Highlights from the Collections

Truman Michelson was a linguist and ethnographer who spent his nearly 40-year career with the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) in the field gathering cultural information and linguistic data, primarily working with Algonquian tribes. He made over 100 contributions to the study of Native American languages, and at the time of his death was considered the leading expert in the world on Algonquian languages and culture. 

 

Michelson was born in New Rochelle, New York on August 11, 1879, and attended Harvard University for his Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees, as well as receiving his PhD in 1904. He continued his work at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig from 1904 to 1905, as well as working privately with Franz Boas from 1909 to 1910. Upon his death, Franz Boas said that Michelson's comparative studies of Algonquian dialects "brought a rich harvest of knowledge regarding the history of this important group." 

 

Following his appointment to the BAE in 1910, he spent part of nearly every year in the field - principally in Iowa with the Sauk and Fox tribes, but also in Montana, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wisconsin, working with various other tribes. His linguistic work included field research on Arapaho, Shawnee, Peoria, Kickapoo, and Cheyenne, among other languages. His success can be attributed to collaborations with Native speakers, such as Alfred Kiyana, Horace and Ida Poweshiek, Bill Leaf, and Harry Lincoln, with whom he worked with over many years. Some of Michelson's most significant work included the first scientific classification of the Algonquian languages published in 1913 and an extensive series of monographs on Fox ethnology that began in 1921. 

 

Michelson also served as chair of ethnology at George Washington University from 1917 to 1932, as well as the president of the Anthropological Society of Washington from 1923 to 1925. By the time of his death in 1938, he had over 140 published works, including contributions to the first volume of the Handbook of North American Indians. 

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is grateful for the grant it received from the Arcadia Fund to digitize endangered-language materials currently housed in the National Anthropological Archives. The materials found in these archives preserve an unparalleled collection of primary sources for investigating endangered cultures and languages, indigenous environmental knowledge, and the connections between these subjects. 

John Peabody Harrington was a Bureau of American Ethnology ethnologist involved in the study of over one hundred Native American languages. Most of the material concerns California, southwestern, and northwestern tribes and includes ethnological, archaeological, and historical notes, as well as writings, correspondence, photographs, sound recordings, biological specimens, and other types of documents.

In his field work, Harrington sometimes worked within relatively structured formats; this was especially true when he was "rehearing" material - using an informant to verify and correct the work of other researchers. Often, however, the interviews with informants (and this seems to have been the case even with some "rehearings") seem to have been rather free-form and topics are often intertwined. Nevertheless, certain themes frequently appear in his work, including annotated vocabularies concerning flora and fauna and their use, topography, history and biography, kinship, cosmology (including tribal astronomy), religion and philosophy, names and observations concerning neighboring tribes, sex and age division, material culture, legends, and songs. His "perfect ear" allowed him to easily pick up and record languages - he was reportedly fluent in nine international languages and eighteen Native American languages. His linguistic abilities, combined with his thorough ethnological research and his relentless mission has resulted in some of the most extensive linguistic, anthropological, and ethno-biological data on the Native peoples of North America. 

 

Harrington produced the earliest sound recordings of many languages and, in some cases, the only surviving audio record of the language. His earliest audio recordings were on wax cylinders. Those in good condition were copied to magnetic audio tape in the early 1980s as part of the Federal Cylinder Project. Copies are available for use at both the National Anthropological Archives (NAA) and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. In the 1930s he began recording on aluminum disks. Many of these disks were also copied to audio tape for use in the NAA although corroded disks could not be copied. New technologies are currently being developed that would allow us to recover these sound materials and make them available digitally. 

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is grateful for the grant it received from the Arcadia Fund to digitize endangered-language materials, including many sound recordings in the John Peabody Harrington collection, currently housed in the National Anthropological Archives. The materials found in these archives preserve an unparalleled collection of primary sources for investigating endangered cultures and languages, indigenous environmental knowledge, and the connections between these subjects.

