r* ^\ Anthropology, History, and American Indians: Essays in Honor of William Curtis Sturtevant WILLIAM L. MERRILL and IVES GODDARD EDITORS SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY • NUMBER 44 SERIES PUBLICATIONS OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION Emphasis upon publication as a means of "diffusing knowledge" was expressed by the first Secretary of the Smithsonian. In his formal plan for the Institution, Joseph Henry outlined a program that included the following statement: "It is proposed to publish a series of reports, giving an account of the new discoveries in science, and of the changes made from year to year in all branches of knowledge." This theme of basic research has been adhered to through the years by thousands of titles issued in series publications under the Smithsonian imprint, commencing with Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge in 1848 and continuing with the following active series: Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology Smithsonian Contributions to Botany Smithsonian Contributions to the Earth Sciences Smithsonian Contributions to the Marine Sciences Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology Smithsonian Folktife Studies Smithsonian Studies in Air and Space Smithsonian Studies in History and Technology In these series, the Institution publishes small papers and full-scale monographs that report the research and collections of its various museums and bureaux or of professional colleagues in the world of science and scholarship. The publications are distributed by mailing lists to libraries, universities, and similar institutions throughout the world. Papers or monographs submitted for series publication are received by the Smithsonian Institution Press, subject to its own review for format and style, only through departments of the various Smithsonian museums or bureaux, where the manuscripts are given substantive review. Press requirements for manuscript and art preparation are outlined on the inside back cover. Lawrence M. Small Secretary Smithsonian Institution SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY • NUMBER 44 Anthropology, History, and American Indians: Essays in Honor of William Curtis Sturtevant William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard EDITORS Smithsonian Institution Press Washington, D.C. 2002 ABSTRACT Merrill, William L., and Ives Goddard, editors. Anthropology, History, and American Indi- ans: Essays in Honor of William Curtis Sturtevant. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropol- ogy, number 44, 357 pages, frontispiece, 86 figures, 13 tables, 2002.—This collection of 31 essays and one bibliographic compilation is presented as a festschrift for William Curtis Sturte- vant. Since 1956 a research anthropologist, and, since 1965, a museum curator, at the Smith- sonian Institution in Washington, D.C, Sturtevant is one of the world's leading scholars of the cultures, languages, and histories of the indigenous peoples of the New World. Over the course of his career, he has also served as general editor of the Handbook of North American Indians, president of four of anthropology's major professional organizations, university professor, con- sultant, and public lecturer. He has contributed in myriad ways to the development of contem- porary anthropology and to the research endeavors of scores of anthropologists and scholars in many other disciplines. The volume is organized into six sections. The first begins with recollections of Sturtevant's childhood and early adulthood by his younger sister, Harriet Sturtevant Shapiro, followed by an overview of his professional career and a compilation of his writings from 1952 through 2001. The second section offers a range of perspectives on the history of anthropological and historical research on themes related to Native Americans, and the third examines the transfor- mations that have occurred in their lives and circumstances from the time of European contact to today. The fourth section considers the relationship of anthropological collections and repos- itories to the development of the field and the shifting significance of museums, archives, and universities as the settings where anthropological research has traditionally been conducted. The fifth section presents the results of a series of research projects focused on museum and archival collections, and the sixth explores the complex interconnections between the cultural and natural worlds. The essays provide an indication of the variety of topics and approaches represented in North Americanist studies at the turn of the twenty-first century. Together they address issues central to current scholarly debate: the political implications of cross-cultural research; the transcending of traditional disciplinary boundaries; the impact of colonialist and post-colonial- ist projects on native peoples and their responses to these projects; the relevance of anthropo- logical repositories and collections to research; and the linkages among material and nonmaterial dimensions of human existence. Reflecting the scope of Sturtevant's own research, they stand as testimony to his intellectual breadth and to the extent of his influence on contemporary scholarship. OFFICIAL PUBLICATION DATE is handstamped in a limited number of initial copies and is recorded in the Institution's annual report, Annals of the Smithsonian Institution. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anthropology, history, and American Indians: essays in honor of William Curtis Sturtevant / William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard. p. cm. — (Smithsonian contributions to anthropology ; no. 44) Includes bibliographic references. 1. Anthropology—History. 2. Anthropologists—History. 3. Indians—History. 4. Ethnological museums and collections—History. 5. Sturtevant, William C. I. Sturtevant, William C. II. Merrill, William L. III. Goddard, Ives, 1941-IV. Series. GN27 .A672 2002 301'.09—dc21 2001042020 © The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48—1984. Contents Page Preface viii I. William Curtis Sturtevant 1 Sibling Review Harriet Sturtevant Shapiro 3 William Curtis Sturtevant, Anthropologist William L. Merrill 11 The Writings of William C. Sturtevant Compiled by William L. Merrill 37 II. Anthropologists, Historians, and American Indians 45 Sleepwalking Through the History of Anthropology: Anthropologists on Home Ground Laura Nader 47 Charlatan, Scientist, or Poet? Frank Hamilton Cushing's Search for a Language of Experiential Knowledge Curtis M. Hinsley 55 George A. Dorsey and the Development of Plains Indian Anthropology Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks 59 American Indian Migrations: A Neglected Dimension of Paleodemography Dean R. Snow 75 From Ethnohistory to Anthropological History Shepard Krech III 85 Editing a Cambridge History in a Postmodern Context Bruce G. Trigger 95 A Historian Among the Anthropologists Wilcomb E. Washburn 105 III. Worlds Transformed 111 "A Very Great Harvest of Souls": Timucua Indians and the Impact of European Colonization Jerald T. Milanich 113 The Interstices of Literacy: Books and Writings and Their Use in Native American Southern New England Kathleen J. Bragdon 121 From Manifest Destiny to the Melting Pot: The Life and Times of Charlotte Mitchell, Wampanoag William S. Simmons 131 Indian Imagery and the Development of Tourism in the Southwest JoAllyn Archambault 139 Hawaiian Art: From Sacred Symbol to Tourist Icon to Ethnic Identity Marker Adrienne L. Kaeppler 147 The Neets'aii Gwich'in in the Twentieth Century Jack Campisi 161 in iv SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY IV. Anthropology Evolving 171 Classifying North American Indian Languages before 1850 Elisabeth Tooker 173 Origins of Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution and Beyond William W. Fitzhugh 179 Collections as Currency Jane MacLaren Walsh 201 The Creation of Anthropological Archives: A California Case Study Ira Jacknis 211 Starring the Anthropologists in the American Men of Science David J. Meltzer 221 V. Collections in Anthropological Research 239 At the Cutting Edge: Patchwork and the Process of Artistic Innovation Sally Price 241 European Motifs in Protohistoric Iroquois Art Edmund Carpenter 255 Quilled Knife Cases from Northeastern North America Christian F. Feest 263 Pabookowaih Unmasked William N. Fenton and Donald B. Smith 279 The Linguistic Writings of Alfred Kiyana on Fox (Meskwaki) Ives Goddard 285 The Munich Chukchi Collection Jean-Loup Rousselot 295 VI. Nature in Culture 303 Totemism Reconsidered Raymond D. Fogelson and Robert A. Brightman 305 Coyote, Acorns, Salmon, and Quartz: Verse Analysis of a Karok Myth DellHymes 315 The Distribution and Habits of the Ringed Seal and Central Eskimo Settlement Patterns David Damas 325 Species Transformations in Northern Mexico: Explorations in Raramuri Zoology William L. Merrill 333 Quenching Homologous Thirsts Sidney W. Mintz 349 FIGURES Frontispiece x Sibling Review, Harriet Sturtevant Shapiro Figure 1.—Passport photograph of the Sturtevant family, 1932 4 Figure 2.—Harriet, Bill, and Fritz Sturtevant in Newcastle, England, 1933 5 Figure 3.—Fritz, Harriet, and Bill Sturtevant in Pasadena, California, ca. 1936 6 Figure 4.—Bill Sturtevant photographed in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, ca. 1938... 6 Figure 5.—Bill Sturtevant in his room in Pasadena, California, 1945 7 Figure 6.—Bill Sturtevant at his desk, Pasadena, California, 1945 8 Figure 7.—The Sturtevant family at lunch in Pasadena, California, 1945 8 Figure 8.—Bill Sturtevant in the Navy, 1945 10 NUMBER 44 William Curtis Sturtevant, Anthropologist, William L. Merrill Figure 1.—Mrs. Charley Cypress demonstrating grating of coontie (Zamia) roots, Big Cypress Reservation, 1957 15 Figure 2.—William Sturtevant with Solon Jones, New York, 1957 15 Figure 3.—Josie Billie and William Sturtevant, Big Cypress Reservation, 1959 16 Figure 4.—William Sturtevant in his Bureau of American Ethnology office, 1965 ... 20 Figure 5.—The staffs of the Bureau of American Ethnology and the River Basin Survey, 1965 23 Figure 6.—William Sturtevant collecting botanical specimens, Kashmir, 1968 26 Figure 7.—William Sturtevant in the Department of Anthropology, 1980 28 Figure 8.—William Sturtevant with Claude Levi-Strauss, Paris, 1981 29 Figure 9.—William Sturtevant in the offices of the Handbook of North American Indians, 1985 31 George A. Dorsey and the Development of Plains Indian Anthropology, Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks Figure 1.—Ayer Hall, Field Columbian Museum, 1894 61 Figure 2.—Cleaver Warden, Washington, D.C, 1895 63 Figure 3.—Richard Davis, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, 1904 65 Figure 4.—George A. Dorsey, William Jones, and James R. Murie, 1907 68 American Indian Migrations: A Neglected Dimension of Paleodemography, Dean R. Snow Figure 1.—Distribution of home territories of eastern North American societies .... 79 Figure 2.—Distribution of home territories of Northern Iroquoian societies 80 "A Very Great Harvest of Souls": Timucua Indians and the Impact of European Colonization, Jerald T. Milanich Figure 1.—The region of the Timucua 114 Figure 2.—Timucuan chiefdoms in the sixteenth century 115 The Interstices of Literacy: Books and Writings and Their Use in Native American Southern New England, Kathleen J. Bragdon Figure 1.—An artist's rendering of pictographs on Dighton Rock 122 Figure 2.—Conveyance, Martha's Vineyard, 1706 125 Figure 3.—Verso of New Testament title page, Massachusett Bible, Nantucket 126 Hawaiian Art: From Sacred Symbol to Tourist Icon to Ethnic Identity Marker, Adrienne L. Kaeppler Figure 1.—Feathered cloak of Kalani'opu'u 149 Figure 2.—Feathered cloak with circle design 149 Figure 3.—Pahu drum with crescent design 150 Figure 4.—Feathered cape with crescent design 151 Figure 5.—Replicas of feathered cloaks worn by the Royal Court during Aloha Week, Hawaiian Village, Ala Moana Park, ca. 1947 152 Figure 6.—Funeral of Prince Albert Kuniakea in front of Tolani Palace, 1903 152 Figure 7.—Hawaii Visitors Bureau sign, 1990 153 Figure 8.—Kodak Hula Show, ca. 1961 154 Figure 9.—Menu cover based on a mural painting by Eugene Savage 155 Figure 10.—Menu cover by Frank Mcintosh 155 Figure 11.—Performance by the Zuttermeister Hula Studio, Merrie Monarch Fes- tival, 1990 156 vi SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY Figure 12.—Postcard of a pageant presented at the Mid-Pacific Carnival, ca. 1910 ... 157 Figure 13.—Three generations of Hawaiian dancers, Washington, D.C, 1984 158 The Neets'aii Gwich'in in the Twentieth Century, Jack Campisi Figure 1.—Neets'aii Gwich'in territory 162 Origins of Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution and Beyond, William W. Fitzhugh Figure 1.—Spencer F. Baird 181 Figure 2.—Robert Kennicott 187 Figure 3.—Extract from Kennicott's field ledger 188 Figure 4.—Caribou hide tunic 189 Figure 5.—Flag of the Western Union "Scientific Corps" 190 Figure 6.—"Kegiktowruk in the Fall" 191 Figure 7.—Edward W. Nelson on one of his trips up the Yukon River, ca. 1880.... 192 Figure 8.—"Native village [Gambell] on SW. Point of St Lawrence Is. Copied from sketch by J[ohn] Muir, Summer 1881" 193 Figure 9.—Ingaliks from Lower Yukon, 1880 193 Figure 10.—Norton Sound kayak hunting photographed by Edward W. Nelson and hunting visor collected from this hunter 194 At the Cutting Edge: Patchwork and the Process of Artistic Innovation, Sally Price Figure 1.—Flow chart constructed by Donna Kathleen Abbas and William C. Sturtevant, 1969 242 Figure 2.—A Dutch explorer with his Saramaka guides, 1908 244 Figure 3.—Detail of cloth collected in the 1890s 245 Figure 4.—Saramaka cape, sewn between 1900 and 1910 246 Figure 5.—Bits-and-pieces cape, sewn between 1920 and 1940 247 Figure 6.—Saramaka cape, probably sewn in the 1960s or early 1970s 248 Figure 7.—Cape with cross-stitch embroidery, sewn between 1960 and 1965 249 Figure 8.—Cape and breechcloth with cross-stitch embroidery, sewn in the 1970s... 250 Figure 9.—Top of two-piece calabash container 251 Figure 10.—Saramaka calabash bowl, 1970s 251 European Motifs in Protohistoric Iroquois Art, Edmund Carpenter Figure 1.—Two antler figurines 256 Figure 2.—Mezzotint Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, King of the Maquas (Mohawks), London, 1710 257 Figure 3.—Effigy comb of antler 258 Figure 4.—Petroglyph at Esopus Landing, New York 259 Figure 5.—Effigy comb of antler, horse, and rider 259 Figure 6.—European white clay pipe 259 Figure 7.—Cast-iron handle with pewter shaft 260 Quilled Knife Cases from Northeastern North America, Christian F. Feest Figure 1.—"An Indian dress'd for war with a scalp," 1759 265 Figure 2.—Chief Oshkosh wearing a double knife case 267 Figure 3.—"Bad Hail, Chief of the Sioux nation Minnesota Territory October 1852" 268 NUMBER 44 vii Figure 4.—Knife case with decoration of woven and applique quillwork and moosehair 270 Figure 5.—Knife case with porcupine quill embroidery on birch-bark reinforce- ment 270 Figure 6.—Knife case with two-lane quill-wrapped panel and "zipper" edging in white glass beads 270 Figure 7.—Knife and knife case with applique quillwork 272 Figure 8.—Single knife case with applique quillwork 272 Figure 9.—Single knife case with asymmetrical applique quillwork 273 Figure 10.—Belt-worn knife case with moosehair embroidery and porcupine quill applique 273 Pabookowaih Unmasked, William N. Fenton and Donald B. Smith Figure 1.—Full-face, profile, and back views of the mask at Blantyre, Scotland 280-281 Figure 2.—Two comparable Munsee (Delaware) masks 282 Figure 3.—Pabookowaih of Rev. Peter Jones, after the original 283 The Munich Chukchi Collection, Jean-Loup Rousselot Figure 1.—Two reindeer toys 297 Figure 2.—Fire board 298 Figure 3.—Fish lure with rod to attract fish 299 Figure 4.—Leather pouch to carry human urine 299 Figure 5.—Needle case with thimble holder 299 Figure 6.—A cook at work at a Chukchi camp 300 The Distribution and Habits of the Ringed Seal and Central Eskimo Settlement Patterns, David Damas Figure 1.—Central Eskimo utilization of the ringed seal 326 Preface Of all its major figures, North Americanist anthropology today is perhaps most closely identified with William Curtis Sturtevant. The last North Americanist hired by the Smith- sonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology—long the center of North American Indian studies in the world—Sturtevant has provided continuity and leadership in a field that has undergone radical changes in the decades since he began contributing to it. Through his research and writings, his editorship of the Handbook of North American In- dians, and his participation in professional societies and conferences, he has been a guid- ing force in the development of North Americanist anthropology, both in the United States and abroad. Few North Americanists have failed to have at least passing contact with him, and most can recount occasions on which his willingness to share his knowledge and in- sights has been of enormous benefit to them and their research. His lifelong fascination with and respect for the native peoples of the Americas, his unwavering commitment to North American Indian studies and to anthropology in general, and the quality of his work have inspired several generations of North Americanists and have set the standard against which they have measured their own careers. This volume is intended to recognize William Sturtevant's contributions to North Amer- icanist research and to the field of anthropology as a whole. The authors of these essays— representing at least five generations of Americanist scholars—have all been influenced in one fashion or another by Sturtevant, and most are linked to him in multiple ways, as former professors or students, as collaborators on research projects, as Smithsonian col- leagues, or as interlocutors at professional conferences. All are leading scholars in their own right who have made, and continue to make, substantive contributions to scholarship. The essays prepared for this volume necessarily reflect only certain aspects of their con- tributors' work, but together they suggest the range of topics that have been of concern to Americanists over the past half century and the different approaches that have been adopt- ed to explore them. The essays also reveal the breadth of Sturtevant's interests and the im- pact he has had on the field. We have grouped the essays into six general sections. The first section provides an over- view of Sturtevant's development as a scholar and an assessment of his contribution to an- thropology and other disciplines. The second treats the history of anthropological and his- torical research among North American Indians, with particular emphasis on the political factors that have affected this research and the presentation of its results. The consequenc- es of European colonialism and the responses of native people to the profound changes that have taken place in their worlds over the past five centuries is the subject of the third section. The fourth section deals with the development of anthropological research collec- tions and repositories and the evolving roles that they and the scholars associated with them have played in the anthropological endeavor. The value of these collections to an- thropology and the challenges facing collections-based research is demonstrated in the fifth section. The final section explores the complex linkages between cultural and natural worlds as exemplified through case studies from various parts of North America as well as Europe. This particular organization should not obscure the fact that the essays presented in one section of the volume often are linked to the themes of others. Also, the essays contribute to the development of a number of additional topics not explicitly recognized in this organ- ization. These include the history of anthropology in general and its relationship to other disciplines, particularly history and the natural sciences; American Indian linguistics and literacy; the connections between material and nonmaterial dimensions of culture; ethno- vin NUMBER 44 ix science and cognitive anthropology; world systems; and the anthropology of food—all top- ics that Sturtevant has addressed in his own work. We would like to express our appreciation to the scholars whose essays appear herein for their collaboration in making this volume a reality and to the administration and staff of the National Museum of Natural History and its Department of Anthropology for their support of this project. We are particularly grateful to Joyce Sommers and Kim Waters for their assistance in logistical matters, to Victor Krantz for preparing prints from the Sturte- vant family album, to Marcia Bakry for producing the map that accompanies David Dam- as's essay, and to the readers of an earlier version of this manuscript for their insightful comments. This volume is very much a festscrift in the original German sense of "celebratory writ- ing." We offer these essays to William Sturtevant to celebrate his work and to honor him for his accomplishments. We hope that he will find them entertaining and will recognize in them the admiration and affection that we have for him. William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard ; wp- up* la ■:'mM -£Mtt|r 1 i m » w A. *^Hr^ FRONTISPIECE.—William Curtis Sturtevant. Photograph taken on 22 November 1997 in Washington, D.C, at the annual breakfast of former presidents of the American Anthropological Association. Photograph by Chester Sim- pson (page 7734, frame no. 31). I. William Curtis Sturtevant Sibling Review Harriet Sturtevant Shapiro When the editors asked me to write an article about Bill's childhood, my first reaction was that if they wanted an article on "Growing Up With A Great Man In The Family," I could do one, but the subject would be Father, not Bill. On further con- sideration, it seems that this is not a bad way to start. Because the family was so centered on Father, and all his children have taken him as a role model for how to be an adult, it is necessary to understand Father in order to understand any of his children. Father, Alfred Henry Sturtevant II, was the youngest of six children by a substantial margin. He was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, where his grandfather, Julian Sturtevant, was one of the founders and an early president of Illinois College, a small Congregational church school that still exists. Julian was clearly a great man in that community and apparently was quite autocratic. Julian's youngest son, Alfred Henry Sturtevant I, taught mathematics at the college, but when Father was seven (in 1898), Alfred moved with his family (except the eldest, Edgar, who was away at college by then) to Kushla, Alabama, where he farmed and recovered turpentine. The family led an isolated, rural existence. Until he reached high school, Father attended a one-room school taught by his father's maiden sis- ter, who lived with his family. Father never considered himself a Southerner. He remembered vividly that he fought the Civil War throughout his school years. When Father graduated from high school, his brother Edgar, who by that time was teaching linguistics at Barnard College, suggested that Father could live with Edgar and his family while Edgar paid Father's tuition at Columbia University. This offer surprised Father, who did not expect to go to college. Edgar eventually became a professor at Yale and was an au- thority on the Hittite language. Although he was some 16 years older than Father, he was a great favorite with us children be- cause he told wonderful tall tales of his supposed adventures. Father continued the tradition started by Edgar when Hope Tis- dale, the daughter of another Sturtevant sibling, reached col- lege age. He paid for her tuition, and she lived with him and his new wife in their New York apartment while she got her under- graduate degree at Barnard. Cousin Hope became a distin- guished population statistician, and she in turn financed the college education of one of her own nieces. Harriet Sturtevant Shapiro, 108 Primrose Street, Chevy Chase, Mary- land 20815-3325, USA. At the time that Thomas Hunt Morgan was laying the foun- dation for modern genetics, Father was in the only beginning biology class taught by Morgan at Columbia. Father was inter- ested in the pedigrees of horses, and he realized that the records of their genealogies and coat colors provided a useful opportu- nity to test the fundamental patterns of inheritance being inves- tigated by Morgan. Father's paper working out that relationship was published while he was still a college sophomore; more important, it won him a place with Morgan's research group: a desk in the "fly room" where the early work on the genetics of Drosophila (the fruit fly) was done. For many years thereafter, the nucleus of the fly-room group consisted of Morgan, Calvin B. Bridges, and Father, with a shifting contingent of graduate students and visiting scientists. Father remained at Columbia, aside from brief service in the Medical Corps in World War I, until 1928, when Morgan took the group to Pasadena, California, to start the Biology Division at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Morgan re- ceived the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1933 for the research on genetics done by the fly-room group. In recognition of the con- tributions of his colleagues, Morgan divided the prize money equally among his, Father's, and Bridges's children for their education. It is a source of pride to me, and, I think, my sib- lings, that our college and graduate educations were financed substantially by Nobel Prize money. Mother, Phoebe Reed Sturtevant, was, like Father, one of six children, one of whom died in early adolescence. Mother grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Mt. Holyoke College, where she majored in art. A few years after graduation, she was hired to illustrate the papers and books prepared by the fly- room group. Mother was very visually oriented, and although she left her fly-room job after she married Father in 1922 and did not thereafter continue with her drawing, she remained ac- tively involved in various crafts throughout her life. While her children were young, this involvement was largely expressed in her attention to interior decoration, in knitting, and in sewing for herself and me. She also attended carpentry class at night and made a wonderful large table and a set of cubby holes that were used together as a desk in the living room. Many years later, she went back to carpentry class and built a very success- ful dump truck for her grandchildren. She also wove; Father proudly wore a jacket made from wool she had woven. Mother was unusual in the number and age range of her friends. She often befriended the wives of Father's graduate stu- SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY dents, several of whom regularly used our washing machine be- cause none was available in their quarters. Her circle of friends also included many of her fellow members of the League of Women Voters and many Caltech faculty wives. For one of the latter who was especially devoted to her poodle, Mother spun wool from the poodle's hair and knit it into a coat for the dog. I think as far as we children were concerned, Mother's beset- ting fault was her lateness. Dinner was not started until every- one was really hungry, and she could never get anywhere on time. Her children usually were the last to arrive at parties or other events and almost invariably were the last to be picked up. Bill was born on 16 July 1926, at Mother's family home in Morristown, New Jersey. Many years later, when Bill wanted to know the hour of his birth for the preparation of a Burmese horoscope, Father was able to provide that information by con- sulting the notes he had taken on an ant war he was observing while waiting for the birth. I was bora in 1928 and was named Harriet Morse after Father's mother. The rest of Morgan's lab- oratory group moved to Pasadena while the family stayed be- hind to await my birth because Father felt I had a right to be born in the East; I made the trip to California in a basket. A family story is that Bill, on waking in the morning as the train traveled through the Midwest, inquired "whobody cut down all them trees?" A younger brother, Alfred Henry Sturtevant III, is the only one of the three of us to have been born in California, in 1931. For three generations, our family has named its youngest sons Alfred Henry Sturtevant, but I don't think there was any con- scious family tradition to that effect. In any event, Henry, whom we called "Fritz" until he insisted on "Henry" shortly FIGURE 1 .—Passport photograph of the Sturtevant family before leaving for England, 1932. NUMBER 44 before World War II, is the only one of us not to have named his last child Alfred. I have always thought that the fact that there were three of us, with me being both the middle child and the only girl, meant that the inevitable childhood alliances followed no set pattern: There were instead three natural alliances: the boys, the two younger siblings, or the two older ones. Henry, however, re- members it differently: he thinks that the usual alliance was Bill and I against him. I would have said that, if any alliance domi- nated, Henry and I tended to gang up to try (unsuccessfully) to unseat Bill's natural position of authority as the eldest. In any event, the more or less constant intersibling squabbles were trivial compared to our basic compatibility and affection for each other. There was no real feeling of rivalry among us. I think we were then, as we certainly are now, unusually close. The family spent a year in England, in 1932 to 1933, while Father taught at various universities as a visiting professor of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I remember almost nothing of this time, and Bill has no connected memory of it. It was here, however, that he learned to print, rather than to use cursive, a habit he still retains. Other than that period, our childhood was spent in Pasadena, California, with summers at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. There was a very clear division of responsibilities between Mother and Father: Mother was responsible for child raising and running the household. Nevertheless, the household re- volved around Father, not because he was in any way auto- cratic, but simply because that was the way Mother wanted it. There was never any doubt that Father's wishes were the rule, and his convenience was paramount. This principle worked be- cause Father never abused it. He considered Mother his full partner in all respects, and he had a fundamental regard for indi- vidual rights that extended to his children. Father once told me that "don't do unto others as you would not have them do unto you" was a better general standard of conduct than the usual positive formulation, because it is less likely that what you want, others also want, than it is that what you don't want, oth- ers don't want either. The motto he wrote in my autograph book was "try all things, and hold fast that which is good." This was advice to a 10- or 12-year-old daughter, which reflects in part the more innocent pre-war age but which also was entirely con- sistent with his confidence in the fundamental good sense of his children. At the time, I was more surprised by his use of a bibli- cal quotation than by the sentiment. Father never talked down to us and was regularly available for serious conversation, one- on-one, while he burned the trash in the back yard in the morn- ing or while he washed the dinner dishes, as a child dried them, or during the three meals a day that the family ate together. The house was full of talk, although introspection was not encouraged, nor was the overt expression of emotions. Mother and Father talked about his work and Mother's activities in the League of Women Voters. Both were enthusiastic gardeners, so they also discussed their plans for the garden and Father's efforts in hybridizing irises, applying genetic principles to de- FlGURE 2.—Harriet, Bill, and Fritz Sturtevant in Newcastle, England, 1933. SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY FIGURE 3.—Fritz, Harriet, and Bill Sturtevant in their yard in Pasadena, Califor- nia, ca. 1936. velop specific flower colors and forms. National and interna- tional affairs were another, less cheerful, topic. Father visited Germany while we were in England in 1933, and he was ap- palled at the conditions there. From that time on, he was very pessimistic about the state of the world, and he was convinced that war was coming and that the United States would have to be involved. Perhaps for this reason, during most of our child- hood Father was a rather somber figure. Despite Mother's wide range of personal friends, family so- cial life was mostly with other members of the Caltech Biology Department and with visiting professors. Many of these came from overseas, sometimes for rather extended stays. They and their children gave us some appreciation of the styles of other countries. There was no religion. Father was a committed atheist who believed religion was responsible for many of the world's ills, and Mother was largely uninterested in the subject. Education FIGURE 4.- 1938. -Bill Sturtevant photographed in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, ca. was a very high priority, for its own sake, not as a means of ad- vancement. In fact, ambition was not a value. We were told that happiness lay in deciding what we enjoyed doing, learning to do it well enough to earn a living at it, and being satisfied with the living we earned. We all went to a private school, Polytechnic Elementary, because Mother and Father lacked confidence in the education we would get in the public schools. They were correct in expecting that we would get a solid aca- demic foundation at Poly; the unintended effect was to make us feel somewhat marginalized, although probably we would have felt the same way in public schools, too. We were quite differ- ent from the rest of the students—we were Democrats, atheists, much less well-off, and nonathletic—but I don't think any of us interpreted those differences as inferiority, just the reverse. Our parents expected the best of us academically, and they were pleased, but not surprised or at all demonstrative, when they got it. Similarly, it was simply assumed that we would read a lot. Although we were regularly taken to the library until we were old enough to go on our own, nobody ever got particu- lar credit for reading. Indeed, if Mother found us reading dur- ing the day, she was very likely to find a chore for us to do, or NUMBER 44 at least to send us outside to play. We soon learned that day- time reading was most safely performed in the seclusion of one's room. Even after supper, reading in the living room was likely to be interrupted by talk. Reading was, in short, a plea- sure to be cherished, not an activity that won praise. In general, it was very bad form to boast about your children, and praise was to be used with caution, for fear that they would develop "swelled heads." On the other hand, we never had any doubt that each one of us was in fact a cherished and important member of the family; considerable effort was devoted to en- couraging our individual interests. Henry was mechanical, and from an early age he was the one the family turned to for fixing whatever broke down. He has undergraduate and advanced de- grees from Caltech and went on to design spectrophotometers and equally complex machines to analyze blood. I was the girl in the family, so I sewed, cooked, and knitted. Although I was encouraged in (and enjoyed, as I still do) stereotypical feminine roles, and it was expected that I would (with luck) be a devoted wife and mother, it was always assumed that I was fully as competent intellectually as my brothers, and I was held to the same standards. I completed my undergraduate degree at Wellesley College and then law school at Columbia, where I was editor-in-chief of the law review. After graduating, I was hired by the Atomic Energy Commission and later moved to the United States Department of Justice, becoming the first woman lawyer in the Office of the Solicitor General, the group responsible for representing the federal government in the Su- preme Court. Like that of my brothers, my professional work has been intellectually stimulating, and I have taken great plea- sure both in my legal career and in my family. I don't remember any similar concern for encouraging Bill's particular bent; that was quite unnecessary. Bill was a collector from an early age. His collection was on bookcase shelves along one side of his room; the lower shelf held old National Geographic magazines. Although there must have been Ameri- can Indian items in the collection, I cannot remember any spe- cific such items. It did contain some ground glass from the mir- ror for the 200-inch telescope being made across the street at Caltech (though Bill would never tell us how he got it), some fossils and geological specimens collected from the trash re- ceptacles at the Caltech Geology Department, and a horned toad and a bat that Bill had preserved. His taxidermy also ex- tended to the preparation for my doll house of several mouse- skin rugs, of which I was inordinately proud. He must have made these when he was about 12 to 14. They were whole-skin rugs, wonderfully soft and (at least the later models) flexible, and no one else had anything like them. Bill also collected (at about age 10) enough Ralston cereal box tops to get a pair of heavy leather cowboy (Tom Mix) chaps that were the envy of his younger siblings. He had the usual stamp collection, as well as a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings concerning the En- glish royal family, which covered the death of George V and the coronation and abdication of Edward VIII. For as long as I can remember, Bill has been interested in American Indians. More than the rest of us, Bill inherited Mother's artistic abilities, and he painted several murals reflect- ing this interest for his room. On the wall over his bed, he FIGURE 5.—Bill Sturtevant in his room in Pasadena, California, 1945. Above the headboard is his copy of a copy by Covarrubias of a design on a Haida house front. SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY FIGURE 6.—Bill Sturtevant at his desk beside his rendition of the Aztec day signs, Pasadena, California, 1945. FIGURE 7.—The Sturtevant family at lunch in Pasadena, California, 1945. painted a large reproduction of a Northwest Indian bear design, and his closet door was covered with colorful Aztec calendar symbols (Henry remembers the legend as "The 20 day signs of the Aztec Calendar," with their names around the edges. The layout of our rooms also provided an early lesson in the exercise of, and limitations on, territoriality. Although we each had our own room, we all three shared a bathroom that was lo- cated between Bill's room and mine, with access from those two rooms but not from the hall. This meant not only that Fritz was entitled to go through my room to get to it (the most direct route, though I felt some resentment that the easement was not through Bill's room), but also that if the door was left locked on one side, the child whose access was blocked was entitled to go through the other's room. The trick was to do this as noisily NUMBER 44 and disruptively as possible, while not lingering so long or de- viating so far from a direct route as to justify complaint by the invaded party. Besides our parents, the other most important adult family member in our lives was Mother's mother, Granny, our only surviving grandparent. Granny spent several winters with us in California, escaping the New Jersey weather. She was a some- what formidable character, in part because, like many grand- parents, she didn't really think her grandchildren were being properly brought up; she never hesitated to criticize our man- ners and general deportment. She was a voracious reader and a great source of information and stories. She would even occa- sionally let us listen to her radio, a contraption that was other- wise banned from the house until just before the war. Granny and Father got along very well. They respected and admired each other, and they shared interests in genealogy and Demo- cratic politics. Bill was named after Granny's father, was her eldest grand- child, and was born in her house; he was clearly a favorite. She was the source of most of his early American Indian artifacts. Granny, like Mother, had a very good eye for artistic quality and sometimes purchased American Indian pieces when they were available. In addition, Granny's brother, Lloyd Curtis, was a naval officer who, during a tour to Alaska in 1881-1882, ac- quired a number of items from Alaska Natives on the advice of his friend Lt. George Emmons, an amateur anthropologist and himself a collector of Alaskan Indian artifacts. Many of the items Uncle Lloyd acquired found their way to Granny and then to Bill, in light of his interest and special place in Granny's af- fections. When Uncle Lloyd died, while Bill was in college, his widow gave several more American Indian items to Bill. Father's family too was a source of artifacts, most notably two ceremonial adzes from the South Pacific that came into Fa- ther's family through the seafaring brothers of Father's grand- mother. The provenance of the adzes is established by letters that those brothers wrote to their family in Connecticut and later Illinois. One brother settled in Honolulu around 1835; copies of his letters home until he died in 1850 are in the Ha- waiian National Archives (Bill has the originals). For all of our childhood, the adzes, as well as an Alaskan Indian basket from Uncle Lloyd and a tapa cloth (probably purchased by Mother), decorated the living room in Woods Hole. Bill's friends were always somewhat mysterious to me. I couldn't even reproduce their assembling call, which was made by blowing air, flute fashion, across an opening in one's cupped hands; Henry did master it. With the son, also named Linus, of the chemist Linus Pauling, Bill explored the storm drains under Caltech (unbeknownst, surely, to Mother and Fa- ther). They also built a tree house in the vacant lot across the street, which was, of course, off limits to the younger Sturte- vant and Pauling siblings by order of the builders. Later, when Bill was in high school, there were regular meetings of his mah jongg club. The group's interest in the game derived, I believe, from the Chinese member of the group of friends. The game pieces and the box (which Bill still has) were entrancing—the pieces are carved ivory on bamboo backs, and the box is an el- egant brass-bound, highly polished wooden construct—but the game itself was totally mysterious. I don't remember wanting to learn how to play, and the opportunity was certainly never offered. That was just something that Bill did. We spent our summers in Woods Hole, on Cape Cod, while Father worked at the Marine Biological Laboratory. The house in Woods Hole that our parents built in 1927 now belongs to the three of us; Bill's grandson Alex is the fourth generation to have a strong sentimental attachment to it. Our family traveled to and from Woods Hole by car after we children were old enough to make the trip that way (and outgrew reduced train fares). Due to Mother's congenital lateness, we never started the trip before the end of the day scheduled for departure; this did not seem to bother Father. The aim was to travel three hun- dred miles a day, allowing frequent stops at likely looking places so Father could collect flies using a modified butterfly net made by Mother. The trips took about ten days' travel time. They were not direct, but involved stops to visit Father's col- leagues at other institutions, as well as his family in Alabama and Mother's in New Jersey. Father planned the route, trying to take a different one each time and ultimately to visit each of the then forty-eight states. The trips were rather arduous, with the five of us in close quarters in an unairconditioned car. I particularly remember the smell of Father's pipe in the closed car before breakfast. Never- theless, the trips did provide a chance to have the undivided at- tention of our parents, who would join us in playing games (Fa- ther was unbeatable at "I Packed My Grandmother's Trunk") and collecting Burma Shave jingles (My brothers' favorite, be- cause it got a rise out of me, was "Ladies jump from fire es- capes to get away from hairy apes," "Harriet" being a ready substitute for "hairy apes"). Mother, who had a small repertoire of college and folk songs, would sing with us; she rarely sang anywhere else. We also had rituals for the trip, such as the method for the hourly change of drivers: the whole family piled out and ran once around the car before taking new places. These places were rigidly rotated: the non-driving parent al- ways sat in the middle in the back, to reduce squabbling. When that did not suffice, the offending child (usually, as I remember it, Bill) was put out to walk for a while before being picked up further down the road. Although that discipline backfired once when Bill found a whole dollar by the roadside, it may help ex- plain his current aversion to walking. The walking strategy was dropped after my best friend, Jane Lancefield, and I were put out to walk on a day trip to Martha's Vineyard, and hid when the car drove past. We didn't realize why that particular trick so upset our parents until we ourselves had children. Woods Hole itself was pure delight. This was primarily be- cause the Lancefields also summered in Woods Hole. Rebecca Lancefield was a noted bacteriologist; her husband, Donald, was a former colleague of Father's at Columbia. They were longstanding and very close friends of Mother and Father, so 10 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY their daughter Jane and I were destined to be best friends. When we came to Woods Hole, our family essentially ex- panded to include the Lancefields. Becca and Donald became second parents, and for a few months I had the sister I always wanted. All four of us were in and out of both houses con- stantly. We swam every day at least once, and went barefoot all summer, so that the soles of our feet became almost like hooves, and by the end of the summer our shoes were covered with green mold and felt incredibly cramped. For many years we took classes in the mornings at the science school associ- ated with the Marine Biological Laboratory. These classes in- volved such things as field trips for collecting specimens, dis- sections of marine creatures, and studies of the varied flora and fauna of Cape Cod. When we were teenagers, the two families jointly owned one of the first fiberglass sailboats, an untippable center-board we called the Glass Cat, in which we took day trips down the Elizabeth Islands off Woods Hole. Bill's collecting tendencies evidenced themselves in Woods Hole at an early age by his Tootsie Toy layout, which consisted of his collection of metal Tootsie Toy cars (the forerunners of Matchbox cars, slightly larger) in a town he constructed. Per- haps this was also an early manifestation of his mapmaking ten- dencies. Somewhat later, he collected a complete deer skeleton from the islands and carefully labeled each bone in ink with his characteristically neat printing. Many years later, it was fun to watch Bill, his elder son, and his grandson spend a rainy after- noon reconstructing the skeleton on the living room floor. In his early teens, Bill made a fortune (perhaps as much as $15) one summer by making and selling house signs consisting of the owner's name spelled out in twigs, meticulously split, cut, and nailed onto a board. He also spent a whole summer la- boriously harvesting cattails and constructing a reed boat in im- itation of the Peruvian Indian ones, only to have it sink inglori- ously when it was finally launched. Henry, the engineer (who has worked in Peru), says that it did not in fact sink, "It just floated really low; you got wet sitting in it. Cattails don't have the same low density as the reeds around Lake Titicaca." Bill nevertheless still believes that his failure was due to his inabil- ity to duplicate the design of the Peruvian boats. Despite this early disappointment, Bill and Henry later successfully built a more conventional boat as a small tender for the Glass Cat. That boat, although it also rode low in the water, served to carry us relatively undampened to and from the Cat's mooring until a real rowboat was scavenged from the islands after a hur- ricane. The built boat was called "the Whale," because of the American Indian design Bill painted on its front. After Bill's freshman year at the University of California at Berkeley, he went to summer school in Mexico. He wanted to visit Yucatan after the summer-school term ended, but Mother and Father told him not to, and they refused to send him money FIGURE 8.—Bill Sturtevant in the Navy, 1945. for that trip. Bill cashed in his return plane ticket, budgeted the resultant funds carefully, and made the trip anyway. He re- turned to Los Angeles by bus with just enough money for one phone call home to Pasadena to ask to be picked up. He was drafted into the Navy soon thereafter. Although I think we all assumed we would live forever and be happy and successful adults, we surely didn't expect to reach 75 or to be eminent. Henry reports that when his eldest child was in college at the University of California at San Di- ego, she was asked whether she was related to "the Dr. Sturte- vant." Mother was not at all amused when it turned out the ref- erence was to Bill, not Father. Henry and I are sure that Father would have been amused, and pleased. We are certainly our- selves pleased and perhaps amused, but not surprised, at Bill's eminence. We offer him our affectionate congratulations. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.—I gratefully acknowledge substantial contributions to this article by my brother A. Henry Sturtevant; his wife, Anne F. Sturtevant; Bill's daughter, Kinthi Sturtevant; and Jane Lancefield Hersey. William Curtis Sturtevant, Anthropologist William L. Merrill William C. Sturtevant is widely regarded as one of the leading North Americanist ethnologists of the second half of the twen- tieth century. He has dedicated his career, spanning half a cen- tury, to extensive research on the cultures and histories of the indigenous peoples of the entire North American continent as well as those of much of the rest of the Western Hemisphere. The breadth of his interests and knowledge distinguish him from most other North Americanists of his and subsequent gen- erations, who have tended to focus their research on specific societies or regions of North America. Sturtevant's first publication was a review of a popular book on the Seminole Indians of Florida (Sturtevant, 1952). In the decades since, he has produced over 200 scholarly publications on New World anthropology and on other themes as well, most notably the history and philosophy of anthropology as a disci- pline and the importance of museums and material culture to the anthropological enterprise. At the same time, he has de- voted considerable time and energy to the activities of several of anthropology's major professional organizations and has cu- rated one of the largest museum collections of North American Indian materials in the world. Sturtevant's entry into anthropology coincided with World War II, a watershed event in the history of anthropology in the United States. Before the war, most American ethnologists conducted their research among North American Indians, with Franz Boas and his students dominating the field. After the war, the focus of American ethnology became more global, and the percentage of ethnologists working in North America de- clined dramatically. Despite his interest in world ethnology, Sturtevant chose to concentrate his research on North Ameri- can ethnology and to build upon the extensive knowledge about American Indians accumulated by his North Americanist predecessors. This decision is but one of several instances in which Sturte- vant has gone against the grain of trends in anthropology. He adopted a comparativist approach in his research during an era of growing particularism. He promoted a historical perspective in anthropology when the dominant theoretical approaches were largely ahistorical, and he advocated research on material William L. Merrill, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560- 0112, USA. culture and museum collections when such research was decid- edly out of fashion. He also explored basic issues related to Eu- ropean images of non-European people and their worlds long before anthropologists considered these issues to be interesting or recognized the value of the images themselves to anthropo- logical research. He has not taken these positions simply to be contrary but because they follow logically from his vision of what anthro- pology should be and from the insights he has gained from the pursuit of his own particular research interests. His views on these matters have often placed his work "out of sync" with the shifting trends of anthropology, but more often than not this work has anticipated, in some cases by decades, the directions that subsequent anthropological theory and research have taken. Berkeley and the United States Navy, 1944-1949 Sturtevant began his formal education in anthropology in the spring of 1944, when he entered the University of California at Berkeley (Cal) as a second-semester freshman. His interest in anthropology, however, extends back to his grammar-school days. He remembers first hearing of anthropology while he was a third grader at Polytechnic Elementary in Pasadena, Califor- nia. One afternoon, after a class on American Indians, he asked his father what kind of people study Indians, and his father re- plied, "Anthropologists." Sturtevant decided then that he would make anthropology his career. In the preceding essay, Sturtevant's sister, Harriet Sturtevant Shapiro, provides an engaging portrait of their family and their childhood years together (Shapiro, 2002). Here I will add only that Sturtevant completed his secondary education at McKinley Junior High School and Pasadena Junior College (now Pasa- dena City College), the latter offering both high school and the first two years of college. Because he had taken extra credits, he was eligible for graduation from high school by the end of his junior year, but he did not realize the fact until the fall se- mester of his senior year. He took several college-level courses that semester at Pasadena Junior College, and in the spring se- mester of 1944, he began classes at Cal. Sturtevant chose Cal over other universities because it was relatively close to home, and its anthropology department was among the best in the country. During his first semester there, he concentrated on studying foreign languages, which had long 11 12 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY held a fascination for him, taking courses in Chinese and in Spanish.' To gain some firsthand experience in a foreign cul- ture and to continue his education in anthropology, he traveled in the summer of 1944 to Mexico City, where he attended sum- mer school at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. There he took courses on Mexican archaeology and South American ethnology taught by Robert Barlow and George En- gerrand, explored Mexico City, and visited archaeological sites nearby and in the Yucatan. He also turned 18 and registered for the draft at the United States Embassy in Mexico City. A bout with hepatitis prevented Sturtevant from returning to Cal in the fall and delayed his being drafted until March of 1945, when he entered the United States Navy. After boot camp in San Diego, he was assigned to the hospital corps and was stationed at the Naval Air Station in Calexico, California, where he was given the task of treating sailors for venereal dis- eases they had contracted during visits across the Mexican bor- der. He was at Calexico when the war ended, and shortly after- ward he was transferred to Guam. There he spent most of his time on night duty, sitting idle in an ambulance on the edge of an airstrip. To break the tedium, he prepared a map of Guam. He also made a small surface collection at an archaeological site at Tumon Bay, which he later donated to the Peabody Mu- seum of Natural History at Yale, and joined a discharged Navy officer who was a botanist in collecting plants on different parts of the island. This botanical work gave him the opportunity to visit briefly with native Guamanians, whose settlements were otherwise off-limits. Sturtevant's military service ended on 30 September 1946, at San Pedro, California, where he received an honorable dis- charge with the rank of pharmacist's mate third class.2 He im- mediately resumed his studies at Cal. Alfred Kroeber, the dean of American anthropology of the era and for decades the domi- nant figure in the Department of Anthropology at Cal, retired in 1946, before Sturtevant's return. Kroeber began spending the academic year at other major anthropology departments in the United States, and although he returned to Berkeley in the summers, he gave no classes. Sturtevant took courses offered by the department's senior anthropologists, including Robert Lowie and E.W Gifford, but his closest contacts were with the younger anthropologists, primarily Robert Heizer, John Rowe, and David Mandelbaum. Heizer and Rowe provided Sturtevant with his first formal introduction to American Indian studies and convinced him of the fundamental connection between ethnology and archaeol- ogy. Along with Mandelbaum, Rowe was also an important in- fluence in the area of anthropological theory. Sturtevant recalls as especially useful and challenging Rowe's reading course on the history of anthropology. Rowe would give each student a topic, expecting a report a week later, which he would then read and comment on to the class. One week he assigned to Sturtevant Herbert Spencer's magnum opus, the five-volume Principles of Sociology! Sturtevant was impressed by the breadth of Rowe's knowledge, his dedication to his research, and his respect and high expectations for his students. Rowe served as Sturtevant's undergraduate advisor and guided him in the preparation of a research paper on the origins and history of Chinook jargon. In part because of the influence of his uncle Edgar Sturte- vant, a renowned linguist, and in part because of his keen inter- est in the subject, Sturtevant also enrolled in several linguistics courses. At the time, linguistics was not being offered in the Department of Anthropology, so he took courses with profes- sors in other departments: phonetics and phonemics from Mur- ray Emeneau in the classics department, and advanced linguis- tics from Mary Haas, a linguist in the Department of Oriental Languages. Haas was especially important in encouraging Sturtevant to develop a competency in linguistics and, later, af- ter he began research among the Seminoles, in providing him with guidance in his analysis of Muskogean linguistic materi- als, one of her areas of specialization. During his undergraduate years at Cal, Sturtevant gained his first experience in anthropological fieldwork. He interviewed Japanese-American students who had been interned in reloca- tion camps during the war, and he attended the University of New Mexico's 1947 summer field school in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, where he learned the basics of archaeological fieldwork and visited briefly among the Navajos and Rio Grande Pueblos. In June of 1949, he spent one weekend with Clement Meighan, Francis Riddell, and Tullio Tentori among the Eastern Pomos in northern California (Meighan and Rid- dell, 1972). He also joined fellow student William King on a short archaeological surface survey of the California coast from San Diego south well into Baja California. Apart from King, Sturtevant's closest friends among the undergraduate an- thropology majors at Berkeley were Henry Nicholson and Donald Lathrop. Sturtevant was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa during his jun- ior year, and in the fall of his senior year, he began considering where to apply for graduate school. Apart from the University of California, which encouraged its undergraduates to pursue their graduate educations elsewhere, the leading anthropology graduate departments at the time were at the University of Chi- cago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, Pennsylvania, University of California at Los Angeles, and Yale. John Rowe regarded Yale as the best of these and recommended that he apply there. Sturtevant was impressed by the quality of the faculty at Yale and by Yale's reputation as a center for innovative theoretical work in anthropology, especially in the area of culture and per- sonality studies. He was particularly attracted by the prospect of studying with Ralph Linton, whose work on acculturation and, more recently, culture and personality theory, combined with his writings on anthropology in general, had established him as one of the most important anthropologists of the day. He decided to apply only to Yale, a decision reinforced by the fact that his uncle Edgar was a member of the linguistics depart- ment there. NUMBER 44 13 The University of California gave Sturtevant academic credit for training that he had received in the Navy Hospital Corps. Combined with credits he had earned at Pasadena Junior Col- lege, he was able to graduate early, receiving a bachelor's de- gree with highest honors in anthropology in January 1949. He stayed in Berkeley to audit several courses during the spring semester