Amelia Louise Susman Schultz, Sam Blowsnake, and Ho-Chunk Auto-Literacy1 In June 103 years ago, Amelia was born in New York City into a German Jewish family, sharing the Brooklyn home of tante, a great aunt who was a seamstress. At age six, she started grade school at PS 44, skipped 2 grades, and graduated as valedictorian of James Marshall High School at 14. Joseph Greenberg shared her subway ride, sometimes conversing in Latin with a school mate. Since she was just under five feet tall, she was ineligible to work at Macys, the usual graduation option for women until marriage. Instead, she enrolled in Brooklyn College, 1931-1935, gaining an AB degree in Psychology with Solomon Asch while earning $20/month through National Youth Administration (NYA) of the CCC. Seeking a graduate degree, she was warned by classmate Irving Goldman that only Columbia anthropology under Franz Boas willingly accepted women into its graduate program. Most other disciplines were strictly men only. Accepted at Columbia University, 1935-1939, she wrote two dissertations. The first was a study of acculturation at multitribal Round Valley in northern California, relying on documents in the San Francisco archive more than interviews with these intertribals whose traumas included genocide, girl slavery, and land loss to the ranching family of their BIA agent. Her work was part of a comparative team study in eight tribes, eventually published as Acculturation in Seven American Indian Tribes (Marian Smith = Puyallup; Jack Harris = White Knife Shoshoni; Marvin Opler = Southern Ute; Henry Elkin = Northern Arapaho; Natalie Joffe = Fox; Irving Goldman = Carrier; and William Whitman = San Ildefonso). These seven thereby earned their PhDs since publication was a final degree requirement.2 Since Amelia also devoted a paragraph to a bogus land claims scheme, collecting coins from natives, growing suspicion of a law suite led Ralph Linton, who had replaced Boas, to put pressure on Ruth Benedict to ask Amelia to withdraw her chapter, which she did in favor of her classmates. Why no one thought to excise the paragraph remains a mystery, except Amelia’s great loyalty to Boas was probably involved. Boas had always been Amelia’s advisor of record, so, from retirement, he directed her second PhD project, a study of Ho-chunk ~ Winnebago grammar to improve on a 1937 PhD, published by King’s Crown Press of Columbia University in 1945, by William Lipkind,3 advised by Paul Radin and working with Marguerite Hittle at the Dutch Reform Mission in Nebraska. Informally advised by Radin and working closely with linguist George Herzog, Amelia’s speaker was none other than Big Winnebago, alias Crashing Thunder, Sam Blowsnake, the subject of a very early native autobiography. The Blowsnakes were leaders in the Ho-Chunk community, moving between the Nebraska reservation and ancestral lands in Wisconsin. Preparing to work with him at his home in Green Bay, she bought down clothing but quickly returned her winter outfits when she learned that he was dancing and singing with his wife 1 # Ho-Chunk is now the preferred term among tribal and degreed members in Wisconsin and Nebraska, while Winnebago is what their Algonkian neighbors call them. Amelia and Sam Blowsnake wrote of the Winnebago Syllabary; it is more properly herein called Ho-Chunk Syllabary. 2 Marian was the last Boas student while he was working full time, Whitman also worked with Oto and famously died when his furnace blew up while he was teaching at Harvard. His wife, to whom he was unfaithful, edited his Oto for publication at Columbia. 3 Lipkind (1904 - 1974) then worked in central Brazil with the Carajá and Javahé under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council, eventually becoming author of children’s books as Will Lipkind. i Evening Star and daughter Whirling Eagle on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City. Relying on his more reliable fee of 35¢/hour, she moved the family to Brooklyn and gathered her data into notebooks now at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and onto aluminum disks now at Indiana University and Wisconsin Historical in Madison. With her first paycheck from the Women’s Army Corps she had copies of The Aspectual System of Winnebago offset printed and distributed in 1943, which by then counted as publication to qualify for her final PhD. Confident of her linguistics, in 1941, Boas, with American Council of Learned Societies funds, sent Amelia to work with William Beynon, a fluent Tsimshian speaker, high school graduate, and hereditary Wolf chief at Prince Rupert, BC. Enamored of the working partnership of the Curies in Paris, their marriage was briefly considered. Instead, Amelia put down roots in Seattle, just as WW II began, serving in Women’s Army