Reverend James Owen Dorsey (1848-1895) was a missionary and Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) ethnologist who conducted extensive research on Siouan tribes and languages. He exhibited a talent for languages at an early age. At age 6 he learned the Hebrew alphabet and was able to read the language at age 10. In 1867 Dorsey attended the Theological Seminary of Virginia and was ordained a deacon of the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1871. In May of that year, Dorsey traveled to the Dakota Territory to serve as a missionary among the Ponca. Plagued by ill health, Dorsey was forced to end his missionary work in August 1873. By that time, however, he had learned the Ponca language well enough to converse with members of the tribe without an interpreter. 

 

Dorsey returned to Maryland and engaged in parish work while continuing his studies of Siouan languages. His linguistic talents and knowledge of these languages attracted the attention of Major John Wesley Powell. Powell arranged for Dorsey to work among the Omaha in Nebraska from 1878 to 1880 to collect linguistic and ethnological notes. When the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) was established in 1879, Powell recruited Dorsey to join the staff. As an ethnologist for the BAE, Dorsey continued his research on Siouan tribes. His studies focused on languages but also included Siouan personal names, folklore, social organization, religion, beliefs, and customs. He conducted fieldwork among the Tutelo at Six Nations on Grand River in Upper Canada (1882); the Kansa, Osage, and Quapaw in Indian Territory (1883-1884); the Biloxi at Lecompte, Rapides Parish, Louisiana (1892); and again with the Quapaw at the Quapaw Mission (1894). He also worked with Native Americans that visited DC, including George Bushotter (Teton Lakota), Philip Longtail (Winnebago), Samuel Fremont (Omaha), and Little Standing Buffalo (Ponca). He also spent time at Siletz Reservation in 1884 to collect linguistic notes on the Athapascan, Kusan, Takilman, and Yakonan stocks. Dorsey died of typhoid fever on February 4, 1895 at the age of 47.  

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is grateful for the grant it received from the Arcadia Fund to digitize endangered-language materials currently housed in the National Anthropological Archives. The materials found in these archives preserve an unparalleled collection of primary sources for investigating endangered cultures and languages, indigenous environmental knowledge, and the connections between these subjects.

The Seneca are the largest of six Native American nations comprising the Haudenosaunee or Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. Historically, the Seneca occupied territory throughout central and western New York. As the westernmost of the Six Nations, the Seneca are known as the "Keeper of the Western Door," and O-non-dowa-gah, or "Great Hill People." Following the American Revolution much of their land west of the Genessee River was sold to the United States under the Treaty of Big Tree. By 1848, the remaining Seneca in New York formed an elected government, the Seneca Nations of Indians, which today has over 8,000 members. Two other federally recognized Seneca tribes also remain. The Tonawanda Band of Seneca Indians, who split from the Seneca Nation of Indians, reside primarily on the Tonawanda Reservation near Akron, New York, and enroll 1,200 members. The Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma live near Miami, Oklahoma, and trace their ancestry back to Seneca and Cayuga who migrated from New York before the American Revolution and were removed to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River in the 1830s. 

 

The Seneca linguistic material held at the NAA dates from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, and includes vocabularies, field notes, stories, legends, songs, religious materials, diaries, interviews, documents on Seneca government and social organization, and sound recordings. Much of this material was collected by John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt. Hewitt, a linguist and ethnographer, was born to a Tuscarora mother and learned to speak the Tuscarora language in school. By the late nineteenth century he began working for Erminnie A. Smith, an ethnologist for the Bureau of American Ethnology, on a Tuscarora-English dictionary. He continued this project throughout his life, along with continuing research on Iroquoian and other Native American languages. Many of the materials collected by Hewitt were also published in the Bureau of American Ethnology's Annual Reports. Other Seneca materials were collected by Jeremiah Curtin, John Peabody Harrington, and William C. Sturtevant.  

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is grateful for the grant it received from the Arcadia Fund to digitize endangered-language materials currently housed in the National Anthropological Archives. The materials found in these archives preserve an unparalleled collection of primary sources for investigating endangered cultures and languages, indigenous environmental knowledge, and the connections between these subjects. 

Jerry W. Leach earned a B.A. in History from Emory University; an M.A. in Social Anthropology and the Middle East from the University of California, Berkeley; and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Leach was one of the founding faculty members of the University of Papua New Guinea, serving as a lecturer at the university from 1969 to 1973. During this period, he studied folklore and culture change in the Trobriand Islands, which he described in his thesis "The Kabisawali Movement in the Trobriand Islands" (1978) and his documentary film, "Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response to Colonialism."