of 1949. The following summer, he studied French and German in preparation for examinations in reading com- prehension in these languages that he would be required to take upon entering Yale in the fall. By remaining in Berkeley, he passed up an opportunity to attend summer school at the Uni- versity of Oslo. He regretted his decision after taking the exam- inations, because they turned out to be less challenging than he had expected. Yale, 1949-1956 Yale, like most other departments of anthropology in the United States, promoted a comprehensive approach to the study of humanity, which required an understanding of what have become identified as the four principal subfields of the discipline: ethnology, archaeology, linguistics, and physical an- thropology. Sturtevant's undergraduate and graduate training in this approach established the vision of anthropology that he has maintained throughout his career. He clearly expressed his view of the connections among the four subfields in his 1969 article "Does Anthropology Need Museums?" After acknowl- edging that each of the subdisciplines has its special interests and perspectives as well as linkages to separate, nonanthropo- logical disciplines, he commented: But anthropology remains a single subject, with sub-divisions. Some observers believe that it will not (and sometimes that it should not) remain so, that in- creasing specialization will lead to fragmentation. But this specialization often overlaps sub-field boundaries, so that the discipline may well become a net- work rather than a rigid set of four pigeonholes. I believe that the sub-fields will (and should) continue to offer more to each other than to outside disci- plines. (Sturtevant, 1969a:630-631)3 A number of major figures or rising stars in anthropology were on the faculty at Yale while Sturtevant was a graduate stu- dent there, and he took courses from most of them: social struc- ture, cultural processes, and culture and personality from Lin- ton; cultural dynamics from George Peter Murdock; New World and Asian ethnology from Cornelius Osgood, Wendell Bennett, and Sidney Mintz; archaeology from Irving Rouse; and linguis- tics from Floyd Lounsbury. He also participated in a seminar di- rected by George Kubler on the analysis of Mixtec codices and took several linguistics courses from Bernard Bloch. His professors provided him with a solid foundation in an- thropological theory and method as well as a good background in more specific areas, like structuralist linguistics and New World ethnology and archaeology, which he put to good use in his subsequent research. However, once he had firsthand expe- rience with the theoretical approaches in vogue or development at Yale at the time, such as culture and personality theory pro- moted by Linton and others and Murdock's cross-cultural sta- tistical studies, he was not convinced of their value. Also, like many other students and professional anthropologists, he found Linton a difficult person to deal with (Sturtevant, 1980a). He served as Linton's teaching assistant in courses on social or- ganization and introduction to anthropology, but he was not ea- ger to complete his dissertation under Linton's guidance. Floyd Lounsbury, who completed his doctorate at Yale and joined the faculty the same year that Sturtevant arrived, became his doc- toral advisor. As is typical in graduate school, Sturtevant found that he learned as much about anthropology from other graduate stu- dents as from his professors. His cohort included Stefan Borhe- gyi, Harold Conklin, Philip Dark, William Davenport, Charles Frake, Peter Goethals, William Mangin, John Musgrave, Leopold Pospisil, Donald Robertson, Douglas Schwartz, Anne- marie Shimony, Councill Taylor, Johannes Wilbert, and Stephen Williams. In long conversations in Yale's Hall of Graduate Studies, he and his fellow graduate students devel- oped their ideas about anthropology, exchanged opinions about the work of their professors and other anthropologists, and de- fined the goals and plans for their own research.4 Sturtevant's perspectives on anthropology were strongly in- fluenced by his fieldwork among the Seminole, which he began in the summer of 1950, at the conclusion of his first year of graduate studies. Although many of his friends were planning research outside the United States, Sturtevant's long-term com- mitment to North American ethnology never wavered; how- ever, he had not yet decided on the region of North America where he would focus his research. Rouse, a specialist on Car- ibbean archaeology who had also published on Florida archae- ology, suggested he consider the Seminoles of south Florida. By the end of his first fieldwork season, Sturtevant was convinced that the dearth of ethnographic information about these Semi- noles and their status as one of the least acculturated of all North American Indian societies justified ethnographic research among them and offered the possibility of making an important contribution to North American ethnology. In 1950 the Florida Seminoles lived in a number of small communities in and around the Everglades. The members of these communities were the descendants of the minority of Seminoles who had successfully avoided deportation to Indian Territory by the United States government during the nine- teenth century. These and the Seminoles who were deported derived primarily from distinct groups of Muskogean-speaking Indians who had migrated or had been displaced progressively southward from their homes in southern Georgia and Alabama during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reflecting the diverse origins of their ancestors, the Florida Seminoles spoke two related but mutually unintelligible languages: Mikasuki (a dialect of Hitchiti) and a dialect of Muskogee (Creek) now sometimes called Creek Seminole (Sturtevant, 1971a). The limited ethnographic research on the Seminoles that had been completed before 1950 focused primarily on the Musko- 14 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY gee-speaking Seminoles, so Sturtevant decided to concentrate on the Mikasukis in his own work. In the summer of 1950 and again in the summer of 1951, he traveled from New Haven, Connecticut, to south Florida, his field expenses covered by Yale's Caribbean Anthropological Program, directed by Os- good, which in turn was supported by funds from the Wenner- Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He had con- cluded that the best approach to beginning ethnographic field- work among the Mikasukis and to establishing rapport with them would be to study the language. Accordingly, he devoted most of his time during these two summers to collecting and analyzing Mikasuki words, phrases, and texts, focusing more on phonology than on morphology or syntax.5 The superinten- dent of the Dania (now Hollywood) Reservation recommended that he hire Joseph Jumper to work with him. At the time, Jumper was a high school student on the Dania Reservation; when he graduated, he became one of the first Seminoles to ob- tain a high school degree. Jumper proved to be of invaluable assistance in the project, and by the end of the second summer, they had worked out the phonemics of Mikasuki. Through this research, Sturtevant established a basic under- standing of the Mikasuki language, which allowed him to record Mikasuki terms accurately, analyze their etymologies, and evaluate the translations of Jumper and other interpreters upon whom he relied in his interviews with non-English-speak- ing Seminoles. He also gained some familiarity with the Muskogee language as well as a Mikasuki nickname, roughly translatable as "Language Asker." He soon discovered, how- ever, that his growing competency in the Seminole languages did not provide the entree to Mikasuki society that he had hoped for. Most Mikasukis were suspicious of outsiders, and they were reluctant to interact with him on more than the most superficial level. It was thus good fortune that, near the end of the summer of 1950, he met Josie Billie, a Mikasuki doctor and medicine man about whom Sturtevant (1954b:4) wrote in his doctoral disser- tation, "no greater expert on Seminole culture is now alive" (cf. Sturtevant, 1960c). In the 1940s, Billie, along with about one- third of the Florida Seminole population, had converted to the Southern Baptist religion, but he continued to practice tradi- tional Seminole medicine. He was different from most other Mikasukis, including his fellow Christian converts, in being more open to outsiders and more willing to discuss details of Seminole culture with them. Sturtevant chatted briefly with Billie on the Dania Reservation in 1950 and, in the summer of 1951, visited him at his home on the Big Cypress Reservation. When he returned to Florida the following year to complete his doctoral research, he moved into an abandoned trailer on Big Cypress and began working intensively with him. During the summer of 1950, he met another person who was to have a significant impact on his Seminole research and his perspective on the anthropological endeavor as a whole: John Goggin, a major figure in Florida anthropology. In his obituary of Goggin, who died of cancer in 1963, Sturtevant described their relationship: He was very much interested in all aspects of Seminole ethnography. My own friendship with him began when he visited me during my first fieldwork as a graduate student in 1950 and 1951, decided that I was serious about Seminole ethnography, and thereafter at every opportunity encouraged and helped me, sharing his knowledge of Seminole history and culture (including his own field notes, photographs, specimens, and large newspaper clipping file), extending his hospitality to me, and introducing and sponsoring me among his many friends in Florida. (Sturtevant, 1964b:389) Goggin's interests and expertise extended across much of North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America and encom- passed most of the subfields of anthropology. Although prima- rily an archaeologist, he was firmly committed, in Sturtevant's words, "to a unified approach to anthropological materials, par- ticularly the interconnections of archeology, ethnology, history, and natural history" (Sturtevant, 1964b:389). Goggin's view of anthropology reinforced Sturtevant's own conviction of the value of the comprehensive approach in which he had been trained. Goggin also impressed upon Sturtevant the importance of material culture to anthropological research and inspired him to explore museums, archives, and the extremely varied published literature for information to complement his ethno- graphic field data. In the fall of 1951, Sturtevant attended the annual Confer- ence on Iroquois Research at Red House, New York, in the company of Harold Conklin, who had developed an interest in the Iroquois while a high school student in New York. Sturte- vant and Conklin had met while both were anthropology under- graduates at Berkeley, but they did not become good friends until Conklin entered graduate school at Yale in the fall of 1950, a year after Sturtevant. At the conference, William Fen- ton introduced them to some local Seneca people who invited them to attend the Seneca Midwinter ceremonies to be held the following January and February on the Allegany Seneca Reser- vation, near Salamanca in western New York State. In the inter- vening months, they decided that the purpose of their visit would be to study Seneca musical instruments, one of the few categories of traditional Iroquois material culture still in exist- ence, but one that had been little studied. They spent 11 days at Allegany, during which time they worked out the Seneca classification of musical instruments, recorded detailed information on their construction and use, and acquired examples of several of the musical instruments for the Yale Peabody Museum, which sponsored the project. Sturtevant was pleased that the Senecas, unlike the Seminoles, treated him as an individual rather than as just another white outsider and that they welcomed his questions about their cul- ture and history. This visit marked the beginning of his now de- cades-long research among the Iroquois. They reported the results of their research in a coauthored ar- ticle (Conklin and Sturtevant, 1953). In its careful recording of Seneca terms, close attention to Seneca perspectives, and thor- ough coverage of the relevant literature, this article exemplifies the high standards of scholarship that characterize all of their NUMBER 44 15 FIGURE 1.—Mrs. Charley Cypress demonstrating grating of coontie (Zamia) roots at her camp, Big Cypress Reservation, Florida, 1 February 1957. Junior Billie (left), interpreting; William Sturtevant (right), taking notes (posed). Photograph by John M. Goggin. Courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution (neg. no. 44,464-a). FIGURE 2.—William Sturtevant with Solon Jones, Cattaraugus Reservation, New York, 29 June 1957 (posed). Photograph by Theda Maw Sturtevant. 16 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY FIGURE 3.—Josie Billie and William Sturtevant, Big Cypress Reservation, 28 March 1959. Photograph by Harold C. Conklin. subsequent research and writing and foreshadows their devel- opment, in collaboration with several others, of the approach to ethnography commonly known as ethnoscience. In May 1952 Sturtevant resumed his fieldwork among the Florida Seminoles. Two months later, he left for his family's summer home in Woods Hole, Massachussetts, where, on 26 July, his twenty-sixth birthday, he and Theda Maw were mar- ried. Maw, from Burma, was a graduate student in history at Yale when they met in 1950; they became engaged in the spring of 1952. Following the wedding, they returned together to Florida, where Sturtevant continued his field research. Sturtevant focused this research on Seminole ethnography rather than on linguistics, attempting to gather as much infor- mation on as many different aspects of Seminole culture as possible. He also collected some physical anthropological data on such things as Seminole blood-type frequencies, handed- ness, color blindness, and dentition, and he made a small col- lection of ethnographic materials for the Yale Peabody Mu- seum to supplement those deposited earlier by Goggin and others. His original plan had been to produce a general ethnog- raphy of the Seminole, but he decided to focus on Seminole medicine because this was the area of Seminole culture about which Billie was most interested and knowledgable. A few other Mikasuki people shared bits of information with him, but only Billie was willing to discuss Seminole culture in any de- tail. Although he was aware of the methodological problems of relying so heavily on a single informant, and he recognized that Billie was somewhat marginal to traditional Mikasuki society, he had no other options. Sturtevant worked regularly with Billie through the fall and winter of 1952 and into early 1953. Their discussions focused on Seminole medicine, worldview, and religion, but they also covered Seminole history, inter-ethnic relations, material cul- ture, economy, kinship, and social organization. Together they collected hundreds of plants, for which Billie provided Mika- suki and often Muskogee names as well as detailed information on their use. Sturtevant was also able to make wire and later tape recordings of 18 medicinal spells and songs, a central but previously undocumented component of Seminole medical practice, which Billie and other Mikasuki doctors recited or sang for him. Also of great importance was the information he gathered on Seminole medicine bundles, the significance of which was poorly understood at the time. In investigating these bundles, he built upon the research of Louis Capron, a longtime resident of south Florida who over the years had established amicable relations with several Muskogee Seminoles. He had access to the galley proofs of Capron's (1953) study entitled "The Medicine Bundles of the Florida Seminole and the Green Corn Dance," and he used Capron's findings to elicit informa- tion from Billie about Mikasuki bundles and their place in Seminole culture. NUMBER 44 17 In late February 1953, the Sturtevants left Big Cypress to re- turn to New Haven, and Sturtevant devoted the next 18 months to analyzing his notes and recordings, reviewing the relevant literature, and writing his dissertation.6 He submitted the dis- sertation in September 1954, and it was approved before Christmas; he was officially awarded the Ph.D. at the end of the spring semester of 1955. As is often the case with doctoral dissertations, the title he gave his dissertation—"The Mikasuki Seminole: Medical Be- liefs and Practices"—is misleadingly specific. In it, he exam- ined not only these beliefs and practices but the many other ar- eas of Mikasuki culture linked to them, and he produced one of the more detailed, systematic ethnobotanical studies available for any American Indian society. He also compared his find- ings among the Seminole with data from Indian societies across the Southeast and in other regions of North America and considered some more general theoretical issues, such as the validity of broad, cross-cultural typologies of diseases and psy- chological explanations of the efficacy of curing practices. The result is the most thorough ethnography of the Mikasuki ever written and is a significant contribution to a comparative eth- nology of North America. By discussing in detail the difficul- ties he encountered in his research among the Mikasuki and the limitations of his data, he also provided an important portrayal of the complexities of anthropological fieldwork and a model of anthropological candor. Sturtevant incorporated into his doctoral dissertation only about one-third of his field data and an even smaller proportion of the extensive materials on Florida Indian ethnography and history that he had gathered from other sources. While he was writing his dissertation, he drew on this additional information to produce three articles. In one of these, he provided a detailed comparison of his data on Seminole medicine bundles and busks with data collected by Capron (Sturtevant, 1954a). In the other two, he focused on Florida Indian history, evaluating in the process the reliability of native oral history and emphasiz- ing the importance of taking into account Indian perspectives on their own history (Sturtevant, 1953, 1955a). He also pre- pared a paper that reviewed the ethnohistorical and ethno- graphic evidence for cultural connections between the Indians of south Florida and of the Antilles, which he presented in De- cember 1954 at the annual meetings of the American Anthro- pological Association. This paper was a companion piece to a presentation by Rouse and supported Rouse's view, based on archaeological evidence, that the influence of Caribbean cul- tures on those of Florida had been negligible. By 1954 Sturtevant's research, publications, and participa- tion in professional meetings had marked his transition from graduate student to professional anthropologist. This status was further confirmed in March 1954, when he submitted a statement to the United States Congress opposing a so-called withdrawal bill, which would have terminated federal supervi- sion of the Florida Seminoles (Sturtevant, 1954c). Nearly all the Florida Seminoles also opposed the bill, and Congress did not pursue its passage. In the same year, he was hired by Yale University as an instructor in the Department of Anthropology and as an assistant curator of anthropology in the Yale Pea- body Museum. The Bureau of American Ethnology, 1956-1965 In 1956, when Yale did not renew his contract, Sturtevant be- gan looking for a permanent position elsewhere. He received two offers. One was from Brown University, to establish a de- partment of anthropology and to direct the newly created Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. The other was from the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), to serve as an ethnologist in the position vacated by Philip Drucker, who left the BAE and anthropology in 1955 to become a rancher in Mexico (Stirling, 1957:5; Lantis, 1991). William Fenton, who had left the BAE a few years earlier to take a job at the National Research Council, strongly encour- aged Matthew Stirling to consider Sturtevant for the position. Stirling had directed the BAE for three decades, but despite his own energetic research program, he had failed to prevent the unit's steady decline. By 1956 its permanent research staff consisted only of Stirling and two other archaeologists, Frank Roberts and Henry Collins. Despite these problems, the BAE position was in many ways a "dream" job. Sturtevant found it more attractive than the position at Brown because it offered greater freedom and time for research and because it housed an incomparable library and archives of photographs and manu- scripts on North American Indian subjects. Also, together with the staff and collections of the Anthropology Department of the United States National Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution, it continued to be a major center of North Ameri- can Indian studies. The offer from Brown was the first of several from universi- ties—including the University of Arizona and the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California—that Sturtevant received, and declined, over the next decade. In ret- rospect, he feels that his decision to remain at the Smithsonian throughout his career was the correct one, but in a conversation of June 1996, he expressed to me some regrets: I still think that one keeps up better and tends to be broader if one is teaching, for one is then forced to keep up with changes in the field. And I sometimes thought that if 1 had been teaching I would have sent people to do fieldwork in the Southeast and maybe there would have been more ethnographic fieldwork done in the Southeast than there has been. Sturtevant officially joined the staff of the BAE on 29 March 1956 (Stirling, 1957:22), but he did not actually begin working in Washington, D.C, until the following summer. His principal responsibility, like that of the other members of the research staff of the BAE, was research and writing. The BAE had no material culture collections, so its staff had no curatorial duties, but they were expected to respond to the numerous requests for information on American Indians received every year from various organizations and especially those from the general public, a function that the BAE had fulfilled throughout its ex- 18 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY istence (Hinsley, 1981). To respond efficiently to these re- quests, the staff of the BAE had prepared over the years a series of bibliographies and information leaflets, to which Sturtevant was expected to contribute. Between 1956 and 1962 he com- piled bibliographies on diverse topics: the Seminole and other Indians of eastern North America, the Cherokee language, maps related to American Indians, the contemporary situation of Indians in the United States, American Indian songs and dances, basketry, wars and warfare, clothing, medicine and health, and languages and language families. He also prepared a leaflet entitled "Anthropology as a Career" (Sturtevant, 1957). Regarded at the time as the best portrayal of the disci- pline for nonspecialists, the leaflet was distributed widely and was included in a major collection of readings in anthropology (Fried, 1959, 1:6-14,2:581-587). Producing these materials broadened his already extensive knowledge of North American Indian ethnology, linguistics, and history. He further expanded this knowledge through read- ing, research in museum and archival collections, field re- search, and short visits to Indian communities in various parts of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In July 1957 he traveled to Rock Hill, South Carolina, to collect linguistic data from Sam Blue, the last member of the Catawba tribe to have maintained some competency in the Catawba language. While there, he made a small collection of Catawba pottery for the United States National Museum. In 1957 and 1958 he spent seven weeks continuing his research among the New York Seneca, and in 1959 he returned for a few months to Florida to follow up on his previous fieldwork, focusing especially on Seminole ethnobotany. He also collected ethnographic materi- als, especially objects made for the tourist market, which he deposited in the United States National Museum. In July and August of the following year, he visited 17 European museums to examine early ethnographic examples and possible Euro- pean prototypes of eastern North American Indian material culture, research that complemented his growing familiarity with museum collections in the United States. In the summers of 1961 and 1962, he conducted five weeks of basic ethno- graphic fieldwork among the Seneca-Cayuga in Oklahoma and paid a short visit to the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, Can- ada, during October of the latter year to attend a ceremony and to do a bit a fieldwork among the Seneca and Cayuga there. He also continued to participate regularly in conferences on Iro- quois history and culture and, in 1964, joined Stanley Dia- mond and Fenton in preparing a memorandum to the Subcom- mittee on Indian Affairs of the United States House of Representatives, protesting the construction of the Kinzua Dam, which later flooded a large part of the Allegany Reserva- tion and forced the relocation of many Seneca people living there (Diamond, et al., 1964). Sturtevant combined this active research program with a number of writing projects. In fact, his nearly nine years at the BAE proved to be one of the most productive periods of his ca- reer. He continued writing up the results of his Seminole re- search and prepared several articles on Seminole history, my- thology, ritual, and material culture (Sturtevant, 1955a, 1956a, 1956b, 1956c, 1962a, 1963b, 1967f) as well as a biographical essay on Billie, which appeared in a collection of 20 portraits of anthropological informants (Sturtevant, 1960c). He also of- fered a detailed assessment of the state of ethnological research in Florida (Sturtevant, 1958a) and, with Goggin, analyzed di- verse archaeological and historical data to reconstruct the cul- ture and society of the Calusa, one of the principal Indian soci- eties in southern Florida at the time of Spanish contact, and one of the few stratified, nonagricultural societies in all of North America (Goggin and Sturtevant, 1964). He applied his grow- ing knowledge of Caribbean history and ethnology to analyze the precontact agricultural system of the Taino Indians of the Greater Antilles and to expand his unpublished 1954 paper on the lack of influence of Antillean cultures on the cultures of the Indians of the southeastern United States (Sturtevant, 1960d, 1961b). The expanded study appeared in 1960, in a collection of es- says on the Caribbean compiled by Sidney Mintz and dedicated to Cornelius Osgood, Sturtevant's former professor at Yale (Sturtevant, 1960d). In it Sturtevant pointed out that ethnologi- cal traits taken as evidence of a direct connection between the Antilles and the Southeast often were widely distributed in the circum-Caribbean and adjacent regions, and that in some cases, their presence in the Antilles was assumed rather than actually documented in the historical and ethnographic record. More- over, the relatively shallow time depth of this record precluded arriving at any definitive conclusions about the direction of in- fluence among neighboring societies, which could be deter- mined only within a broader chronological framework, typi- cally derived from archaeological research. In the case at hand, the available archaeological data indicated that the only South- eastern Indians who interacted with Antillean societies were those located in south Florida, and that the influence between them had flowed primarily from Florida to the Antilles rather than the reverse. This essay thus offered a systematic critique of the use of culture-trait distributions based on data gleaned from historical and ethnological sources alone to reconstruct New World culture history and was an important contribution to the methodology of cultural historical research in general. Completing this research project also reinforced Sturtevant's view, which he shared with Goggin and many other anthropol- ogists at the time, that archaeology and ethnology are best re- garded not as totally separate subfields of anthropology but rather as complementary endeavors within cultural anthropol- ogy (Sturtevant, 1964b:389). His writing during this period was not restricted to Florida and the Caribbean. His growing reputation as a North Ameri- canist resulted in invitations to prepare entries on the Haida, Huron, and Ales Hrdlicka for the Encyclopedia Hebraica and on the Creek, the Five Civilized Tribes, and the Seminole for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Sturtevant, 1960a, 1960b, 1961a, 1963a, 1964a, 1964d). He also produced a detailed NUMBER 44 19 overview of Spanish-Indian relations in the Southeast (Sturte- vant, 1962b) and wrote brief articles on Carolina Indians in the early historic period, on American Indian linguistics, and on field methods (Sturtevant, 1958b, 1959, 1960e, 1965b). In 1959 David Quinn invited him, on the recommendation of Wil- comb Washburn, to analyze the ethnographic content of the John White watercolors of coastal North Carolina Indians, which Sturtevant (1976:443-444) later characterized as "per- haps the most interesting and important sixteenth-century illus- trations of Indians from both an ethnographic and artistic point of view." His work on these watercolors and on early illustra- tions of Northeastern Indians, published between 1964 and 1967, marked the beginning of what would become a central focus of his research in the following decades (Sturtevant, 1964c, 1965a, 1967a). It was also during this period that he wrote "Studies in Eth- noscience," the article that has proven to be his most controver- sial to date (Sturtevant, 1964e). He presented the original ver- sion of this article at a conference on "Transcultural Studies in Cognition," sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and held in Merida, Mexico, in the spring of 1963. Although Sturtevant had not applied a strict ethnoscientific approach in his own research, he was an appropriate choice to provide an overview of ethnoscience. Many of the ideas that formed the basis of this approach had emerged out of conversations among Conklin, Frake, Lounsbury, and Sturtevant while they were to- gether at Yale in the 1950s, and Conklin and Frake had pre- sented their views of ethnoscience in a lecture series that Stur- tevant co-organized for the Anthropological Society of Washington in 1960 to 1961 (Conklin, 1962; Frake, 1962). Yet it was somewhat happenstance that Sturtevant wrote the article. He believes that Conklin—one of the earliest practitioners of ethnoscience and the person who, in Sturtevant's opinion, was most instrumental in the development of its methodology— would have been invited to prepare the presentation for the conference had he not been conducting fieldwork in the Philip- pines at the time. Sturtevant's goal in writing the article was not to provide a history of the development of ethnoscience but to present, ex- plicitly and systematically, its perspectives and goals, explore its fundamental theoretical and methodological principles, re- view how these principles had been applied in specific re- search projects, and suggest areas where an ethnoscientific ap- proach might be profitably employed in future research. He defined ethnoscience as a general approach to ethnography fo- cused on discovering and describing the conceptual models that the members of different societies employ to organize their experiences and to orient their activities in the world. Al- though he recognized that this focus continued a long tradition in anthropology of emphasizing the importance of under- standing native points of view, he noted that most ethno- graphic work failed to explore native perspectives exhaus- tively and tended to distort them by forcing them into general categories, like religion or kinship, which were mistakenly as- sumed to exist in more or less equivalent form in all human societies. In this regard, he commented, "It has long been evi- dent that a major weakness in anthropology is the underdevel- oped condition of ethnographic method. Typologies and gen- eralizations abound, but their descriptive foundations are insecure" (Sturtevant, 1964e:100). From Sturtevant's perspective, ethnoscience offered the rig- orous methodology that would enable ethnographers to de- velop a more sophisticated understanding of the conceptual models of other societies and would allow a comparative an- thropology to move forward on a firmer empirical footing. He referred to these conceptual models as "classifications," in the broad sense of being orderings of experience, and argued that the ethnoscientific approach could be adopted to explore any cultural domain, regardless of the degree to which it was struc- tured by more specific classificatory principles, like taxonomic inclusion, or the extent to which its contents were explicitly la- beled in the native language. At the same time, he noted that ethnoscientific research conducted to date had concentrated on taxonomic classification and that the analysis of terminological systems had provided the principal avenue for gaining access to native perspectives. Despite anthropology's lip service to the importance of learning native languages, few ethnographers gained more than a basic competency in the languages of the people with whom they worked. Ethnoscientists insisted, quite logically, that an understanding of native perspectives was possible only if eth- nographers acquired a solid command of native languages. They also emphasized the importance of collecting information in the normal contexts of everyday life and of following proce- dures that approximated local cultural approaches to gaining knowledge. By making these procedures explicit, they hoped that the results of one ethnographer's research could be checked in the future by others. The publication of "Studies in Ethnoscience" in 1964 stimu- lated considerable interest in the approach but also generated sharp criticism. In a general review, Marvin Harris (1968: 568-604) faulted ethnoscience, as well as most other ap- proaches in anthropology, for privileging native perspectives over those of outside observers and for perpetuating mentalist perspectives at the expense of more materialist ones. Because of its emphasis on native terminologies and its adaptation of some methods and concepts originally developed in descriptive linguistics, he and others dismissed ethnoscience as a mis- guided attempt to reduce culture to language and to impose lin- guistic models on largely nonlinguistic cultural phenomena (Berreman, 1966; Keesing, 1972). Another common critique was that the results of ethnoscientific research were "trivial," or as Harris (1968:592) expressed it, "the net contribution to sub- stantive theory is less than what usually results from equivalent labor in-puts." Nonetheless, the methods and perspectives of ethnoscience were widely embraced by anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s and have endured in several research specialities, such as 20 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY FIGURE 4.—William Sturtevant in his Bureau of American Ethnology office in the Smithsonian Castle, Room 406, January 1965. Photograph by Stewart Brand. ethnobiology and cognitive science. The impact of the stan- dards for ethnographic research established by its early practi- tioners is also evident, although seldom acknowledged, in much of contemporary ethnography. For his part, Sturtevant considered most of the critiques of ethnoscience to be wrong- headed, being based on misunderstandings of its aims and un- derlying principles, but he never responded in print to any of them. By the time they appeared, he was heavily involved in other, mainly ethnohistorical, research projects and had already anticipated and addressed many of the critiques in his essay. For example, he had no illusions about the amount of time and resources required to implement the ethnoscientific approach in ethnography, commenting, Ethnoscience raises the standards of reliability, validity, and exhaustiveness in ethnography. One result is that the ideal goal of a complete ethnography is far- ther removed from practical attainment. The full ethnoscientific description of a single culture would require many thousands of pages published after many years of intensive field work based on ethnographic methods more complete and more advanced than are now available. (Sturtevant, 1964e: 123) NUMBER 44 21 Ethnographic research could proceed more rapidly only by lowering the standards of good ethnography or by underesti- mating or ignoring the vast complexity of human cultures. Sturtevant regarded both alternatives as untenable if anthropol- ogy's expressed commitment to understanding humanity was to be taken seriously. In 1962 Sturtevant began planning a year-long research project in Burma to complete an ethnoscientific analysis of clothing in the Pegu District northeast of Rangoon. He intended the project to provide a counterpoint to his research on Semi- nole clothing as well as an opportunity to develop ethnographic methodology within the framework of ethnoscience. Burma was an appropriate place to conduct the project because it was one of the few countries in the world whose citizens had not adopted European-style clothing, but his decision to focus his project there was motivated primarily by his wife's desire to visit her family and to have their children learn about her coun- try. She had not returned to Burma since the summer of 1955, when she introduced her husband and their infant daughter, Kinthi (born in 1954), to her family. In the interim, they had had two more children—Reed, bom in 1956, and Alfred, born in 1958—and the country had undergone a number of radical political changes. The army had taken over the government in 1962 and was in the process of transforming Burma, which they renamed Myanmar in 1989, into a pseudosocialist state. In 1963 Sturtevant received a grant from the National Sci- ence Foundation to undertake the project and secured permis- sion from the BAE to take a one-year leave of absence. In May of that year, his close friend and mentor John Goggin died after an eight-month-long illness with cancer. Sturtevant (1964b) prepared an obituary, which was published in the American An- thropologist the following year. Earlier, realizing that Goggin's illness was terminal, he had joined Charles Fairbanks and Rouse to organize a collection of Goggin's writings, also pub- lished in 1964 (Fairbanks et al., 1964). On 4 October 1963, the Sturtevant family left Washington, D.C, arriving in Rangoon on 24 October. On the surface the country seemed little changed from their 1955 visit, but the new political climate made fieldwork impossible. Sturtevant was unable to get permission from the Burmese government to spend any significant amount of time outside the capital, and government officials, infused with antiforeigner sentiment, were suspicious of him and kept close tabs on his movements and on the people with whom he associated. He was tempted to try to work in the Pegu District without official approval, but he feared that the government would revoke his visa, thereby cutting short their visit, or that it would take reprisals against his wife's relatives, whose political situation was already tenu- ous. Her father, Dr. Ba Maw, had served between 1937 and 1939 as Burma's first premier after the British established Burma as a colony separate from India and had also served as Burma's head of state between 1943 and 1945, during the Japa- nese occupation. Although Maw did not support the 1962 mili- tary coup, he had not yet been identified by the government as an enemy. His was one of the few politically prominent fami- lies in Burma whose members did not form part of the military government and had not yet been jailed. Despite these difficulties, Sturtevant was able to visit neigh- borhoods in Rangoon and villages in the surrounding country- side, examine photographs in several archives, study the Bur- mese language, and read extensively about the country's history and culture. He also became quite interested in Bur- mese drama and began attending performances, especially of the Indian epic Ramayana, but he felt that he lacked the requi- site language skills and background knowledge to make these performances the focus of his research. In the process, he as- sembled extensive notes on Burmese clothing and many other aspects of the culture, took hundreds of photographs, and made a large collection, 386 objects in all, of clothing and other ob- jects for the Smithsonian. He also had the opportunity, in 1964, to visit Inle Lake in the Southern Shan States southeast of Mandalay, where he exam- ined local approaches to artificial island agriculture. Agricul- tural systems had been an important focus of his work in Flor- ida and the Caribbean, and he had observed another example of this unusual approach to agriculture—in which earth is moved to water rather than the opposite—during a brief visit in 1960 to the "floating gardens" of Xochimilco, in the suburbs of Mexico City. In 1968 he collected data on a similar system in Kashmir, and he presented a paper on the topic that year at the Eighth In- ternational Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sci- ences, held in Tokyo and Kyoto (Sturtevant, 1970). This re- search established that artificial island agriculture emerged independently in different parts of the world and lent support to the conclusion that early Spanish observations of this form of agriculture in the Valley of Mexico had been accurate. About five months after arriving in Burma, Sturtevant was shocked to learn that the BAE had become the focus of a reor- ganizational plan being developed by S. Dillon Ripley, who on 1 February 1964 assumed the duties of Secretary of the Smith- sonian Institution. Ripley was concerned by the general state of anthropology at the Institution and was being drawn to the con- clusion that merging the BAE and the Department of Anthro- pology would make for a stronger program. The department in various organizational guises had formed part of the Smithson- ian since the Institution's founding in 1846.7 Its staff was re- sponsible for curating the Institution's anthropological collec- tions, predominantly from North America but including important materials from other parts of the world. The BAE was created in 1879 as a separate research bureau focused on North America. Over the years, the two units developed a co- operative relationship—among other things, the department cu- rated the enormous collections amassed by the BAE's research- ers—but in recent decades the department had been able to increase its research staff and budget, whereas those of the BAE had declined. By 1964 Stirling had retired from the BAE, and Roberts retired in the spring of that year. Its research staff 22 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY then consisted only of Sturtevant, Collins, and Robert Laugh- lin, who had been hired in 1962. To determine the future of anthropology at the Institution, Ripley consulted with anthropologists in the BAE, in the de- partment, and outside the Smithsonian. In a series of letters written from Rangoon, Sturtevant provided Ripley with his perspective on what he believed should happen. He argued that the BAE should remain an independent research unit, but that it should be transformed into "a bureau of ethnology in the mod- ern sense" by increasing its staff to include 10 to 15 research positions and expanding its focus from the Americas to the en- tire world.8 Ripley was not unsympathetic to Sturtevant's vi- sion, but he believed that the interests of anthropology would be better served by merging the BAE and the department into a new unit that could then serve as the foundation for a separate museum of anthropology. The Department of Anthropology, 1965-1997 The BAE was officially abolished on 1 February 1965, and its staff, library, and archives were subsequently moved from the Smithsonian Institution building (the Castle) across the Na- tional Mall to the Department of Anthropology's recently ex- panded space in the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). The new unit created by the merger of the BAE and the Department of Anthropology was named the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology (SOA). Its position within the organi- zational structure of the NMNH was higher than that of the other departments in the museum but was lower than that for- merly held by the BAE, which had been an independent bureau within the institution. Waldo Wedel, a senior scientist in the museum who special- ized in Plains archaeology, was named the first chairman of the SOA, but he was soon replaced by Richard Woodbury, a south- western archaeologist. A few months later, Secretary Ripley decided that the SOA needed additional, more dynamic leader- ship and invited Sol Tax to become its head, apparently on the recommendation of Collins. Ripley believed that Tax—a pro- fessor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and a ma- jor figure in international anthropology at the time—would transform the SOA into one of the most important centers of anthropology in the world (Tax, 1988; Stanley, 1996). Tax was intrigued by the possibilities, but he did not want to resign his position at the University of Chicago, so Ripley asked him to spend a few days each month at the institution as a special ad- visor for anthropology. Tax accepted this revised offer and be- gan familiarizing himself with the Smithsonian's anthropology program and developing ideas for the future of the new unit. Tax was immediately concerned that the research staff of the SOA had failed to develop programs that went beyond their personal research projects. He asked them to prepare descrip- tions of their work and to offer their perspectives on new pro- grams that could be developed, organizing a meeting in late January 1966 to discuss their ideas. Among the alternatives considered was the proposal that a new edition of the two-vol- ume Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, origi- nally published by the BAE in the first decade of the twentieth century, would be appropriate. Everyone supported the idea, and a second meeting was held a short time later to decide on the general format of the new Handbook of North American In- dians and to determine who would be in charge. A few of the curators felt that a dictionary format like that of the original Handbook would be best. Sturtevant proposed instead that a more ambitious, multivolume collection of detailed essays would be more useful, on the lines of the Handbook of South American Indians published by the BAE between 1946 and 1959 and the Handbook of Middle American Indians then in preparation at Tulane University. The majority of the curators concurred with Sturtevant's position, and he volunteered, and was designated, to coordinate the project. Sturtevant was attracted by the prospect of becoming general editor of the new Handbook for several reasons. No compre- hensive, scholarly overview of American Indians was then available except for the original Handbook, which was badly out of date. A new Handbook would make available to a broad audience the significant advances in knowledge about North American Indians that had been accomplished during the previ- ous 60 years. He was also becoming concerned that his inclina- tion to pursue somewhat disparate research topics and to focus on rather specific issues would preclude his ever producing a major synthesis of North American ethnology. He believed that organizing the new Handbook would provide him the opportu- nity to make a major contribution to the field. With characteristic energy and enthusiasm, Tax began elabo- rating his vision of a new Smithsonian anthropology, but he soon encountered difficulties. Because he was reluctant to leave Chicago for more than a few days at a time, Tax could not maintain contact with the Smithsonian staff at the level re- quired to implement his plans, even after the Smithsonian hired his former student Samuel Stanley to keep Tax informed and to coordinate the programs on a daily basis. A more serious prob- lem was the lack of support for and, in some cases, opposition to his plans on the part of several members of the SOA research staff. Some were concerned that Tax's ambitious vision ignored the basic responsibilities of the staff to the museum's collec- tions and that its implementation would overwhelm the staff with new duties. Others resented Tax's attempts to direct the activities of the SOA from a distance or feared that his plans would have a detrimental impact on their personal research programs. By November 1967 Tax was convinced that this opposition would preclude moving ahead with his plans for the SOA, and he proposed to Secretary Ripley that the new programs that he and a few members of the SOA were developing should be or- ganized within a distinct unit. An outside committee, ap- pointed to review the status of the SOA in January 1967, con- curred with Tax's suggestion, and on 1 July 1968—just three years and six months after he abolished the BAE—Secretary NUMBER 44 23 FIGURE 5.—The staffs of the Bureau of American Ethnology and the River Basin Survey (RBS) at the time of the BAE's merger with the Department of Anthropology, on the steps of the NMNH, September 1965 (left to right): Front row: Matthew W. Stirling (director, retired), Jessie Shaw (administrative assistant), Carl Miller (RBS), Flo- rence Morgan (secretary); center row: Evelyn S. Anderson (secretary), Robert L. Stephenson (RBS), Robert M. Laughlin (ethnologist), Karlena Glemser (secretary), Henry B. Collins (archaeologist); back row: William C. Sturtevant (ethnologist), Edward G. Schumacher (illustrator), Harold A. Huscher (RBS), Margaret C. Blaker (archivist), Rachel Penner (archival assistant). Missing: Frank H.H. Roberts, Jr. (archaeologist, retired). Courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution (neg. no. 1530B). Ripley created the Center for the Study of Man, with Tax as its acting director and Stanley as its program coordinator. Three months later, the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology was de- moted to the status of a department. Sturtevant and other members of the SOA who supported Tax's plans were invited to join the Center along with a few other people from within the Institution and several leading scholars from the interna- tional anthropological community. The Handbook of North American Indians project was also designated as one of the Center's programs. Before the merger of the BAE and the Department of An- thropology, Sturtevant regularly joined members of the depart- ment's staff for lunch and regarded many as his friends. The merger, however, generated conflicts, especially between him and Clifford Evans, a Latin Americanist archaeologist who had been one of its more active proponents. Sturtevant resented Evans's role in bringing about the demise of the BAE and his tendency to resort to heavy-handed and, from Sturtevant's per- spective, underhanded tactics in departmental and institutional affairs. For his part, Evans considered Sturtevant's opposition to many of his plans to be unreasonable and was frustrated by his inability to neutralize this opposition or to convert Sturte- vant into an ally. In contrast, they seldom disagreed on intellec- tual matters, the main exception being Evans's view that New World culture history had been significantly affected by trans- Pacific contacts, which Sturtevant rejected for both method- ological and factual reasons. Sturtevant was not the only member of the department who opposed Evans, but Evans also had his allies. By 1969, two factions had emerged, known among the staff as "the Sturte- vant faction" and "the Evans faction."9 In October of that year, Richard Cowan, director of the NMNH, asked the research 24 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY staff to provide him with names of possible candidates for the chairmanship of the department. The supervisors of the four re- search divisions of the department responded: We are convinced that the factions in this department are so firmly established, so polarized, and so pervasive, that there is no member of the staff who is suffi- ciently neutral (or likely to remain so if appointed) to serve effectively as de- partmental chairman....The only permanent solution to this dilemma, we be- lieve, will come with the establishment of a Museum of Man with a new Director (from outside) with a strong mandate and several additional positions to dilute the existing factions and radically change the administrative, social, and personal environment which has thus far supported the factions. Given this situation, most staff members were surprised and several were appalled when Cowan appointed Evans as chair- man, first on a one-year trial basis in 1970 and then for an addi- tional four years, starting in 1971. His appointment escalated the conflicts, and the associated factionalism dominated depart- mental affairs throughout the 1970s, lingering on even after Evans's death in 1980. William Fitzhugh, who succeeded Evans as chairman of the department in 1975, worked hard to improve relations within the department, as did Douglas Ubelaker, who succeeded Fitzhugh in 1980. Their efforts were facilitated by the hiring of several new curators in the late 1970s and early 1980s to replace curators who had retired, and by the mid-1980s the factionalism had disappeared entirely. When Sturtevant was transferred from the BAE to the De- partment of Anthropology, he assumed curatorial responsibility for all of the North American ethnology collections. The other North Americanist ethnologist in the department was John C. Ewers, a noted Plains specialist hired by the department in 1946. In the 1950s, Ewers had been responsible for renovating the American Indian exhibition halls in the United States Na- tional Museum, and in the 1950s and early 1960s, he had played a major role in creating the National Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American His- tory) (Ewers, 1956, 1959). In recognition of this service to the institution, he had been given a largely research position, with the title of "senior scientist." Sturtevant and the other curators tried to shield him from day-to-day curatorial concerns, con- sulting with him only on issues about which he had special ex- pertise or which they believed would be of interest to him. Although Sturtevant had never intended to be a museum cu- rator, he was not averse to becoming one. He had long main- tained an interest in material culture, had conducted consider- able research in museums, and had taught a course and prepared a bibliography on the subject when he was an instruc- tor and assistant curator at Yale (Sturtevant, 1955b). He had de- posited ethnographic and archaeological collections from the United States, Mexico, and Guam at the Yale Peabody Mu- seum. He also made large ethnographic collections for the Smithsonian from the Seminole and from Burma as well as smaller collections of Catawba pottery and Tarascan laquer- ware, the latter collected during a brief visit to Uruapan, Mi- choacan, Mexico, in January 1960. In the 1950s he had worked with Ewers in planning the Seminole case for the museum's North American Indian exhibition halls, and in subsequent years he served as a consultant on a number of large exhibi- tions at the Smithsonian and other museums. In his new position, Sturtevant emerged as a major advocate for the view that museums had an important role to play in the anthropological enterprise. In two articles (Sturtevant, 1969a, 1973) he explored, within the framework of the history of an- thropology museums and material culture research, what this role should be, and he prepared a "Guide to Field Collecting of Ethnographic Specimens," which he hoped would "improve the quality and research usefulness of collections of ethno- graphic materials" (Sturtevant, 1967d:l). Beginning in 1964, he was a member of the American Anthropological Associa- tion's Committee on Anthropological Research in Museums, which was supported from 1965 to 1974 by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. On 25 February 1970, Sturtevant and some other committee members wrote to Nelson Rockefeller, then governor of New York, and to the re- gents of the University of the State of New York explaining why wampum belts currently housed in the New York State Museum in Albany should not be returned to the Onondaga who had requested them. Because they represented themselves as a committee of the American Anthropological Association but failed to clear their statement with the Association's execu- tive board, in 1971 the Association severed its connection to the committee. The following year, the American Ethnological Society decided to sponsor the committee, which continued to enjoy the support of Wenner-Gren. In 1974 the committee evolved into the Council for Museum Anthropology (Freed et al., 1977). Sturtevant was the council's first vice president, serving two terms between 1974 and 1978, and was its presi- dent from 1978 to 1981. Immediately after Sturtevant was officially designated as the editor of the new Handbook of North American Indians, in 1966, he and Stanley began preliminary planning, developing a general outline of its contents, preparing lists of potential con- tributors, analyzing the coverage of the old Handbook, and working out budgetary and personnel requirements for the new Handbook and its staff. More detailed planning of the Hand- book, however, did not get underway until 1969. Between 1965 and 1969 Sturtevant wrote several articles on Indian agriculture (Sturtevant, 1965b, 1965d, 1969b), and, with Stanley, compiled an overview of contemporary Indian communities in the east- ern United States (Sturtevant and Stanley, 1968). He also pre- pared entries for the Encyclopaedia Britannica on "mutilations and deformations," "tattooing," and "scalping," which summa- rized ethnographic and historical information on these prac- tices from around the world (Sturtevant, 1965c, 1965e, 1967e). The entry on tattooing provided the point of departure for a more extensive overview of the subject (Sturtevant, 1971c), and later he expanded his entry on scalping into a full-length essay, prepared in collaboration with James Axtell, which con- vincingly refuted the idea that scalping had been introduced to the New World by Europeans (Axtell and Sturtevant, 1980). NUMBER 44 25 During this period, Sturtevant produced one of his most im- portant studies of Seminole material culture. Presented in 1966 at the annual meeting of the American Ethnological Society and published the following year, this study focused on Florida Seminole men's clothing to trace the evolution of their clothing styles during the period of their greatest isolation, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Although Stur- tevant (1967f:160) characterized the paper as giving "the pre- liminary results of a larger study," it is a mature work, the cul- mination of over 15 years of field, museum, archival, and library research, in which he had collected information on all major and most minor museum collections of Seminole arti- facts, compiled a corpus of over 1000 illustrations of the Semi- noles from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and consulted extensively with Seminole people on the interpretation of these materials. In addition to providing a chronological typology of certain elements of this clothing and detailed information on their construction, he examined their relationship to the mate- rial culture of both Europe and other areas of North America and their role as identity markers among the Seminoles and other North American Indians. He indicated that the Florida Seminoles employed a "reconstructed older-style Seminole costume" (Sturtevant, 1967f:173), sometimes mixed with mod- ern-style clothing, to distinguish themselves from both non-In- dians and other Indians alike, but that Indians in other parts of the United States, both Seminoles and non-Seminoles, had adopted some of these same items to mark a generalized, pan- Indian identity. He also demonstrated how certain methods as- sociated with ethnoscience—in this case, native classifications and componential analysis—could be profitably applied to the study of material culture. In addition to his research and writing, Sturtevant became in- creasingly involved in the activities of several professional or- ganizations. He had begun participating as an officer in such organizations in the previous decade, soon after he was hired by the BAE. In 1957 he began a three-year term on the board of governors of the Anthropological Society of Washington, and from 1959 to 1960 he was a member of the executive commit- tee of the Florida Anthropological Society. In the latter year, he joined Thomas Gladwin of the National Institute of Mental Health to organize the annual lecture series of the Anthropo- logical Society of Washington, for which they invited nine speakers from anthropology, linguistics, and psychology "to take a critical look at a variety of strategies available for the study of human behavior in a cultural context" (Gladwin and Sturtevant, 1962:vii). The essays were published in a volume titled Anthropology and Human Behavior (Gladwin and Sturte- vant, 1962). From 1962 until 1968 he worked as the book-re- view editor and associate editor of the American Anthropolo- gist, and in 1969 he began serving on the American Anthropological Association's Committee on Archives. His membership on this committee was especially appropriate, not only because of his commitment to consulting archival materi- als in his own research but because he had been instrumental in establishing the National Anthropological Archives—created through the merger of the archives of the BAE and the Depart- ment of Anthropology—as a major repository of anthropologi- cal materials from around the world." He also devoted considerable time to the development of the American Society for Ethnohistory, serving on its executive committee in 1959 and as its president between 1965 and 1966. This society began as the Ohio Valley Historic Indian Confer- ence, and then, around 1958, changed its name to the American Indian Ethnohistoric (later "Ethnohistorical") Conference. In 1966 Sturtevant convinced the majority of the members that the society should have a global rather than a strictly North American focus and that its name should be the "American So- ciety for Ethnohistory" rather than the "Society for American Ethnohistory," which many preferred. At the same time, he ex- plored ethnohistory as an intellectual endeavor, providing in his essay "Anthropology, History, and Ethnohistory" (Sturte- vant, 1967b) a definitive analysis of the relationship between history and anthropology and of the relevance of historical data and methods to anthropological research. In June 1967 Sturtevant briefly visited the Seminoles in Flor- ida. The following month he and his family left Washington, D.C, for England where he spent a year, at Rodney Needham's invitation, as a Fulbright scholar and lecturer at Oxford Univer- sity's Institute of Social Anthropology. He returned to the United States in September 1968, traveling first to Germany to attend the International Congress of Americanists, then to Kashmir to collect data on artificial island agriculture, and on to Japan to present a paper on the topic (Sturtevant, 1970). After settling back in Washington, he became active in the anti-Vietnam war effort, signing petitions, attending demon- strations, and supporting anti-war motions at the business meetings of the American Anthropological Association. He also helped draft an advertisement, published in 1968 in the American Anthropologist (70:1311-1317) and signed by over 800 members of the association, protesting an advertisement from the United States Navy for anthropologists to participate in psychological warfare in Vietnam, which had been published in the same journal two issues earlier. During this period, Sturtevant began devoting increasing amounts of his time to planning the new Handbook. Faced with the size of this task and the pressures of a number of unfulfilled writing commitments, he found it difficult to accomplish any- thing. He discussed the problem with Tax, who recommended that he "wipe the slate clean" by cancelling all his commit- ments except the Handbook. He followed Tax's advice and soon was able to move ahead on his various projects. By 1970 Sturtevant had established, after extensive consulta- tion with a number of North Americanists from the United States, Canada, and Europe, that the Handbook would be orga- nized into 20 volumes. Eleven of these volumes would focus on specific North American culture areas, whereas seven would explore general topics from a pan-North American per- spective. The remaining two volumes would be devoted to an 26 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY JKwiniJJ Mi ?u^ <.v^frikfueA<,n{ *fayu a/CX«U« <«»uy( ^hvjf < "i\jje?l«.6 ffemafS, < i/fAu/ Ti-cxMiA. ti;&tl'**inu-nnu77iniA.ucn im&n.icK £"/» *Jru.fi., wr* (jjyJl iluWe/C4cn -nJyUe^ \fiji ncIUn-i^J.