Corps, 1943-1946 (after the inductor “gave” her a ½ inch to qualify for the legal 5 feet). At first, she was editing bilingual material for troops (phrase books, dictionaries, language courses) at the Army linguistic office at 165 Broadway along with Morris Swadesh, Mary Haas (Thai desk), Stanley Newman (Persian desk), and other American linguists under the direction of Haxie Smith. Later she became a psychiatric social worker for neuropsychiatric discharges at Mason General Hospital, Brentwood, Long Island, NY. Mustered out, she returned to Seattle, where, hoping for an academic career, she renewed Tsimshian linguistics with Mrs Louise Mertz, a bus ride away in West Seattle. When no academic position materialized, Amelia found a job, 1942-1943, in social work, state department of Public Assistance, at Raymond and Bremerton, Washington. She met and married Elias Schultz, nicknamed Dutch, through Melville Jacobs, a fellow Boasian linguist and folklorist long at UW, and his wife Bess, a psychiatric social worker. To gain necessary credentials, Amelia enrolled in Social Work at University of Washington, earning an MSW, 1946-1947, with a thesis on Indien unmarried mothers, abstracted in Social Work Review. A labor organizer, Dutch used his GI Bill to study woodcarving in Switzerland guilds, while Amelia offered classes in English. Unpleasant interactions with Swiss locals, especially landlords, led them to move to London, 1950-1952, where Dutch studied at Guild Hall while Amelia took anthropology and linguistics classes at London University through a 1951 grant from the Foreign Service Institute, State Department, during stringent post war conditions. Back in Seattle, Amelia worked as Child Welfare Worker, State Public Assistance, Seattle, 1952-1953; Case Worker, Children’s Home Society, 1953-1958; Case Worker, Jewish Family & Child Service, 1959-1960; Social Worker, Research Associate, Clinical Research, Center and Department of Medicine, University of Washington, 1960-1965; Social Worker, Research Instructor, Clinical Research Center and Department of Medicine, University of Washington, 1965-1973; and Social Worker, Assistant Professor, Clinical Research Center and Department of Medicine, University of Washington, 1973-1977, when she retired. She also served on committees for human subjects review and medical school admissions. She has been a member of Linguistic Society of America, American Anthropological Association, National Association of Social Workers, and the short lived Seattle Anthropological Society. Throughout her careers, she relied on three of the four fields of anthropology: linguistics, physical, and cultural, but not (yet) archaeology, as shown by her own publications: Word Play in Winnebago American Anthropologist 1941 Accent in Winnebago, PhD Thesis Columbia University 1939, published 1943 Brienzer Deutsch, Studies in Linguistics 9 (23) 1951 ii The Impact of Genetic Disorders. Social Work 11: 29-34. The Round Valley Indians of California, PhD 1938, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Contributions of the Archaeological Research Facility 31 1976. Boas on Phonemics and Dissertations. International Journal of American Linguistics 43 (10> 56-57) 1977 January. Review of Autobiographies of Three Pomo Women by Elizabeth Colson. Journal of California Anthropology: 144-145 1977. Swiss Swear Words; Epithets in the Alps Maladicta 3 (2): 261-274, 19xx. Amelia also coauthored with Arne Motulsky, the famous geneticist at UW whose archive is also at APS: Motulsky, AG, Schultz, A, and Priest, J Warner’s Syndrome: Chromosomes, genes, and the aging process. Lancet I: 160-161 1962 Epstein, CJ, Martin, GM, Schultz, AL, and Motulsky, AG Warner’s Syndrome, A Review Of Its Symptomatology, Natural History, Pathologic Features, Genetics, And Its Relationship To The Natural Aging Process. Medicine 45: 177-221 1966. Schultz, AL, and Motulsky, AG Medical Genetics And Adoption. Child Welfare 50:4-17 1971. Schultz, AL, Pardee, GP, and Ensinck, JW. Are research subjects really informed? Western Journal of Medicine 123: 76-80 . Lipe, Hillary, Bird, Thomas, and Schultz, AL Risk Factors for Suicide in HD. American Journal of Medical Genetics 48: 231-233 1993. Since 1967, she has been actively concerned with the Huntington’s Disease Society of America as a national trustee for several years in 1970s, NW Chapter Board to 1999, Area Contact (currently), and coordinator of support groups for those diagnosed by DNA. She has long been involved with the families of Woody and Arlo Guthrie, famous musicians who carry this gene. She also works with Citizens For Improvement Of Nursing Homes And Long Term Care, and Caroline Kline Galland Home, where her younger sister, hindered by a botched delivery during WW I, lived after she moved out from