The Arkansas River twists across the state of Arkansas and through eastern Oklahoma. Barges chug down it carrying agricultural goods, coal, and the petrochemical products of Oklahoma’s lucrative oil industry. In this setting, the prosaic name of the Pocola Mining Company sounds little different from hundreds of other companies started in this century to tap the rich natural resources of Oklahoma. Most of them disappeared with little interest to anyone other than the Internal Revenue Service, and a few of them grew into fabled multimillion-dollar fortunes that financed the skyscrapers, mansions, and magnificent art collections of Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Bartlesville.

The Pocola Mining Company had a short life of two years from 1933 to 1935. It operated on one small farm along the Arkansas River outside of Pocola, Oklahoma, where the company dug several tunnels into a handful of hillocks. It made little money, and its owners left no fortunes to its heirs, created no museums, and endowed no foundations.

This mining company did not search for coal or metal or uranium or diamonds. The Pocola Mining Company operated as one of the few officially and legally organized mining companies in American history that did not seek to mine any natural resource. Instead, Pocola’s founders created the company for the sole purpose of mining cultural resources; they mined the rich deposits of Indian artifacts made and buried in that area. The owners of the Pocola Mining Company dug up what was probably the greatest collection of artifacts and art objects ever discovered in North America.

In 1935 the Star of Kansas City compared the discoveries of the Pocola Mining Company to the recently completed excavations of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. The mining company had tunneled into the largest of the mounds just outside Spiro, Oklahoma, and found a treasure of pearls, hand-carved beads, necklaces, earspools, carved pipes, and other goods carefully crafted from copper, stone, wood, and pottery, including effigy pipes, T-shaped pipes, shell and cedar masks, arrowheads, spearpoints, axes, blankets, flint knives up to three feet in length, and embossed copper plates and bowls. They also found hundreds of large conch shells and gorgets that had been carefully engraved. The gorgets were pendants worn about the neck, but larger than a modern saucer or small plate; they had been carefully carved from shells and incised with sacred images. The ancient craftsmen had carved many of them with cut-out designs that rendered the hard white shell as delicate and fragile as a lace collar.

The men who mined the Spiro mounds sold many of the artifacts at the mouth of the mine, where curiousity seekers and curio collectors came to purchase the pieces for a few cents, or a few dollars for the finest specimens. The miners loaded up crates of the artifacts, which they drove to the East Coast to sell to people from the trunks of their cars.

The Pocola Mining Company looted the mounds with no concern for archaeology or history, much less for the rights of the native people whose ancestors made and buried the objects. They did not record what they took, or where they sold it. What could not be sold had no value to them. They discarded the pieces of pottery, textiles, feathers, and fur for which they found no buyers. They burned the wooden timbers that could later have been used by archaeologists to gain valuable information on the people who buried the artifacts. Frequently the miners broke up larger artifacts, such as the carefully engraved conch shells, because they could often get a few more cents for several interesting chunks than they could get for a whole piece.

The surprising find of artifacts by the grave robbers of the Pocola Mining Company revolutionized thought about North American Indians. No one had expected that such objects could have been created by Indians, and no academic theories of the time could explain the incredible funerary remains from Spiro.

After two years of looting by the mining company, the state and federal governments finally moved to protect what remained in the mounds. The Oklahoma legislature passed an antiquities preservation law, and the federal government sponsored a scientific excavation of the mounds through its Depression relief programs of the Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1941. The archaeologist Forrest E. Clements of the University of Oklahoma visited the site and later wrote that when the looters realized that they would lose their primary site, they began working faster. By the time the archaeologist arrived, the “great mound had been tunneled through and through, gutted in a frenzy of haste.” He said that “[s]ections of cedar poles lay scattered on the ground, fragments of feather and fur textiles littered the whole area; it was impossible to take a single step in hundreds of square yards around the ruined structure without scuffing up broken pieces of pottery, sections of engraved shell and beads of shell, stone, and bone.” Tragically, “the diggers had completed their work” (Page).

Before the Pocola Mining Company angrily surrendered its tunnels at Spiro, the looters perpetrated one final act of outrage and revenge on history by wiring the mine and tunnels with dynamite and blowing up as much of it as they could. In a sad testimony to the effect of their work, the dynamite did not do as much damage as the previous two years of indiscriminate tunneling and looting.

The Pocola Mining Company represents one of the most egregious examples of the wholesale looting of Indian artifacts for profit, but it is certainly not unique. Similar tragic stories could be told about the looting of Anasazi and Mimbres sites of the Southwest, the theft of wampum belts from the Iroquois of New York, the seizure of Kwakiutl ceremonial objects and masks in British Columbia, and the theft of Dorset and Thule artifacts across the Arctic.

America has literally mined the ancient Indian cultures for artifacts. Not all of the mining has been as cruel as that of the Pocola Mining Company, but it has continued in more genteel ways up to the present. Some of this material is now on display across the world in museums from Leningrad to London and from Berlin to Los Angeles, but even more is hidden away or even forgotten in private collections, university warehouses, and the storage lockers of local history societies.

It is relatively easy to trace material objects, since they always bear the distinctive marks of the culture that created them. No matter where the artifacts travel, they can still be identified as American Indian. There is always the hope that one day they will be found, identified, and returned to their proper places.

We can trace Indian objects, but it proves much harder to trace Indian ideas, knowledge, and other parts of nonmaterial culture. Yet American scholars have mined the rich deposits of American Indian knowledge as much as native deposits of artifacts, tut in contrast to artifacts, which usually reveal their origins, an idea or a bit of information can quickly be clothed in new garb that forever hides its true source.