^^xL n'<'n >Lfr*n<.•<{ y-c r^.^fx aw>efftJfi-y&". iAf(fi far»l*i.S TUL- n-twcn,ij7faf\u^nmnJ^ la ^L„ X^.Vu <\s+->l'A%» ■t««• 1 +y yi 'J.I^'AO? -UtumC nu/tfyurl X'-14 aXXctiiuukf'na?i"-x \-'X o£^ Jta-ct). nru 0& Cc/a /n- y*:«*\* I v '{^faiypte aJ^etl ^%i** 4&**rS (x ^ L utin„- „w>-Li.k<..nj« UafX/h* a-hX X ?*#*■? 1/1 **5t<\ -z- i -Z ,U^ jH X,XXl',X£, vru3.r>-ifXffekf<*a y e r\i<"\ xiva-crij- ?; t-'n. /nan-ifS^-^ J0S -rX UtUUlagfU •»« MfrX- H- .*i0mm*-wu.nntfdi-ea-->i.-e,*.&>- tiu^n7na.J(u.n 7xt.ijHym<-->inu-mfliaiicn "_fc J,n/fi^.7>jan »t u+jZcvie I ^i/^&wan^X -K..X-J^f>\Z^f7^n -£*j£ii/iun/i*rj/'« aSi-i«£ « -utntneo ^xJAavu i' V 'c/t n.xlnpJt 'ici^incJUcaarif^xiie a^/ou-c-cOr^ycX mifAsLt)e TliL]>pa.pftniaoei,ic'rt.n ■n-en-vJi aMa.fu.j7 ptx-m^i eX<-*c?'\ — .tig-nt jfe'rrnwwim*nn]#[{%itfUM*Ti£i/u n/LXS ^a/zw^^.^'-ca^ .came mB'.. - :< m'nnufcAx #"■*/<«*fiton? ttxin ty-enir y«nfa>vu/c/u/i- ^ J^u* 1 ; ; ■ *w» ^t rrxtHlTL-nrAJif/, -,,^ rna.^r, t. ' ^ 1 . .„.vv. g^.^i "fM'- yifrX t^rr '* ilf ^.Hdn. ur FIGURE 2.—Conveyance, Martha's Vineyard, 1706. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California (HM3993[1]). 126 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 74 ix W 4*"?** >u< i stir/ wuf. -/i{*# ^p *-> i/Vt ^ww ''»■ "^"ris 'Jrj^ c f j .txx»fj,n¥ m /y'M M 4 s. . mx$L '- ■ - I I / S c ■; fi I I •-«*****. FIGURE 3.—Verso of New Testament title page, Massachusett Bible (Eames no. 16), Nantucket. Courtesy of the Congregational Society Library, Boston, Massachusetts. NUMBER 44 127 native people linked books and the ability to read to the per- ceived power of Europeans and to their seeming immunity to disease (Axtell, 1987:305). Others may have rejected these ob- jects as symbolic of a way of life and of a people so threatening to their own. Native American Books and Writings in Colonial Rhode Island and Connecticut The remarkable spread of vernacular literacy among Massa- chusett speakers was not duplicated among other peoples closely linked to them by ties of language and culture, due to differences in colonial administration, the continuing power of native communities, and the lack of a single-minded and tire- less missionary, such as Eliot. During the seventeenth century, missionary activity was limited in what is now Rhode Island and Connecticut. Much of the country was too remote from En- glish settlement, or the native peoples successfully resisted Christianity. Among the Narragansetts, their allies the Niantics, and the indigenous societies of coastal Connecticut, early mis- sionary efforts were less dramatically successful than were those among the Massachusett, although short-lived missions were established at Branford and Norwich (Conkey et al., 1978:177). Other communities adopted Christianity during the Great Awakening religious movement of the 1740s (Simmons and Simmons, 1982). When the Reverend Experience Mayhew, a fluent speaker of the Martha's Vineyard dialect of Massachusett, toured southern Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut in 1717, he found little if any evidence of literacy skills among the native peoples he en- countered (Mayhew, 1896). Joseph Fish, missionary to the Nar- ragansett in the mid-eighteenth century, reported that the native minister Samuel Niles preached with an open Bible in front of him, quoting passages he evidently knew from memory, for it appeared that he could not read (Simmons and Simmons, 1982). Yet books, especially the Bible, occupied places of im- portance even in this region. For example, throughout the sev- enteenth century, several sources document the theft of En- glish, Greek, and Latin textbooks from English school houses and churches (Bragdon, 1981:49; Hall, 1994; Robert Gross, pers. comm., 1998). Such thefts most frequently were said to have been committed by non-Christian, or "strange," Indians (e.g., MacFarlane, 1933:564). Several seventeenth century au- thors recall remarks made by Indians about the importance of books. One contemporary observer recounted with approval the explanation given by the Narragansett sachem Miantonimo to an Indian of Connecticut regarding English knowledge of the afterlife: He hath books and writings, and one which god himselfe made, concerning mens soules, and therefore may well know more than wee that have none, but take all upon trust from our forefathers. (Williams, 1936:137) Historical and archaeological evidence suggest that books and writings took on a number of social and religious functions even among nonliterate native people who were on the periph- eries of literacy, both English and vernacular. James Axtell (1987) has suggested that in New France, writing and its mys- teries may have been part of the perceived powers of the Euro- peans, especially missionaries, who, it was thought, could in- fluence supernatural powers through writing, a skill they jealously guarded. Archaeological finds of Bible-page frag- ments in two historic-period graves dating to the mid-seven- teenth century, recently excavated in southern New England, suggest that among the nonliterate, non-Christian people of the Pequot and Narragansett, writing, print, and books were indeed believed to be powerful. These printed pages were evidently in- cluded as grave goods along with items of native and European manufacture (Amory, 1996; Kevin McBride, pers. comm., 1996; Paul Robinson, pers. comm., 1996). In the mid-eighteenth century, a school for Indian people of southern New England was established by Rev. Samuel Whit- man at Farmington, on the middle Connecticut River, where students were evidently instructed in Latin and English. A doc- ument in Latin, composed by the Tunxis Indian John Metauan, in 1736, was sent by the prominent Connecticut minister Elea- zer Wheelock, who trained Whitman, to the commissioners of the New England Company in the hopes they would fund Me- tauan's efforts to enter the ministry (Szasz, 1988:188). In 1755 Wheelock founded Moor's Indian Charity School in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Moor's school helped to foster the careers of several prominent Indian men and women, including such na- tive ministers as the Mohegans Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson, who were both prolific writers, although they appar- ently left no manuscripts in their own language (Love, 1899; Murray, 1996). The Later History of Native Literacy in Southern New England The history of native literacy becomes more difficult to trace in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Although no Massa- chusett texts have been located dating to after this period, it seems likely that native-language literacy, or at least the ar- chiving of vernacular texts and books in Massachusett, did not die out in Massachusett-speaking communities until the middle to late nineteenth century. When Rev. D.W. Stevens of Mar- tha's Vineyard visited Gay Head in the 1870s, he collected more than 50 documents in the native language there (Pilling, 1891:341). There is little evidence of interference from English in Massachusett texts dating to the third quarter of the eigh- teenth century, although many native people were then no longer using that language exclusively, and others had given it up altogether in favor of English.3 In the latest of the docu- ments written in Massachusett, writers were still capable of a highly elaborated rhetorical style (Goddard, 1993). These data suggest that manuscripts and books in the native language came to reflect its increasingly limited and symbolic function, a "latinization" of the language that almost always precedes Ian- 128 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY guage obsolescence (Dorian, 1981; Woolard, 1992). Although, aside from the publication oiSome Helps for the Indians (Pier- son, 1658) in the Quiripi language, there is no concrete evi- dence delineating the history of native-language literacy in Connecticut, Mrs. Fidelia Fielding, of Mohegan ancestry, kept a diary in that language in the first decade of the twentieth cen- tury (Speck, 1928:228-251). How this attenuated, but persis- tent, vernacular literacy coexisted with increasing bilingualism in English and, by the end of the nineteenth century, with the loss of most native languages in the region is a subject yet to be examined. Conclusions Books and manuscripts were important items of material cul- ture in native southern New England, objects significant not only for their content and origins, but also for their functions as a focus for social interaction, avenues to spiritual power, and markers of native identity. Books and pamphlets in the Massa- chusett language have long occupied a singular place in biblio- graphic and antiquarian histories of colonial American printing (e.g., Morison, 1936; Hall, 1994). Yet, because their publica- tion in the now extinct Massachusett language appears so quix- otic to most modern scholars, their significance and widespread use among native converts to Christianity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has not been well recognized. John Eliot, who was at the time urging the New England Company to fund a second printing of the Bible, wrote in a letter that even though most of the copies of the Massachusett Bible and other translations had been destroyed during King Philip's War "they have still fragments of their old Bibles, which they make constant use of."4 While commitment to Christianity was surely one motive for the desire for and use of religious translations in Massachusett, it also seems likely that these objects, like native languages themselves, were prized as symbols of Indian iden- tity and persistence. The act of writing and its long associations (through painting and pictographic images) with shamanic practice and access to manitou are also clearly referenced in early ethnographic accounts and are implied in later descrip- tions of Christian and non-Christian native practices. Finally, the importance of books and writings in English to native peo- ples of southern New England who remained steadfastly non- literate appears to have been widely recognized in the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries (Axtell, 1985). Much work remains to be done in understanding the ways in which the worldview of the Massachusett-speaking people and their neighbors was transformed through the adoption of ver- nacular literacy and how the content and structure of transla- tions into Massachusett undermined or appropriated the con- ceptions and beliefs of native peoples. The political context of the unequal power relations in which Massachusett-speaking people acquired and used literacy in their own language must also be considered in understanding the meaning of literacy within native communities. The various uses to which books and writings were put, which extend beyond their function as a means of acculturation and control, and their significance to native communities both literate and nonliterate, lasting two hundred years after contact with Europeans, suggest that our understanding of literacy needs to be broadened further still, to encompass the social and ideological functions of reading and script at the interstices of literate cultures. Notes 1. Eliot to Robert Boyle, 28 Apr 1651, cited in Pilling, 1891:127. 2. A numbering system for identifying all known copies of Eliot's Bibles was developed by Wilberforce Eames (Pilling, 1891). 3. Phineas Fish to Andrew Stewart, 3 Jun 1826, concerning the Mashpee In- dians. Gallatin Papers no. 64-12, 3, 65, 66, 67, New England Miscellaneous. New York Historical Society, New York, New York. See also Badger, 1835. 4. Eliot to Robert Boyle, Nov 1683, cited in Pilling, 1891:155. 1. Literature Cited Amory, Hugh 1996. "Preliterate Uses of Print: Two Seventeenth-Century Algonquian Fragments." Essay delivered at the symposium "Communicating with the Indians: Aspects of the Language Encounter with the Indig- enous Peoples of the Americas, 1492 to 1800," John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island, 19 Oct. Axtell, James 1987. The Power of Print in the Eastern Woodlands Notes and Documents. William and Mary Quarterly, series 3, 44:300-309. Badger, Reverend Stephen 1835. Historical and Characteristic Traits of the American Indians in Gen- eral, and Those of the Natick in Particular.... Collections of the Mas- sachusetts Historical Society, series 1, 5:32-45. Bayley, Lewis 1685. Manitowompae Pomantamoonk.... John Eliot, translator, 333 pages. Cambridge, Massachusetts: [Samuel Green]. Becker, Laura 1982. Ministers vs. Laymen: The Singing Controversy in Puritan New England, 1720-1740. New England Quarterly, 55:79-95. Besnier, Niko 1991. Literacy and the Notion of the Person on a Nukulaelae Atoll. Ameri- can Anthropologist, 93:570-587. Boyarin, Jonathan, editor 1992. The Ethnography of Reading, vi+285 pages. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bragdon, Kathleen 1979. Probate Records as a Source of Algonquian Ethnohistory. In Will- iam Cowan, editor, Papers of the Tenth Algonquian Conference, pages 136-141. Ottawa, Ontario: Carleton University. 1981. "Another Tongue Brought In": An Ethnohistorical Study of Native Writings in Massachusett. 210 pages. Doctoral dissertation, Brown University. NUMBER 44 129 1987. "Emphattical Speech and Great Action": An Analysis of Native Speech Events Described in Seventeenth-Century Sources. Man in the Northeast, 33:88-101. 1991. Native Christianity in 18th Century Massachusetts: Ritual as Cul- tural Reaffirmation. In Barry Gough and Laird Christie, editors, New Dimensions in Ethnohistory, pages 119-126. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization. [Canadian Ethnology Service Paper, Mer- cury Series, 120.] 1993. 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The Indian Grammar Begun: Or, An Essay to Bring the Indian Lan- guage into Rules for the Help of Such as Desire to Learn the Same, for the Furtherance of the Gospel Among Them. [4], 65, [3] pages. Cambridge: Marmaduke Johnson. 1671. Indian Dialogues....[4], 81, [1] pages. Cambridge: [Marmaduke Johnson]. 1672. The Logick Primer....[SO] pages. Cambridge: M.J. [Marmaduke Johnson.] Eliot, John, translator 1663. The Holy Bible: Containing the Old Testament and the New. [836], [356] pages. Cambridge: Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson. [Another edition appeared in 1685.] Fabian, Johannes 1986. Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation ofSwahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880-1938. viii + 206 pages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goddard, Ives 1977. Some Early Examples of American Indian Pidgin English from New England. International Journal of American Linguistics, 43:37-41. 1978. A Further Note on Pidgin English. International Journal of Ameri- can Linguistics, 44:73. 1993. 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Essay presented to the Institute of Early American History and Culture, College of Wil- liam and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, Nov. Harris, Roy 1995. Signs of Writing. \'\\\+185 pages. London: Routledge. Hossueit, Zachary, Jr. n.d. [Sermon fragment.] Manuscript in the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island. Irvine, Judith 1993. Mastering African Languages: The Politics of Linguistics in Nine- teenth-Century Senegal. In Richard Handler and Daniel Segal, edi- tors, Nations, Colonies, Metropoles. Social Analysis, special issue, 34:27-16. Joyce, William L., David D. Hall, Richard D. Brown, and John B. Hench, editors 1983. Printing and Society in Early America, xii+322 pages. Worcester, Massachusetts: American Antiquarian Society. Kellaway, William 1962. The New England Company 1649-1776. 303 pages. New York: Bar- nes and Noble. Little, Elizabeth 1980a. Probate Records of Nantucket Indians. Nantucket Algonquian Stud- ies, 2: 72 pages. Nantucket, Massachusetts: Nantucket Historical Association. 1980b. Three Kinds of Deeds at Nantucket. In William Cowan, editor, Pa- pers of the Eleventh Algonquian Conference, pages 61-70. Ottawa, Ontario: Carleton University. Love, William DeLoss 1899. Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England, xiii+379 pages. Boston: Pilgrim Press. MacFarlane, Ronald 1933. Indian Relations in New England 1620-1760: A Study of a Regu- lated Frontier. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Mayhew, Experience 1709. Massachuset Psalter.... [408] pages. Boston: B. Green. 1727. Indian Converts or Some Account of the Lives and Dying Speeches of a Considerable Number of Christianized Indians of Martha s Vineyard, in New-England, xxiv+310 pages. London: J. Osborn and T. Longman. 1896. A Brief Journal of My Visitation of the Pequot and Mohegan Indi- ans, at the Desire of the Honourable Commissioners for the Propa- gation of the Gospel.... London: Spottiswoode. Monaghan, E. Jennifer 1990. "She Loved to Read in Good Books" Literacy and the Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1643-1725. History of Education Quarterly, 30:492-521. 130 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY Morison, Samuel Eliot 1936. Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century. 2 volumes. Cam- bridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Murray, Laura J. 1996. "The Diaries of Joseph Johnson and Peter Jones." Essay delivered at the symposium "Communicating with the Indians: Aspects of the Language Encounter with the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, 1492 to 1800," John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Is- land, 18-20 Oct. Pierson, Abraham 1658. Some Helps for the Indians.... 67 pages. Cambridge: Samuel Green. Pilling, James C. 1891. Bibliography of Algonquian Languages. Bulletin. Bureau of Ameri- can Ethnology, 13: x+614 pages. Salisbury, Neal 1974. Red Puritans: The Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot. William and Mary Quarterly, series 3, 31:27-54. Salwen, Bert 1978. The Indians of Southern New England: Early Period. In William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of North American Indians, volume 15, Bruce Trigger, editor, Northeast, pages 160-176. Wash- ington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. Schousboe, Karen, and Mogens Trolle Larsen, editors 1989. Literacy and Society. 247 pages. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Simmons, William, and Cheryl L. Simmons, editors 1982. Old Light on Separate Ways: The Narragansett Diary of Joseph Fish, 1765-1776. xxxvii+149. Hanover, New Hampshire: Univer- sity Press of New England. Speck, Frank G. 1928. Native Tribes and Dialects of Connecticut: A Mohegan-Pequot Di- ary. Forty-Third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnol- ogy to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1925-1926, pages 199-287. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. Szasz, Margaret C. 1988. Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607-1783. x+333 pages. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Vincent, David 1993. Literacy and Popular Culture: England, 1750-1914. viii+362 pages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Roger 1936. A Key Into the Language of America, by Roger Williams. ...[IS], 205, [3] pages. Providence: Rhode Island and Providence Planta- tions Tercentenary Committee, Inc. Winslow, Edward 1910. Relation. In Emest Rhys, editor, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, pages 267-356. Boston: Everyman's Library. Wood, William 1977. New England's Prospect. Edited by Alden T Vaughan, x+132 pages. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Woolard, Kathryn A. 1992. Language Convergence and Language Death as Social Processes. In Nancy C Dorian, editor, Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Lan- guage Contraction and Death. Studies in the Cultural Foundations of Language, 7:355-368. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. From Manifest Destiny to the Melting Pot: The Life and Times of Charlotte Mitchell, Wampanoag William S. Simmons People who matured in the last quarter of the nineteenth century knew whence they came and also to what destination they moved... .From Edward Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence to George Bancroft's History, the message bore endless repetition in the New World. A known beginning and a foreseeable fu- ture framed all particular events. Moreover, Americans were not alone in nurs- ing such millennial dreams for their New Jerusalem, for their promised land, dreams that infused their nationalism and sustained faith in their manifest desti- ny. (Handlin, 1996:335) Manifest Destiny New England colonists and their descendants defined their presence in North America in terms of a large and evolving myth that began with the Divine Providence of seventeenth- century Puritans and merged with the Manifest Destiny of nineteenth-century westward migration. Given the priority of their claim to the continent, Native Americans are invoked in this myth in ways that explain their dispossession. One persis- tent motif was that of the "good" and the "bad" Indian: that In- dian character was split between the capacity for loyal and un- selfish help toward pioneers and the capacity for uncontrollable deceit and destruction. "Good" Indians, such as Massasoit and Squanto, assisted colonization, and "bad" Indians, such as Sas- sacus and Metacomet (King Philip), opposed it. That Indians succumbed to advancing white populations was proof that God and universal laws of human progress favored the winners and that Indians were spiritually lost and culturally lacking. An- other tributary to this myth was that of the disappearing Indian, the last of their tribe, who vanished or at least lost power in the course of progress, but whose memory or descendants live as a local legend or genius loci among European Americans (Lub- bers, 1994:44). Lucy Lillie, a traveller through southeastern Massachusetts in 1885, revealed such thoughts—split Indian character, the disappearing Indian, and the Indian imprint on the landscape— in her account of a journey from East Bridgewater to Fairhaven: We had no intention, I am sure, of making any aboriginal investigations, and yet we found that everywhere suggestions of the Indian in his most picturesque William S. Simmons, Department of Anthropology and Senior Vice President, Brown University, Box 1986, Providence, Rhode Island 02912-1986, USA. as well as warlike moments confronted us...the gaunt, bold figure that con- fronted Captain Standish and his men, the brave, pathetic chieftain who pledged and kept his faith with the white man, and as well the Indian who de- stroyed villages and tortured captives, yet who left in that fair and fertile region names that are like music in the ears and rhyme upon the tongue, whose haunts are yet to be seen with the glamour of his best hours upon them—silent lakes and dim forest lands, hill-tops and plains that are called by his names, and still have the pensive charm and grace of his sovereignty about them. (Lillie, 1885:813) Near the end of her journey, Lillie passed by Assawompsett Pond, in the town of Lakeville in Plymouth County, where Zerviah, Charlotte, and Melinda Mitchell, all descendants of the seventeenth-century Pokanoket, or Wampanoag, sachem, Massasoit, were then living. The Pokanoket, or Wampanoag, were a political subdivision of the Massachusett-speaking lan- guage area of what is now southeastern Massachusetts. Thence from Fairhaven to Lakeville the country is rich and impressive. The road, when Long Plain is passed, leads to the lakes—Quitticus great and little, Long Pond, and Assawamsett. They inclose all the most famous country of old Indian times in that region, and with their belts of forest land, lie so silent, so sombre, and so grandly, impressively alone that one almost feels that the spell of the red man rests upon them never to be lifted. (Lillie, 1885:826) Lillie and her travelling companions found Charlotte Mitch- ell unsettling: While she talked she looked at us from under her half-veiled eyelids with a cu- rious kind of contempt, as though she felt our race entirely inferior to her own, and I am not sure but that as we drove away a sense of her superiority did not impress us more than anything else. We talked of it afterward as a curious and fitting ending to our journey. (Lillie, 1885:828) Charlotte (or Wootonekanuske) Mitchell, her mother Zerviah, and her sister, Melinda (or Teweeleema) lived in the heart of this myth-filled world where old frontier incidents, In- dian memories, and stories of Indian ghosts were still in the thoughts of living people. A marker erected in 1930 on South Main Street in nearby Middleboro, for example, carries a mem- ory of King Philip's War (1675-1676): Fifty rods east is the site of the old fort. Built about 1670 as a place of defence and refuge in time of need. During King Philip's War, an Indian making insult- ing gestures on Indian Rock, across the Nemasket River, was shot from the fort. Charlotte and Melinda Mitchell heard a lesson in Manifest Destiny in 1898 at their mother's funeral in the North Abing- ton, Massachusetts, Baptist Church: 131 132 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY Mr. Cunningham [the white minister] had written an address, which he read and in which he told of the advance in civilization that had been witnessed by the deceased. He told of "the supplanting energy of the white man" and its ef- fectiveness in exterminating the race of Indians, and considered this an illustra- tion of the fact that modem civilization changes the character of the people of any nation. He told the congregation that Mrs. Mitchell had been proud of the fact that she was descended from Massasoit, and concluded a long, dry talk with the announcement that pride of birth counted for very little after all, and that death came alike to prince and pauper. Meantime the children of the prin- cess sat before him weeping for the mother who had gone from them; they knew of her long life of suffering. (Kalor, 1898) From a Native American Perspective Despite their participation in a world of Anglo-American dom- ination and myth, the Mitchells held an independent perspec- tive on the economic and moral justification of this world and its idealizations. Zerviah, for example, resented the wrongs done by the English of Plymouth Colony to her ancestor, Mas- sasoit: When their scanty provisions were gone, and they were left in a state of starva- tion, had they not received timely aid from the noble red man they would have perished then and there. But what has been the reward to Massasoit and his de- scendants, from the time of the landing of the Puritans down to the present hour? Nothing but deception and neglect. (Mitchell, 1972:iii) Similarly, Charlotte is reported to have admired both the "good" Indian, Massasoit, of Old Colony myth, and the "bad" King Philip, for his tragic effort to resist the injustices done to her people. Named Wootonekanuske for Philip's wife, Char- lotte Mitchell was in a sense wedded to the historic symbol of her people's resistance: The high triumph of Wootonekanuske's life came [in 1921] when she was cho- sen to unveil the statue of Chief Massasoit, which is on Cole's Hill in Ply- mouth. Charlotte Mitchell, by patient review of history recorded in her memo- ry, would often correct the townspeople who had the impression she was a descendant of King Philip. That warrior was her uncle, seven generations re- moved, she would explain. She traced her ancestry to Massasoit through her mother, who came in direct line from Amie, the daughter of Massasoit. (Vigers, 1983:27) King Philip was her uncle seven times removed, and for him she had the great- est reverence. She used to say that Massasoit made a great mistake when he signed a treaty of peace with the white men. "He signed the doom of my people right there," said the Princess. "Although King Philip tried to right our wrongs, by that time the white men were too strong for us." (Thompson, 1944) Zerviah Gould Mitchell (1807-1898) attended public schools in Abington and a private school in Boston; she then taught for a while at a private Boston school. Zerviah's geneal- ogy included (in addition to Massasoit, his daughter Amie, and Metacomet) such well-known figures from New England fron- tier history as the Christian convert John Sassamon, whose death ignited King Philip's War, and the Black Sachem, Tus- paquin, who was an ally to Philip and adversary to the English in that war. Zerviah Mitchell appears to have raised her chil- dren in Abington and Cambridge, apart from known Native American communities of her day, but apparently she taught them the techniques of straw and wood splint basketry, some historical legends, medicinal and divining knowledge, and a firm attachment to their family land and Wampanoag lineage. Charlotte Mitchell was bora 2 November 1848 in North Abing- ton and was educated in Abington public schools as well as in the Harvard Street Grammar School in Cambridge. Her father, Thomas C. Mitchell (d. 1859), a merchant seaman, was part Cherokee and part English. Charlotte was their tenth of eleven children (Peirce, 1884:290-297, 1972:210-219; Vigers, 1983:9-28). By unbroken transmission from seventeenth-century ances- tors, Zerviah Mitchell inherited lands at Betty's Neck on Assa- wompsett Pond in Lakeville. Betty's Neck, a 27-acre tract known earlier as Nahteawanet, was named for Assowetough, the daughter of John Sassamon, who accepted the English name of Betty: Witneseth these presents, Pamantaquash, the pond Sachem, being weak in body, but of perfect disposeing memory, declared it to be his last will and Tes- tament, concerning all his lands at Assawamsett, or elsewhere, that he is now possessed of, that he would after his disease leave them unto...Tuspaquin, alius the black Sachem, for his life, and after the sd Tuspaquin his disease unto So- quontamouk, alius William, his sone, and to his heires forever, (ca. 1668, in Peirce, 1884:290) I, the above-named Assowetough, alias Bettey, do freely will, give, and be- queath the above said tract of land unto My daughter Mercy, to her heirs forev- er. Witness My hand this 14th day of May, 1696. (Peirce, 1884:293) Zerviah, with her unmarried daughters, Charlotte (1848-1930) and Melinda (1836-1919), moved from North Abington to the 15 remaining acres of their ancestral property at Betty's Neck in May of 1879. In addition to knowing their genealogy for- ward from the early seventeenth century, Charlotte Mitchell and her siblings also were heirs to what may have been the old- est private property in Plymouth County that remained uninter- ruptedly in Native American hands. By virtue of their histori- cally significant family and their unique claim to ancient family property, Zerviah, Charlotte, and Melinda Mitchell cul- tivated a very distinct Indian identity that was strongly rein- forced by Yankee and other inhabitants of the region who simi- larly valued genealogical ties to seventeenth-century forebears and priority of connection to place in defining themselves. Speaking for herself and her children, Zerviah Mitchell iden- tified with the white motif of the disappearing Indian: "When we are gone the race of Massasoit will have disappeared from the face of the earth. There are but a few years left to us" (Anonymous, 1894). Charlotte Mitchell's obituary described her as "the last of the once powerful tribe of Wampanoags, which acknowledged Massasoit as its chief, of the direct blood line of leadership in the tribe, and entitled to the rank of prin- cess" and also included what may have been her own explana- tion for why she was the "last" of her line: "It is said she had never been attracted by any full blooded Indian and that she was averse to a marriage with less than full Indian blood, so that to her last days she had been a spinster by choice for 81 years" (Anonymous, 1930). NUMBER 44 133 Pilgrimages Whites often were sympathetic to the Mitchell's perspective on Indian-white history. The Mitchell's home became something of a shrine for white reporters, writers, children, and many oth- ers who identified with or at least were attracted to the heroic, injured, and indigenous story that the Mitchells presented to turn-of-the century white Americans. Many were drawn to vis- iting, hearing about, and personally communicating with this unique family, in whose custody then rested the only Native American voice in the Plymouth Colony encounter story. One local writer, Hezekiah Butterworth, a well-known author of children's and travel literature, boarded in one of the Mitchell's lakeside cottages on occasion and recorded a fascinating Mas- sasoit family legend of a silver pipe: One of the oldest legends was related to me last summer by Mrs.... Mitchell, now eighty-five years of age, and the oldest member of the only surviving fam- ily of Massasoit, who lives on...a little principality, if I may so term it, at Lakeville, Mass.... King James of England, on hearing of die goodness and virtues of Massasoit, once sent him a present of a silver pipe. The chieftain prized it highly as a gift from his "white brother over the sea." But one of his warriors did a deed of val- or that so won his heart that he resolved to make him a present of the pipe as his choice treasure. The warrior, finding himself about to die, charged his squaw to put the silver pipe into his grave at the burial, but she, out of regard to the value of the treasure, hid it, and covered the grave without it. One evening she went to the place where she had hidden the royal present, resolving to smoke from the pipe alone, and to hide it again. She put out her hand to take the pipe, but it moved away from her. Again, but it moved away, and again and again, but a dead hand was moving it. Then she bitterly repented of her disobedience, and promised to bury the pipe if she were able. At this resolution, the pipe lay still, and she opened the grave, fulfilled the warrior's command, and was enabled to smoke in peace of mind and conscience, we may hope, the rest of her days. (Butterworth, 1893:16, see also 1895:235-236) Rudolf Haffenreffer, a notable collector of American Indian artifacts, owner of the Narragansett Brewery in the Arlington section of Cranston, Rhode Island, and owner of what had been King Philip's property at Mount Hope, in Bristol, Rhode Is- land, also made the pilgrimage to Lakeville: I listened [in November, 1913] to the touching story told me by Queen Tee- weelema and her two sisters, direct lineal descendants of King Philip, two of whom are now living at Lakeville, Mass., in a little hut surrounded by a few acres of land—all that the whites have left them of their glorious heritage from Massasoit. In their hearts, with the memories of those long bygone days, lives the acute sense of irresistible wrong done them by the alien in the land of their forefathers. (Haffenreffer, 1929:34) Haffenreffer also once invited Charlotte Mitchell's younger sis- ter, Emma Safford, of Ipswich, Massachusetts, to visit his shrine at Mount Hope: "I am the owner of Mount Hope, where King Philip's chair is hewn out of the rock, and also the place where King Philip was killed; and any time when either you or any of your descendents would like to visit Mount Hope, I would like you or yours to communicate with me, so as to visit the beautiful old spot."1 Although the Mohegan scholar Gladys Tantaquidgeon seems not to have visited the Mitchell family at Lakeville, she inter- viewed Emma Safford at her Ipswich home in the summer of 1929. Tantaquidgeon was interested in the Mitchell family dyed-straw basketry, which she considered to be a distinctive last expression of an indigenous tradition: "Data pertaining to the straw-grass articles... indicate that the production of this particular type of basket receptacle persisted among certain of the more conservative mainland Wampanoag until a much later date than had been supposed" (Tantaquidgeon, 1930:476-478). Charlotte Mitchell's Diary, 1896 Charlotte Mitchell wrote in longhand a very legible diary that covers the period from Thursday, 2 January through Saturday, 15 March 1896. It is one of two diaries known to have been written by a Native American woman of southern New Eng- land (her contemporary the Mohegan Fidelia Fielding being the other) and is one of three diaries known to have been written by a person of Wampanoag or Pokanoket ancestry, Paul Cuffe and Paul Cuffe, Jr., being the others (Cuffe, 1839; Speck, 1928; Harris, 1972:77-262). In contrast to the isolated, dream-like quality of Fielding's 1902-1905 narrative, which she wrote in Mohegan, Mitchell documents in English the matter-of-fact de- tails of farm activities and relationships with family, hired help, friends, and neighbors. With the exception of a few personal names and place-names, the Mitchells do not appear to have known the Massachusett language. In this brief diary, which is only a snapshot of her world and of her life, Mitchell records the details of farm and household activities that would seem to be typical of rural Massachusetts in the late nineteenth century. The daily and seasonal routines that she describes (food preparation, caring for chickens, horses, and cows, cutting and storing ice, marketing eggs, and cutting firewood) characterized the small New England family farm of her day. The relationships that she depicts with hired men, neighboring families, storekeepers, and delivery men in- dicate that her recurrent interactions and practical interdepen- dencies were with people of European-American and not Na- tive American backgrounds. The only clearly Indian relationships that she mentions were with her mother and siblings. Although numerous other per- sons of Wampanoag descent lived in nearby Fall River, Ply- mouth, Mashpee, and New Bedford, Mitchell appears not to have interacted with them during these three months. By com- parison with Fielding, Mitchell focused on immediate practi- calities and not on inner states and spiritual concerns. The fol- lowing passage from the 30 May 1904 entry in Fielding's diary suggests the difference in consciousness between the two: Birds. I love to see the birds, because [they are] pretty. They do not say any- thing evil. They eat these things Mandu [manitou, god] gives, then they sing, because they do not want for anything. All things Mandu gives [them], that is so. All things! Yesterday I saw in the river a snake; he had a fish in his mouth. I hit him, then he gave up the fish. The fish is handsome. The snake is horrid, he bites you, too. ...I am afraid of the snake, snake is a spirit. (Speck, 1928:247) Mitchell never invoked indigenous or Christian belief in her daily reflections. Her voice in most respects is that of a person 134 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY who was actively engaged with the non-Indian family farming community in which she, her mother, and her sister had chosen to live. She wrote of her Indian heritage almost inadvertently in references to basketry manufacture, medicinal preparation, for- tune-telling, and a property dispute with a neighbor. The fol- lowing excerpts from the diary give a sense of her day-to-day activities and what was on her mind.2 Thursday January 2nd Fair and high winds-been thawing-winds very raw. After breakfast Henry [a hired man, apparently white] drove over to the Rock [a nearby village] after Lin [Melinda, her sister]. He wore his new canvas coat and Lin didn't know him at first sight. He stopped at Rat Sherman's and got 3 bags of hay. Paid 50 cts for them. After dinner Henry drove over to the Wayside and brought home the goods the grocery man left. Before Henry got home, Old man Moranville [Josiah DeMaranville] and his wife drove down in here and seemed to be look- ing round to see if anything had been cut on what he claimed. He had quite a talk with Lin; he seemed to be friendly. Henry got home in good season. Brought the bag-oats and sugar, cream tar tar & box cocoa. Mother was sick about all night last night with wind colic. Was better this morning. Hens laid 5 eggs today. Warmer this evening. I put all of the bedding out on the line today, it was so fine. The Grocery man told Henry that there was something down at the station for him. Lin let the cows up tonight. Friday Jan 10th It snowed all night last night and is snowing hard this morning, but it is ever so much warmer; it thaws on top the house. It has been snowing all day. After din- ner Henry went to see the men about coming to morrow to work on the ice. He came home just before dark. Lin went down and fed the hens. Lin roasted Jason [Gordon] a chime piece of pork, and they took it home for their suppers. They carried a half bush, of coal down at the same time. Hens laid 5 eggs to day. Mother has been real quiet to day; staid in her room all day. Saturday Jan 11 Colder. Brown and Bill Cudworth helped them on ice to day. Silly Billy brought the team at noon, and Brown [and] Cudworths dinner. Jason and Salon eat dinner with us. Russel didnt come with the ice plough so they have got to cut it by hand. They had to shovel a lot of snow off the ice before they could commence to cut ice. Jason and Salon took tea with us. I guess they were pretty tired to night. Henry watered the animals at noon as usual. Will Moranville drove down to get Henry to help him fix up his building. Hens laid 2 eggs. Monday January 27 Sun shone out quite a lot today but cloudy most of the day been thawing. Lin & I have been working on baskets. We put the cows out and Lin put them up. .. .Mother has been very good today. Tuesday February 4 Cloudy & stormy. Mother kept Lin awake night before last, so I staid with her last night & precious little sleep I had of it. Henry worked over to Will Moran- ville's. Got home in time for supper. He brought a postal for Lin from Robie Riley saying that Mr. Lee wanted 2 bottles more of the same kind of medicine he had before. I cleaned out the hen house, put the hen dressing into bags, what I didn't put into a barrel. I sent Mrs. P's [Parkhurst] magazine home by Henry. Hens laid 9 eggs. Henry handed me $2.00 on board. Saturday February 8th Fair and pleasant. Been thawing. Henry went to Will Moranville's and finished up what he had to do up there. After dinner he drove down to Middleboro with me & I borrowed 2.00 of White but didn't have to use it. I got 25 cts worth of iron for Mrs. Parkhurst for her horse; we went to Lovell & got the hams & ba- con that was done & there is 3 more hams, they came to 2.98 cts I paid him. I got some wormwood for Lin to go in her medicine & a box of headache tablets. We got home just [at] lamplight. I got a [Boston] Globe at Drake's & [Boston] Record & Globe was sent Henry. I got at White's. Hens laid 8 eggs. Wednesday February 12 Fair and cold. Not so high winds as yesterday. Smith was around on the grocery wagon himself today. Lin sent 2 bottles of medicine by him to go to New Bed- ford by Ex. Henry went across as he calls it about 12 o'clock. Hens laid 16 eggs. I sent White the 2.00 I borrowed by Smith. Thursday February 13 Snow & rain which made it very slushy. A woman by the name of Jones drove over here from the Rock with her daughter & grandchild. She had both of there fortunes told & bought a bottle of medicine. All came to 1.50. Henry drove over & carried 38/i2 Doz eggs. They are 24 cts a doz. Henry got home in time for dinner. We had salt fish for dinner. Hens laid 8 eggs. Sunday February 23 Sunny & cloudy. Henry cut me some holes through the ice & I trap[p]ed for fish but got none. It has been thawing all day. Henry went over to the wayside and got home in good season. He let the little horse out after he got back and he did have a good run. Hens laid 9 eggs. Monday March 2nd Stormy all day. Towards night a regular snow storm blizzard. Colder. It snowed so fast that it covered the ground in a very short time. Henry drove over to the wayside right after breakfast. Got home in time to water the cows. After dinner he planed some strips of board. Mother has done quite nicely for her. Lin got ready to color straw but didn't have enough cut up to color. Got 11 eggs today. Wednesday March 12 Cold and clear. Jason went home today. Henry and I drove him down to Middleboro... I got some herbs for Lin's medicine and some Alcohol and a pair of shoes for myself. I paid the Apothecary man 20 cts that I owed him. I got 2 doz tin boxes for Salve. We got home shortly after 2 oclock. Basketry, Medicin , Fortune-Telling, and Land The Mitchell family's Native American predecessors at Betty's Neck made baskets and brooms in the winter months, which they sold for income to purchase supplies once their stores of corn and grain were depleted (Bennet, 1810:1; Mandell, 1996:199). Charlotte and Melinda Mitchell continued to make and sell baskets, with their distinctive family style of plaited and dyed rye-straw miniature baskets as one source of income: From this home they went out to earn their livelihood—by selling the baskets, brooms, and beaded work which they had made and the vegetables they had raised. With their wares they were frequent visitors at Sampson's Tavern, here in Lakeville, and at the summer resort of Onset, where Teweeleema also told fortunes. (Vigers, 1983:24-25) In her diary entry for 27 January, Mitchell noted without elaboration that she and her sister worked on baskets. On 2 March she added that Melinda "got ready to color straw but didn't have enough cut up to color." Most probably this pas- sage refers to the green or purple commercial dyes that both used to color the miniature rye-straw baskets for which they were best known (Tantaquidgeon, 1930:475-484; McMullen, 1987:175; Turnbaugh and Turnbaugh, 1987:92). A brief refer- ence on 20 February to gathering tag alder could pertain to bas- ket manufacture, for alder was used elsewhere in the northeast as a natural dye (Speck, 1947:28). Around 1902, when South- ern New England Indians were abandoning their basketry man- ufacturing, Melinda told a newspaper reporter that she still made baskets but fewer than before: "It is not easy to get the NUMBER 44 135 material. We used to send 400 or 500 dozen every year to firms in Boston, and seldom were many returned to us. Farming is our principal work now" (Pease, 1902). The Mitchells, as well as a number of other Native American men and women in the region, had reputations as healers among both the Indian and the white populations. Rebecca Davis, of the nineteenth-century Ponkapoag community in Canton, Massachusetts, for example, "gained some money by the sale of a salve, which she prepared from herbs according to the prescription of some ancient medicine-man" (Huntoon, 1893:39; see also Mandell, 1996:200; McBride and Prins, 1996:321-347). Mitchell's great grandmother, Lydia Tus- paquin, who earlier lived at Betty's Neck, "claimed great skill in the healing art, and was in the act of gathering herbs tor medical purposes, when she fell from a high bank into Assa- womset Pond and was drowned" in 1812 (Vigers, 1983:19). Gladys Tantaquidgeon interviewed one such herbalist, Rachel Ryan of Gay Head, who prepared "roots and herbs to be used for medicinal purposes" as recently as 1928 (Simmons, 1986:101). One of the most noted local practitioners, William Perry, who had a considerable reputation among country peo- ple and was frequently called upon to minister to white fami- lies, lived on the Fall River Reservation, a few miles from Lakeville (Simmons, 1986:102-104). Although Perry died dur- ing the period covered in her diary, Mitchell does not seem to have known about his death, or at least did not mention it. On 4 February Mitchell entered in her diary that a Mr. Lee of New Bedford had written her sister, Melinda, to request that she send him two bottles of the same medicine that she had made for him before. Although Melinda sent Lee the two bot- tles (one ingredient was wormwood, see 8 February entry) on 12 February, Mitchell mentions neither the purpose nor the cost of the medicine. One day later a woman named Jones drove over to Betty's Neck with her daughter and grandchildren from nearby Rock Village to have their fortunes told and to buy one bottle of an unspecified medicine, all for SI.50. Tom Tate, a white child who boarded with the Mitchell sisters for a few years at Betty's Neck, recalled how they "used the different herbs and things for medication," and that Charlotte had once healed his ulcerated foot with "a poultice of plantain leaves" (French, 1989:238). This limited information suggests that Melinda and Charlotte Mitchell's reputations as curers ex- tended beyond the countryside to at least one major urban area. The one reference in the diary to fortune telling (on 13 Feb- ruary) reveals that Melinda charged for the service and per- formed it for non-Indians, but it is silent regarding the concepts and procedures that may have been involved. William Perry, of Fall River, and a number of Mitchell's contemporaries at Gay Head were known to have practiced a range of divinatory tech- niques. In their efforts to reclaim or hold on to what they believed to be their territorial heritage in both Fall River and Lakeville, Zerviah Mitchell and her children were involved in legal pro- ceedings with the state and with their immediate neighbors (see Earle, 1862:118; Lillie, 1885:828; Peirce, 1972:iii-v). Accord- ing to a newspaper reporter who interviewed Charlotte and Melinda around 1902, they were then in the midst of a property dispute with their neighbor, Josiah DeMaranville: In the present land trouble, the Mitchells are respondents, Josiah DeMoran- ville of Lakeville being the petitioner He has brought a bill in equity to restrain Alonzo H. Mitchell of North Abington and Melinda and Charlotte Mitchell of Lakeville from entering on five acres of land on Cranberry pond in Lakeville, and cutting and removing timber therefrom The Indians claim that the land is theirs by royal descent, while the petition- er says it was deeded to him ..and that he has been in possession of it more than 40 years. It adjoins land occupied by the Mitchells. A short time ago Mr. DeMoranville started wood-cutting, and the Mitchells, after a protest, began themselves to cut. Court proceedings followed and now there is a truce, as both parties have agreed to await a decision. (Pease, 1902) This disagreement over wood-cutting rights and property lines helps illuminate Charlotte's comments on her neighbor in her diary entry for 2 January. Charlotte Mitchell held legal title to a 15-acre tract until her death on 29 April 1930, whereupon the estate went to her sisters, Lydia Mitchell (residence un- known) and Emma J. Safford, of Ipswich.3 Massasoit's lineage surrendered this land finally and completely in October, 1943, for nonpayment of back taxes: Case# 23538. Land Court. This is to certify that the Petition of the Town of Lakeville vs. Emma Safford to foreclose its tax lien under a certain deed for non-payment of taxes, was filed in this Court Dec. 16, 1942. Thereafter due proceedings under said petition were instituted according to law and finally on Oct. 15, 1943, a decree forever foreclosing and barring all rights of redemption under said deed was entered and this notice of disposition of said petition is di- rected to be recorded in the Reg. of Deeds for District of Plymouth County. Description in Book 1791, page 424 land with the buildings thereon as- sessed to Emma J. Safford and is known as the Indian's Land: bounded N[orth- er]ly. by Assawampsett Pond; W[ester]ly by the Spooner land; E[aster]ly by land formerly of Josiah DeMoranville; Southerly by the 68 lot sixteen shilling Purchase.4 In the Backwaters of Myth The Mitchell family experience and Charlotte's diary speak from a little-known time and place in Native America. Distant in time by some 250 years from the Pilgrim and Puritan fron- tiers, and living still on ancestral Pokanoket soil, the three women stood uniquely apart within the rural and industrialized postcolonial and recent immigrant populations. Whereas the myths of Divine Providence and Manifest Destiny took deadly aim at those Indian groups at the frontier's edge, they invested surviving enclaves in long-domesticated areas with a certain amount of nostalgia, identification, and idealization. Native American survivors in these backwaters had opportunities to direct their lives within the nostalgic version of the myth. By virtue of their esteemed lineage and their presence on ancient deeded land, the Mitchells occupied an important symbolic place in the consciousness of local whites, who saw them as a living connection with their own sacred history. Knowing that these Indians still lived somewhere in the nearby woods was very important to them. 136 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY Zerviah Mitchell and her daughters accepted and even culti- vated their enhanced Indian status among whites as public fig- ures and by marketing their traditional familial skills. With their non-Indian neighbors they lived near the end of the time when Manifest Destiny continued to give shape and historical meaning to the overwhelming majority of American lives. Yet they spoke from a uniquely Indian position in the local enact- ment of this myth. They upheld it as symbols of long-ago sa- cred events and also articulated its negative meaning for Indi- ans. Interestingly, many of their white friends and acquaintances identified with the Indian stance. In some ways they were becoming like Indians. American Indians, Old-Line Americans, and the Melting Pot In the years following her sister's death, Charlotte Mitchell worked on the family farm as best she could and depended on white friends as well as on a small state pension for her sup- port. She was one of the humble New England country women "who prefer to starve rather than say they are hungry" (Brooks, 1940:472). A reporter who interviewed her in 1926 on the oc- casion of her seventy-eighth birthday emphasized the interest local women had taken in her welfare and in her opposition to changing women's styles: For the present mode of living and its fantastic dress, Princess Wootoneka- nuske has nothing but adverse comment. The bobbed hair of the women and girls is deplorable, she says... .There is a feeling of sorrow with her as the great white winter approaches, and if she had enough money coming to her to have some woman companion with her during the dreary months she would be in better spirits, but it looks to her as if she would have to pass the time alone, when for days she will not see a living person. Many women have tried to obtain money for her in her just rights, but as for any gift in a sense of charity, it is a delicate matter, for her indignant royal blood will not allow it. Other relatives are living in and about Abington now, but they make but [injfrequent visits to the hunting grounds of their fathers, for they have been married and have homes of their own. (Anonymous, 1926) In 1927 Mitchell applied without success to the state legisla- ture for an increase, from $300 to $600, in her annual annuity. A white fraternal organization, the Nunkatest Tribe, 65, of the Improved Order of Red Men (IORM) raised funds throughout Massachusetts for her relief: With the effort to increase her annuity a failure, the legislature refusing the request for special aid, it remained for Nunkatest tribe of Whitman to sponsor a fund in aid of Princess Wootoneknuski. A committee was appointed and an ap- peal was made last week to all Red Men throughout Massachusetts to contrib- ute to the fund. The committee consists of Fred W. Glasier, CA. Vinton, A.W. Harriman, Samuel Bradshaw, OA. Smith and A.F. Blanchard. Already money has started coming in, and with a substantial sum received in the first few days, it is hoped that a fund will be raised ample to make the last days of Princess Wootoneknuski's life comfortable. (Anonymous, 1927) This was not Mitchell's first contact with the IORM. The or- ganization raised funds for the tercentenary dedication of the Massasoit Memorial on Cole's Hill, overlooking Plymouth Rock and Harbor, and invited Mitchell to unveil the statue (Lemke, 1964:503, 524). The IORM was (and is) a distinc- tively American organization, dedicated to preserving the moral qualities of the "good" Indian. Their character and pur- pose are clearly portrayed in their official history, written in 1909, at about the time that Manifest Destiny was yielding to the triumphal mythology of the Melting Pot: We are the acknowledged conservators of the history, the customs, and the vir- tues of the original American people,—a people conceded by the early travel- lers and writers to have been intelligent, brave, and free, loyal in its friendships, generous in its hospitalities, and with many traits of character worthy of emula- tion by the civilized race. The Improved Order of Red Men is proud to perpetu- ate the memory of this, the noblest type of man in his natural state that has ever been discovered. (Paton, 1909:11) Could a higher ambition inspire its members, than to emulate the virtues, pre- serve the customs, and transmit to posterity the history of an extinct race? Such is our destiny. (Litchman, 1909:608) Why was the Princess Wootonekanuske then so important to white people, and who were the white people to whom she mat- tered, some of whom organized themselves into Indian tribes? One thought is that she and her family symbolized permanence in the midst of industrialization, abandonment of rural liveli- hoods, demographic change, ethnic as well as class restratifica- tion, and a sense of loss that swept through the late nineteenth- century northeastern United States. Women, particularly coun- try women, were the ones who stayed at home, "where some- thing lurked that was still sublime" (Brooks, 1940:472). In his story about a street not far from Lakeville, H.P. Lovecraft artic- ulated nativist fears of displacement that appear to have been commonly shared by old-line Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in this region: Men of strength and honour fashioned that Street: good valiant men of our blood who had come from the Blessed Isles across the sea. (Lovecraft, 1970: 164) New kinds of faces appeared in the Street, swarthy, sinister faces with furtive eyes and odd features, whose owners spoke unfamiliar words and placed signs in known and unknown characters upon most of the musty houses. Push-carts crowded the gutters. A sordid undefinable stench settled over the place, and the ancient spirit slept. (Lovecraft, 1970:166-167) Old-line Americans threatened by immigrants felt in a way like "good" Indians, for in their own minds they were a virtu- ous indigenous people. Henry Adams, for example, wrote in his autobiography that as a consequence of immigration his "world was dead," and despite his revered lineage of "Puritans and Patriots," he was "no worse off than the Indians or the buf- falo who had been ejected from their heritage by his own peo- ple" (Adams, 1995:229). In his nativist story "The Street," Lovecraft (1970:164) observed, "There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not." The Mitchells knew that where they lived, on Mas- sasoit's family land in Lakeville, places and things had souls, or ancestral meanings, as Lovecraft seemed to mean by his use of this word. The local descendants of earlier white generations had their own sacred landscapes, monuments, and histories. Their places, the earliest ones named for moral ideas, English villages, original grantees, and Indian place names, were the ones Lovecraft had in mind. Having become in their own NUMBER 44 137 minds like Indians being colonized, many identified with the "'good" Indian in the intensity of feeling and nostalgia with which they embraced their own objects, history, and places. Many also became sympathetic listeners to the Indian side of the story. Some of these listeners were anthropologists who, in the early years of the twentieth century, were very attentive to what has become known as the "memory culture" of Native Ameri- cans. One example is Roland B. Dixon, professor of anthropol- ogy at Harvard University, an old-line American who did ex- tensive field research on the ancestral memories of living Indians in the Sacramento valley and Sierra Nevada of northern California. Dixon's interest in memory culmre may have been suggested at least in part by a sense that his indigenous culture, like that of Henry Adams, and like that of the California Indi- ans, was being lost as a consequence of ethnic displacement: "For two centuries they [British Americans] built according to the pattern that was their heritage, then came the great wave of immigration of the last century, which wrought a fateful change" (Dixon, 1928:294). American anthropologists of re- cent immigrant backgrounds, Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, and Robert Lowie being examples, also pursued the study of mem- ory culture but perhaps for different motivations related to their separation from ancestral attachments. From the moments of earliest contact, Native American and immigrant peoples in North America revised their self under- standings in the light of borrowings from and projections upon one another. In this account of Charlotte Mitchell and her im- mediate family I have tried to show how they drew upon ances- tral as well as European-American knowledge in ordering their practical activities, and beyond that, how they asserted their in- dependent and critical perspective as players on the stage of old-line American sacred history. As indigenous whites felt themselves being displaced by nineteenth and early-twentieth century immigrant populations, and absorbed into this increas- ingly pluralist world, many identified with Native Americans, whose displacements they had not only witnessed but caused. Although many indigenous and immigrant whites eventually reconciled themselves to the idea of the Melting Pot by con- struing it in terms of what Lawrence Levine described as the "principle" of Anglo-conformity, many of them felt that the most recent immigrant cultures were of potentially threatening moral value (Levine, 1996:109). In this context, they looked back to their own origins for moral direction and idealized not only their past but also that of Native Americans, in relation- ship to whom their American identity at least in part originated. That Indians continued to live in the woods near Plymouth re- assured those who identified with the old-line American past as they looked beyond the older mythscapes of Divine Providence and Manifest Destiny to the Melting Pot and what Oscar Hand- lin (1996:335) described as "the unmarked way" of the twenti- eth century. At this point, the disappearing Indian faded in their imaginations to be replaced by a new enchantment with the persisting Indian, whose identity and culmre had survived what they knew to be even greater ordeals. Notes First thanks go to Bill Sturtevant, whose visionary Handbook of North Ameri- can Indians project brought me back to my most cherished interest in Native Americana. I also would like to express my appreciation to Kathleen Bragdon, Mitchell Breitwieser, Ann McMullen, Peter Nabokov, and Cheryl Simmons for ideas along the way as I thought through this essay. Finally, I am grateful to Marion Delaney and Evelyn Caughlan of the Dyer Memorial Library in Abing- ton, Massachusetts, for their hospitality while I worked in their friendly and unique institution. They brought the Charlotte Mitchell diary to my attention and graciously arranged permission for me to publish it for scholarly purposes. 