few of the Native collaborators examined in this work were successful in altering the public’s conception of American Indians as either frozen in time or doomed to disappear, the cultural heritage materials these collaborators gathered have had some unintended consequences on how Native peoples view themselves today. For example, in the past two decades much work has been done to culturally revitalize or “breathe life into” American Indian

1080 Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Avon, 1969), 86, 104.

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communities through the study and return of Native linguistic materials held in non-Native repositories and museums.1081 Although language revitalization work was probably not something that many collaborators or anthropologists originally envisioned when creating linguistic grammars in the field, no doubt many of them would be pleased that their work continues to have the impact that it does today.

A Few Continuing Thoughts

Although by no means exhaustive, this in-depth examination of the lives and contributions of museum anthropologists and Native collaborators during the half-century from

1875 to 1925 illustrates the various changes which took place in the anthropological museum field in its early years. More importantly, this work illuminates how anthropologists and

American Indian collaborators represented the Native peoples of North America, and how these representations influenced public thought. Not surprisingly, a study of this nature inevitably leads to even more questions about Native representation, issues of power, inclusion, and exclusion from the dominant society.

While not specifically addressed herein, a number of related issues arose during the researching and writing of this study which may benefit from future scholars’ further examination. The inclusion or exclusion of particular Native individuals or entire communities by earlier anthropologists, for instance, has had vastly important ramifications on these communities and how they are perceived, represented, and understood today. For example, the voices of Native peoples which persist in the anthropological record today only represent those

1081 See National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages, accessed April of 2020, nationalbreathoflife.org.

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individuals who were willing to speak or collaborate with anthropologists. While many Native community members refused to interact or inform anthropologists about their cultures and life- ways, those Native peoples who were willing to do so often had their own agendas. In this way, only certain families or individuals within Native communities came to dominate the anthropological record, while others were excluded or denigrated, often by their own community members.1082 Essentially, a huge gap exists between the information then available, and that which anthropologists actually recorded and eventually disseminated to the public. Is there a practical way to retrieve this information and thus more accurately balance the anthropological record?

Similarly, while many late nineteenth-century ethnologists viewed Plains Indian communities as “real Indians” and other Native peoples as somehow less “authentic,” how did such anthropological representations impact these communities in terms of being recognized or ignored by non-Native missionaries, politicians, or landholders of their day?1083 Relatedly, how have the anthropological record’s depictions of over-represented or under-represented Native communities shaped our present-day views of these individuals? In other words, as contemporary scholar and Abenaki museum anthropologist Margaret Bruchac succinctly puts it,

“Do the relative degrees of visibility in the museum correspond to relative degrees of visibility and political sovereignty today?”1084

Finally, again in debt to Bruchac for salient points in her 2018 work, Savage Kin, the asymmetry in power relationships between non-Native anthropologists and the peoples whom

1082 I am in debt to Apsáalooke (Crow/Absaroke) artist Wendy Red Star for raising this point during a conversation in November of 2018.

1083 Deloria, Playing Indian, 90-91; Parker, “Book on Secret Societies,” 134.

1084 Bruchac, Savage Kin, 180.

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they studied did not suddenly come to an end in the mid-twentieth or late twentieth century.

Rather, while the underlying power structures are more openly acknowledged and perhaps less explicit than in the past, they nevertheless continue to exist, with museums holding greater power and Native communities less.1085 Further, while many of the previous century’s anthropological exhibitions and lectures have long ago faded away, publications from those early years of museum anthropology continue to fill library bookshelves around the world, where they still exert authority over the Indigenous communities that they purport to accurately represent.1086

Representations such as these continue to inform and misinform the mainstream public about the histories, cultures, and contemporary lives of Native Americans, and will no doubt continue to do so for generations to come.

1085 Enote, “Community & Museums”; Efforts to combat these asymmetries of power include the recent work “Guidelines for Collaboration” produced by the Society for Advanced Research. See “Guidelines for Collaboration,” accessed April of 2020, guidelinesforcollaboration.info.

1086 Bruchac, Savage Kin, 178.

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