Leach has held a number of positions over the years. In addition to serving as an assistant lecturer at Cambridge University from 1974 to 1979, Leach served as Deputy Director of Strategic Technology Affairs for the U.S. State Department; White House Director of International Economic Affairs (NSC); Peace Corps Regional Director for Eastern Europe, the Soviet Republics, Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific; National President of the World Affairs Council of America; and Director of the American Studies Center at the American University of Cairo. 

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is grateful for the grant it received from the Arcadia Fund to digitize endangered-language materials currently housed in the National Anthropological Archives. The materials found in these archives preserve an unparalleled collection of primary sources for investigating endangered cultures and languages, indigenous environmental knowledge, and the connections between these subjects. 

Phillip L. Ravenhill was the chief curator of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art, where he worked from 1987 until his death in 1997. His papers primarily document the period during which he was a graduate student at the New School for Social Research and contain his field research on the Wan of Cote d'Ivoire, including linguistic notes and notebooks with interlinear translations of Wan folktales and proverbs; archival and bibliographic research; field recordings; and a draft of his dissertation.

Browse digitized selections from the Phillip L. Ravenhill papers here.

James Henri Howard worked as a linguist, musicologist, and folklorist, as well as an informed and able practitioner in the fields of dance and handicrafts. The papers document his research and professional activities from 1949-1982 and primarily deal with his work as an anthropologist, archaeologist, and ethnologist, studying Native American languages & cultures, such as the Chippewa, Choctaw, Creek, Dakota, Omaha, Ponca, Seminole, and Shawnee.

Browse digitized selections from the James Henri Howard papers here.

H. Arlo Nimmo is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at California State University East Bay at Hayward. His papers document his field research among the Bajau (also known as Sama Dilaut) in Tawi-Tawi Province in the southern Philippines in 1963, 1965-1967, 1977, 1982, and 1997. Nimmo's initial research focused on social change, but he collected data about other aspects of Bajau culture, including social organization, kinship, religion, fishing, boats, boatbuilding, art, and music.

Browse digitized selections from the H. Arlo Nimmo papers here.

Charles F. Hockett was a linguist best known for his contributions to structural linguistics. His research material focuses on Potawatomi and Kickapoo, with a small amount of other material relating to Spanish, Fijian, and Chinese. The materials in this collection document Hockett’s career and provide a glimpse into his military service and his passion for music.

Browse digitized selections from the Charles F. Hockett papers here.

Jon Haskell Breslar was a sociocultural and applied anthropologist who conducted his fieldwork on Mayotte, Comoro Islands. His papers document his fieldwork performed for his dissertation as well as his work developing a new housing policy for Mayotte.

Browse digitized selections from the Jon H. Breslar papers here.

Francis P. Conant was a cultural anthropologist who pioneered the use of satellite data in anthropology. He conducted fieldwork in Nigeria and Kenya, and his research interests spanned cultural ecology, AIDS, malaria, and sex and gender studies.

Browse digitized selections from the Francis P. Conant papers here.

Alan Harwood, a social anthropologist, studied illness and healing in Tanzania and communities in New York City and Boston. The bulk of this collection is composed of his 1962-1964 ethnographic research among the Safwa in Tanzania (then known as Tanganyika); his research on health beliefs and medical practices of residents in a low-income area of the Bronx, New York (1967-1970); and his research in Boston, Massachusetts on different ethnic groups' conceptions of health (1994-1995).

Browse digitized selections from the Alan Harwood papers here.

Geoffrey N. O'Grady was a linguistic scholar, and his papers cover from his days as a jackaroo in the Australian outback to his time at the University of Victoria. The majority of the collection is made up of field research and contains detailed vocabularies and linguistic analysis for Aboriginal peoples of Australia and First Nation communities of Canada.

Browse digitized selections from the Geoffrey N. O'Grady papers here.

Barry F. Carlson is an anthropologist known for his linguistic work with the Salish language of Washington State. This collection contains his linguistic study of the Salish dialects spoken by the elders at the Spokane Indian Reservation.

Browse digitized selections from the Salish Notes and Sound Recordings of Barry F. Carlson here.