1. Haffenreffer to Emma Safford, 24 Nov, Brown University, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. 2. Mitchell diary, 2 Jan-15 Mar 1896, Dyer Memorial Library, Abington, Massachusetts. 3. Probate Records, Plymouth County Massachusetts, volume 34, no. 39743, page 81 (1930). 4. Lakeville v. Safford, Lakeville, Massachusetts, book 1855, page 126 (1943). 1. Literature Cited Adams, Henry 1995. The Education of Henry Adams. Edited by Jean Gooder, 229 pages. London: Penguin Books. [Published by the author in 1907, Wash- ington, D.C] Anonymous 1894. Last of Their Race: Indians Who Are Descendants of the Great Chief Massasoit—They Are Very Proud Of Their Lineage. Clipping file, Dyer Memorial Library, Abington, Massachusetts. 1926. Wampanoag Princess 78. Boston Herald, 2 Nov. Clipping file, Dyer Memorial Library, Abington, Massachusetts. 1927. Nunkatest Red Men To Assist Indian Princess. 23 Mar. Clipping file, Dyer Memorial Library, Abington, Massachusetts. 1930. Princess Wootonakanuse, Last of Wampanoags, Dead. 30 Apr. Clip- ping file, Dyer Memorial Library, Abington, Massachusetts. Bennet, Nehemiah 1794. Description of the Town of Middleborough, in the County of Ply- mouth; with Remarks. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society For the Year 1794, 3:1-3. 1810. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, for the Year 1794. Volume 3, 304 pages. Boston: Munroe and Francis. [Origi- nally printed in 1794 by Joseph Belknap, Boston.] Brooks, Van Wyck 1946. New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915. 557 pages. Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Company. Butterworth, Hezekiah 1893. Massasoit of Sowams in Pokanoket. In Massoit Souvenir, pages 7-35. Warren, Rhode Island: Massasoit Monument Fund. 1895. In Old New England: The Romance of a Colonial Fireside. vii + 138 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY 281 pages. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Cuffe, Paul 1839. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Paul Cuffe, a Pequot Indian. 21 pages. Vernon: Horace N. Bill. Dixon, Roland B. 1928. The Building of Cultures. 312 pages. New York and London: Charles Scribner's Sons. Earle, John M. 1862. Report to the Governor and Council Concerning the Indians of the Commonwealth. Commonwealth of Massachusetts House Docu- ment No. 215, pages. French, Susan Ashley 1989. Toys in the Sand: Recovering Childhood Memories in Lakeville, Massachusetts. 286 pages. East Freetown, Massachusetts: Susan Ashley French. Haffenreffer, Rudolf F. 1929. Indian History of Mount Hope and Vicinity. In Proceedings of the Society from Its Organization in 1921 to August, 1926, pages 34-62. Fall River, Massachusetts: Fall River Historical Society. Handlin, Oscar 1996. The Unmarked Way. The American Scholar, 65(3):335-355. Harris, Sheldon H. 1972. Paul Cuffe: Black America and the African Return. 288 pages. New York: Simon and Schuster. Huntoon, Daniel TV. 1893. History of the Town of Canton, Norfolk County, Massachusetts, xiv, 1 leaf, + 666 pages. Cambridge: J. Wilson and Son. Kalor, Mary Fielding [1898]. Descendants of Massasoit: Mrs. Zerviah Mitchell, Grandaughter of Famous Indian Chief, Is Dead. Clipping File, Dyer Memorial Li- brary, Abington, Massachusetts. Lemke, Carl R., editor 1964. Official History of the Improved Order of Red Men Compiled Under Authority From the Great Council of the United States. 810 pages. Waco, Texas: Davis Bros. Publishing Company. Levine, Lawrence W. 1996. The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History. xxiv+212 pages. Boston: Beacon Press. Lillie, Lucy C. 1885. An Indian Journey. Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 71(426): 813-828. Litchman, Charles H., editor 1909. Official History of the Improved Order of Red Men Compiled Under Authority From the Great Council of the United States. 620 pages. Boston: The Fraternity Publishing Company. Lovecraft, Howard Phillips 1965. The Tomb and Other Tales. 190 pages. New York: Ballantine Books. Lubbers, Klaus 1994. Born for the Shade: Stereotypes of the Native American in United States Literature and the Visual Arts, 1776-1894. 328 pages, [40] pages of plates. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi B.V. Mandell, Daniel R. 1996. Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massa- chusetts. ix+255 pages. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. McBride, Bunny, and Harald E.L. Prins 1996. Walking the Medicine Line: Molly Ockett, a Pigwacket Doctor. In Robert S. Grumet, editor, Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632-1816, pages 321-347. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. McMullen, Ann 1987. Descriptive Entries for the Objects. In Ann McMullen and Russell G. Handsman, editors, A Key into the Language ofWoodsplint Bas- kets, pages 172-179. Washington, Connecticut: American Indian Archaeological Institute. Mitchell, Zerviah Gould 1972. Preface. In Ebebezer W. Peirce, Indian History, Biography and Ge- nealogy Pertaining to the Good Sachem Massasoit of the Wampanoag Tribe, pages iii-v. Freeport, New York: Books for Li- braries Press. [Published by the author in 1878, North Abington, Massachusetts.] Paton, Andrew H. 1909. Introduction. In Charles H. Litchman, editor, Official History of the Improved Order of Red Men Compiled Under Authority From the Great Council of the United States, pages 11-15. Boston: The Fra- ternity Publishing Company. Pease, Z.W. 1902. Fighting For Royal Domain. Clipping file, Dyer Memorial Library, Abington, Massachusetts. Peirce, Ebenezer W. 1884. History of Lakeville. In D. Hamilton Hurd, editor, History of Ply- mouth County, Massachusetts, pages 290-320. Philadelphia, Penn- sylvania: J.W. Lewis and Co. 1972. Indian History, Biography and Genealogy Pertaining to the Good Sachem Massasoit of the Wampanoag Tribe. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press. [Originally published in 1878 by Zerviah Gould, North Abington, Massachusetts.] Simmons, William S. 1986. Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620-1984. xi+331 pages. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England. Speck, Frank G. 1928. Native Tribes and Dialects of Connecticut: A Mohegan-Pequot Di- ary. Forty-Third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnol- ogy,to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1925-1926, pages 199-287. Washington, D.C. 1947. 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[Originally published in 1952 in Lakeville, 247 pages.] Indian Imagery and the Development of Tourism in the Southwest JoAllyn Archambault William Sturtevant's first publication about the imagery of American Indians as produced by non-Indians examined an 1838 drawing of a Seminole dance (Sturtevant, 1962). Subse- quent publications analyzed the contributions that early artists, such as John White and Jacques Le Moyne, made to the under- standing of native peoples in encounters between early Euro- pean explorers and Native Americans (Sturtevant, 1964, 1965, 1967,1976, 1977, 1980a). These and other publications discuss the value of early drawings and paintings by artist-explorers as a source of ethnographic data, to be considered within the con- text provided by associated, contemporary written documents, such as diaries, letters, and official reports (Sturtevant, 1980b). These early images must be considered critically since the in- fluence of preexisting images from European traditions is often apparent and, unless articulated by the researcher, will confuse the naive viewer (Sturtevant, 1968, 1978, 1992). The persever- ance of such literary and visual preconceptions can lead to such stereotypes as the Patagonian giants (Sturtevant, 1982). Sturtevant's interest in imagery led to his research into early American Indian visitors to Europe, who provided Old World citizens with their first look at New World peoples. Some of these visitors died in Europe or otherwise disappeared from the historical record, but their portraits, which ranged in quality from fine paintings to crude engravings intended for advertis- ing posters, were drawn by a variety of local artists. The pub- lished portraits allowed many more Europeans to see some ap- proximation of the appearance of these earliest American Indian visitors (Sturtevant, 1993). Some of them were mem- bers of traveling entertainment groups, forerunners of the late nineteenth century wild west shows organized by Buffalo Bill and others.1 These groups traveled widely and performed be- fore hundreds, if not thousands of Europeans eager to catch some glimpse of the people of the Americas. The performances contributed to the creation of icons associated with American Indians, such as the Plains Indian warbonnet, an object adopted by many non-Plains Indians as a pan-Indian ethnic symbol (Sturtevant, 1990). Sturtevant's writing on imagery, icons, and traveling Indian shows has contributed to my own work on the Gallup Inter- JoAllyn Archambault, Department of Anthropology, MRC 112, Na- tional Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washing- ton, D.C. 20560-0112, USA. Tribal Indian Ceremonial (Archambault, 1984) (see "The Gal- lup Ceremonial," below), the development of tourism, and the commodification of American Indian culture. The Ceremo- nial's activities are an excellent example of the tandem matura- tion of the tourism industry and the portrayal of the American Indian as an icon and commercial product, a process in which imagery plays a central role. The Ceremonial is also an excel- lent example of cultural continuity of a theatrical spectacle. Sturtevant's work on imagery is founded on a deep under- standing of the social and historical context in which the im- ages were created and initially interpreted. His analyses are in- formed by a thorough knowledge of the textual and visual lineages of the images of interest, and his interpretations have always been founded on data, not on simple opinion. The Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company This history properly starts with the entrance of the railroad into New Mexico, in 1879. Track was laid to Albuquerque by 1880 and to what is now Gallup by 1881 (Telling, 1952). The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe Railway, known locally as the Santa Fe Railway, gained control of the rail from Deming, New Mexico, to the west coast terminal in San Francisco, Cali- fornia. This gave the Santa Fe Railway an outlet to the west that had great potential for pleasure travel, an opportunity the railroad quickly seized and exploited (McLuhan, 1985). Gallup started as a rough and ready section camp for railroad workers. There were a few Spanish-American families living in the area who farmed and ranched, in addition to the Navajo and Zuni living in portions of their original territory. Named after a railroad paymaster, David Gallup, Telling (1952) describes the town in 1882 as being a typical construction camp with saloons and hastily built shacks. The advent of the railroad benefitted all of the nascent towns along its path by providing both steady employment and commerce during the construction phase and access to markets once the line was completed. Those towns that became division points for the railway, as Gallup did in 1889, were assured of a steady income from railway workers, freight, and the sale of locally produced coal, timber, and food. Gallup became the trading center of central western New Mex- ico and adjacent Arizona and shared in the development of pleasure traveling. In 1895, with the Santa Fe Railway recovering from bank- ruptcy, the company president, E.P. Ripley, decided to promote 139 140 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY southwestern tourism more aggressively (Dutton, 1983:93). Freight revenues generated from southwestern towns were small, and increased passenger travel would bring in needed in- come. But although the Santa Fe track ran through beautiful, dramatic countryside and was near impressive archaeological sites to which trips could be arranged, the Southwest was still perceived as rough, untamed, and, perhaps, even dangerous. Most of the hostile encounters between Indians and whites had ceased by 1890, but the easterner was likely to need some as- surance before traveling in what most thought to be wild coun- try. This public perception would be skillfully assuaged by a publicity campaign, using exotic, sanitized, romantic images and describing a land that existed outside of time, full of pictur- esque, nonthreatening, primitive peoples (McLuhan, 1985). The themes that emerged in Santa Fe's subsequent publicity campaign transformed the Indians into symbolic reductions of its American heritage. The success of that enterprise sprang from the American public's longing for be- longing, its quest for roots, and its unconscious desire for liberation from a vio- lent past. (McLuhan, 1985:19) Central to the advertising campaign were images of a heroic In- dian archetype, at one with nature and secure in a culture that was exotic, picturesque, simple, and peaceful. Artists were commissioned to create images for the Santa Fe calendar that "were expected to be 'thematically pleasing and colorfully dec- orative' and neither 'pictorially perplexing' nor 'intellectually challenging'... a magnification of the railway's sense of popu- lar taste" (Coke, 1963:59, in McLuhan, 1985:29). The Indian calendar figures were frozen in time. They were portrayed in an idealized past, serene and sometimes medita- tive, set within a landscape or against a flat background. What developed was a highly selective presentation of Indian society that stressed some decorative aspects of nineteenth century ma- terial culture (beads, metal jewelry, hand woven textiles, leather clothing) set within a visual context that evoked an un- sullied, aboriginal culmre. This was the "real, old time Indian" whose authenticity was unchallenged. The fact was ignored that some aspects of the material culture, for example, beads, manufactured cloth, and metal, existed only because of contact with non-Indians. Other elements of material culture that would have been common in a late nineteenth century Indian home, such as metal tools, buckets, paper, and mirrors, were never pictured. Just as Edward S. Curtis deleted from his pho- tographs some manufactured items that he considered intrusive (Lyman, 1982), so the Santa Fe calendar paintings ignored sig- nificant aspects of nineteenth century Indian life considered unauthentic or tacky. There was no attempt to present native peoples as they really lived at the turn of the century, only to show the Indian icon as created by the Santa Fe advertising de- partment. The railway was both creating and preserving visual stereotypes of Indians. In the same process that Sturtevant de- scribed for the Patagonian giants (Sturtevant, 1982), the visual images generated by the railway publicists supported generic stereotypes of the Indian as a simple, primitive child of nature; stereotypes that have circulated in western thinking since the sixteenth century (Berkhofer, 1978). The calendars were first distributed gratis in 1907 in what may have been the largest general mailing at that time. They found their way into hundreds of thousands of homes, schools, and businesses (McLuhan, 1985:19) and are now considered collectors' items. Indian images dominated the calendars, with dramatic landscapes being a secondary theme. In addition, the railway printed brochures, time tables, folders, and maps and took out ads in many popular magazines of the time, all of which featured the same idealized Indian and landscape imag- ery (McLuhan, 1985:20). The publicity campaign was a huge success. In less than a decade the Santa Fe Railroad had estab- lished a new corporate image for itself, had attracted new pas- sengers for its trains, had helped to establish tourism as a major industry in the Southwest, and had created a new version of an old stereotype, the Noble Redman. The Santa Fe Railroad was not alone in its production of In- dian imagery. The exotic appeal of Indian cultures for potential travelers had been recognized early on by Fred Harvey, who developed the famous Harvey House hotels and food service on the Santa Fe track from Chicago to California. The railroad had a symbiotic relationship with Fred Harvey. The former pro- vided transportation and infrastructure, and Harvey provided standardized, high- quality services. The Santa Fe built and owned the hotels, and the Harvey Company furnished and operated them as well as dining cars, newsstands, and other shops along the railroad's route. (Bryant, 1974:118) The first Harvey hotel, the Montezuma, opened in 1882 in Las Vegas, New Mexico (Grattan, 1980:125-126). A Harvey House was built in Gallup in 1895, and El Tovar debuted at the Grand Canyon in 1905. All of the hotels were given colorful names that emphasized the southwest region, and the architecture combined Spanish and Pueblo elements in what is now called the Mission style (Howard and Pardue, 1996). Native crafts were used to deco- rate both public spaces and the guest rooms. Navajo rugs, Pueblo ceramics, baskets and textiles from many tribes, and paintings featuring the landscape and Indian scenes were ev- erywhere (Thomas, 1978). Even the tableware in the dining rooms featured Indian motifs. The decor provided a visual con- text for the emergent Indian-land nexus that is at the heart of southwestern tourism. The two companies played major roles in the commodifica- tion of Indian material culture. The train stopped at every Har- vey hotel, allowing sufficient time for travelers to eat and buy souvenirs. Attached to every hotel was a shop where tourists could purchase Indian-made items like the objects they saw decorating the Harvey House. The Alvarado Hotel complex in Albuquerque, built in 1902, was an excellent example of the union of form and function in a Harvey complex. "It was not possible to get to the main hotel facilities without first passing the Indian Building," with its sales rooms, museum, and artist demonstration area (Howard and Pardue, 1996:21). Inside, the NUMBER 44 141 passenger experienced a visual cornucopia of Indian artifacts "arranged in the form of exhibits, cozy comers, etc. to illustrate to people how these things can be utilized to best advantage" (Howard and Pardue, 1996:15). There is no doubt that the mu- seum, the artist demonstrations, and the sales shops were in- tended to facilitate sales and increase profits for both compa- nies. Herman Schweizer, head of the Harvey Company's Indian Department, wrote in 1930: Our place here was established thirty years ago on such a large scale, primarily as an advertising feature of the Santa Fe Railway, with a view of interesting the public in the Indians of the Southwest and their products, which purpose has admittedly been well served, and it has not only been of great benefit to the Santa Fe Railway, but to the Indians and all dealers in these products. (Howard and Pardue, 1996:15) Entrepreneurs dealing in Indian artifacts benefitted from an in- creased demand, created in part from the structured marketing organized by the railway and the Harvey Company. Some Indians quickly took advantage of the opportunity for selling handicrafts to tourists and sold their goods directly to railroad travelers at the train depots and local hotels (Howard and Pardue, 1996). But the bulk of the sales took place in local gift shops, such as the Hopi House, near the El Tovar, both maintained by the Harvey Company. Some Indians sold di- rectly to the gift shops, thereby avoiding middlemen, but the great majority had no option other than to sell to local traders, who then resold the goods to retailers. The Indian artisans were the primary producers of goods, but all evidence points to the fact that they earned very little in return. The middlemen and the retail operators realized far more profit for their efforts, in a classical example of capitalist economies (Adams, 1963). The Bureau of Indian Affairs supported craft sales as a means of generating income for reservation residents and incorporating them in a cash economy (United States Department of the Inte- rior, Office of Indian Affairs, 1939:23). Indians were hired as artist-demonstrators and entertainers for the Harvey Houses throughout the Southwest (Howard and Pardue, 1966; Thomas, 1978). Sometimes trains were met by groups of dancers who performed for the arriving travelers, and some sites featured nightly dances illuminated by bonfires (Thomas, 1978). Both companies used photographs of Indians in their promo- tional materials, but, with rare exceptions, their personal names were never given. In Harvey Company brochures only the Na- vajo weaver, Elle of Ganado, and the Hopi potter, Nampeyo, were routinely identified in print (Howard and Pardue, 1996:64). Virtually everyone else was an anonymous artist or dancer presented in typical dress or pose and identified by tribe. They had become archetypes of the exotic, friendly na- tive (Dilworth, 1996:141). The Harvey Company interpretation of the American Indian included slide-illustrated lectures at some of the hotels. The La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe featured such lectures, given by non- Indians about local history, geography, and Pueblo Indians, for their guests in the Lecture Lounge (McLuhan, 1985:37). This burgeoning commercialization of Indian material cul- ture, begun earlier by reservation traders and bolstered by the corporate interests of the railway and the Harvey Company, would culminate in the fully mature Indian art market of today. The economic benefits to Native American artists in this pro- cess have been substantial and have allowed many families on the reservation to make a living over several generations. By 1905, if not earlier, the basic elements of southwestern tourism as created by the Santa Fe Railway and the Harvey Company were in place. The physical infrastructure consisted of railway transportation, hotels, dining rooms, and entertain- ment venues (museum, lecture lounge, gift shops, and perfor- mance areas). The Southwest, formerly a harsh, dangerous frontier, was repackaged as an exotic, safe, alluring "oasis" filled with colorful, friendly natives living in a place removed from the normal passage of time. An Indian image had become an icon of American identity, and carefully managed aspects of Indian culture became pastimes or souvenirs for the harried, ur- ban traveler. Imagery in the form of paintings, photographs, and prints promoted this new vision of the railway's Southwest through promotional materials, slide-illustrated lectures, and their physical presence in hotels, homes, art galleries, and gift shops. All of these elements became part of the Gallup Cere- monial's program. The Gallup Ceremonial The Ceremonial started with entertainment entrepreneur and trader Mike Kirk, who provided a Navajo dance team as part of the local attractions during the summers at the Grand Canyon. Kirk was typical of the entrepreneurs who booked American Indian performers for public events, which were very popular at the turn of the century (Moses, 1996). He owned a trading post at Manuelito, New Mexico, and by 1922 had for some time been taking groups of Indian dancers, runners, and crafts- men to national and regional conventions or festivities. Encour- aged by his experiences at the Grand Canyon, he returned to Gallup with plans for a traveling Indian show for the vaudeville circuit. He hoped to secure partial funding for this project from local businessmen, the return to the investors being the atten- dant publicity for Gallup. But he was persuaded that a local production would stand a better chance of support from local investors (Carroll, 1971). Having decided to stage the show in Gallup, Kirk and attor- ney John Chapman sought financial backing. Kirk's previous employment with the Santa Fe Railway was an asset. Railroad executives, impressed with the dance performances at the Grand Canyon, agreed to provide partial financial backing and publicity support as its contribution (Carroll, 1971). The Har- vey Company also provided assistance (Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association (IICA), 1922). It is probable that the corporate support was critical to the continued success of the fledgling Ceremonial. Given the railroad's heavy investment in regional tourism, its support of a new celebration in Gallup was 142 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY a prudent investment and evidence of the industry's importance in southwestern tourism. The Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association was incor- porated as a nonprofit organization in August, 1922, and its purpose was "to preserve the purity and integrity of native In- dian customs and culture... through staging of an annual Cere- monial."2 The original incorporators included some of the most influential traders of the era and two Bureau of Indian Affairs agents attached to the Navajo reservation (Carroll, 1971; Ar- chambault, 1984:30). Kirk was in charge of securing the Indian performers, and he recruited groups from the Hopi, Zuni, Isleta, Santo Domingo, and Navajo that year. The mayor declared a half-day holiday for everyone, and local citizens were requested to help with re- pairs to the county fairground where the Ceremonial was to be staged that night. It was an informal affair, with the headlights from cars providing most of the illumination for the evening dances. It was a rousing success by all accounts, and so was born the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association (Carroll, 1971). In addition to the dances there were a number of contests (foot and horse races, tug of war, chicken pull), an exhibit of Indian crafts available for purchase, and products of the industrial training programs at the Bureau of Indian Affairs schools (IICA, 1922). A new and larger Gallup Harvey House, named El Navajo, was built in 1923, and the town was designated by the Santa Fe Railway as the hub for tours to Zuni, El Morro, and Chaco Canyon. Intrepid motorists were exploring the Southwest in au- tomobiles (20 a day in Gallup), and local businessmen were sure they had a hit in the making (Carroll, 1971). Kirk recruited dancers from 12 New Mexican tribes to appear, and the format was the same as the year previous with afternoon dances, "In- dian games and sports," evening dance program, and exhibits (IICA, 1923). In 1924, 5000 fliers were sent to auto clubs in the Midwest and the Pacific coast as part of a promotional cam- paign, and they yielded results. There were so many visitors that, because of a shortage of hotel rooms, Gallup citizens were asked to house them. The event was beginning to attract the at- tention of such people as Edward S. Curtis, who came out from Los Angeles to photograph the dances (Carroll, 1971). By 1925 the Ceremonial format was complete and would al- ter little over the next 60 years. There was a parade, afternoon sports, an exhibit hall with Indian handicrafts for sale, a concert by an all-Indian band, an evening dance performance, and lots of photo opportunities. All of the performers and artists were Indian. Later, some of the businessmen in the exhibit hall would be Indian themselves, but then all were non-Indian. It was staged for two to three days in the late summer and at- tracted both Indian and white audiences, all of whom spent money locally. Small cash prizes were given for the best art- work, for agricultural and industrial products, and to winners of the athletic contests. A printed program gave short explana- tions about the meanings of dances and gave brief sketches of tribes. In some years there were articles about various aspects of Indian life, usually the expressive arts (for example, dance, art, music, oral traditions), but sometimes current social condi- tions were described, for example, education, ranching, or In- dian veterans. The programs served as the official voice of the Ceremonial Association, and as such they are primary docu- ments in my analysis. All of the features of the Ceremonial—native dance perfor- mances by Indians in traditional dress, colorful athletic con- tests, artist-demonstrators, sales of arts and crafts, and educa- tional public lectures by non-Indian experts—were familiar features of southwestern tourism and were prefigured in the at- tractions created by the Santa Fe Railway and the Harvey House hotels. The Indian-land nexus was visible in the land- scape photos that appeared in later printed programs. The cele- bration did not break new ground in the structure and presenta- tion of its events but fit into a comfortable format that had been in place for two decades. The one element in the early Ceremonials that did not derive from railway-linked tourism was displays of the Bureau of In- dian Affairs training programs in the Indian schools. One could see native-produced examples of the domestic arts (sewing, embroidery, canned goods), "industrial" products (carpentry, metalwork), and agricultural produce. The Bureau had been sponsoring similar exhibits since the Louisiana Purchase Expo- sition in Saint Louis in 1904 and saw them as an efficient means of advertising its success in assimilating young Indians to American culture. At the reservation level, the Bureau estab- lished agricultural fairs and encouraged friendly competition by awarding small prizes for the best examples of produce, do- mestic arts, and so forth. The annual Navajo tribal fair started in 1909, and prizes were given for the best blankets and silver- work, in addition to farm products (Moses, 1996), so local In- dians were accustomed to the idea of competition for awards. Much of the recent interpretation of southwestern Indians, tourism, and popular imagery has focused on the orientalism that is so often apparent in literature and in fine and popular arts (McLuhan, 1985; Babcock, 1990, 1994; Dilworth, 1996). Certainly the promotional materials generated by the Santa Fe Railway and affiliated companies are excellent examples of such presentation. The Indian Detours, established by the Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway in 1925, designated Gallup as the hub for local tours. They were combinations of rail and bus travel that took passengers on extended trips to Indian villages and ar- chaeological sites in northern New Mexico and Arizona far from the rail lines, complete with the food and housing service for which the Harvey company was so well known. Trips to some Indian pueblos were orchestrated so that the groups ar- rived in time to see local dances (Thomas, 1978). Many of the travelers who booked these trips may well have attended the Ceremonial. The language used in brochures distributed by the Indian De- tours stressed unbridled exoticism. "Motorists crossing the Southwestern States are nearer to the primitive than anywhere NUMBER 44 143 on the continent. They are crossing a land in which a foreign people, with foreign speech and foreign ways, offer them spec- tacles which can be equaled in a very few Oriental lands" (Thomas, 1978:196). Potential customers were encouraged to discover a "last frontier that has taken 350 years to sub- due... find out buried cities...and string together age-old Pueb- los where one may 'catch archaeology alive'" (Thomas, 1978:201-202). Such language, combined with imagery, sup- ported the interpretation of the American Indian as a romantic, simple primitive who was one with a strange, magnificent land- scape, living in a place outside time and the pressures of an ur- ban lifestyle. Imagery of the Ceremonial Given the institutional history of the Gallup Ceremonial, its close ties to the Santa Fe Railway and Harvey Company, and its centrality within state tourism, one would expect to see a repetition of similar themes, language, and imagery in its publi- cations. But examination of the Ceremonial's annual printed programs reveals conflicting images and text in a display of multivocality and complexity. All of the images (40 photo- graphs and 5 drawings) used in the 1922-1928 programs por- tray unidentified Indians in traditional clothes and in activities such as dancing, weaving, baking, or standing in picturesque poses. None of the images shows Indians engaged in modern activities that would have been common experiences for many, such as visiting an office or a medical clinic or attending school. The lack of images showing engagement with the mod- em world supports an orientalist interpretation of the Indian as "exotic others, good and bad, tamed and wild" (Dilworth, 1996:58), "ethnic others who were happy to remain outside modernity" (Dilworth, 1996:6). But upon reading the accompa- nying text one finds a more complicated reality that is at odds with the imagery. The text may describe a native person who is assimilating to American culmre, learning new skills, and ad- justing to the challenges of new lifeways. There were three major themes in the earliest programs of the Ceremonial. The first was that Indians were no longer dan- gerous: "They are not the menace of fifty years ago" (IICA, 1922:4). The second was that Indians were supervised, produc- tive, and learning new skills—they were gainfully employed under the supervision of the federal government: [T]he Indians of today are a producing race. ...Under the tutelage of the gov- ernment the Indians have been encouraged to continue their native craftsman- ship and art and have been taught other lines of industry and trade... .This As- sociation has encouraged the various tribes...to place upon exhibition specimens of their blankets and rugs, silverware, pottery, basketry, bead work and leather work....The domestic science exhibits...embroidery, canned fruit and vegetables, pastry and other baked goods, demonstrates what is being done by the Indian women. The school exhibits and exhibits of manual training show the result of the education of Indian children. The produce from the farm, garden and orchard illustrates the productiveness of a primitive race when en- couraged and protected by a benevolent government. (IICA, 1922:4) Some of the exhibits mentioned above were sponsored by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and displayed the success of the forced assimilation programs in Indian schools. The third theme articulated the Ceremonial Association's intent to in- form the American public about the value of Indian culture through its annual spectacle and associated publications and educational activities: [W]e promise that in future Ceremonials the exhibits will be more varied and... will demonstrate the advancement of these misunderstood people. ...To the uninitiated the customs and life of the Indians seem strange and meaning- less and the Indians themselves are deemed lazy and indolent. Such is not the case. Each custom has its significance and the traditions of the origin of these customs are just as poetic and interesting as those of any race of people. This program has been prepared to explain briefly some of the dances and sports which will be produced on the different days of the Ceremonial. (IICA, 1922:5) This last reads like a classical statement of cultural relativism and social tolerance written at least 40 years before it became the hallmark of the turbulent 1960s. In an era when cultural chauvinism and conformity were the rule and the primacy of Anglo-American customs was unquestioned, this statement was politically progressive. Nor was it an attitude that was shared by all Gallup citizens. On at least one occasion the Cer- emonial Association was taken to task by local ministers for having the parade on Sunday, which conflicted with the Chris- tian day of worship (Archambault, 1984). Even national pan- Indian organizations of the times, like the Society of American Indians, experienced conflict over the issue of traditional reli- gion and cultural practices, with some supporting total and im- mediate assimilation and others arguing for tolerance of the same (Hertzburg, 1971). The progressive perspective may have been inspired by simi- lar statements written by the writers and protoanthropologists Hamlin Garland (1896), George Wharton James (1900, 1902), and Charles Lummis (1891), all of whom supported the right of the Hopi to practice their own religion, specifically the Snake Dance. Certainly it was not a position representative of most elected officials or government officials, although by the 1920s there were some supporters of the Indian right to freedom of re- ligion even within the ranks of the government service (Moses, 1996). An interpretation based on orientalism cannot account for the complex and multivalent themes so readily apparent in the Cer- emonial's programs. It also displays the danger of selective use of evidence when using historical documents. It would have been easy enough to focus on the imagery to the exclusion of the text and make an argument for the construction of the In- dian as icon and primitive. But consideration of all of the evi- dence available in the programs undermines this approach. Even while advocating cultural acceptance and understand- ing, the Ceremonial's annual programs illustrate the power of the federal government over American Indian communities. Whatever may have been the political aspirations of Indian leaders of the time, the government's program of cultural and economic assimilation was not to be denied. Not only had the United States tamed the wild Indian, but it was now teaching 144 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY the Indian the arts of civilization. These elements reflect the participation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs officials who were members of the Ceremonial's organizing committee. Their presence was essential because in 1922 it would have been dif- ficult for Indian performers to have been hired without tacit ac- ceptance by the local superintendent, even though the govern- ment no longer required and enforced the writing of contracts between native peoples and employers (Moses, 1996:142). While orientalism fails as an explanatory device for all of the complicated and conflicting streams of interest and influence that can be extracted from a fuller reading of the historical doc- uments and context, the persistence of the Indian as icon in the Ceremonial's annual programs is undeniable. Moving forward to 1955, the annual program advertises an essentially unchanged calendar with the exception of displays of agricultural and industrial products, which had disappeared by 1935. In the exhibit hall were dozens of dealers, both Indian and white, selling native arts guaranteed to be authentic and good quality. Working Indian craftsmen were available for questions, and a display of a Navajo man creating a sandpaint- ing was very popular. A seminar presented "leading [white] ex- perts on Indian affairs speaking on topics bearing on the In- dian" before a large audience (IICA, 1955:2). The grand entry of the dance groups into the performance area was well staged and dramatic, and the closing dance sequence was a Plains war dance, a proven crowd pleaser. Special accommodations were made for photographers. After the morning parade the dance groups had to be available for photographic setups, often staged against scenic backdrops. Photo clubs attended in large numbers, and some of the pictures were published in journals and magazines across the land (IICA, 1948, 1951). The major- ity of the images in the program portray the Indian as exotic, heroic, noble, anonymous, in harmony with the land. The ori- entalism so obvious in the tourist brochures of the early century was still visible in 1955. There were, however, some changes: the 1955 program was handsomely produced, with a full-color cover and eight color pages inside, all dedicated to images of Indian individuals and art except for four photos of picturesque landscapes. There are 88 black-and-white photos and 30 color photos. On the full- color panels, all of the 10 Indians featured in one- or two-per- son portraits, and the 11 Indians in two group photos, are in tra- ditional dress or dance regalia; none of them is identified by personal name. The captions make reference either to their tribe, their social status ("old mother, grandmother"), or their activity ("Apache Crown dancers") (IICA, 1955:9-10). In the 32 black-and-white photos that feature one- or two-person por- traits of Indians, three of them are named and 29 are anony- mous. All of them are dressed in some variant of traditional dress or dance regalia. The three identified Indians are well- known Indian artists. In an article about the presentation of the Palmes Academiques award by the French Republic to 12 prominent Indian artists, all of the artists in two photos are named, as are all of the non-Indians. In the eight photos of non- Indians, all of them are identified by name and position within the Association. The only non-Indians who are not identified by name appear in photos of visitors to the exhibition hall ac- tivities. The implications are obvious. Indians are individuals less than they are members of a tribe. Despite the fact that many of the Indian dancers or artists were well known and had partici- pated in the Ceremonial for years, they were reduced to ethnic symbols in the Ceremonial's program. This depersonalization was not a new development for this publication but was of long standing, and it continued to be the rule until quite recently. Some of the photographs, however, featured Indians dressed in modern clothes and living in mid-century America. A photo es- say on the Indian encampment featured native visitors to the Ceremonial engaged in various activities: eating, visiting, get- ting water, and singing at an evening social dance. While there was an ethnic quality inherent in all of the photos, it was very clear that these were contemporary native people, not icons trapped in a timeless past. The text inside the 1955 program is mixed in the same fash- ion as the imagery, combining both an orientalist and a journal- istic approach. Language evoked the allure of the magical and mystical. "This is true beauty, pageantry, mystery and enchant- ment in a natural setting and only Gallup affords it (IICA, 1955:7)" As the "final beat of the tom-tom fades on the night air, the rumbling of wagon wheels and clatter of hoofs will van- ish into the plains from whence they came, and another Cere- monial will be history" (IICA, 1955:7). Never mind that the In- dian participants returned to conventional jobs, schools, and often substandard housing, for the moment they were the driv- ers of "quaint wagons...pulled by typical Indian ponies... [with the] eyes of bashful Indian children peeking out from under the flaps: they're seeing 'city life' for the first time... .It is a charm- ing and amusing scene to climax a morning parade" (IICA, 1955:6). The Land of Enchantment populated by a native peo- ple who possessed an authentic culture and lived outside time was the stuff of dreams. But it still managed to attract tourists from across the country to the Ceremonial, the self-styled "Queen" of the Indian shows. In contrast, although unstated, were the harried lives of the urban visitors, alienated from their own lives, in search of a community lacking at home. The text went on, however, to describe Indian artists working as professionals within the milieu of modern American art. The first article described the award of the distinguished Palmes Academiques, "a French civilian decoration given for meritori- ous services rendered the arts in fitting tribute to the interna- tional status achieved by American Indian artists and artisans of the Southwest" (IICA, 1955:25). The recipients were 12 distinguished artists known through- out the area for the quality of their work. Paul Coze, a French artist and Consul to Arizona, was responsible for its conception and for obtaining the cooperation of the French government in this unusual award to American citizens. The ceremony took place in front of the Ceremonial's grandstands and was re- NUMBER 44 145 ported widely in the newspapers of the region. Its lasting im- portance lay in the recognition of American Indian art as hav- ing a place at the table of international art. The second article, by Dorothy Dunn, a long time observer and promoter of American Indian art, is a journalistic account of Indian art history, starting with the precontact period and ending with some of the artists who had just received the Palmes Academiques. Dunn argued that Indian arts could and should be accepted as American arts and incorporated into the national body of pure and applied design. Like Hamlin Garland (1894) before her, she believed that the future of American arts lay in the recognition of regional culture and its roots in the land, especially as understood by its native people. She de- scribed the artists as struggling with the same dilemmas of ar- tistic growth and vision as any other artist, thereby placing them in a modern context of aesthetic concept, product, con- sumer, and marketplace. Gallup provided a critical source of potential sales and public exposure to all of the American Indian fine artists working in the mid-century period. Most, if not all, of the first generation of twentieth century American Indian artists exhibited or sold their work at the Ceremonial. The Studio style in which they worked has been discussed broadly by others, and it is gener- ally agreed that it evoked a sense of times past, not present. The subject matter was the traditional culture of the nineteenth cen- tury presented in sentimental, nostalgic, and sanitized images (Brody, 1971). Serious collectors and dealers attended the Cer- emonial, and many deals were made while standing by the ex- hibitor's booth or at the numerous parties in town. Indian ex- hibitors were immersed in the "tangled relationships between artist, consumer, and art object in the marketplace" (Dilworth, 1996:215). In conclusion, a close reading of the Ceremonial's programs provides a complicated dialogue with the past and present, not- withstanding a superficial gloss of stereotypic imagery and text. Contextualizing the Ceremonial within the larger frame of regional tourism and federal history vis-a-vis Indian peoples, the annual programs illustrate the multiple, intricate, and often contradictory elements that are part of its history. Notes 1. Research notes on Captain Hadlock, in the possession of William C. Stur- tevant. 2. Articles of incorporation, 1922, in the records of the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association, Gallup, New Mexico. 1. Literature Cited Adams, W.Y. 1963. Shonto: A Study of the Role of the Trader in a Modem Navajo Community. Bulletin, Bureau of American Ethnology, 188: 329 pages. Archambault, JoAllyn 1984. The Gallup Ceremonial. [259] pages. Doctoral dissertation, Univer- sity of California, Berkeley. Babcock, Barbara 1990. "A New Mexican Rebecca": Imaging Pueblo Women. Journal of the Southwest, 32:400-437. 1994. Mudwomen and Whitemen: A Meditation on Pueblo Potteries and the Politics of Representation. In S. Norris, editor, Discovered Country: Tourism and Survival in the American West, pages 180-195. Albuquerque, New Mexico: Stone Ladder Press. Berkhofer, Robert R, Jr. 1978. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Co- lumbus to the Present, xvii+261 pages. New York: Knopf. Brody, J.J. 1971. Indian Painters and White Patrons, xvii+238 pages. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Bryant, Keith L., Jr. 1974. History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, xvi+398 pages. New York: Macmillan. Carroll, Terry Lee 1971. Gallup and Her Ceremonials. 311 pages. Doctoral dissertation, Uni- versity of New Mexico. Coke, Van Deren 1963. Taos and Santa Fe: The Artist's Environment, 1882-1942. 160 pages. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press for the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art. Dilworth, Leah 1996. Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primi- tive Past, xiv+274 pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institu- tion Press. Dutton, Bertha P. 1983. Commerce on a New Frontier: The Fred Harvey Company and the Fred Harvey Fine Arts Collection. In Christine Mather, editor, Colo- nial Frontiers: Art and Life in Spanish New Mexico, the Fred Har- vey Collection, pages 91-104. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Ancient City Press. Garland, Hamlin 1894. Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art, Dealing Chiefly with Lit- erature, Painting and the Drama. ix+192 pages. Cambridge: Stone and Kimball. [Reissued, 1952, viii+192 pages, with an introduc- tion by Robert E. Spiller, by Scholar's Facsimilies: Gainesville, Florida.] 1896. Among the Moki Indians. Harper's Weekly, 40(August 15): 801-807. Grattan, Virginia L. 1980. Mary Colter: Builder Upon the Red Earth. x+131 pages. Flagstaff, Arizona: Northland Press. Hertzberg, Hazel W. 1971. The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements, ix+362 pages. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse Univer- sity Press. Howard, Kathleen L., and Diana F. Pardue 1996. Inventing the Southwest: The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art. xv+150 pages. Flagstaff, Arizona: Northland Pub- lishing. 146 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association (IICA) 1922. First Annual Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial; Gallup, New Mexico: September 28th, 29th, 30th 1922: Program. 12 pages. Gallup, New Mexico: Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association. 1923. Souvenir Program: Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, September, 13-14-15 Gallup New Mexico. [17] pages. Gallup, New Mexico: Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association. 1948. [Program.] 28 pages. Gallup, New Mexico: Inter-Tribal Indian Cer- emonial Association. 1951. Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial; 1951 Gallup New Mexico. [32] pages. Gallup, New Mexico: Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Associ- ation. 1955. Ceremonial Magazine, 34(1): 44 pages. Gallup, New Mexico: Inter- Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association. James, George Wharton 1900. What I Saw at the Snake Dance. Wide World Magazine, 4(January): 264-274. 1902. The Snake Dance of the Hopis. Camera Craft, 6(l):58-62. Lummis, Charles F. 1891. Some Strange Corners of Our Country: The Wonderland of the Southwest, xi+270 pages. New York: Century Company. Lyman, Christopher M. 1982. The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by EdwardS. Curtis. 158 pages. New York: Pantheon Books in associ- ation with the Smithsonian Institution Press. McLuhan, T.C. 1985. Dream Tracks: The Railroad and the American Indian 1890-1930. 208 pages. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Moses, L.G. 1996. Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883-1933. xvii+364 pages. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Sturtevant, William C. 1962. A Newly-Discovered 1838 Drawing of a Seminole Dance. Florida Anthropologist, 15(3):73-82. 1964. John White's Contribution to Ethnology [and catalog commentaries on the North American Indian entries]. In Paul Hulton and David Beers Quinn, The American Drawings of John White, 1577-1590, with Drawings of European and Oriental Subjects, 1:37-43, 85-113, 138-139, 140. London: The Trustees of the British Mu- seum, and Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 1965. Ethnographic Details in the American Drawings of John White, 1577-1590. Ethnohistory, 12(l):54-63. 1967 ("1965"). Catalog of Early Illustrations of Northeastern Indians. Eth- nohistory, 12(3):272-273. [Date on title page is 1965; actually pub- lished in 1967.] 1968. Lafitau's Hoes. American Antiquity, 33(l):93-95. 1976. First Visual Images of Native America. In Fredi Chiappelli, editor, First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, pages 417^54. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1977. The Ethnological Evaluation of the Le Moyne-De Bry Illustrations. In Paul Hulton, editor, The Work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, a Huguenot Artist in France, Florida and England, 1:69-74 [plus ethnological annotations in catalog entries on pp. 163-164, 185, 204-214], foreword, catalog, and introductory studies by Paul Hul- ton. [London]: Published for the Trustees of the British Museum by British Museum Publications Ltd. in association with the Huguenot Society of London. 1978 ("1977"). The Sources of Lafitau's American Illustrations. In Joseph Francois Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with Customs of Primitive Times. 2:271-303, edited and translated by William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore. Toronto: The Cham- plain Society. [Date on title page is 1977; actually published in 1978. Series: Publications of the Champlain Society, 49.] 1980a. The First Inuit Depiction by Europeans. Etudes Inuit; Inuit Studies, 4(1-2)47-49. 1980b. In Kristian Hvidt, editor, with the assistance of Joseph Ewan, George F. Jones, and William C. Sturtevant, Von Reek's Voyage: Drawings and Journal of Philip Georg Friedrich von Reck, [transla- tions from the German on pages 45-50, plus passim identifications and translations of Creek and Yuchi words]. Savannah, Georgia: The Beehive Press. 1982 ("1980"). Patagonian Giants and Baroness Hyde de Neuville's Iro- quois Drawings. Ethnohistory, 27(4):331-348. [Date on title page is 1980; actually published in 1982; errata published in 1982 (1981 on title page) in Ethnohistory, 28(1):99.] 1990. What Does the Plains Indian War Bonnet Communicate? In Dan Eban, editor, with Erik Cohen and Brenda Danet, Art as a Means of Communication in Pre-Literate Societies: The Proceedings of the Wright International Symposium on Primitive and Precolumbian Art, Jerusalem 1985, pages 355-374. Jerusalem: The Israel Mu- seum. 1992. The Sources for European Imagery of Native Americans. In Rachel Doggett, editor, with Monique Hulvey and Julie Ainsworth, New World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492-1700, pages 25-33. Washington, D.C: The Folger Shakespeare Library. 1993. The First American Discoverers of Europe. European Review of Na- tive American Studies, 7(2):23-29. Telling, Irving 1952. New Mexican Frontiers: A Social History of the Gallup Area 1881-1901. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Thomas, Diane 1978. The Southwestern Indian Detours: The Story of the Fred Harvey/ Santa Fe Railway Experiment in "Detourism. " 327 pages. Phoenix, Arizona: Hunter Publishing. United States Department of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs 1939. Pueblo Art in the Modem Home. Indians At Work, 7(8):23. Hawaiian Art: From Sacred Symbol to Tourist Icon to Ethnic Identity Marker Adrienne L. Kaeppler The arts of Hawai'i have evolved from sacred objects and structured sound and movement systems embedded in religious rituals to objects and performances that mark Hawaiian iden- tity.1 Some of these cultural forms have taken on the additional dimension of tourist icons—promoted by the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau and abhorred by activists. During the two centuries since the European discovery of Hawai'i, the arts have waxed and waned, especially since the coming of the Christian mis- sionaries, in 1820. Along the way there have been revivals, out- sider's constructions, and the recent renaissance—each of which has been accompanied by a series of revitalized mean- ings of the verbal and visual surface manifestations of artistic forms. Three main cultural revivals can be delineated: one led by King Kalakaua in the 1880s, one that occurred in the 1930s and was at least partially tied to tourism, and one that began in the 1970s and focused on Hawaiian identity. This essay focuses on featherwork and dance. It explores how the underlying meanings of these cultural forms were ex- panded to make them acceptable in the nineteenth-century Christian world and how these forms are used as elements of Hawaiian identity. In effect, it addresses how sacred Hawaiian feathered objects and a ritual movement system were trans- formed into works of art and how these works of art have be- come markers of ethnic identity. The terms "art" and "the arts" have been used in so many ways, in both specialized and general contexts, that they mean very little. Here I regard the arts as cultural forms that result from creative processes that use or manipulate (i.e., handle with skill) words, sounds, movements, materials, scents, or spaces in such a way that they formalize the nonformal. Art in- tensifies the ordinary in much the same manner as poetry inten- sifies language. The cultural forms produced have structured content that conveys meaning, are visual or aural manifesta- tions of social relations, and may be the subject of an elaborate aesthetic system. Aesthetics is defined here as evaluative ways of thinking about these cultural forms. Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. 20560- 0112, USA. Art, in the Western sense of the word, was not a conceptual category of traditional Hawaiian culture, but no 'eau (skillful- ness or cleverness) was a part of all activity and is the first im- portant concept for the study of Hawaiian art. It can be argued that art did not exist, or, that art, as no 'eau, was all pervasive. The emphasis of no eau was on the process. The resulting products were passed as heirlooms from generation to genera- tion, and the occasions on which they were used became part of them. They became chronicles of social relationships objecti- fied in visual and verbal forms and were inherited not only as products made with skill, that is, works of art, but also as infor- mation. The skillful process of fabrication of an object or per- formance and its later repair or refurbishing, in addition to its objectified social relationships and changing symbolism, were aspects of an aesthetic system concerned with ongoing process and use (Kaeppler, 1985:109-110). The second important concept is kaona (veiled or layered meaning), which encapsulates the aesthetic of indirection, a concept important throughout Polynesia. Kaona can be thought of as a creative potential that enables understanding the invisi- ble through the visible, thereby gaining a more profound under- standing of both what is seen and what is unseen. The unseen is the underlying system of cultural and social philosophy that artists express through the visible. Hawaiian Featherwork: Sacred Symbols and Expanded Meanings Hawaiian featherwork was part of a system of sacred symbols and ritual objectifications. The term "symbol" is generally re- garded as something that stands for or represents something else. I use the term here to refer to the visible manifestation of invisible concepts or knowledge, and specifically to concepts about embodiment of the divine. In Hawai'i the divine was transmitted genealogically from the gods to chiefs, whose bod- ies were vessels of divine mana or sacredness. The most sacred parts of a chief's body were the head (especially the top of the head) and the back (especially the backbone). It was necessary to protect these body parts during dangerous or sacred situa- tions, and feathered helmets, cloaks, and capes protected and drew attention to these body parts. Important elements were color, design, length, shape, and backing. 147 148 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY FABRICATION The process of making feathered pieces was related to making an even more sacred object that embodied the divine, an 'aha cord. The Hawaiian concept of 'aha refers not only to cordage made of plant fibers, human hair, or animal intestines, but also to a prayer or service whose efficacy depended on recitation under kapu (taboo) without interruption (Pukui and Elbert, 1986:5). 'Aha cords were described in the Hawaiian language newspaper Ka Nupepa Ku 'oko 'a (19 Jul 1884) as follows: The cords were made by chiefs and kahunas [priests] with the worship of cer- tain gods. They were of sennit braided tight into a rope, some with a depression down the center, some like fish nets, others like the koko carrying net for wooden calabashes and still others with fringes. There were many kinds made by chiefs and priests who placed their faith in the gods they worshipped. The chiefs took the sennit cord as a sign of their high rank, of a lineage from the gods and also to observe the kapu of the priesthood. The process of making an 'aha cord consisted of one or more priests chanting a prayer while braiding the cord: "All of the chief's priests concentrated their prayers on it as it was being made under kapu. The priests forbade all those outside to enter, nor could those on the inside go out while the 'aha was being put in place, for the penalty was death" (Kamakau, 1991:162-163). The braiding captured the prayer and objecti- fied it, and it became a "tool" of the kahuna (Kamakau, 1976:143). It would be useful for chiefs to carry or wear such a prayer during sacred or dangerous situations, and I believe that is what they did. The base of the feathered cloak was nae, a net structure of olond fiber (Touchardia latifolia). This backing was often in small pieces, made by several people of varying skill. If the nae was fabricated while chanting prayers, it could entangle or cap- ture {ho 'oheihei) them to serve as perpetual prayers to protect its wearer. The addition of red feathers gave the nae even more sanctity. Red was the sacred color in Hawai'i, as elsewhere in Polynesia, and red feathers were considered among the most sacred natural products.3 The Hawaiian term for feather cloaks and capes is 'ahu 'ula, (red shoulder garments). Although some small feathered capes are entirely red, most feathered pieces are a combination of red and yellow.4 Sacred red feathers attached to a perpetual- prayer backing would constitute protection for the sacred backbone of a chief. Red feathers activated that to which they were attached. They formed the important outer layer of god images and a feathered "temple" into which an 'aha cord could be placed. A temple ceremony, kauila huluhulu, focused on readorning the images with feathers (Pukui and Elbert, 1986:135). An important taboo called kua 'a (flaming back) prohibited approaching a chief from the back; breaking this taboo was punishable by death (Pukui and Elbert, 1986:155). A feathered cloak might suspend this taboo in warfare or in a procession when it was appropriate for individuals of lesser status to walk behind a chief. Feathered helmets offered protection for the sa- cred top of the head. The base of a helmet was intertwined 'ie 'ie vine (Freycinetia arborea) activated by the addition of red feathers. Some helmets were entirely covered with feather- covered cords similar to 'aha cords, and feather-covered cords were sometimes attached to the edges of the helmets. DESIGN When examining designs on cloaks and capes, it is difficult to determine which is figure and which is ground, what are the designs, and what are the spaces between them (Figure 1). Im- portant design motifs were circles, crescents, and triangles. The designs and colors appear to be related to specific chiefly lines, and the foregrounding and backgrounding of the motifs changed over time. Information about design elements and their combinations was not recorded, nor do we know the "grammar" of the underlying design system. We know who some of the cloaks belonged to and can therefore associate some relationships between designs and people. Circles (po 'ai) seem to be related to certain chiefs, especially Kahikili of Maui and Ka'eo of Kaua'i. Triangles seem to be associated with the chiefs Kalani'opu'u and Kamehameha from the island of Ha- wai'i. Many capes incorporate crescent designs. Circles have the metaphorical meanings "surrounding" and "besieging" (Pukui and Elbert, 1986:307) and are related to pil- lars that hold up the earth and sky. Kamakau (1976:5) noted that at the edge of the ocean next to the base of the sky that lies around the platform of the earth, there is a circle or band (po 'ai) called the pillars of the earth, and at the lower edge of the firmament are the pillars of the sky. Translating this into cloak designs are arrangements such as those on two eighteenth-cen- tury cloaks: the so-called Joy cloak from Kaua'i (Figure 2) and a cloak in the British Museum that probably came from chief Kahikili from Maui (Kaeppler, 1985:112, 117). Hoaka (crescent) is a powerful word. Besides naming a de- sign used in the openwork carving on pahu drums (Figure 3) and a motif used in tattoo, hoaka also means (1) to cast a shadow, to drive away, ward off, frighten; (2) a spirit, appari- tion, ghost; and (3) brightness, shining, glittering, splendid. Hoaka is the term used for helmet crests and also has the figu- rative meaning "glory" (Pukui and Elbert, 1986:68). During certain rituals, the arms of the human participants were raised skyward, forming crescents like those carved on pahu drums. Crescent designs could give additional sacred qualities to sa- cred red-feather-covered, prayer-enhanced backings (Figure 4). FIGURE 1 (opposite, top).—Feathered cloak of Kalani'opu'u, high chief of Hawai'i Island during the visit of Captain Cook (1779), illustrating the diffi- culty of separating triangle and crescent designs from background. The upper half was the original cape. National Museum, Wellington, New Zealand (cat. no. FE 327). Photograph by John C. Wright. FIGURE 2 (opposite, bottom).—Feathered cloak with circle design. Courtesy of the Bishop Museum (neg. no. XC 76891). Photograph by Seth Joel. NUMBER 44 149 ACQUIRING FEATHERED OBJECTS Feathered cloaks and helmets were made for specific individu- als. The cloaks often began as short capes, probably for wear on a specific occasion; they could be ritually renewed by lengthening (Figure 1) or by adding important feathers as an overlay. This is comparable to the ritual renewal of temples (heiau) that were rebuilt or refurbished for important or dan- gerous situations. Because the cloaks and helmets had touched the sacred bodies of the chiefs, they carried the sacred power (mana) of that person and were dangerous for others to wear or even touch. Feathered cloaks could also be acquired by appropriation or inheritance. If a chief were killed in battle, his cloak would be taken as a battle prize. After a chief's natural death, his cloak would be kept by his son, as a symbol of his legitimate acquisi- tion of power. Liholiho (Kamehameha II) had three cloaks— one that he inherited, with the sacred mana of his father, Kame- hameha the Great; one that embedded the power of Kame- hameha's paternal line in that it was the cloak of Kekuaokalani (son of Kamehameha's full brother), taken as a battle prize by Liholiho, thereby consolidating his power; and one that embed- ded the sacredness of Liholiho's mother's line—it belonged to Kiwala'o (Liholiho's mother's father), taken as a battle prize by Kamehameha I. It is unlikely that Liholiho (or any other Hawaiian) ever wore these cloaks because of the important taboo against wearing clothing that had touched the body of someone else, especially the body of a high chief. Clothing embodied personal mana, and individuals who did not respect prohibitions associated with clothing were vulnerable to sorcery (Handy and Pukui, 1958:181-182). An important clothing taboo was that a son could not wear the clothing of his father (or a daughter could not wear the clothing of her mother). A father could wear the clothing of his son, but apparently only if the child were not of higher rank through the female line. It was best not to wear clothing that had belonged to someone else if one did not want to make one's body vulnerable. What did a chief do with extra, potentially harmful, feathered cloaks inherited from ancestors or taken as battle prizes? They could be given to unsuspecting Europeans, who would proba- bly not be harmed because they were obviously subject to a dif- ferent taboo system. Although Liholiho gave feather cloaks as royal gifts during his trip to England in 1823, he never gave away the cloak of his father or that of Kiwala'o, or Kekuaokalani—all of which legitimized his right to rule and embodied his genealogy. Which cloak was Liholiho's own is unknown. Presumably, he took it with him to England, where he died; probably it remained there, and this information was not given to the European who received it. It is probably a cloak now in Edinburgh, said to have been worn by Liholiho's "favorite medicine man." It is unlikely that Liholiho actually wore the cloak in England himself—he usually appeared in Eu- ropean dress. It could be carried or worn by one of Liholiho's attendants—who would not be harmed if Liholiho willfully 150 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY FIGURE 3.—Pahu drum with crescent design. Height 44.1 cm. Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (cat. no. 1954.4.3). Courtesy of the Pitt Rivers Museum (neg. no. A4f25). withdrew his mana while another person wore it with his per- mission. After Liholiho's death, the chief Boki—ranking mem- ber of Liholiho's entourage—knowing the clothing taboo, probably gave it away, as no one in Hawai'i could wear it, and Liholiho had no son to inherit it. FEATHERWORK AS STATUS AND ART OBJECTS These ritual objects, dangerous to others and incompatible with Christianity, were transformed along with Hawaiian society during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mate- rial culture not only changed by importing and adapting West- ern objects, but traditional Hawaiian material culture evolved as part of changing relationships and changing categories to meet the needs of a changed society. Objects were part of the transformation of social relationships among people, the gods, and the universe. In pre-European times, authority in its ideal Hawaiian form derived from the power of the most genealogically prestigious chiefs, especially before the charismatic chief Kamehameha (ca. 1758-1819) acquired guns and powerful followers. Kame- hameha operated by what was expedient rather than by what was genealogically correct. He downplayed highest genealogi- cal descent and its concomitant taboos, and he promulgated the change from the notion that genealogical prestige gives power and therefore authority, to the concept that power gives author- ity and therefore prestige. His son, Liholiho (of higher rank than Kamehameha through his mother) induced his own changes, including the overthrow of the state gods and their re- strictive taboos, among them the important taboo prohibiting men and women from eating together. The skepticism about traditional beliefs and practices that followed the influx of for- eign ideas, and the unpunished lapses of taboos, induced at least some priests to support and encourage Liholiho. Within a few short years, during which Christian missionaries arrived, the concept "power gives authority and therefore prestige," evolved further to "chiefly status equals authority." Status, rather vaguely defined and without the sanctity of the gods, be- came the norm. Values and traditions that continue today derive from this concept. The bilaterally extended kin group ('ohana) grew in importance as did the tradition of feasting together— without gender or rank proscription. The primarily peaceful reigns of Kamehameha's successors, and the influx of foreign ideas, expanded values to emphasize the 'ohana. Along with social changes, objects of sanctity, pro- tection, utility, ritual, and power took on expanded value as works of art in the Western sense. Prestige, power, authority, and status became more interchangeable, and traditional Hawaiian objects became objects of value for the enhancement of status. In pre-Christian times, shared cultural knowledge was neces- sary to understand what meanings were attached to designs or motifs, how they could be combined into patterned sets as a vi- sual grammar, and how to decode the messages embodied in them. If chiefs were going to continue to wear feathered cloaks, it could be on the basis of tradition and aesthetics rather than as objectified prayers, which was not a concept compatible with Christianity. Feathered objects retained their importance as sta- tus objects suitable for ceremonial occasions. With the demise of the Kamehameha line of chiefs in 1872, the wearing of featherwork almost ceased except for harmless replicas (Figure 5). A short feathered cape was made for Kalakaua by Mrs. John Ena (Brigham, 1918:52), but long cloaks were not made for King Kalakaua, Queen Kapi'olani, or Queen Lili'uokalani. Other featherwork pieces were acquired by them to become what might be called the state cloaks and capes. Queen Lili'uokalani posed for an 1892 photograph seated on a cloak on her throne, but the primary use of featherwork pieces during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was for funerals (Figure 6). The techniques of fabrication were all but forgotten, and only recently have they been revived. Feather- work pieces made in recent years (often by non-Hawaiians), are considered art objects and are used primarily for display. Starting with the eighteenth-century voyages of Captain James Cook, feathered objects became part of museum and private collections in Europe and America, where they were considered exotic "artificial curiosities," and later, art objects. NUMBER 44 151 FIGURE 4.—Feathered cape with crescent design. American Museum of Natural History (cat. no. 80.0/784). Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History (neg. no. 335315). Photograph by A. Singer. Except for the important legitimizing cloaks of the Kame- hameha chiefs mentioned above, by 1840 most cloaks and hel- mets had been given to ship captains and prominent Europe- ans. The last descendant of the Kamehameha dynasty was Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, and the remaining Kame- hameha dynasty featherwork is now in the Bishop Museum, which was founded by her husband, Charles Reed Bishop, to conserve the difficult-to-care-for and sometimes dangerous- to-touch art objects that she had inherited. Nineteenth-century Hawaiians, like most people, wanted to be up-to-date. In 1818 Kamehameha wanted to be painted in his red vest, whereas the artist, Choris, wanted to depict him in his traditional clothing. Liholiho and his entourage wore European- style clothing during their visit to London in 1823, but the En- glish artist John Hayter represented chief Boki wearing a feather cloak and helmet—and the cloak and helmet were left in Eng- land. Hawaiian self-presentation enlarged nineteenth-century traditions. The 'ohana and values associated with it—especially feasts (lit 'au)—became more prominent than the eighteenth- century values associated with warring chiefs (before 1819 it was forbidden for men and women to eat together). During the eighteenth century, feathered cloaks were protective devices worn during sacred and dangerous situations; during the nine- teenth century, Hawaiian chiefs wore feathered cloaks as visual expressions of status and prestige on ceremonial occasions. Many Hawaiian objects (such as stone food pounders) be- came obsolete technologically or taboo to their original owner's descendants because of clothing restrictions. It became useful to have treasure houses in which to keep these important artifacts, and museum collections have become important for forging cul- 152 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY NUMBER 44 153 FIGURE 5 (opposite, top).—Replicas of feathered cloaks worn by the Royal Court during Aloha Week, Hawaiian Village, Ala Moana Park, ca. 1947. Cour- tesy of the Bishop Museum (neg. no. CP 115,269). Photograph by Tai Sing Loo. FIGURE 6 (opposite, bottom).—Funeral of Prince Albert Kuniakea in front of 'Iolani Palace, 1903. Courtesy of the Bishop Museum (neg. no. CA 96494). Photograph by F. Davey. rural, ethnic, or national identity. Objects serve as ethnic identity markers in a future that recognizes its roots in the past, and even if they are not worn or used, it is appropriate to keep them safe. Hawaiian objects, especially feathered cloaks and capes, were part of categories that embedded social distancing. The motifs and structure of specific objects were part of an aes- thetic system based on kaona and no 'eau, embodying artistic memory and philosophy. With the coming of Christian mis- sionaries in 1820, the life of objects became less sacred and more social and political. Since the mid-nineteenth century, these objects have become art in the Western sense of the term, and featherwork now plays a significant role in Hawaiian con- cepts of the past. Identification with these objects reveals how individuals and groups perceive themselves and want to be per- ceived by others. Today, mutual support, environmental con- servation, and sharing are values associated with the extended family, while feather-cloaked "chiefs" appear in replica during Aloha Week events (Figure 5) and indicate points of interest to tourists for the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau (Figure 7). FIGURE 7.—Hawaii Visitors Bureau sign featuring a chief dressed in a feath- ered cloak and helmet, directing tourists to the statue of King Kamehameha, Honolulu, 1990. Photograph by Adrienne L. Kaeppler. Ritual Movements: Sacred System to Broad Participation Movement systems were equally important cultural forms in old Hawai'i. Two movement systems existed in pre-Christian times: ha 'a, a ritual movement system performed as a sacrament to the gods on the outdoor temples, and hula, formal or informal en- tertainment performed for a human audience. Ha 'a, performed as rituals for Lono—god of peace, agriculture, and fertility— and other gods, combined chanting, drumming, and movements at sacred ritual junctures. Movements objectified the sacred, sung texts while the performers carried out "ritual work"—ty- ing, braiding, and placement of sacred objects, such as 'aha cords, into sacred receptacles—that was concerned with the conservation and proliferation of human, plant, and animal life. We have little first-hand knowledge of ha 'a movement se- quences because the temple rituals of which they were a part were overthrown in 1819, but it is likely that movement se- quences, like the texts they accompanied, would have had a standardized form that ideally was performed without deviation. After the overthrow of the state religious system, the sacred sung texts and movements of ha 'a were removed from the tem- ples and went underground for nearly 60 years. During the Kalakaua revival in the 1880s, it was permitted to perform them openly again; ha 'a were transformed into hula pahu, and their interpretation was expanded in ways that would make them appropriate to new contexts in a Christian world. Reli- gious metaphors, myths, and rituals were recontextualized, ex- panding cultural traditions with understandings of a universe that also included Christian ideologies. Hula, in contrast to ha 'a, were usually composed in honor of people and places and conveyed this information in an indirect way through veiled or layered meaning. This kaona, especially in relation to words and their combinations, had a power of its own that could harm as well as honor. During the reign of King Kalakaua, some ha 'a were reconstituted as hula and were per- formed in his honor; these eventually became associated with him as name songs. One of these was the most important of the remaining ha 'alhula pahu repertoire, "Kaulilua," derived from a ritual for Lono (Kaeppler, 1993). As embodied today, its ex- panded interpretation and kaona refer to a passionate, yet dis- dainful woman—an ancestor of Kalakaua. The movements did not change, but its new interpretation helped to legitimize Kalakaua's rise to power. In 1836, when Kalakaua was born, the state religion had been overthrown only 17 years. Of chiefly lineage, son of Kapa'akea and Keohokalohe, Kalakaua was no doubt filled with stories of the "olden days." He would have understood how Kamehameha I had used aspects of tradi- tion to advance his own cause and legitimize his line and how lineage manipulation could be used for status verification. Al- though Kalakaua was an elected king, he was also interested in demonstrating his high rank and status according to Hawaiian tradition. He encouraged performances of old dances and con- tinued the practice of prohibiting the attendance of non-Hawai- ians at certain dance events, such as wakes for high chiefs. 154 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY The hula tradition that emerged from Kalakaua's court was basically a secular form suitable as court entertainment, com- bining traditions of a number of hula masters into what can be considered the style of the Kalakaua era. This was essentially hula ku 'i, dance that combined old and new, usually performed in conjunction with chant and a gourd idiophone (ipu). In hula ku 7 movements interpret the text, whereas in older hula, move- ments allude to the text. Although sometimes performed in his honor, hula pahu was not a significant part of the Kalakaua hula revival, but traditions associated with this form reap- peared in the 1920s and spread in the 1930s. DANCE AND CLOTHING AS TOURIST ICONS A fortuitous combination of the right people at the right place and time stimulated a revival on the island of O'ahu in the late 1920s. This conjunction and the characteristic Hawaiian atti- tude expressed in the proverb All knowledge is not taught in one school ('a'ole ipau ka 'ike i ka halau ho'okahi), resulted in many older hula reappearing with renewed vigor. This time they moved to Waiklkr. The Royal Hawaiian Girl's Glee Club was formed in 1927 by Louise Akeo, and this group was among the first to perform at the new and elegant Royal Ha- waiian Hotel. The Royal Hawaiian Girl's Glee Club danced for the entertainment of tourists with a varied hula program. This program included hula pahu taught to the dancers by the well- known traditional hula master Keakaokala Kanahele. On the same program, the dancers performed "half foreign hula" (hapa haole hula) accompanied by Johnny Noble, Hawaiian composer and bandleader at the Hotel. In 1937 the Kodak Hula Show was founded, featuring Louise Akeo and the Royal Ha- waiian Girl's Glee Club. They, and their performing descen- dants, have performed ever since in what has become the most enduring show for tourists in Hawai'i (Figure 8)—still per- formed essentially in the style of the 1930s. Sam Pua Ha'aheo, another well-known traditional hula mas- ter of the 1930s, moved his talents to the secular arena in night clubs, such as Don the Beachcomber, Niumalu Night Club, Ha- waiian Village, and the Queen's Surf. Sam Pua Ha'aheo was the musician/chanter for the entertainer Lei Conn, and later his premier student, Kau'i Zuttermeister, replaced him. In the romantic mural paintings of Eugene Savage, the tour- ist orientation of the time is recorded. His depictions include the revived hula performances of the 1930s and feature the sa- cred hula pahu, descended from the temples of old, but now in the service of a feather cloaked and helmeted King (Figure 9). These murals were painted originally for the S.S. Lurline, the premier tourist ship, and were reproduced as menu covers. The contemporary paintings of Frank Macintosh (Figure 10) were also reproduced as menu covers and illustrated Hawaiians in what became "aloha clothing." Such illustrations were at least partially responsible for what tourists believed Hawai'i was like and helped to build expectations of exotic dance, food, and clothing. As barkcloth and featherwork were no longer made or worn, however, new exotic clothing, such as the aloha shirt, sa- rong, and mu 'umu 'u, was created to fill the void and became the "must have" tourist attire. This clothing was worn to a lit 'au, the Kodak Hula Show, and evening dance performances at WaikTkT Hotels—which eventually featured such luminar- ies as Hilo Hattie and Tolani Luahine. Indeed, dance, food, and WM 1 a &2K *"^2f „* \. FIGURE 8.—Kodak Hula Show, ca. 1961. Courtesy of the Bishop Museum (neg. no. CP 112,963). NUMBER 44 155 FIGURE 9.—Menu cover based on a mural painting by Eugene Savage, illustrating dancers accompanied by apahu drum. These menus were used on the Matson ship Lurline in the 1940s and 1950s. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. FIGURE 10.—Menu cover by Frank Mcintosh used on ships of the Matson Navigation Company between 1937 and 1947, showing exotic aloha clothing and flowers. DeSoto Brown Collection. Courtesy of the DeSoto Brown Collection. 156 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY unusual clothing became icons for tourists who had to experi- ence them. During the 1940s, performances centered on the Armed Forces, and movie stars, such as Dorothy Lamour, got into the act. Hula continued to change into Waiklkl tourist art and reached wide audiences through Arthur Godfrey, the Radio show "Hawaii Calls," and Hollywood films, such as Bird of Paradise. Traditional hula went into decline and by the 1960s was considered by many to be an endangered tradition. Con- cerned Hawaiian residents—both Hawaiian and non-Hawai- ian—decided something must be done to preserve the old dances and their histories, and they enlisted the services of knowledgeable Hawaiians who would be recognized as Ha- waiian cultural treasures. Under the aegis of the State Founda- tion on Culture and the Arts, an organization called the State Conference on Hawaiian Dance (now the State Council on Ha- waiian Heritage) was established in 1969. The purpose of the group was the preservation and the perpetuation of the dances—and with them, the cultural heritage—of old Hawai'i. The group was composed of representatives of cultural institu- tions and was backed by important living repositories of tradi- tional dance. The renaissance of traditional dance went into full swing. In the meantime, the Merrie Monarch Festival was begun in Hilo, Hawai'i, in 1963. "Aloha Week" tourist festivities brought tourists to Honolulu, and the Merrie Monarch Festival was calculated to bring people to Hilo. Although the Merrie Monarch Festival includes craft demonstrations, parades, and other festivities, it is best known for its hula competitions, which draw some 20 group-entrants each year, and a special exhibition evening featuring a hula studio that has not entered the competition (Figure 11). Much controversy has been en- gendered regarding whether prizes should be given for perfor- mances that preserve traditions of old Hawai'i or for creative new choreographies based on old Hawaiian forms. The con- troversy has not been resolved, and in some ways the Merrie Monarch Festival tends to be divisive among competing groups. Competition between unrelated kin groups (or dance- groups), like the wars of old, can be harsh and bitter. For some, not winning means you have lost—and is, like losing a battle in old Hawai'i, degrading—a modern version of tradi- tional jealousies among chiefs of warring lines. But this, too, is an element of ethnic identity, an identity that separates Ha- waiians (and would-be Hawaiians) from the larger society, whose values are primarily Western. Hawaiian identity perpet- uates the values of respect and support for one's own ingroup, sometimes at the expense of other groups, even if they, too, are Hawaiian. Unlike the revivals of the Kalakaua era and the 1930s, which were limited to a relatively small, select number of people, the renaissance of the 1970s has involved hundreds, perhaps thou- sands, of individuals—men and women, young and old—mak- ing hula an important outward manifestation of the Hawaiian renaissance. All important ethnic identity occasions, for exam- ple, the important Ho'olokahi day ("to bring about unity"), that ended the "Year of the Hawaiian" on 23 January 1988, featured traditional hula and the playing oipahu drums. FIGURE 11.—Performance by the Zuttermeister Hula Studio at the exhibition evening of the Merrie Monarch Festival, 1990. Photograph by Adrienne L. Kaeppler. NUMBER 44 157 CONTEMPORARY HULA Today, hula is presented in three ways: as art, as tourist enter- tainment, and as ethnic identity marker. Hula as art has considerable time depth, having been part of entertainment for chiefs and visiting dignitaries from as far back as oral traditions and written sources testify. The impor- tance oi kaona and evaluative criteria forjudging hula suggest that hula has always been considered art. Hawaiian Pageants held in the first decades of the twentieth century presented hula as a staged or dramatic form (Figure 12). These pageants took place at a beach or at Kilauea volcano, honoring chiefs or Pele the volcano goddess in an audience-oriented form. Hula as art continued into the 1930s, when Keakaokala Kanahele and her protege Eleanor Hiram were hired to perform in concert, at par- ties, and at important events, such as the visit of President Roosevelt in 1934. Dance programs at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, at least as early as the 1930s, presented Hawaiian dance as art, and since the establishment of the ethnomusicol- ogy program at the University of Hawai'i, Hawaiian dance has been presented in concert. The "Dances We Dance" concert dance series presents Hawaiian dance alongside other great dance traditions of the world as an art form. An important event in the recognition oi hula as an art outside of Hawai'i took place in July 1987, when two full evenings of the Ameri- can Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina, were devoted to Hawaiian hula and featured four traditional hula schools. Hula as tourist entertainment was a logical extension of hula as art and was presented to entertain early explorers, officers of visiting ships, and the passengers of luxury liners. Traditional hula was brought into the mainstream of tourist entertainment when Louise Akeo and the Royal Hawaiian Girl's Glee Club began to perform at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in the late 1920s. Since then, traditional and nontraditional versions of hula have been part of the tourist scene, from the large hotels in Waiklkl, with a wide range of visitors, to luxury hotels on the neighboring islands. The most important significant use of hula in recent years has been its emergence as an ethnic identity marker. Since the beginning of the Hawaiian renaissance in the late 1960s, hula has played an important role. Previous to this renaissance, hula was considered part of cultural identity and was presented as one of many interrelated facets of Hawaiian culture. The many lecture demonstrations by Kawena Pukui with Keahi Luahine, and later with Patience Namaka Bacon, during the 1930s and 1940s for historical societies, museums, and schools, focused on dance as a vehicle for understanding Hawaiian culture. This has been retained in such places as the Bishop Museum, which presents dance performances as part of an overall cultural ex- perience. Dance is also presented as part of cultural identity when Hawai'i is represented in folk festivals at Pacific Festi- vals of Arts and other world venues. Hula was presented as a folk tradition, as an aspect of culture, and as an ethnic identity marker at the Festival of American Folklife at the Smithsonian Institution in 1984 as part of the Grand Generation program (Figure 13) and in 1989, when Hawai'i was the featured state. Cultural identity has taken on a political dimension as it has become the visual manifestation of ethnic identity. Dance, as FIGURE 12.—Postcard of a pageant presented at the Mid-Pacific Carnival, ca. 1910. Courtesy of the Bishop Museum (neg. no. CP 115,267). 158 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY FIGURE 13.—Three generations of Hawaiian dancers: (left to right) Noenoelani Lewis, Kau'i Zuttermeister, and Hau'olionalani Lewis. From the Grand Generation Program at the Festival of American Folklife, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C, 1984. Photograph by Adrienne L. Kaeppler. part of politics, can be an aural and visual statement of distinc- tiveness. A hula pahu that developed from a temple ritual is '"Au'a 'ia"—often performed today in identity-promoting con- texts because it embodies the prophecy of great changes pre- dicted for the Hawaiian Islands and is an encouragement for Hawaiians to hold fast to their heritage. Originally part of im- portant temple rituals that dealt with the war god Kuka'il- imoku, in the 1880s it took on expanded meaning when the prophecy it embodied was at least partially fulfilled. Another important song used today in Hawaiian identity situations is "Kaulana na Pua" ("Famous are the Flowers"), which ex- presses the feelings of the Hawaiians at the overthrow of the Monarchy and annexation by the United States. It notes that they would rather eat stones than sign demeaning papers. Art and Identity More Hawaiians are appreciating and championing the impor- tance of their heritage and how it can be used to promote iden- tity in the modem world. Identity arises from the desire of Ha- waiians to perceive and present themselves as different from the surrounding cultural and social environment in which they find themselves after more than 200 years of foreign contact and im- migration. Identity is promoted politically for the redemption of land and reparation for the cultural alienation that occurred since annexation. There are movements toward sovereign rec- ognition and self-determination. Visual manifestations of iden- tity are based on traditional Hawaiian artifacts and dance. In contrast to featherwork, primarily a historic art form, much of which is now in museums for safekeeping, more and more Hawaiians—male and female—are studying hula as part of ethnic identity. They are engaged in understanding the movement conventions of hula and how they communicate. Dance communicates, but only to those who have the competence5 to understand the structure of the movement sys- tem as well as knowledge of its sociocultural background and history. Traditionally, hula functioned to promote prestige, power, status, and social distancing, but in its three revivals, it has fostered the renaissance of traditional Hawaiian culture. Unlike featherwork, Hawaiian dance has become politicized, and it is now widely understood that knowledge and compe- tence in this cultural form is valued as the most important vi- sual ingredient of ethnic identity. Notes 1. Any exploration of the social life of ritual objects that fell into disuse in 1819, and especially the meaning of designs embedded in these objects, can be said to be speculative. The presentation here is based on visual and literary metaphors in social, cultural, and historical contexts derived from observations of Hawaiians published in Hawaiian newspapers. English translations are in the Hawaiian Ethnological Notes (HEN) in the Bishop Museum Archives, Ho- nolulu, Hawai'i. Also important is the dictionary of Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel Elbert (1986). Some of the research on which this essay is based has been used in my earlier publications (Kaeppler, 1985, 1988, 1992, 1993; Kaep- pler et al., 1993), which can be consulted for more ethnographic and historical details not relevant to the thrust of this paper. 2. Translation in the HEN. 1. NUMBER 44 159 3. Similar concepts of sacred processes for making sacred fibrous products by prayer and entanglement were found in Tahiti, as was the importance of the addition of red feathers (see the Orsmond Manuscript in the Bishop Museum Archives for 20 pages of 'aha entries). 4. Yellow feathers were rarer and more difficult to procure; they came from birds that were primarily black. In the nineteenth century, yellow feathers ac- quired a political significance in that only powerful chiefs could obtain them (Kaeppler, 1985:121). 5. 1 use "competence" in Dell Hymes's sense of "communicative compe- tence," which enables viewers to understand a grammatical movement se- quence that they have never seen before because they know the structure of the system that the movement sequence expresses. Literature Cited Brigham, 1918. Handy, E. 1958. Kaeppler, 1985. 1988. 1992. William T. Additional Notes on Hawaiian Feather Work. Honolulu: Memoirs of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, 7( 1): 1 -69. S. Craighill, and Mary Kawena Pukui The Polynesian Family System in Ka-'u, Hawai'i. xvi+259 pages. Wellington, New Zealand: The Polynesian Society. Adrienne L. Hawaiian Art and Society: Traditions and Transformations. In Antony Hooper and Judith Huntsman, editors, Transformations of Polynesian Culture, pages 105-131. Auckland, New Zealand: Polynesian Society. [Series: Memoir, Polynesian Society, 45.] Pacific Festivals and the Promotion of Identity, Politics, and Tour- ism. In Adrienne L. Kaeppler and Olive Lewin, editors, Come Mek Me Hoi' Yu Han ': The Impact of Tourism on Traditional Music, pages 121-138. Kingston, Jamaica: Jamaica Memory Bank. Ali'i and Maka'ainana: The Representation of Hawaiians in Muse- ums at Home and Abroad. In Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kraemer, and Steven D. Lavine, editors, Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, pages 458—475. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1993. Hula Pahu: Hawaiian Drum Dances, Volume 1: Ha'a and Hula Pahu: Sacred Movements. 289 pages. Honolulu, Hawaii: Bishop Museum Press. Kaeppler, Adrienne L., Christian Kaufmann, and Douglas Newton 1993. L 'art Oceanien. 637 pages. Paris: Citadelles and Mazenod. Kamakau, Samuel Manaiakalani 1976. 777e Works of the People of Old: Na Hana akaPo'e Kahiko. viii+ 170 pages. Honolulu, Hawaii: Bishop Museum Press. 1991. Tales and Traditions of the People of Old: Na Mo'olelo a ka Po'e Kahiko. 184 pages. Honolulu, Hawaii: Bishop Museum Press. Pukui, Mary Kawena, and Samuel H. Elbert 1986. Hawaiian Dictionary: Hawaiian-English, English-Hawaiian. xxvi+ 572 pages. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii. The Neets'aii Gwich'in in the Twentieth Century Jack Campisi The Neets'aii Gwich'in (also known as the Chandalar Kutchin) own and use 1.8 million acres (729,000 ha) of land within the Arctic Circle north of the confluence of the Yukon and Porcu- pine rivers of Alaska (Figure 1). The property rises from 440 ft (134.1 m) above sea level (ASL) along the Yukon River to 2000 ft (609.6 m) ASL at its northern boundary. The tree line in the region is at 1200 ft (365.75 m); the land below the tree line is covered by a boreal forest consisting mainly of white and black spruce, white birch, aspen, poplar, and willow. The Christian River marks the eastern boundary of the tribal land, and the east fork of the Chandalar River marks its western and part of its northern boundary. The entire region is subject to permafrost, which may reach depths of several hundred feet or more. The climate is subarctic, with a normal winter range of-49° F to +10° F (-45° C to -12° C) and a summer range of+32° F to +67° F (0° C to 19° C). It is not uncommon, however, for win- ter temperatures to drop to -65° F (—48° C) and summer tem- peratures to reach +80° F (27° C) (Caulfield, 1983:17-18). In addition to extensive river systems, the area has innumera- ble streams and lakes, which contain whitefish, northern pike, arctic char, lake trout, burbot, and suckers. Several species of salmon, including king and dog salmon, occur in the Yukon River. While there are many species of small game animals, in- cluding snowshoe hare, Arctic ground squirrel, and porcupine, and several fur-bearing species, such as black and grizzly bear, lynx, wolverine, mink, weasel, beaver, muskrat, martin, and wolf, the most important food sources for the Neets'aii Gwich'in are moose, Dall sheep, and caribou (Caulfield, 1983:20-22). Although all of these animals play a part in the tribe's subsistence, the last mentioned, caribou—Rangifer tarandus—has special importance to their subsistence and identity. This paper is concerned with the Neets'aii Gwich'in in the twentieth century. It focuses on three aspects of their history: the impact of technological changes, the influence of Christian- ity and government policies, and the role of particular tribal leaders in the adjustment to change and the preservation of a way of life. Within the past 150 years, the Neets'aii Gwich'in have adopted the gun, steel trap, airplane, snowmobile, radio, television, processed foods, tobacco, and alcohol, to mention Jack Campisi, Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Ul Pequot Trail, Mashantucket, Connecticut 06339-3180, USA. but a few of the more important items. Even before technology could influence them, however, Christianity arrived. By the 1870s Anglican, and later, Episcopal, missionaries had con- verted most tribal members and had developed a contingent of native lay ministers to continue the proselytizing. To add to the factors impacting the Neets'aii Gwich'in, the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, and although some decades passed without federal government intrusion, the mineral wealth of the territory alone meant supervision from afar by interests igno- rant of or hostile to native rights, needs, and desires. The grant- ing of statehood in 1959 only increased the pressures. In spite of the intrusions on their culture, the Neets'aii Gwich'in have not given up the trap line or the hunt, and they continue to depend on more traditional food resources, such as caribou, salmon, and moose. They have adopted Christianity by fitting it to their belief systems, and they have been success- ful in their struggles with and against federal and state officials to maintain their way of life. In large part this has been made possible by the combination of geographical remoteness, strong cultural values, and extraordinary leadership at propi- tious moments. These factors have brought significant changes in technology and lifestyle to these people, while serving to intensify their view of themselves as a unique, separate people. To understand this evolution, an exploration of the nineteenth century Neets'aii Gwich'in is in order. The Neets'aii Gwich'in in the Nineteenth Century In 1847 Alexander Murray traveled to the confluence of the Yukon and Porcupine rivers and established Fort Yukon, then in Russian America, as a trading post. During his one-year stay, Murry met a number of people from different Gwich'in tribes, including the Neets'aii Gwich'in, whom he located northwest of the "Vanta Kootchin" (Crow River), "being right in the midst of the Carribeux lands, I suppose no better place could be found for provisions" (Murray, 1910:36). He estimated their number at 40 men, referring to them as the "Ney-et-se Kootchin' (Gens du large)" (Murray, 1910:35-36), which he translated as "People of the wide country" (Murray, 1910:83). His contact with the tribe was minimal; he reported only one visit by four individuals in the fall of 1847 (Murray, 1910:62). 161 162 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY FIGURE 1.—Neets'aii Gwich'in territory. The Neets'aii Gwich'in that Murray met so briefly at Fort Yukon were but one of nine (possibly 10) Athapascan-speaking Gwich'in tribes that occupied interior Alaska and western Can- ada (Slobodin, 1981:514-515). These tribes ranged from the headwaters of the Colville River in the west to the Mackenzie River in the east, and north and south of the Yukon River. Os- good (1934:172) translated Neets'aii Gwich'in as "those who dwell off the flats" (i.e., Yukon River). He called them the Chandalar River Kutchin, a name derived from the corruption of the French gens du large. Slobodin (1981:515) located them north northwest of Fort Yukon, between the Chandalar River on the west and the Sheenjek River on the east. It took less than two decades for the Gwich'in to feel the im- pact of the Euro-Americans. Around 1860, weakened by a se- ries of defeats at the hands of the Inupiat and Koyukon, mem- bers of the Di'haii Gwich'in moved eastward from their territory at the headwaters of the Koyukon River and began joining the Neets'aii Gwich'in (Burch and Mishler, 1995). This infusion of Di'haii Gwich'in was fortuitous. The Neets'aii Gwich'in, along with other Gwich'in, had suffered grievously from a scarlet fever epidemic that struck the area in 1863 (Burch and Mishler, 1995:158; Raboff, 1999), so the gradual influx of Di'haii Gwich'in survivors may well have been welcomed. The 1860s also saw the rise of an intense competition be- tween Protestants and Catholics for the minds or, more particu- larly, the souls of the Gwich'in. The early skirmishes in this battle for converts took place primarily in the westernmost parts of the Canadian Subarctic, at Fort Simpson, Fort McPher- son, and La Pierre's House, but by 1861, the Anglican priest William West Kirkby had made his way down to Fort Yukon (Mishler, 1990:121). The following year, the Reverend Robert McDonald replaced Kirkby at Fort Yukon, after learning that the Oblate priest Jean Seguin was headed there with conversion on his mind. The competition between the two lasted more than a decade, with the Anglican winning out over the Oblate, partly because Father McDonald spoke Ojibway, Cree, and French fluently (he was one-quarter Ojibway). There were, however, other factors that made for success. The Anglican missionaries prevailed in part because they arrived first and stayed the longest but also because they were supported by the Hudson's Bay Company Protestant infrastructure, which included sympathetic bilingual interpreters and (apparently) a large supply of tobacco.... However, the Anglicans also prevailed because they and their American counterparts, the Episcopalians, encouraged a Native ministry and Native lay readers. (Mishler, 1990:125) Some of the lay readers were reportedly former shamans who were able to integrate aspects of the new religion with tradi- tional beliefs (Mishler, 1990:125). With the purchase of Alaska in 1867, the Hudson's Bay Company was forced to move its operation to Canada, and with it, in 1869, went Father McDonald. He settled at Fort McPher- son, where he developed an Gwich'in orthography he named Tukudh. Subsequently, he translated the Bible, the Book of Common Prayers and some hymns in Tukudh (Krauss and Golla, 1981:78). Of perhaps more importance, MacDonald taught a number of Gwich'in to read and write his orthography. One of those who learned to write in Tukudh was Albert Edward Tritt. He was born on 17 May 1880, near Arctic Vil- lage, the son of Edward Tritt and Sarah Andrew. He grew up in the shadow of the Brooks Range, on the upper reaches of the east branch of the Chandalar River. Tritt informs us through his journal that his first contact with Tukudh came from his father's daily reading of the Bible. His later conversion to Christianity was a result of a vision, but he was heavily influenced by his fa- ther's devotion, as well as by a number of religious experiences that occurred while he was still a child. In one, a dying member of the tribe told of her visit to heaven and the message she re- ceived. She had entered a house of many rooms, where she was provided food and given a message. She was told to "make one trip on earth" and to tell the people that each was being watched from heaven for "all kinds of doing right and wrong." She told NUMBER 44 163 those present that the next day they would find ample caribou, and the next day they did indeed locate a small herd. Tritt, barely seven years old, went with his mother while "men, women, children got round the caribou & kill all of them. ...When they were shooting the caribo the noise & echoe of the guns sure scare me it was like a thunder.... We were all happy everybody was" (Tritt, n.d., box 2, folder 1:4-7). Robert McKennan, who conducted research among the Neets'aii Gwich'in during the summer of 1933, met and inter- viewed Tritt, who by that time was a well-respected preacher. Tritt described how he had struggled "to understand the mean- ing of the Bible," how he had retreated to the mountains for 40 days, how he agonized over the mysteries of the Bible, and how, in the end, he had received a revelation. "During this quest for true understanding," wrote McKennan, "in true apoc- alyptic fashion he was struck by a blinding flash of light and fell into a faint. When he recovered consciousness, he was a new man and was sure that his vocation lay in bringing the gos- pel to his people together with reading and writing" (McKen- nan, 1965:87). The following winter Tritt went back to Fort Yukon, where he studied Tukudh and the Bible. Around 1910 Tritt led what McKennan characterized as a revitalization movement among the Neets'aii Gwich'in around Arctic Village. He returned to Arctic Village and be- gan his ministry, preaching a conservative form of Christian- ity and advocating the return to old hunting methods. He stressed the use of caribou fences and, in fact, convinced his followers to build a caribou fence several miles in length. Completed around 1914, the fence was poorly located, "with the result that the Indians never succeeded in taking caribou in it, and it came to serve only as a symbol of the old hunting life" (McKennan, 1965:87). Why did Tritt decide to build a caribou fence near Arctic Vil- lage? McKennan argued that it was a part of, indeed the major proof for, the nativistic content of Tritt's revitalization move- ment. According to McKennan, Tritt had been a shaman but had abandoned this role after his revelation (McKennan, 1965:86-88). It seems odd that he would give up shamanism and yet try to reinstate a communal hunting method as part of a belief in the need to return to old ways. Would not a return to shamanistic practices and beliefs have served better for a return to old ways? There is another explanation for the building of a caribou fence near Arctic Village. Before 1900 the Neets'aii Gwich'in relied heavily on caribou fences. Rifles were unavailable and the few muskets the tribal members had, although used in con- junction with the fences, were ineffective except at close range. Ammunition was scarce. Tritt spoke of two or three men going to Old Rampart in the summer to get supplies, including ammu- nition. "Each one got 10 or 20 bullets, a little powder, and 100 brass caps. This was a winter's grubstake. They always had to look for bullet in meat to make it over and use again. This was the only way the supply lasted all winter" (Dalziell, 1922:2). In the fall, families tended their fences and waited for the caribou to come. If they did, all members of the family would surround the herd, pushing it along the fence, where some were caught in snares and others were trapped and killed in the sur- round at the end of the fence. After a successful hunt the women and children would haul the meat and hides back to camp. The head was roasted, and the meat was boiled in a pot, and the family members ate and told the story of the hunt. After the feast the Chief made a speech to the people, telling them to divide what they have killed honestly among themselves. Don't forget old men and women, poor and helpless. They are the ones that got the meat for you, "in their minds." God wants you to take care of them. Keep all bones of meat and give assent with one accord. When speech is made some go out doors. Others listen from within tents for all can hear. No one questions the Chiefs authority, even if he wants them all to move to another place. (Dalziell, 1922:3) Families whose hunt failed moved to the camps of those who had been more successful and who shared their larder until all was consumed. Then it was time to scatter again in search of caribou. In Tritt's words: "Whole tribe kept together and 'not each man for himself" (Dalziell, 1922:3). During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Neets'aii Gwich'in underwent a major change in their hunting method. Around 1890 a few tribal members crossed the Brooks Range and purchased three rifles from the Eskimo. A year later the Eskimo returned the visit, bringing with them more rifles (Tritt, n.d., box 1:11, 13, box 2:4—5). The use of rifles lessened the need for cooperative efforts and thus placed less impor- tance on maintaining the fence and corral. Because of the change in hunting technique, the tribal membership scattered. Now, instead of having a relatively stable population around Arctic Village for at least part of the year, to whom Tritt could preach, he had to travel to bring his message. For the next half century, Tritt traveled continuously, preaching anywhere he met Gwich'in (Tritt, n.d., box 3). From this perspective, Tritt's interest in constructing the caribou fence related more to a de- sire for a fixed group to whom he could preach than to a plan to return to past ways. The Development of Neets'aii Gwich'in Camps With the changes in hunting method and the distribution of the population came a change in the patterns of leadership. About 1890 the tribe's long-time leader, Chief Peter, died (Tritt, n.d., box 1:12). No single successor was accepted by the tribal members. In his place, several men, heads of extended fami- lies, were recognized as leaders. Among these was Chief Christian, born in 1866, who founded the settlement at Arctic Village. Tritt and Chief Christian differed over Tritt's views on religion, and when their differences could not be resolved, Chief Christian moved his followers to his camp on Christian River. This schism occurred around 1924. It appears, however, that Chief Christian spent time in both Arctic Village and Christian Village, and the disagreement between the men did not prevent their association. During the first decade of the 164 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY twentieth century, a third leader, Old Robert, settled with his family at Venetie. Thus, by 1920, there were three groupings of Neets'aii Gwich'in. A United States Bureau of Education report in 1915 identified Christian Village, which it described as consisting of two villages "and some scattered families strung out for about twenty five miles" and Chandalar Village1 (Venetie). No mention was made of Arctic Village, but it may have been the second village referred to in the report in con- nection with Christian Village. When McKennan visited the Neets'aii Gwich'in in the sum- mer of 1933, he found them located around three camps, which he referred to as bands. Each camp consisted of a few extended families, each related to the other and also related to families in the others' camps (McKennan, 1965:19). Arctic Village had a population of 36. The principal families were Tritt, Frank, Pe- ter, and John. Christian Village, to the south of Arctic Village, had a population of 25, principally members of the Christian and Simon families, and on the Chandalar River, about 50 miles (80.45 km) from its confluence with the Yukon River, was the village of Chandalar (also known as Old Robert's Vil- lage or Venetie). Its population, including two nearby fishing camps, was 63, and the principal families were Robert and Leviti (McKennan, 1965:19-20). Except for the impact of guns on the Neets'aii Gwich'in so- cial organization previously described, life styles changed lit- tle during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Al- though the camps were permanent, the tribal members were far from sedentary. They were still almost entirely dependent on game and fish for subsistence. Families moved frequently in search of food. In the summer, small groups visited each oth- ers' hunting camps or returned to the permanent camps, ex- changing information on game availability, holding potlaches and parties, and celebrating weddings, births, and funerals. Their diet consisted mostly of meat and fish, supplemented in- frequently by small quantities of tea, sugar, flour, and dried ap- ples. When the camp was moved, the men left first to scout the new location, leaving the women to take down the caribou- skin tents, load the dogs, and then reassemble the camp. Each family unit made its own decisions as to where it would next go, reflecting the great autonomy each head of household exer- cised (Campisi, 1989; Peter, 1992). In this context, it is important to understand what the Neets'aii Gwich'in meant by leadership. What were the quali- ties that made an individual a leader, and what was the extent of that leadership? In 1962 the Neets'aii Gwich'in tribal gov- ernment produced a remarkable document entitled, "A short history of the first people who gave leadership to the Native people in the Chandalar Country, the type of work they did and the future plans for the people,"2 which summarized the quali- ties of a leader: service, generosity, and luck. People followed to the extent that an individual demonstrated these qualities. Strength and wealth were admired, but only to the extent that they supported service and generosity. The tribal council named seven individuals and in each case identified the quali- ties that made them leaders. Three were respected because they were lay readers, individuals who "made service for the peo- ple." Another was considered a leader because of his skill and good luck as a hunter and his willingness to share. "He was not the only one [who] had a muzzleloader but he always killed some animals. He was a good luck man for meat and split it with the people." Two of the remaining three leaders were also given recogni- tion because of their accomplishments. Albert Tritt was, of course, recognized for his religious commitment and activities. He built and served churches in Arctic Village, Chalkyitsik, and Venetie. He also established a native store at Arctic Vil- lage, constructed a trail from Arctic Village to Fort Yukon, and built a school at Arctic Village. By contrast, Chief Christian's leadership related more to his business acumen. He owned a store at Arctic Village and was known for his skill as a trader. He was the first to establish a permanent dwelling at Arctic Village, and, later, he founded the settlement of Christian Village. He was also a noted hunter: "1886 His community started to use him for animals and hunting." Finally, there is mention of John Fredson, who was respected for his education and for establishing and teaching in the school at Venetie. Fredson was born in 1895 along the Sheen- jek River. While still quite young his mother died, and his fa- ther, unable to provide for his nine children, left him in the care of the schoolteacher in the Gwich'in village of Circle. She raised him and several other children for a few years and then took him to St. Stephen's Episcopal Mission at Fort Yukon, where he impressed Archdeacon Hudson Stuck. He spent the next 10 years alternating between the mission school and living with his father and siblings. Upon completing his schooling in Alaska, Stuck arranged, in 1916, for him to continue his educa- tion at Mount Hermon Academy in Gill, Massachusetts. There he stayed until he graduated, in 1921, except for a few months of service in the United States Army in the fall of 1918. After graduation, he returned to Fort Yukon, where he worked in the hospital for a year (Mackenzie, 1985). In 1922 he received a scholarship to the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. It was while he was a student at the college that he was sought out by Edward Sapir, for whom he recorded stories in Gwich'in. He stayed at Sewanee for two years and then returned to Fort Yukon, where again he worked in the hospital. He completed his college education at the Uni- versity of the South in 1930 and returned home. He lived with Dr. Grafton Burke and worked for a few years for the Northern Commercial Company. While at Fort Yukon he met and mar- ried Jean Ribaloff. The depression had hit the area hard, and with a family on the way he sought more permanent and certain employment. Given his education and training, government service seemed the best avenue to follow (Mackenzie, 1985). Fredson moved to Venetie in 1937 to be a teacher, taking his family with him. He soon recognized the threat that over-ex- ploitation of game posed to the Neets'aii Gwich'in. Less than NUMBER 44 165 six months into his service, he began organizing a fur coopera- tive to secure better prices for the Neets'aii Gwich'in trappers and pushing for a reservation to protect game and thus the way of life. In January 1938 he wrote to the Alaska Indian Service raising the subject of a reservation for his people: If the Chandalar school is to be permanent, in our opinion, the first big step is to put that section of the country under reservation. There is no trader there now. The people want the reservation. And they realize that the time has come when such action is necessary to protect their fur and game. Please note the petition attached. This is the story. The planes are rapidly changing methods of trapping. Two of the residents took plane this fall and in a short time came back with one hundred martens. How long can this keep up? We suggest that a section of the Chandalar country be made into a reservation for the Natives. Attached is a map. Also the possible boundaries.3 The letter was accompanied by a map showing the proposed boundaries, as well as a petition from "We, the undersigned, being a group of adult Indians having a common bond of resi- dence in Venetie, Arctic Village, Christian Village and Ka- chick Village, Alaska do hereby respectfully petition the Hon- orable Secretary of the Interior to grant a reserve for the use of the Indians in this neighborhood."4 The Department of the Interior received Fredson's letter and initiated steps to implement the request; however, there were problems. First, the department had to develop a constitution and by-laws as the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), as amended in 1936, required. Because of the remoteness of many of the Alaskan villages, it was impossible for the Bureau of In- dian Affaire's Alaskan field staff to visit the villages more than once a year, let alone conduct elections.5 The solution was to direct Fredson to carry out the necessary steps. On 17 June 1939 Fredson received a letter outlining the infor- mation needed to justify the establishment of "a reservation for Chandalar natives."6 The information required included the proposed boundaries, the location of villages and fish camps, systems of communication and transportation, and the use of land. Fredson provided the required data and informed the Bureau of Indian Affairs that Johnny Frank, the chief at Venetie, had traveled to Arctic Village to obtain signatures on a petition seeking the establishment of a reservation: although he "had hard trail and he often had to camp out in the open," he suc- ceeded in signing up most of the residents, although "a few were so far away that he could not reach them. The people of Arctic Village and Christian Village move back and forth so much that it is difficult to place them. At present they are camping halfway between the two places."7 Fredson informed the bureau that they had collected three petitions signed by a total of 67 tribal members. In January 1940 Claude M. Hirst, general superintendent in Alaska, forwarded the request for a reservation to Assistant Commissioner of Indian Affairs William Zimmerman, Jr. He explained that the request came from the residents of the four villages—Arctic Village, Christian Village, Venetie, and Rob- ert's Fish Camp (Ka-chick)—adding that "although these vil- lages are some distance apart the people are from closely inter- related families and use in common the game, fur and fish which are the chief resources of the area." He then described the boundaries of the proposed reservation, adding the follow- ing justification for its creation: The native Indians of this region have always been self-sustaining but their in- come is being threatened by the intrusion of white trappers who enter the re- gion by airplane and reach trapping grounds which are inaccessible to the na- tives by dogteam. These white trappers are interested in securing all the furs possible and over trap the country leaving insufficient breeding stock to assure a continuing fur crop sufficient to maintain the native population. A reservation is necessary to protect this well-established and to date self-maintaining econo- my of the Native people.8 Before the reservation could be established, however, the Neets'aii Gwich'in had to approve a constitution. Again, Fred- son informed the tribal members and arranged for the vote. On 25 January 1940 a constitution was ratified at Venetie "by a vote of 30 for and 0 against in an election in which over thirty percent (30%) of the legal voters cast their ballots."9 Another three years passed before the Department of the Interior issued a proclamation setting aside 1,408,000 acres (570,240 ha) for the Neets'aii. (After a survey in the 1970s, it was determined that the area was actually 1.8 million acres (729,000 ha).) In- cluded in this reservation was all the land from the middle and east forks of the Chandalar River on the west, north to Arctic Village, then south along the Christian River to the Yukon River, and west along the Yukon River to its confluence with the Chandalar River.10 Before the reservation could be officially designated as such, one step remained: a majority of tribal members had to accept it. Accordingly, Fredson sent out notices that an election would be held on whether or not to accept the reservation. The elec- tion took place on 1 March 1944. Fredson reported that of the 72 eligible to vote, 49 were present, and of this number 47 voted affirmatively. (Fredson and the chairman of the meeting abstained "since we directed the proceedings.") Among those voting was the Reverend Albert Tritt, about whom Fredson wrote is "counted in the Arctic Village or Sheenjek group." The meeting was followed by dog races, a potlach, and dancing." On 28 March the department informed the commissioner of In- dian affairs that the election had been held and that the tribe had approved the reservation.12 The establishment of so large a reservation caused consider- able distress among territorial officials. Anthony Dimond, del- egate from Alaska, asked the department for an explanation of the grant. In its reply, the department stressed several central points. There were 47 Neets'aii Gwich'in families dependent for their livelihood on hunting, trapping, and fishing in a region of severely limited resources, thus requiring the setting aside of an extensive area. The department closed its argument with the following explanation: The people of the four main villages of Venetie, Arctic Village, Christian Vil- lage and Robert's Fish Camp, as well as of the semi-permanent camps are all more or less inter-related. Many of the trails and camps are used jointly by the people of the different villages. Such camps and trails are indispensable to the utilization of the resources of the region. Since the entire area lies north of the 166 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY Arctic Circle, the resources are sparse and large areas are required for the sup- port of a few people. Travel over these areas in search of game and fur would be impossible without well developed trails and a sufficient number of shelter cabins or camps. The land reserved for the Neets'aii Gwich'in by the federal government corresponded generally to that requested by Fred- son, but it differed in two essential ways. The Fredson map drew the boundaries some distance west of the Chandalar River and east of the Christian River, giving the tribe control of the valley of each river. His map also included all of the land between the 145th and 147th meridians north of the mid- dle fork of the Chandalar River, well into the Brooks Range. Fredson had tried to secure for the Neets'aii Gwich'in their fa- vorite moose, sheep, muskrat, and caribou hunting areas. In- stead, the department ran the boundaries along the middle courses of the rivers and just north of Arctic Village. Nonethe- less, Fredson had preserved for the tribe most of their tradi- tional territory. On 23 August 1945 Fredson died of pneumo- nia (Mackenzie, 1985:184). Post-Reservation Period For the first 10 years after its institution, the IRA-style govern- ment had little impact on tribal life. The rules of behavior were still based on traditional practice, and political and social con- trol flowed from the network of intratribal marriages and the harsh realities of life in the Subarctic. It was not until the 1950s that Arctic Village could claim a more or less year-round popu- lation similar to Venetie. According to Caulfield (1983:92): Until the middle of the twentieth century, the Neets'aii Gwich'in continued a highly mobile way of life, utilizing semi-permanent settlements such as Arctic, Christian, Venetie and Sheenjeck villages as well as seasonal camps at places such as Old John Lake, Wind River T'sukoo, Caribou House, T'eet'ree, and the Koness River. Occasionally families would move to Fort Yukon or Venetie for a period of time and then return to their homeland. From 1950 on, the tendency has been for the population to concentrate in Venetie and Arctic Village (Table 1). A number of factors have influenced the gradual development of perma- nent communities. First, the establishment of a federal govern- ment school at Venetie in the late 1930s encouraged families to settle in the area. The same process was repeated in Arctic Vil- lage two decades later. The desire to have their children edu- cated in public schools was (and is) strong among tribal mem- bers, as is the desire that the children learn the Gwich'in language, culture, and ways of subsistence. Leaders of the sta- tus of Rev. Albert Tritt and John Fredson had strongly advo- cated education. Second, the development of regular air service to the villages furthered the impetus for residential consolidation. It also spurred the move toward a cash economy and ameliorated the danger of famine. Scheduled flights brought in supplies, food that could be stored, fuel for machinery, and clothing—the ne- cessities of modern life. Fairbanks was less than two hours away, and a trip to Fort Yukon that once took a week or more was now within an hour's reach. TABLE 1 .—United States Bureau of the Census data for three settlements of Neets'aii Gwich'in. The data do not include tribal members living in other Gwich'in villages, in Fairbanks, or in Anchorage. Settlement 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 Arctic Village Venetie Christian Village 40 32 24 62 36 53 86 34 110 81 85 107 111 112 96 132 182 'Population summaries, 1920-1990, Washington, D.C, U.S. Government Printing Office. Third, the availability of fuel and parts made the snowmobile an indispensable part of village life. Trappers could now ser- vice trap routes in excess of 100 miles (160.9 km) in length. Their stays on the trap line could be shortened, and their efforts could be made more productive. The same was true with hunt- ing and fishing: the snowmobile expanded the range and de- creased the reaction time for hunters. Since all of the houses depend on wood for heat, and since trees do not grow in abun- dance in the subarctic climate, the wood supply close to the vil- lages was quickly exhausted. The snowmobile provided a means of hauling firewood from some distance, removing the need for villages to move in search of fuel. Fourth, with the expansion of the villages and the develop- ment of schools and airfields, came a concomitant expansion of public services that resulted in more or less permanent jobs. These services included a post office, water systems, schools, electric generation plants, health care, and airfield mainte- nance. Additionally, there is seasonal work in home construc- tion and repair, road maintenance, and forest-fire-fighting jobs in the summer. These produce income, some of which stays in the villages. Added to these tasks are services rendered by the more able-bodied to the elderly and infirm, who generally re- ceive small incomes from social security and social welfare programs. The establishment of a second permanent village, the in- creased contact with non-Gwich'in society, and the growing population on the reservation necessitated changes in the sys- tem of governance. As originally written, the IRA charter cen- tered power at Venetie. To share representation with those liv- ing in Arctic Village, the tribe in the 1960s repeatedly requested that the constitution be amended, but the Department of the Interior took no action. As early as 1962, Arctic Village and Venetie attempted to form a joint council but were thwarted by bureaucratic inaction.14 The department continued to reject efforts of the Neets'aii Gwich'in to reorganize their government through the 1960s and 1970s, apparently because the reservation-wide powers of the common council conflicted with the same powers vested in the IRA council by the latter's constitution. Finally, in 1976 the tribe went ahead with its re- structuring and formed a common council with staggered terms of three years each for the nine council members. The odd number of council members was managed by having two elected alternately from each village. In addition, the positions NUMBER 44 167 of first and second chiefs are rotated every three years between the two villages. The tribal council deals with any issue that affects the reser- vation as a whole. It manages controversies that arise with the state and federal governments, makes general rules for the use of the reservation, and deals with issues of tribal sovereignty. Matters affecting tribal enrollment and membership, children and the state, welfare, and taxation fall within its purview. Its interests include leases of land, fees for use of the landing strips, land development and use, and protection of the reserva- tion's resources, particularly the Porcupine caribou herd, which is vital to tribal survival. In addition to tribal government, each village has its own council. They are similar in organization and carry out essen- tially the same functions. Each operates an airfield and an elec- tric generating plant, collecting and keeping the fees. Both sell fuel to the residents, run laundromats and showers for public use, and operate health clinics. Each village maintains its own roads and runway with a small fleet of bulldozers, trucks, and graders. Both run water systems, drawing water from the Chan- dalar River. Venetie sells water to the school; in Arctic Village, the school has its own supply. The village governments have as primary functions the set- tling of disputes among its residents and enforcing tribal rules. For example, the possession and use of alcohol and drugs are prohibited; violators are punished by fines and, in persistent cases, banishment from the reservation for specified lengths of time. In addition to banishment and fines, the village councils have a more subtle, but equally potent form of persuasion. The village has a limited number of paid jobs available in the sum- mer and always has more applicants than work. The work is generally divided among members so that all share, but if an individual breaks the rules, he or she falls to the bottom of the list, or if the violation is particularly egregious, is taken off the list completely. Land, Subsistence, and Identity The strength of the Neets'aii Gwich'in's attachment to their land is illustrated by their reaction to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. Under the act, the Neets'aii had the op- tion of either taking a cash settlement and turning over the sub- soil rights to the Doyon Native Corporation, or rejecting the cash and keeping all rights and ownership of the reservation. They chose the latter. The importance of that decision was per- haps expressed best by Larry Williams of Venetie when he tes- tified before the Alaska Native Review Commission. We'd rather have the land, and that's the way it stands today. And it's up to the people in the tribal council to keep up that tradition of keeping the land as it is, and we call ourselves a sovereign people. And that's the way it should be, be- cause we don't have to ask anybody, we going to hunt on our land or to get tim- ber to build our cabins. We go out and do it without any waste, and we have our own laws that [we] follow, that's been in existence before the White man law came into the village, came into the country. And we still follow that. That's a traditional law. (Berger, 1985:142) Much of the life in the two villages revolves around subsis- tence activities. From the Neets'aii Gwich'in point of view, these connote a rich and varied food supply and a key dimen- sion of tribal self-sufficiency and sovereignty. It includes the seasonal exploitation of the resources available on the reserva- tion, supplemented by day labor. During the summer months many tribal members take tem- porary employment with the villages or go to Fairbanks and Anchorage for jobs; others fish for salmon on the Yukon River and for burbot, graylings, pike, and whitefish in the streams and lakes. With the onset of autumn, individuals hunt moose and caribou, shoot ducks and geese, and bring in a supply of wood. Dall sheep are hunted in the Brooks Range, and moose are available in the lowlands that border the river systems. Trapping begins in the late fall and continues through the winter. Trap routes are sometime quite long and distant from the villages, many exceed 100 miles (160.9 km) in length, and men generally work the trap lines in pairs. Commonly, these pairs consist of brothers or other close kin. There is consider- able preparatory work that goes into trapping. Trails must be cleared so that the snowmobiles can move easily; caches of food, fuel, traps, and tools must be distributed along the trap line, and cabins must be constructed and repaired. In 1991 there were upwards of 40 families that made their living trapping. So many individuals ran trap lines that there was not enough land available within the reservation, forcing trappers to extend their trap lines beyond reservation bound- aries. The trappers are divided into two types: those who have short lines close to their village, that is, individuals who can tend the traps in a day or with an overnight stay, and those whose lines require them to stay out for weeks at a time. These trappers often put out 150 to 200 traps and an equal number of snares, and their trap lines often run 100 miles (160.9 km) or more in length. They concentrate on trapping lynx and martens and, to a lesser extent, wolves. Over the years there has evolved a general agreement among the Neets'aii Gwich'in regarding which areas of the reservation and adjoining lands are recognized as the principal hunting and trapping areas of each village. It is common for pairs of men from the two villages to hunt together, increasing the subsis- tence opportunities when game such as caribou and moose are scarce in a particular area. There are strong cultural prohibitions against killing more game than is needed. Caulfield (1983:205-210), who has done extensive research with the Neets'aii Gwich'in, has identified five customary laws related to hunting and land use: (1) each village has "a prescribed area of use which, though not totally exclusive in nature, places limits upon use of the land by non- community residents;" (2) there are prescribed subareas in which individual families hold a usufruct right; (3) each village has the authority to set limits on the game taken within the area recognized as its prescribed area; (4) each village may deter- mine when there is sufficient caribou or other game to permit 168 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY harvesting; and (5) exploitation and industrial utilization of the land are secondary to the protection of the habitat. The rules of behavior that govern the tribe and the villages work, to a large degree, because of the close kin networks that exist. These ties continue to be a decisive factor in Neets'aii so- ciety, despite the increased frequency of contact with other na- tive people. In 1991 there were 41 households in Arctic Vil- lage, all descended from six patrilines: Albert Tritt, Sr., Paul Williams, Sr., Birchcreek James, Peter Peter, Joseph Gilbert, and Isias Sam. All but one of the married couples living in the village had Indian spouses. In Venetie, the 58 households are descended from seven patrilines: Old Man Robert, Old John, Paul Erick, Albert Tritt, Sr., Chief Christian, Johnny Frank, and Elijah Henry. In Venetie, the Franks are married to members of the John, Roberts, Tritt, Henry, and Fredson families. The Christians are married to the Robertses and Ericks. In Arctic Village the Tritt family is married to members of the Roberts, Christian, James, Frank, Sam, and Williams families. The James family is married to the Christian and John families; the Williams to the Ericks; the Peters to the Gilbert, Tritt, and Sam families (Campisi, 1989, 1991). Added to the importance of kinship is the Neets'aii sense of themselves as a tribe, one that is inextricably linked to the land, and more particularly, to the Porcupine caribou herd. This herd, numbering in excess of 150,000 (Davis, 1997:41), winters in western Alaska and eastern Yukon Territory, Can- ada, and in the spring migrates to its calving grounds along the Arctic coast. Following the spring calving, the herd moves southerly to return to the boreal forests, where it disperses for the winter. The caribou are hunted from mid-August to their departure for the calving grounds in late April. Even though famine is no longer a danger, year-round survival would be an economic impossibility for the Neets'aii Gwich'in without the Porcupine caribou herd; the cost of transporting replacement food would be prohibitive. The importance of caribou to Neets'aii Gwich'in life cannot be overstated. It is a defining feature of their worldview. Indi- viduals repeatedly say that they do not feel well unless they have caribou regularly. According to Slobodin (1981:526), the Gwich'in have a special relationship with caribou: Every caribou has a bit of the human heart in him, and every human has a bit of the caribou heart. Hence humans will always have partial knowledge of what caribou are thinking and feeling, but equally, caribou will have the same knowledge of humans. This is why caribou hunting is at times very easy, at oth- er times very difficult. All hunted creatures are to be respected, but none, ex- cept the bear, more so than the caribou. Despite the changes inflicted upon them by state and federal authorities, and by virtue of their adaptation of introduced tech- nologies, the Neets'aii Gwich'in have managed to maintain a viable tribal society in a politically hostile world. This, in part, has been the result of their relative isolation, but in large mea- sure it has flowed from their ownership of the 1.8 million acres that make up their property and which permits the exercise of political and social autonomy. Thus land and subsistence have become synonymous with sovereignty, and borrowings from the dominant culture—whether religious, technological, eco- nomic, or governmental—have been adapted to support a fiercely independent way of life. Notes 1. Report, "Surrounding Villages," by the Bureau of Education, Alaska School Service, 1915, General Correspondence 1908-35; Records of the Alaska Division, 1877-1940; Records of the Bureau of Indian Affaris, RG 75; National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. 2. Minutes of Dec 1962, Neets'aii Gwich'in Tribal Archives (NGTA), Neets'aii Gwich'in Tribal Office, Venetie, Alaska. 3. John Fredson to Claude M. Hirst, 1 Jan 1938, NGTA. 4. Petition for Reserve, Jan 1938, NGTA. 5. William Zimmerman, Jr., to the Secretary of the Interior, 12 May 1939, NGTA 6. George A. Dale to John Fredson, 17 Jun 1939, NGTA. 7. John Fredson to Clyde G. Sherman, 30 Dec 1939, NGTA. 8. Claude M. Hirst to William Zimmerman, Jr., 25 Jan 1940, NGTA. 9. Donald W. Hagerty to John Collier, 17 Feb 1940, NGTA. 10. Venetie, Arctic and Christian Robert's Fish Camp, Alaska; Proclamation Designating Indian Reservation, 20 May 1943, signed by Assistant Secretary of the Interior Oscar L. Chapman, NGTA. 11. John Fredson to Claude M. Hirst, 1 Mar 1944, NGTA. 12. T.W. Wheat to John Collier, 28 Mar 1944, NGTA. 13. Oscar W. Chapman to Anthony Dimond, 13 Dec 1944, NGTA. 14. Minutes of 9 Dec 1962, NGTA. 10. Literature Cited Berger, Thomas R. 1985. Village Journey: The Report of the Alaska Native Review Commis- sion. x+202 pages. New York: Hill and Wang. Burch, Ernest S., Jr., and Craig W. Mishler 1995. The Di'haii Gwich'in: Mystery People of North Alaska. Arctic An- thropology, 32(1): 147-172. Campisi, Jack 1989. Field notes in the possession of the author. 1991. Field notes in the possession of the author. Caulfield, Richard A. 1983. Subsistence Land Use Upper Yukon—Porcupine Communities. Alaska Technical Paper, 16: xviii+231 pages. Fairbanks: Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of Subsistence. Dalziell, Winifred 1922. Chronicle Given By Albert E. Tritt of Arctic Village. [Box 2 (4 fold- ers) of the unpublished journals of Albert Tritt. Archives, University of Alaska, Fairbanks.] Davis, James L. 1997. Caribou. Alaska Geographic, 23(4):26-54. NUMBER 44 169 Krauss, Michael E., and Victor K. Golla 1981. Northern Athapascan Languages. In William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of North American Indians, volume 6, June Helm, editor, Subarctic, pages 67-85. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian In- stitution. Mackenzie, Clara Childs 1985. Wolf Smeller (Zhoh Gwatsan): A Biography of John Fredson, Native Alaskan, xiv+201 pages. Anchorage: Alaska Pacific University Press. McKennan, Robert A. 1965. The Chandalar Kutchin. Technical Paper (Arctic Institute of North America), 17: 156 pages. Montreal, Quebec: Arctic Institute of North America. Mishler, Craig 1990. Missionaries in Collision: Anglicans and Oblates among the Gwich'in, 1861-65. Arctic, 42(2): 121-126. Murray, Alexander H. 1910. Journal of the Yukon, 1847-48; edited with notes by L.J. Burpee. Publications of the Public Archives of Canada, 4: 125 pages. Ot- tawa, Ontario: Government Printing Bureau. Osgood, Cornelius 1934. Kutchin Tribal Distribution and Synonymy. American Anthropolo- gist, 36(2): 168-179. Peter, Katherine 1992. Neets 'q\\ Gwiindaii: Living in the Chandalar Country. Revised edi- tion, retranslated by Adeline Raboff, xii+108 pages. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska. [First edition published in 1981.] Raboff, Adeline Peter 1999. Preliminary Study of the Gwich'in Bands. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 23(2): 1-25. Slobodin, Richard 1981. Kutchin. In William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of North American Indians, volume 6, June Helm, editor, Subarctic, pages 514-532. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. Tritt, Albert Edward n.d. Journals. [Unpublished journals, boxes 1-4, in the Archives, Uni- versity of Alaska, Fairbanks.] IV. Anthropology Evolving Classifying North American Indian Languages before 1850 Elisabeth Tooker Anthropology, it might seem, has always been with us, and his- tories of the discipline often so presume. The beginnings of an- thropology, however, are more fairly dated to the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth century. In these decades, the words that characterize the disci- pline—ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology (in the now most commonly used sense of that word)—were introduced and gained acceptance in various European languages, and the great project of nineteenth century anthropology was under- taken: the systematic mapping of the peoples of the world. Fueled by the intense interest in exploration at the time, the premise of this great mapping project was that each "nation," "people," or "race"—the terms were virtually interchange- able—could be distinguished on the basis of physical appear- ance, customs, and language. These were the same kinds of criteria—physical appearance and behavior, including vocal- izations—on which "species" of other animals were identified, and this led, at least in the English-speaking world, to the in- clusion of anthropology in natural history. In one important respect, however, the identification of hu- man species, as they were then often termed, differed from that of other animals. The latter might be best classified on the basis of physical characteristics; the former on the basis of language. This was so because each of the other animal species was gen- erally (if imprecisely) defined as being able to breed with members of its own but not with other species. The definition of human species involved no such criterion. The various hu- man species could interbreed with each other with the result that physical characteristics—skin, hair, and eye color, hair and head form, height, and the like—shaded from one species to another. So also did customs, a consequence of diffusion of ideas across species lines. Language was an easier and more convenient way of identifying what were then called nations: In judging of the relations between savage and civilized life, something may be learnt by glancing over the divisions of the human race. For this end the classification by families of languages may be conveniently used, if checked by the evidence of bodily characteristics. No doubt speech by itself is an in- sufficient guide in tracing national descent, as witness the extreme cases of Jews in England, and three-parts negro races in the West Indies, nevertheless Elisabeth Tooker, Department of Anthropology, emerita, Temple Uni- versity; 2 Franklin Town Boulevard, Apartment 1906, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103-1233, USA. speaking English as their mother-tongue. Still, under ordinary circumstances, connexion of speech does indicate more or less connexion of ancestral race. (Tylor, 1871:43-44) Tylor was expressing an idea long in place and one applied not only to European languages in the seventeenth and eight- eenth centuries, but also to non-European ones. For example, writing in 1641, the Jesuits noted of the Iroquoian languages: We have every reason to believe that not long ago they all made but one Peo- ple,—both Hurons and Iroquois, and those of the Neutral Nation; and that they came from one and the same family, or from a few old stocks which formerly landed on the coasts of these regions. (Thwaites, 1898:193-195) Similarity of words as well as custom and physical appear- ance was used in the seventeenth century, notably by Hugo Grotius and Johannes de Laet in the 1640s (Charlevoix, 1761:16-31), to answer the question of the origin of American Indians. But as they employed it, the method had obvious faults. As Pierre de Charlevoix noted in 1744 of this work, in what was probably the most influential discussion of the matter in the eighteenth century, The simple resemblance of names, and some slight appearances, seemed, in their eyes, so many proofs, and on such ruinous foundations they have erected systems of which they have became enamoured, the weakness of which the most ignorant are able to perceive, and which are often overturned by one sin- gle fact which is incontestable. But what is most singular in this, is, that they should have neglected the only means that remained to come at the truth of what they were in search of; I mean, the comparing the languages. In effect, in the research in question, it ap- pears to me, that the knowledge of the principal languages of America, and the comparing them with those of our Hemisphere, that are looked upon as primi- tive, might possibly set us upon some happy discovery; and that way of ascend- ing to the original of nations, which is the least equivocal, is far from being so difficult as might be imagined. (Charlevoix, 1761:49-50) Establishing relationships between languages on the basis of their grammar requires considerable knowledge of the lan- guages themselves, making it an unwieldy method when deal- ing with large numbers of languages. The easier method is to compare vocabularies, and undoubtedly for this reason word lists that could be used in collecting data for comparative pur- poses were developed by various individuals. The most notable was the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. From at least the time of Leibniz's famous appeal (Gulya, 1974:258-259), these lists have comprised basic vocabulary, the kind of words taught to children and hence known to all and easy to collect. They are also apt to consist of words that 173 174 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY change relatively slowly. Although the lists compiled by vari- ous individuals are not identical, they typically include such words as those for the following: family relationships (e.g., fa- ther, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle, aunt); parts of the body (e.g., head, face, nose, eye, hair, mouth, hand, fingers, foot); natural phenomena (e.g., God, sky, sun, moon, star, air, wind, rain, lightning, snow, ice); animals (e.g., dog, wolf, bear, fox, bird, snake, fish); things ingested (e.g., food, drink, water, bread, meat); actions (e.g., eat, drink, speak, see, be, stand, laugh, sleep); seasons (e.g., spring, summer, autumn, winter); colors (e.g., white, black, red, green); senses (e.g., hearing, sight, taste, smell); and numbers (e.g., one, two, ten, twenty, one hundred, one thousand). The invention of movable type and hence the publication of printed books facilitated the comparative study of languages, and some such studies were made, but these now seem to be tentative steps. In the mid-1780s three individuals undertook research that more directly influenced modem comparative his- torical linguistics. Perhaps the most famous is Sir William Jones. In an address before the Asiatick Society of Bengal in 1786, Jones observed that the similarities in both roots of verbs and forms of gram- mar between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Germanic, Celtic, and Old Persian (similarities not shared with the Semitic languages) could not have originated by accident and thus were evidence of a common source. This idea was picked up by others whose work firmly established Indo-European as a language family. The second most famous is Catherine the Great of Russia. In contrast to the more western countries of Europe, Russia had a great diversity of languages, a fact that partly accounts for Catherine's interest in the languages of the world and the study of them that she undertook two years before Sir William Jones's famous pronouncement. Distraught over the death of her lover of four years, Alexander Lanskoy, in June 1784 (Key, 1980:55), she turned her attention to the comparison of vocabu- laries. On 9 September 1784 she wrote to a friend: I've got hold of as many dictionaries as I could find, including a Finnish, a Mari and a Vbtic [Finno-Ugric languages]; from these I compile my word-lists. Also, I have collected a lot of information about the ancient Slavs, and I shall soon be able to prove that the Slavs named the majority of rivers, mountains, valleys and regions of France, Spain, Scotland and elsewhere. (Cronin, 1978:232) It was later, apparently, that Catherine compiled the word list that she used as a basis for comparison. In a letter dated 9 May 1785 she wrote: I made a list of between two and three hundred radical words of the Russian language, and had them translated into every tongue and jargon that I could hear of; the number of which already exceeds two hundred. Every day 1 took one of these words and wrote it down in all the languages I had been able to collect. (Pickering, 1818:322) But she then wearied of the task and turned over her materi- als to Peter Simon Pallas, who prepared them for publication. The results were printed in Russian in two volumes with a pre- fixed Latin title, Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia compara- tiva augustissimae cura collecta (Pallas, 1787-1789). In it, Pal- las compared 285 words, 130 in the first volume and 155 in the second. About the same time, Catherine decided to expand the study to include data from America and Africa and, for the purpose of obtaining this information, in 1786 had the 285-word list printed. Copies were sent to various individuals who might be able to provide vocabularies or might know someone who could. One recipient was the Marquis de Lafayette,1 who on 10 February 1786 sent copies to Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and perhaps others he knew in the United States (Key, 1980:61-63). Whether Franklin, then 80, sent copies on to others is not known, but Washington did, sending Lafay- ette's request to Thomas Hutchins, then surveying western lands for the Continental Congress.2 After he had written Hutchins, Washington learned of Richard Butler's appointment as superintendent of Indian affairs in the Ohio region and on 27 November wrote to him also (Fitzpatrick, 1938, 28:525; 1939, 29:88-90). Washington had more than a casual interest in Catherine's project. Writing to the Reverend Jonathan Edwards, Jr., on 28 August 1788 to acknowledge receipt of Edwards's description of Mahican (Edwards, 1788), Washington echoed the ideas of Charlevoix, among others: You have been rightly informed relative to the application, which had been made to me from Europe, for Documents concerning the Indian Language. It seems that a Society oi Literati are endeavouring to make discoveries respect- ing the origin and derivation of different Languages. In the prosecution of this curious study, all Judicious philological communications must be important, yours, I conceive, will not be deficient in that quality. I have long regretted that so many Tribes of the American Aborigines should have become almost or en- tirely, extinct, without leaving such vestiges, as that the genius and idiom of their Language might be traced. Perhaps, from such sources, the descent or kin- dred of nations, whose origins are lost in remote antiquity or illiterate darkness, might be more rationally investigated, than in any other mode. The task you have imposed upon yourself, of preserving some materials for this purpose, is certainly to be commended. (Fitzpatrick, 1939, 30:64) The year before, on 25 March 1787, Washington had written Lafayette that both Butler and Hutchins had assured him that they would obtain vocabularies for Catherine the Great (Fitz- patrick, 1939, 29:183-184). A week before, on 18 March, James Madison had written Washington enclosing a Cherokee and Choctaw comparative vocabulary he had received from Benjamin Hawkins.3 In this letter, which Washington did not receive until 31 March (Fitzpatrick, 1939, 29:191), Madison wrote: Recollecting to have heard you mention a plan formed by the Empress of Rus- sia for a comparative view of the aborigines of the New Continent, and of the N. E. parts of the old, through the medium of their respective tongues, and that her wishes had been conveyed to you for your aid in obtaining the American vocabularies, I have availed myself of an opportunity offered by the kindness of Mr. Hawkins, of taking a copy of such a sample of the Cherokee & Choctaw dialects as his late commission to treat with them enabled him to obtain, and do myself the honor now of inclosing it. I do not know how far the list of words made use of by Mr. Hawkins may correspond with the standard of the Empress, nor how far nations so remote as the Cherokees & Choctaws from the N.W. shores of America, may fall within the scheme of comparison. I presume how- NUMBER 44 175 ever that a great proportion at least of the words will answer, and that the laud- able curiosity which suggests investigations of this sort will be pleased with ev- ery enlargement of the field for indulging it. (Hunt, 1901:320-321) Later that same year, on 30 November, Butler sent the Shaw- nee and Delaware vocabularies he had collected to Washing- ton, and on 10 January 1788 Washington sent a copy of them along with a copy of Hawkins's Cherokee and Choctaw vocab- ularies to Lafayette4 (Fitzpatrick, 1939, 29:373-377; Key, 1980:67). Hutchins, however, never sent Washington the prom- ised material. He died in April 1789, apparently before he had collected the information Washington had asked him to furnish. A second section to Pallas's Linguarum, which was to have contained in one volume data on the languages of America and Africa, was never published. In its stead was published a four- volume edition of Pallas's materials by F.I. Yankovitch de Mir- ievo (1790-1791), having a different arrangement and covering the entire world. Pallas's volumes were, however, the more in- fluential. In the spring of 1796, Benjamin Smith Barton received a copy of the Linguarum from the noted chemist Joseph Priestly, who had come to the United States two years before. A native of Philadelphia, Barton (1787) had published a volume titled Observations on Some Parts of Natural History while in Edin- burgh studying medicine. Reflecting the increased interest in archaeology after the founding of the Republic—part of the at- tempt on the part of Americans to create a history of the conti- nent separate from the history of England—Barton's study contained some archaeological data. While in Edinburgh, Bar- ton also attempted to find some resemblance between Ameri- can and Asiatic languages, but he had little success. On his re- turn to the United States in 1789, he took up the study again and was somewhat encouraged by his results (Barton, 1797:xxiii-xxiv). After receiving the book from Priestly, Bar- ton redoubled his efforts, collecting more data from his read- ing, through correspondence, and on his travels. In 1797 he published his results in New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America, which was republished the following year with a vocabulary list extended to 70 words from the orig- inal 54 words (Barton, 1798). Although his reasoning has much to commend it, later students regarded his data as being too inadequate to support his conclusions, and today his study is regarded more as an interesting curiosity than as a scientific contribution. Modem comparative studies of North American Indian lan- guages, however, owe more to the third important figure active in the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson, than they do to Barton. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1785, Jefferson made the same observations as Charlevoix had 40 years before in a work with which Jefferson was familiar: Great question has arisen from whence came those aboriginals of America? ...A knowledge of their several languages would be the most certain evidence of their derivation which could be produced. In fact, it is the best proof of the affinity of nations which ever can be referred to. How many ages have elapsed since the English, the Dutch, the Germans, the Swiss, the Norwegians, Danes and Swedes have separated from their common stock? It is to be lamented then, very much to be lamented, that we have suffered so many of the Indian tribes already to extinguish, without our having previously collected and deposited in the records of literature, the general rudiments at least of the languages they spoke. Were vocabularies formed of all the languages spoken in North and South America, ...and these deposited in all the public libraries, it would fur- nish opportunities to those skilled in the languages of the old world to compare them with these, now, or at any future time, and hence to construct the best ev- idence of the derivation of this part of the human race. (Jefferson, 1955:100-101) Late in December 1783, less than two years before Notes on the State of Virginia was published and a full six months before Catherine the Great began her linguistic project, Jefferson initi- ated his own comparative study of the American Indian lan- guages—sending letters requesting vocabulary lists to various individuals, including Benjamin Hawkins5 and Thomas Hutch- ins (Boyd, 1952:427, 431). Only Hawkins replied, in 1787 sending Jefferson, then in Paris, a copy of the Cherokee and Choctaw vocabulary that he had also sent to Madison. In July 1784 Jefferson sailed for England, and in 1785 he was appointed to succeed Benjamin Franklin as minister to France. He left in 1789 and the following year accepted Wash- ington's offer to serve as his secretary of state. Back in the United States, Jefferson's interest in American Indian lan- guages was renewed. On 13 June 1791, in the presence of James Madison and General William Floyd, Jefferson obtained a vocabulary list from some Unquachog (Poosepatuck) living in a village in Brookhaven Township, Long Island.6 By the next year, if not before, he had a 282-word list printed, comparable to Catherine the Great's but not copied from hers.7 (Jefferson had not then seen a copy of Pallas's Linguarum, nor did he see one for some years.) For 35 years, Jefferson's list was exten- sively used in the United States; it was supplanted only by the list composed by Albert Gallatin, who had been Jefferson's secretary of the treasury. At the end of 1793, Jefferson resigned as secretary of state and returned to his home, Monticello, in Virginia. On 3 March 1797 he became president of the American Philosophical Soci- ety in Philadelphia, what its members saw as the American equivalent of the Royal Society of London. The following day he was inaugurated vice-president of the United States. Four years later he become president of the United States. During these years, Jefferson collected from others more vo- cabulary lists as he could, perhaps totaling 40 (Bergh, 1907:4-5). Jefferson also made up at least one long compara- tive list of such data that he had on 22 languages.8 A substantial portion of these manuscripts were lost, however, when robbers stole the box that contained these papers while they were being shipped back to Monticello at the end of Jefferson's term as president. Only some were recovered, and Jefferson lost inter- est in completing the project. In 1814 Jefferson resigned as president of the American Philosophical Society. The following year Barton died. An era had ended. Linguistic studies in the United States passed from Jefferson and Barton, who had both encouraged and criticized 176 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY each other's work, to Peter Duponceau, John Pickering, and Albert Gallatin, who also exchanged information and ideas. Before coming to the United States from France in 1777, Du- ponceau had served as secretary to Antoine Court de Gebelin, then a noted philologist and author of Monde primitif (1773-1782), an important study in universal grammar. Not until 1815, however, when the American Philosophical Soci- ety established the Committee of History, Moral Science, and General Literature, did Duponceau show much interest in lin- guistics. He became the committee's corresponding secretary, seeking out information as he could. One of his correspon- dents was the Reverend John Heckewelder, a Moravian mis- sionary whose correspondence and memoirs on the Delaware Indians Duponceau published (Heckewelder, 1819). Extend- ing Barton's comparative study, Duponceau collected more vocabulary lists, applying to and receiving from Jefferson his surviving lists. And reflective of the work of European philol- ogists, Duponceau was interested in grammar, proposing that American Indian languages were characterized by what he termed "polysynthesis"—an idea that subsequently was widely discussed. The publication of Heckewelder *s data at the instigation of Duponceau spurred John Pickering's interest in American In- dian linguistics. Son of Timothy Pickering, who among other things had negotiated a treaty with the Iroquois and who was John Adams's secretary of state, John Pickering had early been attracted to the study of languages, becoming an authority on Greek. Pickering published some manuscript materials and re- published some important early works on American Indian lan- guages, but he is perhaps most renowned for his "On the Adop- tion of a Uniform Orthography for the Indian Languages of North America" (Pickering, 1818). In it he proposed a standard orthography that was widely used by missionary societies, which in the nineteenth century were perhaps the greatest sources of data on American Indian languages. Both Duponceau and Pickering made some comparative studies. It was, however, Gallatin who completed Jefferson's project. In 1823, at the request of Alexander von Humboldt, Gallatin wrote a essay on the languages of North American In- dians, which subsequently received favorable notice in Balbi's (1826) Atlas ethnographique du globe. In the next several years Gallatin undertook a more extensive study of Indian lan- guages, collecting data, some of which he obtained from Du- ponceau, including that collected by Jefferson. In 1826 he pub- lished a some 600-word vocabulary list and a preliminary classification of 71 languages of Indians of the United States into 15 families.9 Also in 1826 Gallatin went to London on a government mis- sion, and not until 1834 did he return to the subject. The results of his research were published in the transactions of the society in 1836 under the title "A Synopsis of the Indian Tribes within the United States East of the Rocky Mountains, and in the Brit- ish and Russian Possessions in North America" (Gallatin, 1836). This volume contained vocabulary lists on 82 languages of North American Indians, languages Gallatin classified as be- longing to 28 families. At the time, the subject of language was deemed important enough for a philologist to be included in the scientific person- nel of the Wilkes Expedition, in 1838-1842, America's great exploring expedition to the Pacific. Horatio Hale, then just graduated from Harvard College, was appointed to the posi- tion. The son of the noted editor and poet, Sarah Josepha Hale, he probably through her met Pickering, with whom he studied on an informal basis. And it may have been Pickering who en- couraged Hale to collect and publish as a college freshman the data in his pamphlet Remarks on the Language of the St. John s or Wlastukweek Indians, with a Penobscot Vocabulary (Hale, 1834). John Pickering's nephew, Charles Pickering, was also on the Wilkes expedition and after his return pub- lished The Races of Man and their Geographical Distribution (Pickering, 1848). Gallatin, in part because of the lack of available data, had re- duced the number of words on his comparative list to 120. To extend Gallatin's classification, Hale used the same list with a few changes. He published the data he had collected on the lan- guages of the Northwest Coast and the Plateau in his final re- port, Ethnography and Philology (Hale, 1846), along with a nearly complete classification of the languages of the region, except the northernmost (Goddard, 1996:293). Only 250 copies of Hale's final report were printed. This cir- cumstance and the fact that Gallatin earlier had obtained virtu- ally no data on the languages of North American Indians west of the Rocky Mountains led Gallatin to excerpt from Hale's volume materials on Northwest Coast languages. He reprinted them along with a revision of his own classification in Hale s Indians of North-west America (Gallatin, 1848). Gallatin's death a year later, in August of 1849, again marked the end of an era. Duponceau had died in 1844, and Pickering in 1846. Hale, who had gone to Europe after he finished writ- ing his report, did not return to the study of Indian languages for almost a quarter century. The task of classifying North American Indian languages passed first to William W. Turner. After Turner's death, in 1859, it passed to George Gibbs, and then after Gibbs's death, in 1873, to John Wesley Powell, whose "Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mex- ico" (Powell, 1891) expanded Gallatin's classification to all parts of the continent—a classification that became the depar- ture point for subsequent discussion of deeper linguistic rela- tionships. It remains an important one to this day. Notes 1. Marquis de Lafayette to Benjamin Franklin, 10 Feb 1786, American Philo- sophical Society Library (APSL), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, cataloged in Freeman, 1966, Freeman no. 1171. 2. The text of George Washington's letter of 20 Aug 1786 addressed to Thomas Hutchins, published in Fitzpatrick (1938, 28:52) and Abbott (1995:222), is from Washington's letter book. An autograph letter also dated 20 Aug 1786 and having an identical text—a letter stated in 1907 to be in the pos- session of A.S. Morgan (Fitzpatrick, 1938, 28:525 n. 63) and sold at auction in 1. NUMBER 44 177 1999 (Sotheby's, 1999:157)—bears at the end the notation "(Addressed to Col. George Morgan of Prospect near Princeton)" in an unknown hand, and for this reason is generally said to be a letter Washington sent to Morgan. Other evi- dence, however, suggests this may not have been the case. More likely, this au- tograph letter is the one Washington sent to Hutchins, the notation at the end of the letter having been added at some later date by someone unfamiliar with its history. When going through Hutchins's papers after his death, in 1789, George Morgan found a copy of Lafayette's letter to Washington and Washington's re- quest to Hutchins. In September of that year, he wrote Washington, sending a copy of the Lord's Prayer in Delaware that he had obtained from David Zeis- berger, a Moravian missionary, and offering to send Zeisberger's Delaware vocabulary and grammar then in the possesion of Morgan's son. Morgan also offered to send Washington a Shawnee vocabulary and grammar as well as a translation of the Lord's Prayer he had obtained from Alexander McKee (Twohig, 1989:591-592). If Washington had written Morgan on the same day he wrote Hutchins, it seems likely that Morgan would have sent Washington these materials then, or at least remembered the letter three years later when he did write Washington. It also seems likely that Morgan took Washington's letter to Hutchins with him. Only later, probably after Morgan's death, did this letter come to be regarded as one written by Washington to Morgan, and a no- tation to this effect was added. 3. About the same time Hawkins sent this vocabulary to Madison, he also sent a copy to Jefferson (see below). The copy Madison sent Washington, now in the Washington Papers (see note 4, below), is identical to the copy sent to Jefferson, now in the APSL (Freeman no. 663), except for the omission of a few words and phrases. An endorsement in Jefferson's hand (Boyd, 1955:203) at the end of his copy, stating that "This vocabulary was from Benjamin Hawk- ins, probably before 1784," is probably in error. 4. Washington to Lafayette, 10 Jan 1788, Papers of George Washington, 1592-1943 (bulk 1748-1799), Library of Congress, Washington, D.C, micro- film 12.935-124N-124P-124P (series 1-8D). 5. Just why Jefferson selected Hawkins for this task can only be conjectured. Both were members of the Continental Congress in 1783, and Hawkins, a dele- gate from North Carolina, served on a number of committees dealing with In- dian matters, including the committee on Indian affairs (Pound, 1951:35). In 1885-1886 he was a member of the commission that negotiated treaties with the Cherokee, Choctaws, and Chickasaws (Pound, 1951:45-51), and it was perhaps at this time that Hawkins obtained or made arrangements to obtain the Cherokee and Choctaw vocabularies he sent to Jefferson and Madison. From 1790 to 1795 Hawkins served in the United States Senate. Defeated in his bid for a second term, he became agent to the Creeks and other southern Indians, a position he held until his death, in 1816. 6. Jefferson manuscript, 1791, Unquachog Vocabulary, APSL, Freeman no. 2335. 7. Jefferson, Vocabulary, broadside printed ca. 1790-1792, APSL, Freeman no. 2051. 8. Manuscript, 1802-1808, Comparative Vocabularies of Several Indian Lan- guages, APSL, Freeman no. 1289. 9. Printed circular letter of 8 pages consisting of a cover letter dated 16 May 1826 by James Barbour; No. I: Vocabulary; No. II, Verbal Forms and Select Sentences; No. Ill: A Table of Indian Tribes of the United States East of the Stony Mountains, Arranged According to Languages and Dialects, Furnished by Albert Gallatin, United States Department of War, Washington, D.C; mi- crofilm no. 234, roll 429, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 4. Literature Cited Abbot, W.W., editor 1995. The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series. Volume 4, xxv+688 pages. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Balbi, Adriano 1826. Atlas ethnographique du globe. 2 volumes. Paris: Rey and Gravier. Barton, Benjamin Smith 1787. Observations on Some Parts of Natural History. 76 pages. London: C. Dilly. 1797. New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America, xii, cix, [3], 83, [1] pages. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: John Bioren. 1798. New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America. Sec- ond edition, [2], xxviii, cix, [1], 133, [1], 32 pages. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: John Bioren. Bergh, Albert Ellery, editor 1907. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Volume 15, xiv+494 pages. Washington, D.C: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States. Boyd, Julian P., editor 1952. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Volume 6, xxxvi+668 pages. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1955. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 11, xxxiii+701 pages. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Charlevoix, Pierre-Francois-Xavier de 1761. Journal of a Voyage to North-America. Volume 1. London: R. and J. Dodsley. [Originally published in French in 1744.] Court de Gebelin, Antoine 1773-1782. Mondeprimitif analyse et compare avec le monde moderne. 9 volumes. Paris: Chez l'auteur. Cronin, Vincent 1978. Catherine: Empress of all the Russias. 349 pages. New York: Will- iam Morrow. Edwards, Jonathan, Jr. 1788. Observations on the Language of the Muhhekaneew Indians. 17, [3] pages. New Haven: Josiah Meigs. Fitzpatrick, John C, editor 1931-1944. The Writings of George Washington. 39 volumes. Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office. Freeman, John F, compiler 1966. A Guide to Manuscripts Relating to the American Indian in the Li- brary of the American Philosophical Society. x+491 pages. Phila- delphia, Pennsylvania: American Philosophical Society. Gallatin, Albert 1836. A Synopsis of the Indian Tribes Within the United States West of the Rocky Mountains, and in the British and Russian Possessions in North America. Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collec- tions of the American Antiquarian Society, 2:[xxxi+xxxii], 1-422. 1848. Hale's Indians of North-west America, and Vocabularies of North America, with an Introduction. Transactions of the American Ethno- logical Society, 2:[xxiii]-clxxxviii, 1-130. Goddard, Ives 1996. The Classification of the Native Languages of North America. In William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of North American Indians, volume 17, Ives Goddard, editor, Languages, pages 290-323. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. Gulya, Janos 1974. Some Eighteenth Century Antecedents of Nineteenth Century Lin- guistics: The Discovery of Finno-Ugrian. In Dell Hymes, editor, Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms, 178 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY pages 258-276. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hale, Horatio 1834. Remarks on the Language of the St. John s or Wlastukweek Indians, with a Penobscot Vocabulary. 8 pages. Boston: Horatio Hale. 1846. Ethnography and Philology, xii+666 pages. Philadelphia, Pennsyl- vania: Lea and Blanchard. Heckewelder, John G.E. 1819. No. I: Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations, who once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States; No. II: Correspondence between Mr. Heckewelder and Mr. Duponceau; No. Ill: Words, Phrases, and Short Dialogues, in the Language of the Lenni Lenape. Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society, 1: 1-464. Hunt, Gaillard, editor 1901. The Writings of James Madison. Volume 2, xvii+412 pages. New York and London: G.P. Putnam's Sons. Jefferson, Thomas 1955. Notes on the State of Virginia. Edited and with an introduction and notes by William Peden, xxv+315 pages. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Key, Mary Ritchie 1980. Catherine the Great's Linguistic Contribution, xiii+200 pages. Car- bondale, Illinois, and Edmonton, Alberta: Linguistic Research. Pallas, Peter Simon 1787-1789. Linguarum Totius Orbis Vocabularia Comparativa. 2 vol- umes. St. Petersburg. Pickering, Charles 1848. The Races of Man and their Geographical Distribution. 447 pages. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown. Pickering, John 1818. On the Adoption of « Uniform Orthography for the Indian Lan- guages of North America. Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 4(2):319-360. [Issued separately in 1820 as An Essay on a Uniform Orthography for the Indian Languages of North America, by University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.] Pound, Merritt B. 1951. Benjamin Hawkins, Indian Agent, ix+270 pages. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Powell, John Wesley 1891. Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mexico. Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secre- tary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1885-1856, pages 1-142. Sotheby's 1999. The Frank T. Siebert Library of the North American Indian and the American Frontier. Part 1, 370 +[1] pages. New York: Sotheby's. Thwaites, Reuben Gold, editor 1898. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Volume 21,319 pages. Cleveland, Ohio: Burrows Brothers. Twohig, Dorothy, editor 1989. The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series. Volume 3, xviii+651 pages. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Tylor, Edward B. 1871. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. Volume 1, x+453 pages. London: John Murray. Yankovich de Mirievo, Fedor Ivanovich, editor 1790-1791. [Comparative Dictionary of AII Languages and Dialects Ar- ranged in Alphabetical Order] 4 volumes. St. Petersburg. [In Rus- sian.] Origins of Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution and Beyond William W. Fitzhugh Anthropological subjects were among the first fields of inquiry identified by the Smithsonian founding fathers in 1846. Reso- lution number 3 of the Smithsonian Board of Regents' meeting of 4 December 1846 called on the secretaries of state, the trea- sury, war, and the Navy "to furnish.. .suggestions.. .in regard to the procurement... of additions to the museum... especially to its ethnological departments."1 Resolution number 4 requested the secretary of war to obtain from the commissioner of Indian affairs "suggestions as he may deem proper regarding the pro- curement from the Indian country of collections for the mu- seum of the Smithsonian Institution illustrating the natural his- tory of the country, and more especially the physical history, manners and customs of the various tribes of aborigines on the North American continent" (Board of Regents, 1847:11). These instructions originated the oldest institutional anthro- pological program in the Americas and one of the earliest sys- tematic approaches to the study of non-European cultures in the history of Western science. Although the discipline of an- thropology did not become formally professionalized until Franz Boas established the first Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, in 1901, the practice of anthropology and its subfields—linguistics, ethnology, archaeology, and physical anthropology—had been pursued vigorously at the Smithson- ian for more than 50 years and had been taught in universities since 1879 (Tooker, 1990). Because most anthropologists in North America trace their origins to the beginnings of aca- demic anthropology, the importance of this instance of early museum collecting, research, and exhibition is not widely known. In fact, one of anthropology's deepest roots lies in nat- ural history as it was practiced in European and American mu- seums from the 1830s to the 1850s. The museum role was especially important in imparting a scientific method for data gathering, analysis, and classifica- tion, not only of material culture, but of social life, behavior, and language. The models for these developments came origi- nally from the early biological systematics of Linnaeus (1964), as applied in America by Spencer Fullerton Baird to zoological William W. Fitzhugh, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560- 0112, USA. field studies before and during his early years as assistant sec- retary of the Smithsonian Institution. The biological ancestry of early anthropological field method is not widely recognized, probably because of the corrosive effect that evolutionary and racial theory (e.g., Morton, 1839) had on early anthropological thought (Stanton, 1960; Stocking, 1966). Aspects of these an- thropological developments have been discussed (e.g., Hinsley, 1981) largely without recognition of the debt owed to Baird, Robert Kennicott, and other early Smithsonian naturalists who worked under his supervision. While none of these collectors and researchers were trained ethnologists, their methods, adapted from biology, produced the Smithsonian's first impor- tant ethnological collections and research programs. The Baird-Kennicott collecting program in northwestern British America (Lindsay, 1993) became a model for later Smithsonian field programs that almost always included ethno- logical, archaeological, and linguistic components. While Ken- nicott's ethnological collections and field observations were never published, his project pioneered field methods that were later applied by Smithsonian collectors in the Yukon-Macken- zie region of northwestern Canada and Alaska between 1870 and 1890. Despite advances in field method and analysis, it was not until John Wesley Powell arrived at the Smithsonian, in 1879, that analysis and publication of ethnological collec- tions became standard practice, in the newly founded Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), which Powell had succeded in getting Congress to establish as a permanent anthropological survey, with himself appointed as director. Origins The earliest and most visible product of the Smithsonian's charter was the publication of "Ancient Monuments of the Mis- sissippi Valley" (Squier and Davis, 1848) in volume 1 of Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. As the Smithson- ian's premier scientific publication, this series broadcast a com- mitment to serious scholarly endeavor, and the selection of an archaeological contribution by the Board of Regents signalled their intent that cultural scholarship was one of the institution's core interests. This publication investigated the biggest histori- cal mystery of the young republic, the identity of the "mound- builders" and their relation to historic American Indian tribes 179 180 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY (Silverberg, 1968; Willey and Sabloff, 1980; Trigger, 1989). The work laid out the archaeological evidence pertaining to the mounds and took a skeptical view of the popular European su- premacist theories of Indian origins (Thomas, 1894; Stanton, 1960:11). But it was not until the publication oi Report on the Mound Explorations (Thomas, 1894) that their Indian origin was established conclusively. The Contributions series, presided over by Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the institution, established the Smithson- ian as a scholarly "mouthpiece" for a nation whose private publication resources were extremely limited and were not suf- ficient for the type of broad scientific discourse he and the Smithsonian founders envisioned. One thousand copies were printed and were sent to libraries across the country and throughout the world. In this way the Smithsonian's publica- tion outreach program and the scientific credentials of the na- scent institution were launched in one fell swoop. The fact that this volume and most of the published contributions that fol- lowed were written by scientists throughout the country—from universities, natural history societies, amateur science societ- ies, and others—established Smithsonian science as a broad national endeavor. Only later was authorization given for the institution to do original research and field expeditions on its own, an innovation that followed the appointment of Baird as assistant secretary, in 1850. This vision of the Smithsonian as a central node in a broad national and international network of scholarly activity and ex- changes was at the very core of the Smithsonian's original charter. In those days, the institution's "public" was the dedi- cated naturalist, the historian, and the antiquarian, for without a museum or any means to communicate broadly other than through its circulars and publications, its only real constituency was the educated elite. This was an age, literally, of rapidly ex- panding horizons, of national territorial growth, and of intellec- tual achievement in the wake of revolutionary progress in biol- ogy and geology. The opportunities for scientific advance were enormous, and scholars and naturalists throughout the country, as well as in Europe, saw the Smithsonian as both a leader and a political lobbyist for the emergence of a uniquely American science. It took more than James Smithson's mandate, "the increase and diffusion of knowledge," to ensure that his bequest of $508,318.40 in 1838 dollars (about $6 to $7 million today; Pamela Henson, pers. comm., Apr 1997) would not be squan- dered by Congress in other directions. There was also an urgent need to provide curatorial care and scientific analysis for the large government collection of artifacts and art held in the United States Patent Office in Washington, D.C. Among this collection were about 5000 ethnographic objects collected by the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842, com- manded by Lt. Charles Wilkes, from South America, the South Pacific, the Oregon Territory, and the British Northwest Coast (Viola and Margolis, 1985). Having experienced difficulties in completing the scientific analyses of the Wilkes collection and having noted the damage incurred by curatorial neglect, includ- ing deterioration and loss of specimens and documentation, the need for a national museum had become clear, not only for nat- ural history, ethnology, and linguistic collections, but for the American Indian paintings of C.B. King and George Catlin, and for other treasures stored by various groups in Washington, D.C, that became consolidated in 1840 as the National Insti- tute (Hinsley, 1981:17). Baird's Science With these problems in mind, Henry decided to hire an assis- tant to manage the collections and to organize a scientific pro- gram. Recommendations by Harvard's Louis Agassiz (a Smith- sonian Regent) and other leading scholars led Henry to select Baird (Figure 1), who had assisted James Dwight Dana in his studies of the Wilkes collection. Baird arrived in 1850 with two railroad boxcars full of specimens collected during his natural history fieldwork in eastern North America. If the Smithsonian authorities ever meant to limit the institution's function to li- brary and publication exchanges, as Henry and others had orig- inally argued, they made a huge mistake in hiring Baird (Goode, 1897; Dall, 1915; Washburn, 1965, 1967; Rivinus and Youssef, 1992). Baird was an accomplished biologist whose research had al- ready won him a respected place in the leadership of American science. He was an organizer whose efforts over more than a decade had established a vast array of scientific collaboration with scholars and amateur field collectors throughout North America. Ultimately, the purpose of his acquisitiveness was not to build a museum but to conduct scientific research.2 Today we cannot imagine the need for such broad-scale collecting, both of so much material and by so many collectors, but for a biologist seeking to systematize the newly discovered fauna and flora of the New World, it was necessary to begin by build- ing large reference collections to which new specimens could be compared for purposes of scientific classification. In many cases the North American flora and fauna differed markedly from Europe's more familiar and better-studied biota. In addi- tion, beyond the arcane methods of taxonomy and classifica- tion, geography, climate, and environment were beginning to be recognized as having an impact on organism morphology, evolution of species, formation of ecological complexes, and delineation of life zones. Even species identity itself was still a novel and malleable biological concept. For these reasons, Baird believed that one had to build large collections from con- tiguous geographical zones to understand regional variation and recognize diagnostic features of species and subspecies. To cite one example of his organizational and collecting techniques, Baird convinced his wife's father, General Sylvester Churchill, to issue a circular to military officers at bases in remote locations, asking them to make natural history collections in their spare time. Baird's circular provided details as to what species should be collected, what observations were NUMBER 44 181 FIGURE 1.—Spencer F. Baird, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, established and implemented the institution's field programs and documenta- tion systems. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution (neg. no. 46853-A). required for each species, and what information should be re- corded about geography and environment. Other government agencies conducting land and boundary commission surveys, naval explorations, or gathering tidal and climatic observations were also solicited and were provided with written instructions. Given the rapidly expanding United States territorial bound- aries of the day, the result was a deluge of information and specimens. When Baird landed his job at the Smithsonian, his organizational abilities resulted in an explosion of government and private collaborations, and he used his position, with Henry's authority and concurrence, to establish the Smithson- ian as the premier collecting and exchange center for biological materials in North America. Two boxcars was "peanuts" to the flow of collections that soon began to arrive. Yet even with meager assistance from Henry's budget, Baird parlayed the Smithsonian's unofficial "National Museum" into a national repository and center of scientific research. During these early years, Baird's goals were strictly scien- tific and could not be considered educational or display ori- ented. His purpose in building collections was not for public edification in the general sense. Rather, he wanted to compile large, synoptic, documented reference collections to assess bio- logical variation and to revise earlier Linnaean classifications of American fauna that had been based on inadequate numbers of specimens from restricted geographic regions. One of Baird's first projects at the Smithsonian was to use the large collection to prepare his Catalogue of North American Reptiles in the Museum of the Smithsonian Institution (Baird and Gi- rard, 1853). Scientifically, this work was an important revision of an earlier outdated study. It is best known today, however, for having infuriated his former mentor, Louis Agassiz, the doyen of biology at Harvard, who felt upstaged and outraged by the prominent role played in the project by Charles Girard, his estranged former student (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992: 98-105; Lindsay, 1993:16-17). Baird's acquisitiveness, however, did not lead immediately to castle-building. In Baird's view, once basic classification was accomplished with the aid of large suites of specimens, only a few individual specimens identified as "types" needed to be retained in a permanent collection. Upon completing his studies, type specimens would be marked with small green tags and saved for the museum's reference collection, and the masses of similar specimens could then be discarded. In prac- tice this meant large numbers of duplicate collections could be distributed to natural history societies and universities through- out the country and abroad, and (with loss to the legacy of Smithsonian collections; see Walsh, 2002) this was done assid- uously, accompanied by the completed publications and collec- tion records. Thus were born the two pillars of the Bairdian Smithsonian legacy that have continued until the present day: a concern for the importance of empirical (especially natural) science and the importance of sharing scientific information and specimens. Baird displayed a genius for the organization of field collect- ing, data compilation, and mapping but later was criticized for his lack of contributions to biological theory (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992:100; Lindsay, 1993:16). His method, however, was not without forethought. He believed that advances in this pioneering stage of American natural science would come from assiduous collecting followed by classification and compara- tive assessment of large documented collections and subse- quent taxonomic revisions of increasingly wider geographic scope. By 1854 Baird's array of collectors, often referred to as "Baird's missionaries" (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992:83), were supplying the Smithsonian from 26 different expeditions and numerous other government surveys. In return, Baird provided instructions, collecting equipment, small sums of money for field expenses, and return freight. All contributors received copies of the institution's annual reports in which full credit was given to each organization and collector, and many of the latter found their names attached to new species. This was the system Baird established for natural history. The result was exponential growth of collections, rapid publi- cation, broad dissemination of results through the institution's Miscellaneous Contributions and Contributions to Knowledge series and annual reports, and establishment of a network of 182 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY collectors and scientists receiving Smithsonian exchange col- lections and publications. Operating largely outside the univer- sities (which had few capabilities for field research at this early date), he sometimes ruffled the feathers of the university elite. But on the other hand, he trained a new, independent breed of field naturalist whose careers lay largely outside the cluttered, elitist hierarchies of academy life, and whose contributions brought the newly explored and largely undisturbed regions of North America within the sphere of the scientific establishment (including talented amateurs) for the first time. In most cases it was not until after 1900 that university-based scientists arrived in America's "outback." In short, Baird had created a populist scientific revolution. Six years into his term as Secretary, Henry summed up what he saw as the role of the Smithsonian: The prominent idea embraced in the Smithsonian organization is that of coop- eration and concerted action with all institutions and individuals engaged in the promotion of knowledge. Its design is not to monopolize any part of the wide fields of nature or of art, but to invite all to partake in the pleasure and honor of their cultivation. It seeks not to encroach upon ground occupied by other insti- tutions, but to expend the funds in doing that which cannot be as well done by other means. It gives to the words of Smithson their most liberal interpretation, and "increases and diffuses knowledge among men" by promoting the discov- ery of new truths, and by disseminating these in every part of the civilized world. (Board of Regents, 1853:31) This, I think, outlines the mission and politics of the Smith- sonian in a fashion that is as relevant today as it was 150 years ago. There are, indeed, many things that can be done by the Smithsonian that are completely unique and national in scope. Synoptic programs like the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History exhibitions, the Handbook of North American Indians series, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall, the National Science Information Service, the Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition Service, Folkways Recordings, and the recently established Institute for Conservation Biology are ex- amples of the Smithsonian's response to a broad national man- date that reaches beyond individual research to the understand- ing and stewardship of the world at large. Early Ethnological Collecting Despite the fact that it was Baird, a biologist, who was respon- sible for hiring and directing the naturalists who made the Smithsonian's first ethnographic collections, it was primarily Henry's interest in ethnology and archeology, before Baird was hired, that established a place for human studies under the Smithsonian's "big tent." Soon after arriving at the Smithsonian, in 1846, Henry re- ceived a letter from the eminent New York ethnologist, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, urging him to adopt his "Plan for the Inves- tigation of American Ethnology," which incorporated a library of philology, archaeological investigations of the earthworks of the Mississippi Valley, and a "Museum of Mankind" for collec- tions of America's native peoples (Schoolcraft, 1846; Hinsley, 1981:20). Henry, already aware of the contributions made dur- ing previous decades by philological and archaeological stud- ies of the ancient world, became convinced that the answer to Thomas Jefferson's question, "from whence came those ab- originals of America" (Jefferson, 1955:100), might also be set- tled in a similar manner, by dedicated cultural, archaeological, and linguistic field studies. It has often been noted that, compared to the hard sciences and many social sciences, anthropology has been slow to de- velop scientific methods, and that its theory is largely borrowed from other disciplines. This appears to have been true in the emergence of Smithsonian anthropology, in which biology and linguistics played a formative role. The collecting instructions of George Gibbs, a philologist who had been an active member of the Northwest Boundary Survey Commission of 1857-1861 (see "Baird, Kennicott, and Systematic Museum Anthropol- ogy," below), although formulated outside the context of ex- plicit cultural theory, recognized the importance of combining evidence from archaeology, ethnology, philology, and other fields and laid the foundation for Boas's later formation of an integrated science of culture. By establishing systematic data- collecting techniques, by building an empirical database, and by systematizing the collections and organizing exhibitions that explored cultural theory and cultural classifications, the Smithsonian made important contributions several decades be- fore the establishment of anthropology in other museums and universities (Fitzhugh, 1996). In searching for the origins of museum anthropology as it de- veloped at the Smithsonian, I have been impressed by the con- tributions made by the Bairdian system of science described above. In this respect, the earliest phase of American museum anthropology had a different history from academic anthropol- ogy as the latter began to be practiced in the 1890s. If we may judge from modern tendencies reviewed below, museum an- thropology may also have a different future as well. Anthropological collecting, of course, was not a Smithsonian invention, even as a concerted museum-based activity. The Eu- ropean "Cabinet of Curiosities" was clearly the forerunner in this field (Urry, 1984). The European cabinets were devoted to the preservation and display of natural and "artificial" curiosi- ties. For most of these cabinets, scientific inquiry was not a guiding force. Indian materials that arrived in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were collected in a haphaz- ard manner as examples of the arts and industries of Native Americans and usually lacked scientific documentation. The European cabinets, called "Kunstkammers" after about 1600, began in the mid-1500s in Florence, Prague, Dresden, Vienna, and other European locations. Copenhagen was one of the first cities to begin to collect, store, and display curiosities, which included ethnographic materials from Europe and many other areas of the world. As early as the early seventeenth cen- tury these collections were displayed in the Wormianum Mu- seum maintained by Ole Worm, a widely-traveled physician and naturalist. Although his museum and its later incarnations had a staff, a catalog (maintained systematically beginning in NUMBER 44 183 1825), and a cultural and typological basis of object organiza- tion, it was not until 1841, when a new curator named Christian Thomsen separated the non-European materials within the Kunstkammer and created the Ethnographical Department, that a scientific plan emerged (Dam-Mikkelsen and Lundbaek, 1980). Although Thomsen is best known for developing "three- age" systematics (stone, bronze, iron) for archaeology, in 1839 he also began supporting ethnographic collecting, and orga- nized these collections in a systematic manner. In an earlier era, the Cook voyages of the 1770s represented a step forward from previously undocumented collecting, thanks to the scientific and geographical observations of Jo- seph Banks and a dedicated natural history program conducted by the father and son team, Reinhold and George Forster (Kaeppler, 1978:2). The result was a more systematic approach to collecting, but one that still emphasized artificial curiosities. The fact that some specimens were described in print and oth- ers have survived in museum collections permits some under- standing of the cultures encountered. Even so, the charge to the scientists by the British Admiralty was vague and unstructured. Cook was to collect materials illustrating characteristic features of native peoples that would serve to identify them to voyagers rather than for purposes of scientific description or compara- tive study (Kaeppler, 1978:37^18). Sir Hans Sloane described his artifact collections, which were purchased by the British Crown in 1753 and founded the British Museum (MacGregor, 1994), as "miscellanies." They lacked any systematic basis, either in their collection or cata- loging, other than their chronology of accession (King, 1994:231), and reflected Sloane's primarily antiquarian inter- est. His collecting began during his service as a physician and amateur naturalist in Jamaica in the late seventeenth century. Only his botanical collections showed scientific organization, due to the more advanced state of this field. Like Ashton Lever, founder of the Leverian Museum, which displayed Cook col- lections in the 1780s (Kaeppler, 1972, 1978:12-15), Sloane rarely traveled, seems not to have grasped the importance of cultural context, and his collection was assembled secondhand from others. During this early period, Russia developed a strong aware- ness of the value of specimens as scientific documents (Kinzh- alov, 1983; Dzeniskevich and Pavlinskaya, 1988). The Kunst- kammer established by Peter the Great in St. Petersburg in 1714 is an early museum collection that exhibited anthropolog- ical materials. Most Russian expeditions to America began col- lecting ethnological and biological materials in the 1780s, when Governor Boehm of Kamchatka transmitted objects pur- chased from the James Cook expeditions to the Russian Acad- emy of Science's Kunstkammer (today the Museum of Anthro- pology and Ethnology (MAE)) in St. Petersburg. Later, Joseph Billings and Gavril Andreevich Sarychev donated ethnological materials to the MAE from their North Pacific voyages of 1785-1794. The Russian Admiralty Museum acquired materi- als from the Krusenstern and Lisianski voyages to Alaska (1803-1806), and 100 of these specimens were transmitted to the MAE after 1930. Other Russian expeditions, including those commanded by Golovnin (1817-1818), Kashevarov (1830-1860s), Arkimandritov (1840s), and Zagoskin (1842-1844) all provided Alaskan specimens to the MAE. As early as 1741, German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller, on Vitus Bering's voyage to Alaska, speculated on relation- ships between the native peoples of Alaska and Kamchatka on the basis of linguistic similarities (Steller, 1988). In Russia, however, Ilyia Voznesenskii's work in Russian America (south- east Alaska to central California) between 1839 and 1849 most closely marks the transition from informed observation to sci- entific purpose. Voznesenskii, who was then a preparator in the Kunstkammer, was sent to Alaska specifically to make docu- mented collections for the Russian Academy of Science muse- ums. The Academy gave him explicit instructions for collect- ing ethnological specimens. His collection of about 1000 objects was documented to tribe, place, name, function, and material. Many specimens were noted in his diaries and were drawn. According to Dzeniskevich and Pavlinskaya (1988:85), his collecting methods "were unusual for ethnography at the time: Voznesenskii collected objects systematically across functional categories, so that the MAE acquired synoptic series of clothing, canoes, masks, and other artifact types" (see also Liapunova, 1967). Some of Voznesenskii's objects and other specimens from earlier Russian expeditions appeared in the joint American-Soviet traveling exhibition Crossroads of Con- tinents (Fitzhugh and Crowell, 1988; Liapunova, 1994). One of the little-known contributions to early ethnology and material culture studies involved Philipp Franz von Siebold's collections from Japan, made between 1823 and 1829 at the Dutch trading entrepot at Dejima in Nagasaki (Kreiner, 1993:27, 1996). A medical doctor and amateur naturalist em- ployed by the Dutch to gather information about Japan, Siebold purchased books, manuscripts, and maps; made large natural history collections of botanical, zoological, mineral specimens; and compiled an extensive ethnographic collection of Japanese objects and some Ainu materials (Forrer, 1996; Brown, 1996). Although purchased from friends and shops, Siebold pursued what documentation was available on these materials. Japan was still officially closed to foreigners at this time, and Siebold almost lost his life when Japanese officials discovered prohib- ited items (maps, images of shoguns, drawings of ship-building equipment, etc.) in his collections (Brown, 1996:121). Accused of spying and expelled, Siebold returned to Holland where he organized his collection and opened a private museum in the 1830s. He was a prodigious writer and published a five-volume Flora Japonica (Siebold, 1835-1870) and two volumes (crus- taceans and reptiles) in Fauna Japonica (Siebold, 1833-1850). Although he failed to publish his ethnographic collections di- rectly, discussions of these materials appeared in his monumen- tal work, Japan (Siebold, 1930), and his museum arranged them in systematic cultural categories. Here, the organizing principle was cultural region, that is, grouping together Japa- 184 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY nese materials from Honshu, Ainu, Yezo (Hokkaido), and so on. And although he considered his organization inferior to the cross-cultural comparative organization that grouped similar objects from different regions and cultures together as done by Edme-Francois Jomard (Forrer, 1996:26) in his museum in Paris, perhaps Siebold was the wiser, anticipating Otis Mason's culture area principle of ethnographic organization nearly 50 years later. Siebold's was certainly an ethnographic museum in the making, as one eye-witness account from 1835 confirms: There is probably nothing comparable to what is exhibited in the three rooms containing the systematically exhibited treasures which Mr. Von Siebold brought from Japan. One is transferred among all inventions, customs, habits, the art, science, and industry of a population which was, until recently, as un- known as man on the moon. From the toiletries of ladies, one enters into the studio of the artisan, from the golden pagoda and schools into an armoury, and, as to leave out nothing, whole streets in miniature with their wares, temples for their gods, and houses of pleasures are exhibited. They have been made over there by the Japanese themselves, which is a gTeat safeguard for their authen- ticity." (Major-General Ludwig Freiherr von Welden, in Forrer, 1996:30) Later, the fine arts portion of Siebold's collections, and similar items gathered after him by his son, Heinrich, found their way to the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, and the ethnographic ma- terials went to Leiden. While Siebold's collections were not gathered directly from their makers and lack direct documenta- tion and precise geographic placement, they represent an im- pressive inventory of cultural materials, and his museum's carefully classified organization of objects had an inherently scientific purpose (Forrer, 1996:24-25). Another collecting program of the early 1800s that contrib- uted (though more marginally) to the development of system- atic museum studies is that of Jean Louis Berlandier (Ewers, 1969; Berlandier, 1980) in northern Mexico and Texas. Ber- landier 's surveys between 1825 and 1834 were originally com- missioned by the eminent botanist Augustin Pyramus de Can- tolle through the Academy of Natural Sciences in Geneva (Muller, 1980:xi-xxxvi). Although Berlandier's focus was on natural history, which was his specialty, he also acquired an- thropological materials, but the project was poorly organized, and Berlandier, who continued to live in Mexico, died there in 1851 before completing his major publication. His collections, consisting primarily of zoological and botanical specimens with some archaeological and ethnological materials, were sold after his death with the assistance of Baird, who acquired some of the zoological and ethnological specimens for the Smithson- ian (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992:90). The records on these mate- rials were spotty, consisting of journal notes and unfinished manuscripts, and while his information on American Indian culture is useful, his ethnological collecting was not informed by detailed description or scientific method. It appears likely that American collecting prior to 1848 did not meet the contemporary Russian Academy standards, which in turn may have been inspired by German methods (William C. Sturtevant, pers comm., 1985). Other than Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, whose collections for Jefferson dis- played differences among Indian groups but lacked scientific method, one of the earliest major American collecting enter- prises was the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 (also known as the Wilkes Expedition), the first United States expedition to explore the Pacific Ocean and which reached as far north as the Columbia River. The Wilkes Expedition had a designated scientific team (Viola and Marg- olis, 1985), and its members were instructed to gather and doc- ument natural history, ethnology, and native language. Horatio Hale (1846) wrote a monograph on ethnography and philology which provides extensive linguistic detail but has little useful ethnographic description, and no systematic catalog was pre- pared. More serious intent was shown by Titian R. Peale, son of the artist Charles W. Peale, who collected ethnological mate- rial for his father's "American Museum"—the Peale Mu- seum—in Philadelphia, but these specimens were later dis- persed by sale. There seems to have been little scientific purpose to the ethnological collecting other than to secure arti- facts typifying different cultures and regions or to ascertain whether some practical value might be discovered in them. Kaeppler (1978:20) notes that "most of the objects were col- lected primarily as curios and as evidence for the prevailing evolutionary view of culture. Detailed information about where the objects were collected or how they were made or used was often not recorded and kept with the objects." The end result was an amalgam of objects of various cultural provenance. Fol- lowing analysis of the Wilkes collection at the Patent Office in Washington, 25 sets of duplicates (about half of the original collection of 2500 catalogue numbers, which totaled in all about 5000 objects) were given away or exchanged with other museums. Slightly fewer than 2000 Wilkes specimens remain in the Smithsonian collection today.3 Despite the movement toward more extensive field docu- mentation and classification of objects, and the fact that these early collectors to varying degrees followed an informed method of systematic collecting, the purpose of classification was to organize and present objects in museums rather than for scientific comparison and accumulation of systematic knowl- edge. Ethnological and archaeological objects still were con- sidered as curiosities of unique interest rather than as objects expressing an underlying system of human knowledge set in geographical, chronological, and cultural context. Finally, none of these collections was gathered with the express purpose of building large collections for scientific description and com- parison. Lewis Henry Morgan The closest example of "systematic" ethnology collecting of an American Indian group dating to this era is Lewis Henry Mor- gan's work with the Seneca and other Iroquois groups con- ducted in the late 1840s for the regents of the University of the State of New York (Sturtevant, 1987; Tooker, 1994). Briefly, the history of this collection is as follows. In 1847, the regents decided to add a "historical and antiquarian" collection to the NUMBER 44 185 state's Cabinet of Natural History, in Albany, founded in 1843 to house New York State's geological and natural history sur- vey collections. To further this end, the regents sent a general request to the citizens of New York for objects. Morgan re- sponded by sending from his personal collection about 50 ob- jects in 1848, most of them archaeological, and about 35 more in 1848, over half of them ethnological. At the same time he suggested to the regents that a larger collection of ethnological objects be made. As he wrote the regents, "If a scholar of after years should ask of our age an account of our predecessors, such a collection would be the most acceptable answer it could render. It would enable the Red Race to speak for itself through these silent memorials" (Morgan in Tooker, 1994:45). The re- gents concurred, and with their financial support, Morgan made a collection of Seneca ethnological objects in 1849 and another of Seneca and other Iroquois objects in 1850. He trans- mitted with both collections catalogs and descriptive notes that included native names, raw materials and other documentation, which were published in the regents' reports. In making these collections, Morgan had the assistance of his Iroquois friend Ely S. Parker, who accompanied him to the Six Nations Re- serve in Canada in 1850 and who may have helped to identify materials and to supply names and other information. In all, Morgan sent about 500 archaeological, ethnological, and eth- nobotanical specimens to the New York Cabinet. A large num- ber of these materials were destroyed in a fire that gutted the capitol building in 1911. Fortunately, Morgan had duplicated much of this collection with materials acquired on the Tonawanda Seneca Reservation, most of them from members of Parker's family who lived there, and this collection survives in the Rochester Museum and Science Center, Rochester, New York. Sturtevant (1987) noted that a possible stimulus for the cre- ation of the Albany collection may have been a visit made in 1847 by New York Governor John Young to the Hartford His- torical and Antiquarian Museum, which displayed an American Indian collection. But in Sturtevant's view, a more direct moti- vation probably was Morgan's visit in 1846 to the United States Patent Office exhibitions: He [Morgan] wrote in his 1848 report that the proposed New York State Cabi- net, by adding an Indian collection to the existing natural history collections, might soon "not be unworthy of comparison with the more universal collec- tions of the National Government at the Patent Office." That is where the col- lections of the so-called National Institute were displayed from 1841 until they were transferred to the Smithsonian in 1857. A floor plan published in 1844, two years before Morgan's visit, shows that there were many natural history exhibit cases, and eleven cases displaying ethnographic items. Nearly all of these were from the United States Exploring Expedition in the Pacific under Lt. Charles Wilkes in 1838-1842. Evidently the entire Wilkes expedition ethno- graphic collection was exhibited—amounting to over 2500 pieces, of which about 300 were North American (from California and Oregon), including 85 bows and arrows, and the largest number from one region was 1202 objects from Fiji, exhibited in four cases—something like 300 objects per case—which allows very little space for labels and no opportunity for any rational arrange- ment. (Sturtevant, 1987:5-6) Morgan employed a type concept (probably adapted from his familiarity with the New York State natural history surveys) and systematically classified, described, and published the ma- terial culture and ethnobotanical samples of a single ethnic group. As Sturtevant has noted, Morgan, beginning in 1850, or- ganized his collection in types rather than as separate objects. [H]e had a notion of artifact types, which he must have gotten by paying close attention to what the Senecas told him, and probably especially to what Ely Parker explained. These were ethnographic collections, in a narrow, technical sense... .So here and elsewhere the types are Seneca ones. Morgan's essay is a description of types... .He does say that the specimens on his list "are classified under their aboriginal names into 83 distinct classes, and number in all about 300." (Sturtevant, 1987:9-10; emphasis in original) Morgan's collection demonstrates a significant advance in American thought about scientific anthropology. Like Baird's work, which was being conducted at the same time, it seems likely that Morgan began with a biological model—indeed, he sometimes refers to his types as "species." But here the Baird- ian analogy ends, for Morgan did not employ the biological concept of morphological variation to investigate cultural sys- tems and culture change over space. He was not concerned with collecting large numbers of similar objects to ascertain variation within classes. He did not distinguish cultural differ- ences between artifacts collected from the Seneca from those he collected among the Canadian Iroquois. Rather, his types were culturally defined by what conveyed a particular sense of a general Iroquoian "genius." These value judgments were not part of the Bairdian system and may represent Morgan's aware- ness of an important difference between biological and cultural systems, the idea that types may not exist in cultural systems in the same way they do in biology. He did not seek to exclude nonindigenous materials or elements or styles that indicated European influence. Rather than collecting ethnological data for the study and analysis of Seneca culmre in time or space, Morgan was stimulated by the desire to record and thus to pre- serve in a museum setting selected features of a vanishing cul- ture for posterity. As noted by Sturtevant (pers. comm., Dec 1995), his work predates the development of "salvage" ethnol- ogy that motivated later nineteenth century collecting, espe- cially as espoused by the BAE, and his Iroquois materials were not so heavily "traditional" as the idealized systematic BAE collections of 1880-1920. In sum, it appears that Morgan worked within a classic natu- ral history paradigm (not surprising for a scholar who had also authored a monograph on the American beaver) and employed a more anthropological concept of culture than did Baird's col- lectors, but his collection tells us little of cultural variation in space. Lacking large series of objects from a broad region, Morgan's Iroquois collections could not have been used for studies of geographic cultural variation even if the Albany col- lection had survived. Nevertheless, the collection presented an unvarnished view of Seneca material culture at an important period in time. Morgan's work was a more faithful representa- tion of the humanistic dimension linking objects, ethnography, 1! SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY and culture—i.e., what was to become the essence of Boasian anthropology—than what was being studied in the Smithson- ian's early collecting program. One could only have wished that Baird and Morgan had collaborated on their visions, both for the enhancement of Iroquoian studies and for improvement of the Smithsonian's field collection and publication program. Finally, Morgan's writings are full of surprises. Those famil- iar with recent Smithsonian history may find his musings to Ely Parker apocalyptic: "What would be a pretty name for a 'Collection of Indian Antiques', or 'Indian Relics', or 'Aborig- inal Curiosities', or 'Cabinet of Indian History', or 'Indian Museum'?...One word would be preferred. It must all be in one word." (Morgan to Parker, in Tooker, 1994:56). This, from 150 years ago, sums up the conundrum in the 1970s when Smithsonian Institution Secretary S. Dillon Ripley searched for a suitable name and concept for a Museum of Man. It is by this circuitous route we emerge at the doorstep of the Smithsonian Castle in 1850 once again, with the ascension of Baird as direc- tor of the Smithsonian's informal national museum. Baird, Kennicott, and Systematic Museum Anthropology During the 1850s Baird consolidated his position at the Smith- sonian and developed a strong relationship with Henry, whom he greatly admired but fought constantly with over the need for official recognition for the museum. Henry refused to accept the Patent Office collections into the museum without specific congressional authorization and funding. But Baird's rapid col- lection-building program finally paid off in 1858, when Con- gress officially authorized expenditures for the United States National Museum. In the meantime, the biological and ethno- logical collections had been pouring in and were classified and organized by a staff of volunteers and part-time employees. Henry's interests in cultural studies continued to remain prima- rily in historical, archaeological, and linguistic research. In ad- dition to "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley" (Squier and Davis, 1848), he also published "Aboriginal Mon- uments of the State of New York" (Squier, 1849), "Archaeol- ogy in the United States" (Haven, 1856), and several treatises on American Indian languages prepared with the assistance of William W Turner. With Turner's death in 1859, his place as the Smithsonian's (unpaid) Indian linguistic collaborator was taken up by George Gibbs. Gibbs immediately set to work preparing circulars for distribution to Baird's network of collectors and in 1862 pub- lished "Instructions for Archaeological Investigations in the United States" (Gibbs, 1862). This remarkable document pre- sented a rationale for detailed observation of archaeological stratigraphy and time sequencing. It was obviously influenced by geological and archaeological developments in Europe, both in terms of theory and field method. Jefferson had conducted stratigraphic excavations in a Virginia Indian burial mound al- most 100 years earlier, and published his results (Trigger, 1989:69), but his work had since been forgotten. The following year Gibbs (1863) published a second pam- phlet of instructions that specified the types of collections and information desired, including crania and specimens represent- ing native artifacts and arts, "hints for ethnological inquiry" in- tended "to place before us a moving panorama of America in the olden time" (Gibbs, 1863:7), names of tribes, geographical location, population numbers and trends, physical features, lan- guage and writing, dress, food, dwellings, arts, trade, religion, government, social life, war, medicine, literature, astronomy, history, and antiquities. Concerning the latter, he noted that "if the work [excavation] cannot be thoroughly done, it is better to leave the mound unopened for a more favorable opportunity" (Gibbs, 1863:12). After Gibbs's death the task of collecting and classifying linguistic data from American Indian tribes was taken up with great fervor by Powell, who spent two decades mapping the distribution of Native American languages in North America (Goddard, 1996). These developments in American anthropological collecting occurred 14 years before the British Museum extended its instructions for systematic bi- ological collecting to the field of ethnology in its Notes and Queries series (British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1874; Lindsay, 1993:36)4 and effectively modernized its ethnography program (King, 1994:238). Kennicott in Rupert's Land At the same time the Smithsonian expanded its contacts in a new direction. Baird had expressed interest in developing a collecting program in the Mackenzie region of northwestern Canada as early as 1850 (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992:85-87). With the United States Army and other government agencies fully engaged with the Civil War, Baird turned his attention to Central and South America and to the newly accessible north- western frontier, known to the Hudson's Bay Company trad- ers as "Rupert's Land" (Lindsay, 1993:7). In 1857 he had Henry send a letter of introduction to Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson's Bay Company's operations in Can- ada, asking for permission and collecting assistance from its "servants" (post directors, known as "factors") in the Macken- zie region. The idea of collecting was not new to the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), which had since the mid-eighteenth century encouraged its field managers to collect natural his- tory specimens for the Royal Society in London, the members of which included many HBC governors (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992:83; Lindsay, 1993:42).5 Soon after receiving official permission from Simpson in 1859, Baird sent Robert Kennicott (Figure 2), a young, gifted (but somewhat mercu- rial) Chicago naturalist, north to organize a collecting effort with the assistance of the HBC factors.6 The project was spon- sored jointly by the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Michigan, the Audubon Club of Chicago, and the Chicago Academy of Science. Baird's intent was to gather from this unknown land a complete record of natural history and ethnol- ogy. In the process, he also wanted to establish a systematic NUMBER 44 187 FIGURE 2.—Robert Kennicott, Baird's eminent field naturalist, opened British America and Alaska to American science. collection that extended west into Russian America, so that one could begin to assess the relationship of northwestern North American biota and cultures with Siberia and the Old World. Here was a grand scheme indeed! One that excited Kennicott and could provide the Smithsonian with specimens and information from a part of North America totally new to American science. Although he probably was Baird's most gifted student, be- cause of his premature death, at age 31, Kennicott is a little- known figure in American science. He has been described by biographer Donald Culross Peattie as a budding John James Audubon or Alexander von Humboldt (Peattie, 1936:94). Bom in New Orleans in 1835, Kennicott later moved to Illinois where he was trained in natural history by the physician Jared P. Kirtland, who was recognized as the most eminent naturalist in the west and who was well known to Baird. In 1853, at Kirt- land's urging, Kennicott began corresponding with Baird, to whom he had been sending rattlesnakes and other specimens for several years. Baird had a huge effect on Kennicott's devel- opment (Vasile, 1994), and in 1857 Kennicott came to Wash- ington, D.C, to work on Baird's reptile classification project. He spent the winters of 1857-1858 and 1858-1859 in Wash- ington, and while home during the intervening summer, he helped found the Chicago Academy of Sciences and a natural history museum at Northwestern University. It was during this period that he made his first trips into Canada, to the Red River, in 1857. In spring of 1859, utilizing the trading post infrastruc- ture of the Hudson's Bay Company, Kennicott began his major collecting program in northern British America with $2000 of private cash provided by Baird. Between 1859 and 1862 Kennicott organized a collecting network that supplied the Smithsonian with nearly 12,000 specimens from more than 23 collectors (Lindsay, 1993:131). Five hundred of these were ethnological collections from the Mackenzie Inuit (Inuvialuit) and Dene Indians; the remainder were animal and bird pelts, bird eggs (by the thousands), fish, plants, and minerals (Figure 3). About half of these materials were collected by HBC traders Roderick MacFarlane and Ber- nard Ross. Ross had previously participated with the Smithson- ian, through his association with George Gibbs, on the North- west Boundary Survey Commission in 1857. MacFarlane and Ross, in turn, acquired many of their specimens from native people by purchase or exchange. During this period Kennicott spent much of his time training HBC men and native Dene and Inuvialuit to document and prepare specimens. Writing to Baird, he noted, "you know that there is very little chance of my ever killing such things as musk oxen, barren ground bear, and reindeer... .1 can only hope to get them by hiring the Indi- ans to bring them in from a great distance" (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992:86). The Kennicott project produced the largest and most system- atically gathered collection of natural history and ethnological materials acquired by the Smithsonian up to that time. It estab- lished a method of operating in remote regions using the local native population and the existing infrastructure, in this case, that of the HBC, which was offered to the Smithsonian nearly free of charge. Company men were more than eager to provide 188 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY J " ... " .4 i-fn^~2 J 0 26/, CiVa^c *- SA* JZU-,1 & FIGURE 3.—Extract from Kennicott's field ledger. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Department of Vertebrate Zoology. assistance (Coates, 1984; Lindsay, 1993). Given the drab fare of company instructions received by the factors, "there is no doubt that this was one circular they took seriously" (Thomas, 1985:291). Native peoples received financial credit at the posts for contributing objects and documentation, and the HBC men were listed as Smithsonian collaborators and donors. In some instances they found their names credited in subspecies desig- nations. Bernard Ross became so interested in natural history that he began to write original contributions for the Smithson- ian Annual Report and other biological publications. The Kennicott enterprise rivals Morgan's Seneca collection as the first intensive American effort to develop a systematic collection of ethnological materials gathered according to a prescribed scientific plan. The collection was undertaken us- ing Baird and Gibbs's system of documentation and was the Smithsonian's first attempt to develop a comprehensive cul- tural collection from a circumscribed geographic region. Be- cause Kennicott's ethnological collections were never fully published they are relatively unknown, but they represent an important development in anthropological field collecting, in- corporating detailed descriptions and observations of place, tribal affiliation, and native terminology; they also utilized na- tive people as collectors and informants to a greater degree than was the case for collections made in previous decades, such as those by Lewis and Clark, Berlandier, Catlin, and Voznesenskii, or those of Prince Maximilian, who collected on the upper Missouri in 1832-1834 (Maximilian, 1906; Ewers etal., 1984). Unlike Morgan's collection, which, though published, had few intellectual offspring, the Kennicott-Baird program in the Mackenzie District began a long and productive tradition of scientific collecting at the Smithsonian. In 1865-1866, after Kennicott's return from the Mackenzie, Baird sent him to Rus- sian America to lead a survey team charting a route across Alaska to Siberia for the Western Union Telegraph Company (Collins, 1946; Fitzhugh and Selig, 1981) (Figures 4, 5). The project was complex and had strategic importance for emer- gent United States interests in the Northwest. But with West- ern Union in charge, the Smithsonian science program re- mained a remote second priority. After an auspicious beginning, the scientific program fell prey to conflicted goals. Bound by contract to complete a rapid survey, Kennicott be- came overwhelmed by the problems of running a huge explo- ration party in unknown country where logistic support like that provided by the HBC in the Mackenzie was absent. Fits of depression set in, and on 13 May 1866 he was found dead of unknown causes on the banks of the Yukon River.7 Later that year a rival company completed the trans-Atlantic cable. Western Union cancelled the survey, and the scientific team, now led by William Healy Dall, returned to Washington to re- port its findings. Despite problems, the Kennicott expedition produced the first significant scientific information on Russian America made by American observers, and during the next year Baird publicized the findings in Congress and circulated scientific reports to his network of state natural history societ- ies, urging them to support the purchase of what some had dubbed "Seward's Folly." Although the political significance of Baird's campaign to convince Congress to purchase Alaska has been disputed (Sherwood, 1965), Kennicott's Mackenzie and Alaska surveys laid the groundwork for an explosion of Smithsonian survey and field collecting activities following the annexation of Alaska, in 1867. NUMBER 44 189 Iff it/ . dp ' \ V*■■■■«■ f#ti V*. FIGURE 4.—Caribou hide tunic collected for Robert Kennicott by Bernard R. Ross of the Hudson's Bay Com- pany from Peel River Loucheux, British America, in 1866. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Nat- ural History, Department of Anthropology (catalog no. 1855-6). Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution (neg. no. 85-1379). 190 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY APPENDIX Flag of the Scientific Corps. MEMBERS. ROBERT KENNICOTT, W. H. DALL, H. W. ELLIOTT, H. M. BANNISTER, J. T. ROTHROCK, FERDINAND BISCHOFF, CHARLES PEASE. FIGURE 5.—Flag of the Western Union "Scientific Corps" (from Alaska and Its Resources (Dall, 1870)). Baird's Alaska Program Kennicott's opening of Alaska began a heyday for Smithson- ian field collecting and natural history. Over the next 10 years Baird set up collecting programs that covered the entire Alaska territory and adjacent parts of Canada and Russia (Fitzhugh, 1988). His techniques were similar to those used by Kennicott in the Mackenzie District. Baird was assisted by the Alaska Commercial Company (the successor to the Rus- sian America Company), other private trading companies, and a network of United States Government installations estab- lished by the Army, Coast Guard, and Signal Corps, to gather meteorological and natural resource data and administer gov- ernment services. Baird convinced these agencies to hire his naturalists to conduct government studies and in their spare time had them gather collections and data for the Smithsonian. Baird provided instruments, collecting materials, credit in trade goods at posts, and freight for shipping specimens to Washington. Dall, a charter member of Kennicott's Telegraph Survey team, became honorary curator of mollusks at the Smithsonian and wrote Alaska and its Resources (Dall, 1870), the first En- glish language book on Alaska (Figure 6). His surveys of western and southern Alaska netted large natural history col- lections, and he published important papers and monographs on anthropological materials. Dall was emphatic in recom- mending to Baird the opportunities for biology and ethnology in the lower Yukon region, with the result that Lucien Turner, another Smithsonian naturalist, was posted at St. Michael, near the entrance of the Yukon River, to begin a collecting program in 1871. In 1877 Turner was shifted to Unalaska to make room for a more accomplished young Smithsonian natu- ralist, Edward William Nelson, who took up residence at St. Michael from 1877 to 1881 (Figure 7). During this period Nelson collected more than 12,000 ethnological items, all fully documented, and thousands of biological specimens. Most important, Nelson was the first of Baird's northern col- lectors to publish his collections completely, reporting on ge- ography (1882), natural history (1887), and ethnology (1899) (Figures 8-10).8 Nelson represents the epitome of Baird's naturalists. Like Kennicott, his collecting program was conducted with Native American assistants whose work, combined with Nelson's own extensive collecting trips, created a huge inventory of cultural and biological materials from thousands of square miles of western Alaska, the Bering Strait, and adjacent coastal Chukotka. Nelson's ethnology collections are important today because he collected with the impartial eye of a naturalist. His scientific writings on people and cultures are relatively free of the evolutionary paradigms and western superiority that tainted much early ethnological field observation until well after the Boasian revolution that followed 1900. Nelson's diaries (though sometimes less objective) are rich in anthropological detail (Nelson, 1877-1881), and his 1899 monograph "Eski- mos About Bering Strait" describes Alaskan Eskimo cultures with the same descriptive clarity found in his reporting of natu- ral history and animal behavior. Baird's impact is best seen in the following (partial) list of naturalists whose biological and ethnological collecting he pro- moted in Alaska and other regions of Arctic and Subarctic North America. These include Kennicott in British America (1859-1862) and in interior Alaska (1865-1866); Dall in Alaska (1865-1885); Turner in St. Michael (1871-1877), the Aleutians (1877-1878), and northern Quebec (1882-1884); Nelson in the Yukon-Kuskokwim, Seward Peninsula, and Ber- ing Straits region (1877-1881); John Murdoch at Barrow (1881-1883); Charles MacKay in Bristol Bay (1881-1883); William J. Fisher in Kodiak Island (1880-1885); and James G. Swan (1850-1880s), John J. McLean (1883-1884), Robert Ni- NUMBER 44 191 K EG I KTOWRU K IN THE FALL. FIGURE 6.—"Kegiktowruk in the Fall." Yupik Eskimo village drawn by Dall and published in Alaska and Its Resources (Dall, 1870). black (1885-1887), and Lt. George T Emmons (1882-1900) in southeast Alaska. These men provided the Smithsonian with magnificent collections of Alaskan natural history and anthro- pological materials. The fact that these collections and their documentation were gathered and have been preserved and protected down through the years is one of the most important contributions the Smithsonian has made to northern science and cultural studies. But there was also a downside. Except for Dall, Nelson, Turner, Niblack, and Murdoch, few of these naturalists pub- lished their ethnology collections. None were anthropologists (nearly an unknown breed until the 1890s in any case), and only Dall became a Smithsonian employee. By the 1880s Baird had succeeded in recruiting the services of volunteers and cura- tors in various fields, and it was they who took on the task of publishing segments of the Alaska collections. As a result, Alaskan ethnographic collections were partly published by Dall (1870), Otis T. Mason, Walter Hough, Charles Rau, Walter Hoffman (1897), and others recruited to the effort by Baird and his successor to the directorship of the National Museum, George Brown Goode. For the most part these works were ty- pological and comparative and failed to capture the "living" ethnology and first-person veracity seen in the Nelson and Murdoch monographs. For these reasons the publications and the museum exhibits that followed (Gibbs, 1882; Holmes, 1903; Ewers, 1959; Fitzhugh, 1996) were criticized by Boas and others for their flawed evolutionary underpinnings and lack of cultural context (Hinsley, 1981:98). Nelson's approach to ethnography is evident in his writings (1899). He knew that cultures were not monolithic, and he recognized that geographic variation operated in culture as well as in biology and understood that evidence of history and cultural influence could be elicited from field data collected with spatial precision. Nelson's huge systematic collection from throughout western Alaska and Beringia crossed linguis- tic, geographic, and cultural borders and thus presented an ideal data set for analysis following principles of cultural and biological variation. Nelson commented at one point, "In the evening I secured a small vocabulary from a Nunivak Native who is here [in Tununak, a Yupik village in Nelson Island be- tween the mouths of the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers]. The language is almost identical with that spoken here, and the people have no trouble in communicating with each other" (Nelson, 1877-1881, entry for 22 Dec 1879). But his profes- 192 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY FIGURE 7.—Edward W. Nelson on one of his trips up the Yukon River, ca. 1880. Courtesy of the Smithson- ian Institution (neg. no. SI-6342). sion was ornithology, and when he finally found time to pre- pare his ethnological monograph, more than 10 years after re- turning from Alaska, it is not surprising that he did not pursue its full theoretical potential. Nevertheless, even today his col- lection of more than 8000 specimens, housed in the Smithson- ian's National Museum of Natural History (which contains the collections of the former United States National Museum), can be used for detailed spatial studies like those Baird con- ducted on eastern North American reptiles, or like those Boas (1903) planned for the Jesup North Pacific Expedition and which Leroi-Gourhan (1946) accomplished partly in "Archeologie du Pacifique-Nord." Following the close of the first chapter of anthropological collecting in the north, the Smithsonian's United States Na- tional Museum began to focus on research and collecting ef- forts in the Plains, Southwest, and California, and these were paralleled by vigorous programs launched by the BAE (Hins- ley, 1981:83-125). Arctic collecting continued to provide the Smithsonian with specimens, but by this time exhibition and description of existing collections occupied the museum staff, and field work began to come under the purview of newly hired cultural specialists whose research interests lay further south. It therefore fell to others, especially to the National Museum's anthropology curator, Otis Mason, to translate Baird's collect- NUMBER 44 193 ^-*^e-<_ J?~^yx iKZf^xuAs. I FIGURE 8.—"Native village [Gambell] on SW. Point of St Lawrence Is. Copied from sketch by J[ohn] Muir, Summer 1881. At this place about 100 dead natives victims of famine two years ago were found—Only about 15 survivors in two summer houses on the hills" (Nelson, 1877-1881, entry for 3 Jul 1881). FIGURE 9.—Ingaliks from Lower Yukon, photographed by Edward W. Nelson in 1880. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution (neg. no. SI-6367'/2). 194 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY FIGURE 10.—Norton Sound kayak hunting photographed by Edward W. Nel- son and hunting visor (right) collected from this hunter. Smithsonian Institu- tion, National Museum of Natural History, Department of Anthropology (cata- log no. El 76207). Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution (neg. no. 3846) and the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution (neg. no. 83- 10730). ing and research method into "museum anthropology." As noted by Hinsley: In 1883 he [Mason] referred to anthropology as "the application of the instru- mentalities and methods of natural history to the study of man"; Franz Boas recognized a few years later that biological analogy was the "leading idea" in Mason's work. ..."Culture history" he [Mason] once proposed, "takes up the thread of human social groupings where biology drops it and traces its further weavings." Mason's first step with a specimen was to identify its geographic and ethnographic provenance, shape, structure, purpose, and unique proper- ties, [in Mason's words] "just as a naturalist would with a plant or an animal." (Hinsley, 1981:91) This was fine method for a Bairdian naturalist, but for the emerging field of academic ethnology, more would be required. Baird's Legacy Despite their different views about the future of the Smithson- ian, both Henry and Baird shared a fundamental belief in the importance of empirical evidence in science and a skepticism of unsubstantiated theory. Powell was of similar mind. All the publications and projects conducted by the Smithsonian during its first 50 years emphasized the contributions of basic data and incremental knowledge, and these goals continue to inspire the institution's programs today. Baird's approach, involving the integration of increasingly larger sets of data, was as suitable a NUMBER 44 195 method for anthropology as it was for biology, and the field methods employed by early naturalists following the Bairdian system produced excellent building blocks for broader cultural analysis and integration. Baird's record was less substantial when it came to analysis and publication of cultural materials. Kennicott never got to publish his collections, but his followers—Dall, Nelson, Turner, and some others—urged on by Powell, had more suc- cess. None, however, carried the plan to completion as antici- pated by Baird, that is, detailed analysis of ethnological collec- tions with respect to geographic distribution and regional differences. This task was taken up at the level of artifact types by Hough and Mason in the 1890s, and in the early 1900s eth- nologists Gudmund Hatt, Eric Holtved, and Kaj Birket-Smith, using arctic collections in Denmark, extended the method to whole ethnological culture complexes, in essence conducting an "archaeology" of the present. But by this time, questions were being asked of ethnology other than trait-list comparison and distribution, and new studies required richer contextual data, history, linguistic information, and other evidence. It was in these directions, away from formal material culture studies, that Smithsonian ethnologists turned during the development of the BAE. Other than Mason's culture-area hypothesis, these Smithson- ian programs had little impact on later developments in anthro- pology, which veered strongly away from its earlier biological and evolutionary underpinnings. One could argue that Baird had little impact on the development of anthropological theory because he was working with a biological paradigm and had only a general sense of anthropological research problems. Boundaries of cultural types and forms rather than interactions in time or space were the features motivating Mason's and Hough's studies of the arctic collections. In later years, under Powell and Holmes, history became the paradigm of choice, and this framework has dominated Smithsonian work to the present day. Baird's naturalists made their greatest contribu- tions in securing large, comprehensive documented field col- lections that would not have survived otherwise, and they pro- vided a firm material culmre baseline and cultural descriptions useful for later archaeological and ethnological studies. Powell and Mason documented language and culmre areas but did not seek understandings about how those boundaries came to be. Perhaps it was enough that they recognized that boundaries did not conform easily to geographic or ecological zones and were not strictly environmentally determined. It re- mained for Boas to approach the problem of cultural process from a different direction, from the inner workings of culture itself, and of unique histories. This was an approach that the arctic naturalists could not have accomplished, since few (other than Nelson) ever became proficient in the native lan- guage of their research areas. In short, when advances began to be made in Smithsonian anthropology, the Bairdian para- digm was a necessary but insufficient means for anthropologi- cal success. Powell, James Dorsey, James Mooney, Frank Cushing, and others turned primarily to non-material culture studies and saw material culture collections as of secondary importance. While the tradition of field documentation contin- ued, the questions changed. In short, the legacy of Baird for arctic research was in the collection, field documentation, and preservation of large systematic collections, and occasional extremely important descriptive publications (assisted by Powell and the BAE), rather than in advancing the frontier of anthropological theory, which Baird's naturalists were not equipped to do. Museum Anthropology and the Native Constituency Ironically, 150 years later and after many decades of eclipse, material culture studies of the type promoted by Baird are again emerging at the cutting edge of anthropological re- search, revitalized by new theory and by the emergence of Na- tive American interest and scholarship. As a result, today the arctic collections of the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) seem poised for a somewhat different future than was envisioned by the salvage and research paradigm under which they were collected. At that time it was assumed that the cultures of arctic peoples, though better "preserved" than those of native peoples further south, would eventually disap- pear in the wave of westernization sweeping the country. Pre- served, documented, and published in part, the northern col- lections offer great potential for future researchers and Native American artists and cultural specialists. Because the Smith- sonian never hired a curator of northern ethnology, these col- lections lay dormant and were used only occasionally for ex- hibit renovations or loans to other institutions.9 Without adequate funds and display space for developing exhibits that take advantage of these rich inventories, more than 99.9% of the Smithsonian's northern materials have been resting in quiet splendor on shelves in the Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland, awaiting future publication and exhibition opportunities. Recently, media reports about Smithsonian anthropology have emphasized the collections of the newly acquired Na- tional Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) without refer- ence to the older collections of the NMNH. Although less-well documented and less published, the NMAI materials contribute importantly to the Smithsonian's overall holdings of arctic peo- ples, adding much twentieth-century Alaskan and Canadian materials where the older NMNH collections are weak. Gener- ally, the NMNH collections are strongest for the earliest peri- ods, from the 1840s to the 1920s, while the NMAI northern collections are strongest for the period between 1910 and the 1950s and have important eighteenth century materials that George Heye purchased from early but largely undocumented European and American collections. The NMAI also has strong collections of Latin American antiquities, mostly purchased by Heye's collectors without documentation. Together, the NMNH and NMAI collections provide one of the largest col- 196 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY lections of American Indian research and exhibition materials in the world. Today, in a time of new populism and ethnic awareness, these collections do not need to remain under one roof in Washington, D.C, and would be better used if a portion could be placed closer to people with specific interest in them. Even if we someday find a way to create a Smithsonian "Museum of Cultures," I believe we nevertheless need to explore new cura- torial arrangements that bring portions of our northern collec- tions closer to the native peoples who created them and who continue to see them as unique, "living" cultural treasures. Keeping these treasures in vaults in Washington or New York has preserved them effectively for the past 150 years. But inter- est in the repatriation movement shows that collections are not only of interest to scholars but have a wider constituency that includes Alaska Natives and state residents. In the future our mission as a national museum of cultures has to be broader than it has been in the past. While scholarly collecting, archiving, and research must continue, in the twenty-first century, Smithsonian research in anthropology will be conducted as museum-community partnerships, not by sci- entists with notepads and collecting bags combing the "hinter- lands" as in days of yore. The repatriation movement is the har- binger of a new phase of community interest that will invigorate research conducted in collaboration with local knowledge and initiative. Native peoples and museum special- ists need to think more about how this will be done. While I am certain that the museum anthropology practiced by our prede- cessors largely as an isolated academic research enterprise is dead, today's community-focused museum anthropology is showing vigorous signs of life. The Smithsonian's Arctic Studies Center has been experi- menting with new approaches to bring our northern collec- tions into closer contact with their cultural roots in the North (Krupnik, 2000; Loring, 2001). Since 1988, when congres- sional support for a continuing program of northern research and education began, we have sought to present Smithsonian collections to the scholarly community and public through a variety of exhibitions. The most ambitious was the joint So- viet-American exhibition Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska. Versions of this exhibit toured nation- ally in 1988-1991, visited rural settlements in Alaska in 1993-1996, and were seen in the Russian Far East in 1996-1997. Scholarly publications and educational materials have been created for a variety of audiences, and internet and film programming now bring collections from the Smithson- ian and other institutions with North Pacific holdings before even wider audiences. In 1993 an agreement with the Anchorage Museum of His- tory and Art permitted the Arctic Studies Center to open a re- gional office in Anchorage, and this program has steadily ex- panded its offerings and impact on the cultural life of Alaska. Workshops and training programs, plans for small regional ex- hibitions, and collaboration with Alaskan institutions have cre- ated a niche that offers great potential for preserving Alaska's cultural heritage and for training a new generation of Native cultural specialists in museum practice.10 The value of this ap- proach will not only enhance access to museum collections and documentation; it will also lead to new collecting and docu- mentation projects both in traditional arts and in novel types of cultural media now emerging. The crucial link yet to be made is to begin a transfer of col- lections and research materials from Washington, D.C, to our new facility in Anchorage. We plan to shift a portion of the Museum's Alaskan ethnographic collections from each of the major tribal groups (Inupiat, Yupik, Aleut (Unangan), Kodiak (Alutiiq), Athapaskan, Tlingit, Haida) to a supervised storage facility at our facilities in the Anchorage Museum of Art and History where they can be used for traveling exhibits prepared with Native trainees and curators, and for museum training pro- grams, publications, Native arts, and general educational activ- ity. The NMAI is participating in this project and will also loan parts of its collections to Alaska. The rationale for this collec- tion sharing or "affiliation program" (the official Smithsonian designation for this practice) is based on the need to provide representative materials from early collections not available in other Alaskan museums for direct use in Alaska. Alaskan mu- seums have significant ethnological collections, but early col- lections are few and often lack documentation. By making Smithsonian collections available first-hand in Alaska, unique cultural resources can help perpetuate and invigorate living cultural traditions. Their presence will also contribute to eco- nomic development, professional training of Alaska Natives, and local museum growth. Having these materials available on a rotating basis, under professional care, we can also ensure that these materials remain in the public domain, where they can be appreciated by all. This is not the case today, where the great collections from early Alaska are geographically remote and largely inaccessible to a growing, newly recognized native and northern constituency. In the long run, to pursue the past curatorial policy of collec- tion growth without use and diffusion is to court disaster, for the Smithsonian's cultural collections are only as secure as the national will for stewardship. After 150 years of "increase" it is time to share cultural treasures and expertise that the institution has with great care and diligence acquired and maintained. The efforts of Baird and Kennicott, and those of many who fol- lowed, have given us extraordinary resources to work with. History has shown that collections must circulate and "breathe," or they will eventually be lost through neglect or po- litical contrivance. The Arctic Studies Center program is de- signed to enhance the use and availability of these invaluable collections to all sectors of society. In this goal we are in close agreement with Smithson's original mandate and the pioneer- ing legacy of Henry and Baird, who established documentation standards and institutional goals that became indispensable for the foundation of museum anthropology. NUMBER 44 197 Notes This paper was originally prepared for the Smithsonian symposium "What About Increase" and was presented on 13 Mar 1995. A revised version was given at the Smithsonian Archives Forum on 13 Dec 1995. I gratefully ac- knowledge contributions made by William C. Sturtevant to these drafts and for the generous use of his unpublished manuscript material (Sturtevant, 1987). Elisabeth Tooker provided important information, especially on the Morgan connection. John C. Ewers, Adrienne Kaeppler, Edmund Carpenter, and Jane Walsh also provided helpful advice, and I thank Ron Vasile of the Chicago Academy of Science for information on Kennicott's biography. Previous re- search by Hinsley (1981), Rivinus and Youssef (1992), and Lindsay (1993) have been crucial to this effort. During the preparation of this paper it became evident to me that the early history of anthropological collecting at the Smithsonian and elsewhere is less well known than I had imagined. In fact, research on this subject has only be- gun. The notes offered herein are intended primarily as a stimulus in this direc- tion. I had initially intended to focus primarily on Kennicott, but the broader aspects of the roles of Kennicott and Baird took this project farther afield, leav- ing much research still remaining to be done on the history of Kennicott's field activities. Perhaps this paper will challenge others to assess the Baird-Kenni- cott legacy in establishing a scientific framework for systematic ethnological field collecting in the Americas. If so, it will not only have honored the career of one of museum anthropology's strongest proponents, William C. Sturtevant, but it will stimulate interest in understanding the origins and future of museum anthropology. 1. As Sturtevant has noted (pers. comm., 1996), the broadest mid-nineteenth century meaning of "ethnology'' approximated the "four-field" meaning of an- thropology today, while in its narrower context it stood related to but apart from archaeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics. Franz Boas welded these fields into a unified science of anthropology in the 1890s. 2. See Lindsay (1993:13-37) for an extensive discussion of Baird's science program in general and in northwestern North America. 3. The Smithsonian's early policy of distributing its collections, carried out most vigorously during the 1880s and 1890s, continued well into the twentieth century. According to Smithsonian anthropologist Jane Walsh (pers. comm., 1997), determining the inventory history of the Wilkes Collection is problem- atic because objects were frequently cataloged in lots, with numerous speci- mens assigned to a single catalog number. 4. Notes and Queries was issued in five editions, through 1929, by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, with a sixth edition (1951) pub- lished in cooperation with the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain. 5. Baird was the first American scientist to explore the possibility of working with the HBC, an idea that may have resulted from his awareness of collections made by HBC factors for the Royal Society in London, for Edinburgh (through Daniel Wilson's impetus), and for Canadian institutions (Lindsay, 1993: 41-43). 6. For works on Kennicott's biography, northern expeditions, and the HBC's Smithsonian connection, see the Smithsonian Institution's annual reports for 1859-1866; Anonymous, 1867-1869; Preble, 1908; James, 1942; Nute, 1943; Collins, 1946; Deignan, 1947; Fitzhugh and Selig, 1981; Coates, 1984; Thomas, 1985; and Vasile, 1994. 7. Stroke, heart failure, and suicide have been cited as possible causes of Kennicott's death, but the truth will probably never be known. In fact, Kenni- cott had been unhealthy as a child but had overcome his frailty by drive and will power. On the other hand he was emotional and temperamental, and in the days before his death he had been depressed and under great stress. 8. Nelson later went on to conduct the first natural history survey of western Mexico; founded and led the United States Department of Agriculture's Bio- logical Survey from 1916 to 1927, negotiated and wrote the first international legislation protecting migratory bird species (The Migratory Bird Treaty Act) and the Alaska Game Law of 1925—all the products of a bachelor who in later life resided in the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C, until his death, in 1934 (Goldman, 1935; Lantis, 1954; Collins, 1982). 9. Recent research and exhibition use of the Alaska collections began with the exhibition The Far North (Collins etal., 1973). This was followed by inten- sive study of the E.W. Nelson collection for the exhibition Inua: Spirit World of the Bering Sea Eskimo (Fitzhugh and Kaplan, 1982). In the 1980s Jean-Loup Rousselot studied the Kennicott, MacFarlane, and Ross materials, but his work remains unpublished, and these founding collections of Smithsonian ethnogra- phy have never been exhibited. A fourth project, the analysis and exhibition of the William J. Fisher ethnographic collection from Kodiak Island and the Alaska Peninsula, has been published by Aron Crowell and others (Crowell, 1992; Crowell etal., 2001). 10. See the Arctic Studies Center Newsletter (1993-2001, Arctic Studies Cen- ter, NMNH, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C), and see its website at http://www.nmnh.si.edu/arctic. Literature Cited Anonymous 1867-1869. Biography of Robert Kennicott. Transactions of the Chicago A cademy of Sciences, 1 (2): 13 4. Baird, Spencer F, and Charles Girard 1853. Catalogue of North American Reptiles in the Museum of the Smith- sonian Institution, Part I: Serpents. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Col- lections, 2 (article 5): 172 pages. 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Annual Report of the United States National Museum, 1901: 200-231. Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office. James, James A. 1942. The First Scientific Exploration of Russian America and the Pur- chase of Alaska. Northwestern University Studies in the Social Sci- ences, 4: xii + 276 pages. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Jefferson, Thomas 1955. Notes on the State of Virginia. Edited and with an introduction and notes by William Peden, xxv+315 pages. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. NUMBER 44 199 Kaeppler, Adrienne 1972. The Use of Documents in Identifying Ethnographic Specimens from the Voyages of Captain Cook. The Journal of Pacific History, 7: 195-200. 1978. "Artificial Curiosities": Being an Exposition of Native Manufac- tures Collected on the Three Pacific Voyages of Captain James Cook, R.N....xvi+293 pages. Honolulu, Hawaii: Bishop Museum Press. [Bishop Museum Special Publication, 65.] 1985. Anthropology and the U.S. Exploring Expedition. In Herman J. Vi- ola and Carolyn Margolis, editors, Magnificent Voyagers: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842. pages 119-148. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. King, Jonaman CH. 1994. Ethnographic Collections: Collecting in the Context of Sloane's Catalogue of 'Miscellanies.' In Arthur MacGregor, editor, Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the Brit- ish Museum, pages 228-244. London: British Museum Press in as- sociation with Alistair McAlpine. Kinzhalov, R.V. [1983.] History of the American Collections in the Museum of Anthropol- ogy and Ethnography, Leningrad. In Henry N. Michael and James VanStone, editors, Cultures of the Bering Sea Region: Papers from an International Symposium, pages 311-324. New York: Interna- tional Research and Exchanges Board. Kreiner, Josef 1993. European Images of the Ainu and Ainu Studies in Europe. In Josef Kreiner, editor, European Studies on Ainu Language and Culture. Deutsches Institut fiir Japanstudien der Philipp Franz von Siebold Stiftung, Monograph, 6:13-62. Tokyo. Kreiner, Josef, editor 1996. Die Japansammlungen Philipp Franz und Heinrich von Siebold: 200 Jarhe Siebold. Tokyo: Doitsu-Nihon Kenkyujo. Krupnik, Igor I. 2000. Our Words Put to Paper: Sourcebook in St. Lawrence Island Yupik Heritage and History, 2000. 463 pages. Washington, D.C, and Nome Alaska: Arctic Studies Center. Lantis, Margaret 1954. Edward William Nelson. Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, 3(1):5-16. Leroi-Gourhan, Andre 1946. Archeologie du Pacifique-Nord. Travaux et Memoires de I'Institut d'Ethnologie, 42: 542 pages. Paris: Institut d'Ethnologie. Liapunova, Roza G. 1967. [I.G. Voznesenskii's Expedition and Its Significance for the Ethnog- raphy of Russian America.] Sbornik Musei Antropologii i Et- nografii, 24:5-33. [In Russian.] 1994. Eskimo Masks from Kodiak Island in the Collections of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in St. Peters- burg. In William W. Fitzhugh and Valerie Chaussonnet, editors, An- thropology of the North Pacific Rim, pages 175-204. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. Lindsay, Debra 1993. Science in the Subarctic: Trappers, Traders and the Smithsonian In- stitution. xvii+176 pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institu- tion Press. Linnaeus, Carl von 1964. Systema Naturae, 1735. 30+[19] pages. Nieuwkoop: B. de Graff. [Facsimile of the first edition.] Loring, Stephen 2001. Repatriation and Community Anthropology: The Smithsonian Insi- tution's Artie Studies Center. In Tamara L. Bray, editor, The Future of the Past: Archaeologists, Native Americans, and Repatriation, pages 185-198. New York and London: Garland Publishing. MacGregor, Arthur, editor 1994. Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum. 308 pages. London: British Museum Press in association with Alistair McAlpine. Maximilian, Prince of Wied 1906. Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832-1834. In Reuben Gold Thwaites, editor, Early Western Travels, 1748-1846, volumes 24, 25. Cleveland, Ohio: Arthur H. Clark Co. Morton, Samuel G. 1839. Crania Americana; or, a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America. 3, [iii]-v, 296 pages. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J. Dobson. Muller, Charles H. 1980. Introduction. In Jean Louis Berlandier, Journey to Mexico During the Years 1826-1834, translated by Sheila M. Ohlendorf, Josette M. Bigelow, and Mary M. Standifer, pages xi-xxxvi. Austin: University of Texas Press and Texas State Historical Association in cooperation with the Center for Studies in Texas History. Nelson, Edward W. 1877-1881. Field diaries in Alaska, 1877-1881. [Edward W. Nelson Pa- pers, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C] 1882. A Sledge Journey in the Delta of the Yukon, Northern Alaska. Pro- ceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography, new series, 4:667-681. 1887. Report upon Natural History Collections Made in Alaska Between the Years 1877 and 1881. 337 pages. Washington, D.C: Govern- ment Printing Office. [U.S. Army Signal Service, Arctic Series of Publications, 3.] 1899. The Eskimo about Bering Strait. In Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1896-1897, pages 3-518. Washington, D.C: U.S. Gov- ernment Printing Office. Nute, Grace L. 1943. Kennicott in the North. The Beaver, 274(September):28-32. Win- nipeg, Manitoba: The Hundson's Bay Company. Peattie, Donald C. 1936. Kennicott, Knight of the North. Esquire, March: 94-128. Preble, Edward A. 1908. Biological Investigation of the Athabaska-Mackenzie Region. In North American Fauna, 27:70-71. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. Ripley, S. Dillon 1978. The Sacred Grove: Essays on Museums. 159 pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. Rivinus, Edward F, and E.M. Youssef 1992. Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian, x+228 pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. Schoolcraft, Henry R. 1846. Plan for the Investigation of American Ethnology. [Manuscript in possession of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C] Sherwood, Morgan B. 1965. Exploration of Alaska 1865-1900. xiv+207 pages. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. Siebold, Philipp Franz von 1833-1850. Fauna Japonica.... 5 volumes. Leiden: Published privately. 1835-1870. Flora Japonica.... 2 volumes. Leiden: Published privately. 1930. Nippon: Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan; Vollstandiger Neu- druck der Urausgabe, herausgegeben von Japaninstitut Berlin. 5 volumes. Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth. Silverberg, Robert 1968. Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth, viii +369 pages. Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society. 200 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY Squier, Ephriam G. 1849. Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York, Comprising the Results of Original Surveys and Explorations. Smithsonian Contri- butions to Knowledge, 2(1 ):9—188. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution. Squier, Ephriam G., and Edwin H. Davis 1848. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, Comprising the Re- sults of Extensive Original Surveys and Explorations. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 1:1-306. Washington, D.C: Smithson- ian Institution. Stanton, William Ragan 1960. The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes towards Race in America, 1815-59. ix+244 pages. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. Steller, Georg Wilhelm 1988. Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741-1742. Edited by O. W. Frost, translated by Margritt A. Engel and O.W. Frost, vi+252 pages. Stan- ford, California: Stanford University Press. Stocking, George 1966. The History of Anthropology: Where, Whence, Whither? Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1:281-290. Sturtevant, William C 1987. Morgan on Material Culture and Cultural Material. [Paper delivered to the American Anthropological Association, 18 Nov 1987; manu- script in the possession of William C Sturtevant.] Thomas, Cyrus 1894. Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology. Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1890-1891, pages 3-730. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. Thomas, Greg 1985. The Smithsonian and the Hudson's Bay Company. Prairie Forum, 10(2):283-305. Tooker, Elisabeth 1990. A Note on Undergraduate Courses in Anthropology in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century. Man in the Northeast, 39:45-51. 1994. Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture, xxii+325 pages. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Trigger, Bruce G. 1989. A History of Archaeological Thought, xv+500 pages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Urry, James 1984. A History of Field Methods. In R.F. Ellen, editor, Ethnographic Re- search: A Guide to General Conduct, pages 35-61. New York: Aca- demic Press. Vasile, Ronald S. 1994. The Early Career of Robert Kennicott, Illinois's Pioneering Natural- ist. Illinois Historical Journal, 87:150-170. Viola, Herman J., and Carolyn Margolis, editors 1985. Magnificent Voyagers: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842. 303 pages. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. Walsh, Jane MacLaren 2002. Collections as Currency. In William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard, editors, Anthropology, History, and American Indians: Essays in Honor of William Curtis Sturtevant. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, 44:201-209. Washburn, Wilcomb 1965. The Museum and Joseph Henry. Curator, 8:35-54. 1967. Joseph Henry's Conception of the Purpose of the Smithsonian Insti- tution. In Walter M. Whitehill, editor, A Cabinet of Curiosities, pages 106-166. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Willey, Gordon R., and Jeremy A. Sabloff 1980. A History of American Archaeology. Second edition, xiii+313 pages. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co. Collections as Currency Jane MacLaren Walsh The Smithsonian Institution was created by an act of the United States Congress in 1846 with the $500,000 bequest of a British scientist, James Smithson, who mandated that the institution accomplish two things—the increase and the diffusion of knowledge. The first two secretaries of the Smithsonian, Jo- seph Henry and Spencer Fullerton Baird, interpreted this man- date in accordance with their own particular scientific perspec- tives. Henry believed the institution's principal function should be research and publication; Baird viewed the formation of col- lections and their description as paramount. This paper consid- ers Baird's point of view more closely, particularly with regard to the collections he amassed and dispersed, but it is abun- dantly clear that both secretaries' activities contributed to the increase and diffusion of knowledge. Henry was a physicist who, among his myriad accomplish- ments, invented and operated the first electromagnetic tele- graph. One of the most highly respected physical scientists of his day, he had no serious competition for the post of founding secretary of the institution. As George Brown Goode (1897:116) wrote, "For two decades he lived in the laboratory and the lecture-room, and at the end of that period he was ac- cepted as one of the world's great investigators, distinguished alike for skill and originality in experiment and for breadth and philosophic comprehensiveness in deduction." Henry had a clear vision of what he wished the Smithsonian Institution to become: a research center that would establish and maintain close connections with a worldwide network of scientists and scientific reporters. As an initial step toward this end, in 1847 Henry established a program for the exchange of Smithsonian publications (Board of Regents, 1848:183). In 1849 and 1850 the institution exchanged its first publica- tion in the series Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Squier and Davis's "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley," with 173 institutions throughout the world (Gwinn, 1996:221). This early initiative developed into the Interna- tional Exchange Service, which acted as a clearing house for scientific publications from universities and learned institu- tions throughout the United States and Europe. European monographs were sent to the Smithsonian and sorted and sent Jane MacLaren Walsh, Department of Anthropology, National Mu- seum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560-0112, USA. out to American recipients; American publications, requested via circular, were sent free of charge to European addresses (Winlock, 1897:399-400). The importance of this service can- not be overstated. Ten years after its inception, Secretary Henry wrote that "few, if any, American institutions of note, publishing transactions or reports, have any other medium of exchanging them with foreign correspondents" (Board of Re- gents, 1859:45). The creation of the exchange service was an affirmation of Henry's conviction that "the worth and impor- tance of the institution are not to be estimated by what it accu- mulates within the walls of its building, but by what it sends forth to the world" (Board of Regents, 1853:20). In late 1849 Henry chose Baird, a 26-year-old naturalist, as assistant secretary. Upon his arrival in 1850, Baird more than quadrupled the number of extant natural history specimens simply by the addition of his own collection, which he brought with him in two railroad boxcars (Goode, 1897:167; Rivinus and Youssef, 1992:27-28). The institution had begun to collect natural history specimens sometime before the appointment of Baird, but it is to the young naturalist that credit must be given for bringing the Smithsonian Institution into the museum busi- ness. That was his intention from the beginning of his tenure with the institution, and indeed one he had discussed in corre- spondence with James Dwight Dana prior to his appointment. Dana, who had been a member of the "Scientific Corps" of the first government-sponsored international scientific exploration, the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 (or Exp. Exp. in the shorthand of the day), was in 1849 a professor at Yale. He cautioned the young Baird, "As to your application to Prof. Henry—The fact is that Henry has no idea of requiring, yet a while, a Curator. He intends to have nothing to do with the Exp. Exp. collections, or any other government property."1 Not easily deterred, Baird obtained the position, with the assis- tance of Dana and others. Henry "was not a museum man—most of the time" (Hinsley, 1981:54). His feelings about the Smithsonian's becoming the caretaker of the government's massive collections housed in the United States Patent Office, in Washington, D.C, under- scored his general lack of enthusiasm for collections—he viewed the material as a large jumble of curiosities without any real scientific value. "The formation of a museum of objects of nature and art requires much caution," he wrote. Referring spe- cifically to the Patent Office material (principally the Explor- 201 202 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY ing Expedition collections), he pointed out that "this museum was collected at the expense of the government, and should be preserved as a memento of the science and energy of our navy, and as a means of illustrating and verifying the magnificent volumes which comprise the history of that expedition" (Board of Regents, 1851:20).2 Having said that, the secretary cautioned that the collection was so large it would "immediately fill the space allotted for collections [in the castle]," and that "in a short time another appropriation would be required for the erection of another building" (Board of Regents, 1851:21). In a final effort to avoid the burden of the Exploring Expedition collection, the Secretary appealed to the Senate's xenophobia. "It could not be the intention of the Congress that an institution founded by the liberality of a foreigner, and to which he has af- fixed his own name, should be charged with the keeping of a separate museum, the property of the United States" (Board of Regents, 1851:21). Baird, by contrast, subscribed fully to Dana's notion that collections were "better than books to the naturalist," contain- ing "the whole that was ever put in words on the subjects they illustrate and a thousand times more."3 He hoped to build the largest and most comprehensive natural history collection in the world, and he quickly saw that Henry's International Ex- change Service and the steadily enlarging network of scien- tists and reporters could be put toward that end. After all, Baird had been recruiting collectors to exchange specimens since he was 17. As a boy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he had initiated a correspondence with the legendary John James Au- dubon and had exchanged specimens with Audubon he had himself gathered (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992:30-31). Al- though naturalists have always traded duplicate specimens to gain others not already represented in their own collection, the new assistant secretary would eventually develop this strategy into a museum industry. Early in 1850 Baird prepared a letter to be circulated to "friends of science generally, and especially...officers of the Army and Navy." In it he requested assistance in the collection of specimens of animals, plants, minerals, and fossil remains to "lay the foundations of a collection of American Natural His- tory" (Rivinus and Youssef, 1992:82-83). Within five short years of this circular even Secretary Henry was extolling Baird's collecting abilities. In the annual report for 1855 he wrote, "No collection of animals in the United States, nor in- deed in the world, can even now pretend to rival the richness of the museum of the Smithsonian Institution in specimens which tend to illustrate the natural history of the continent of North America" (Board of Regents, 1856:31). The institution, now firmly on the path to forming a national museum, was compelled finally in 1858 to accept the curation of the government's collections, which were transferred to the Smithsonian by congressional order. As Henry had predicted in his objections of 1850, the institution was simultaneously forced to request an appropriation for the care and disposition of the material. The transfer of the government's collections enlarged the in- stitution's general holdings by approximately 20% but in- creased its anthropological collections by more than 300%. The size and scope of the Patent Office material was impressive on all counts, comprising about 1,000 books and pamphlets, 50 maps and charts, 500 castings in plaster (medals and seals), 186 paintings, about 1,600 bird-skins, 160 skins of quadru- peds, 50 skins of fishes; 200 jars, 2 barrels, and 10 kegs of fishes, reptiles, etc., in spirits; 50,000 botanical specimens, 3,000 insects, several hundred thousand shells, 500 corallines, more than 2,000 crustaceans, 300 starfishes, etc., 100 sponges, 7,000 separate specimens of minerals, and 50 boxes of the minerals and geological specimens. (Goode, 1897:307-308) Not mentioned in this list are some 5000 ethnographic and archaeological objects collected by the United States Exploring Expedition, or those objects gathered by later expeditions, such as those to Africa (1843) and Japan (1853-1854) commanded by American naval officer Matthew Perry, and perhaps another 1500 to 2000 objects of Native American manufacture col- lected by soldiers and Indian agents. In 1856, perhaps in anticipation of the transfer of the govern- ment's collections, Baird traveled the four and one-half blocks from the Smithsonian to the great hall of the Patent Office to take a closer look at the objects. Writing his initial impressions on a single page, he proposed that "no country has better col- lections of so large an area or as good." The specimens, once stored in better surroundings in the Smithsonian, and "subject to scientific supervision—can be arranged in proper order— duly classed and cataloged; carefully labeled—so as to be intel- ligible to all," he added (Baird, 1856). The notes seem intended as part of an argument, presumably to Henry, for the acquisi- tion of this material. The assistant secretary obviously saw these specimens as an important resource, and he was deter- mined to make them available to everyone once they were combined with the extant Smithsonian collections. He even en- visioned "handbooks or manuals of the different collections prepared for more critical study and understanding of speci- mens." The end result of having a central repository of natural history and ethnographic collections would be that "any associ- ation or individual can send collections," and using the govern- ment's collections and the Smithsonian's own considerable holdings for comparison, they could then have "labeled series returned" (Baird, 1856). Despite, or perhaps because of, his admiration of and eager- ness to obtain the government's collections, at three separate points on the page Baird noted the numerous duplicate speci- mens, for which he saw obvious and immediate use: They "should be weeded out and distributed among other American museums," and the "collections will thereby occupy much less space" (Baird, 1856), a potential selling point to Secretary Henry. The other anticipated result of distributing these collec- tions to other museums, although one not written down by Baird, would be that exchanging these famous artifacts would bring a return of more, and perhaps rarer, specimens. NUMBER 44 203 In 1859 the "burden" of the government collections brought a yearly endowment of $3650 to cover incidental expenses (Goode, 1897:322). Listed as 12 separate collections, the Patent Office material joined another 23 government collec- tions already housed in what came to be called the United States National Museum. Throughout the 1850s Baird had been amassing large numbers of "mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, shells, and minerals from the exploring and surveying ex- peditions of federal departments, as well as from state govern- ments, local scientific societies, and individuals" (Hinsley, 1981:66-67). While fewer in number, specimens of anthropo- logical and archaeological interest had also been gathered by the Pacific Railroad Survey, the Mexican Boundary Survey, surveys of the Amazon River basin, and explorations of Nica- ragua, among other government expeditions exploring the "na- tional domain" (Goode, 1897:317). By the end of 1858, the in- stitution had managed to catalog some 25,506 specimens, including mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, skeletons and skulls, Crustacea, and bird eggs.4 Almost as soon as the collec- tions were cataloged, duplicates were laid aside "to be distrib- uted to other parties... not only for the purpose of supplying a great want, but also of relieving the shelves and cases of the Institution of a redundancy of material" (Board of Regents, 1859:59). To govern the processes of lending and exchanging specimens of undescribed taxa and effectively distributing du- plicates of specimens of described taxa, the Smithsonian de- veloped a series of rules. The first and foremost rule concerned the institution's origi- nal mandate—the advancement of science. To accomplish this purpose, duplicate specimens would be distributed as widely as possible to scientific institutions in the United States and abroad, to be used in the identification of species already known to science. The second rule dictated that museum per- sonnel make full sets of properly labeled general duplicates, which would in mm be presented to colleges and other institu- tions of learning to promote education. The third rule specified that all due credit would be given to the Smithsonian Institution in the labeling of the specimens and in all published accounts. The fourth and fifth rules concerned what was anticipated, or expected, in return for the institution's generous gifts. In the distribution of specimens abroad, type specimens illustrating species described by foreign authors would be required in ex- change. Specimens presented to American colleges and other institutions in the United States would be given in exchange for collections from specified localities in their own particular re- gions. Thus if colleges wished to obtain duplicate collections from the Smithsonian, they would be required to come up with representative collections of birds or fishes or minerals from their own regions (Goode, 1897:318). Undescribed specimens were covered under a slightly differ- ent set of rules. In this case, the first rule was that uncataloged items would never be entrusted to inexperienced persons and that preference would be given to individuals engaged in pre- paring complete monographs on the subject. Investigators would be allowed to take specimens to their places of residence and keep them for a reasonable amount of time. Sets of type specimens from these collections, including all duplicates, were to be returned to the institution, and, as always, credit was to be given to the Smithsonian in any publication (Goode, 1897:319). The distribution of undescribed specimens provided consid- erable assistance to the young institution, which lacked funds and staff. "Collections which would have remained useless for years were rapidly classified by competent naturalists and sep- arated into series, some to be reserved by the Institution and others to be distributed to kindred scientific establishments and to colleges and schools" (Goode, 1897:319). The list of collab- orators includes almost every name prominent in American natural history in the last half of the nineteenth century. The annual report for 1858, with its list of 25,506 specimens cataloged, makes no mention of ethnological or archaeological material (Board of Regents, 1859:57). This is because the an- thropological collection was first systematically described and numbered beginning on 9 March 1859. This material was sorted for duplicates for exchange the same year. By the close of 1867, with nearly two ledger books filled, the institution had cataloged some 5000 objects from ethnographic and archaeo- logical contexts. The Smithsonian distributed 1048 of these carefully cataloged specimens, or about one-fifth of the de- scribed material, that same year (Board of Regents, 1868:72). By the end of the institution's first quarter century, ledger books indicate that the majority of the anthropological collec- tion originated from the North American continent. It consisted specifically of Arctic and Subarctic specimens collected by Smithsonian naturalist Robert Kennicott with the assistance of various members of the Hudson's Bay Company, such as Ber- nard Ross and Roderick McFarlane. The Northwest Coast of North America was represented by objects collected by Dr. J. Evans and the displaced New Englander James Swan, two of the many important collectors listed in the ledger books. The western and central Plains material was collected by the Wheeler and Hayden expeditions of the 1870s, by Lt. G.K. Warren, who explored the Missouri River region, and by a vari- ety of other collectors, such as soldiers, Indian agents, and United States Army doctors. The remaining curiosities came from just about everywhere else: Japan and Africa via Perry; Thailand as royal gifts to American presidents; Mexico from the Swiss naturalist Jean Louis Berlandier, the American diplo- mat Brantz Mayer, and United States Ambassador to Mexico Joel Poinsett; and from numerous islands in the Pacific, col- lected by the United States Exploring Expedition. For the year 1871, the Smithsonian Board of Regents noted that the general collection then numbered 169,360; of this fig- ure the "ethnological specimens" numbered 10,931. To the end of 1871, the number of ethnological specimens distributed was 1342, or about 12%. The final count that year for all the dupli- cate specimens distributed, however, is astounding: 308,080. This figure, which included all specimens exchanged from all 204 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY branches of natural history, is more than twice the total number of specimens cataloged (Board of Regents, 1873:42). Baird, by all indications, took particular, personal interest in the distribution of all duplicate materials. In 1867 Baird super- vised the assembly of numerous sets of duplicate natural his- tory and cultural specimens for distribution. These included sets labeled "mammal skins," "Pacific fishes," "shells," "bird skins," "eggs & nests," "Minerals & Rocks," "Esquimaux curi- osities" and "Fejee curiosities."s The 25 "Fejee" sets provide an interesting example of a sort of museum starter kit composed almost exclusively of United States Exploring Expedition duplicates. As a sampler it was meant to illustrate the expedition's around-the-world voyage, but in actuality the institution sent the objects it had in greatest supply, its most exotic specimens. Each set contained about 15 objects, including a bow and arrows from Oregon Territory or from northern California, some halibut or eel hooks from the Northwest Coast, and a variety of items from Pacific islands, principally Fiji. This portion of the selection included samples of Samoan, Hawaiian, and Fijian bark cloth;6 a Samoan or a Hawaiian fish hook; a basket; grass skirt; three to five spears; four to six war clubs; and a number of shell ornaments from Fiji. "Esquimaux" sets were assembled using the "Anderson River Esquimaux" collections, including specimens principally collected by Robert McFarlane. These sets mostly also con- tained about 15 specimens, although occasionally as many as 77 objects were packed up and sent off7 In addition to the Es- kimo and Fijian sets, there were duplicate collection boxes la- beled simply "Ethnologica," which contained an unspecified number of objects. The list of distribution recipients is also quite interesting. It details various mid-nineteenth century institutional affiliations and the personal connections that formed a kind of nine- teenth-century naturalist network. It also gives us some indica- tion of the number of then-extant university museums and nat- ural history societies. In the case of the Exploring Expedition duplicates, in the space of a single year, 1867, sets were sent to the universities of Michigan, Kentucky, Toronto in Canada, and Cristiania in Norway. They also went to Amherst, Dartmouth, Harvard, Williams, West Point, Yale, and the City College of New York. Fiji sets of similar size and composition were deliv- ered to the cabinets of natural history societies in Albany, New York; Portland, Maine; Montreal, Quebec; Springfield, Worcester, and Salem, Massachusetts; Bloomington and Springfield, Illinois; Montpelier, Vermont; Jefferson, Missouri; and St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1872, the remaining sets were de- livered to Wells College in Aurora, New York; Columbia Col- lege in New York City; and Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The majority of the specimens sent to colleges and universities can still be found in the collections of those in- stitutions. The items distributed to natural history societies found their way into state museums, and in both instances a large proportion of specimens are still on exhibit. Sets of ethnologica are listed in 1872 as shipped to such En- glish institutions as the Blackmore Museum in Salisbury, the Christy collection in London, and the Peabody Museum in Cambridge as well as to the National Museum in Lisbon, Por- tugal. These gifts numbered 151 specimens. Larger collections consisting of several hundred objects from cultures of the Arc- tic to the South Pacific were sent in 1867 to the Royal Ethno- logical Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, and to the Acad- emy of Sciences in Chicago, Illinois, the latter entirely destroyed in the great fire that consumed the city.8 Once again the material distributed was culled from the largest collections, those from the Arctic and the Pacific, perhaps somewhat skewing the nineteenth-century museum-goer's view of world ethnography. A number of the sets sent out in 1867 were payment in kind for specimens already received from those institutions.9 By the end of 1868 the catalog ledgers already gave a strong indica- tion of the importance and value to the Smithsonian of these exchanges as a means of enhancing its collections. They list as museum acquisitions a collection of archaeological material from J.W.P. Jenks,10 later of Brown University; prehistoric stone tools from Professor Jillson of Sweden; and specimens from Herr R.L. Vortisch of Germany, M. Edouard Lartet of France and Spain, and Sr. Sartorius of Mexico. Henri de Saus- sure sent Swiss archaeological specimens, Minister Crampton sent objects from British Guiana, and G.R. Gliddon exchanged a small collection of Egyptian artifacts, all within a decade of the first ethnographic cataloging. Although collections from other departments were distrib- uted and exchanged in far greater numbers, ethnographic and archaeological specimens also seem to have been in great de- mand. Perhaps the most popular items were southwestern ce- ramics, particularly Zuni pots. Beginning in the late 1850s and lasting well into the early 1960s, the anthropological collec- tions were diffused to museums, colleges and universities, high schools, elementary schools, schools for the blind and deaf, asylums, public libraries, and societies and private collectors in the Americas, Europe, India, Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania." In addition to already cataloged items considered to be dupli- cates, some traded specimens had never been entered into the record. Significant smaller collections were separated out from the larger body of material and sent to foreign institutions by collectors often while still in the field. For example, a hand- written index card in the records of the registrar records a dis- tribution transaction without giving too much detail. Dated 3 June 1885, it reads "Oxford, England, University Museum. Specimens of Pottery, Bureau of American Ethnology. Baird. #4296."12 The corresponding invoice for distribution #4296 is missing from the record, but the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) correspondence files in the Smith- sonian National Anthropological Archives contain a 40-page document and letter signed by John Wesley Powell, founder of the BAE, which fills in the particulars of this single transaction. NUMBER 44 205 Powell sent 10 boxes of material to E.B. Tylor and H.N. Mose- ley at Museum House in England in June, 1885. Included in this shipment were published reports of the Smithsonian and the BAE, a collection of photographic illustrations showing general views of southwestern pueblos, and a series of native portraits, along with a descriptive catalog of these images ap- parently written by James Stevenson of the BAE. Powell also sent more than 200 specimens, principally pottery, from Zuni, Hopi, Acoma, Santa Clara, Cochiti, and San Ildefonso pueblos. These artifacts had been culled from a much larger collection made by Stevenson and his wife, Matilda, another BAE collab- orator, in 1884. Stevenson, according to Powell's letter, had "been arranging and labeling the collection made by him last summer, [and] he has from time to time set apart the articles which I now ship to you. At the same time he has made a care- ful catalog of the whole material, and added such notes as he deemed would be of value in connection therewith."13 Powell noted that the collection was to be divided between Tyler and Moseley. The objects, now mostly housed in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, have only Stevenson numbers, 1-213, as- signed to the collection, and they bear no other marks connect- ing them to the institution. This is one example, among what I believe to be dozens, for which the transactions records are either difficult to locate or do not exist at all. Indeed, further complicating the historical picture, and the possibility of recreating the size and scope of the original collections, is the fact that numerous trades of al- ready cataloged specimens were