Scholars and researchers, often with the best of intentions, have mined Native American thought in much the way that the Pocola Mining Company mined its artifacts. Digging through American intellectual development of the past few centuries does not always prove the Indian origin of an idea, but through an exercise in intellectual archaeology, we find native fingerprints and signatures throughout the work.

Ozhaw-Guscoday-Wayquay, whose name meant “Woman of the Green Prairie,” was the daughter of Waub Ojeeg, the Ojibwa chief in the Lake Superior area of Chequamegon Bay. She married John Johnston, an American fur trader who had settled in the area around Sault Ste. Marie, in the Michigan territory, at the start of the nineteenth century. Ozhaw-Guscoday-Wayquay had several children whom she sought to educate in both the Indian and the white traditions. She raised her children to be fluent in French and English as well as Ojibwa. Her eldest daughter Jane showed particular promise, so the parents sent her to England for schooling (Mason). They sent their son George for higher studies in Montreal.

In 1820 the Johnston family and their Ojibwa relatives played host to the visiting delegation sponsored by General Lewis Cass, who was the territorial governor and would become the U.S. Secretary of War and eventually Secretary of State. Cass brought a group to explore the western Great Lakes and search for the source of the Mississippi. Twenty-seven-year-old Henry Rowe Schoolcraft of Albany, New York, accompanied the expedition as mineralogist and geologist; this was to be his first trip of discovery to the source of the Mississippi River.

The intelligent and charming Jane Johnston captured the attention of the young mineralogist and changed his life. He married her and settled into the Ojibwa community as the government’s Indian agent, a job he held for nearly two decades. The encounter between Schoolcraft and Johnston also redirected Schoolcraft’s academic and scientific interests.

Schoolcraft worked hard to learn the Ojibwa language from his wife and her relatives. He began the task of learning what he thought was a very simple language as a “novel and pleasing species of amusement” (Bieder), but the amusement soon turned to hard work as he found a language based on principles quite different from those of European tongues. Although Schoolcraft went on to become a scholar of American Indian languages, he relied upon his wife and her relatives to translate for him, since he never mastered the Ojibwa language. Like many academic linguists to follow him in the next century, Schoolcraft had an abstract understanding of the rules of grammar of the Ojibwa language, but he had difficulty applying them in daily speech. Convinced of the importance of the Indian languages despite his own shortcomings, Schoolcraft urged American colleges to begin teaching native languages as well as European ones (Bieder).

Jane taught her husband much about her native heritage. Because she had a classical European education, she explained to him the delicacies and complexities of Ojibwa grammer by using Latin declension and conjugation models. This collatoration eventually led to a six-volume analysis of the Ojibwa language. Despite the creation of this monumental linguistic analysis, Schoolcraft gradually realized that with his meager command of the Ojibwa language he could never make his intellectual mark in philology, but through his language studies with his wife, he gradually developed a new area of expertise.

In addition to historical and linguistic information, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft related to her husband the Ojibwa tales and myths told to her by her mother. Through his wife, he also had access to a small but highly educated circle of Indians who led mixed lives combining white and traditional Ojibwa styles. Schoolcraft collected information on a variety of Indian topics, but his great “discovery” through his wife was that the Ojibwa had an oral literature. Today we are so accustomed to the idea that all the Indian nations had complex mythological traditions that it is hard to imagine that English speakers at one time had no knowledge of this. At the same time that Schoolcraft discovered American Indian myths and folk tales, the German brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm of Hanau were also making the same discovery of such tales among their own German farmers and published their Deutsche Mythologie in 1836.

Henry Schoolcraft published his new discovery about oral literature as a two-volume set in 1839 with the title Algic Researches. Schoolcraft himself had coined the pseudoscientific word Algic as an adjective form of Algonquin, the language family to which the Ojibwa language belonged. Schoolcraft had even formed his own Algic Research Society in 1832 to further research into the Ojibwa, and he had hoped to found the State Historical Society of Michigan and the Michigan Territorial Library in 1828 (Mason).

To comply with the newly emerging Victorian standards of refined decency and modesty, Schoolcraft censored and rearranged the tales in order to remove sexual references and any mention of the more unseemly bodily functions. The tales achieved great popularity with a large public audience and made an immediate impact on other American writers of the era. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow borrowed from this set of tales to write his popular poem The Song of Hiawatha. This caused so much interest in the tales that Schoolcraft published a new edition of his book under the more commercial title The Myth of Hiawatha and Other Oral Legends.

Despite, or perhaps because of, Henry Schoolcraft’s dependence on his wife, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and her family, a tense relationship developed between them. As the racism of the Victorian era increased, Henry Schoolcraft found it increasingly difficult to face the world with his Ojibwa wife and their two mixed children, who were called “blacks” in the common terminology of that era (Bieder).

Schoolcraft also felt himself pulled back into a rigid form of Christianity, which he thought should be imposed on his wife and on Indians in general. He criticized her for having been reared by such lenient parents, and wrote to her in a letter of December 8, 1830, that “it is the domestic conduct of. a female that is most continually liable to error, both of judgement and feeling.” He could not break her away from her own culture and the thick webs of kinship that united her to her family and people. He continued to remind his wife of her Christian duty, for “a woman should forsake ‘father & mother & cleave to her husband, and that she should look up to him with a full confidence as, next to God, her ‘guide, philosopher & friend’” (Bieder).

Ten years later, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft died, freeing Henry Schoolcraft from the stigma of an Ojibwa wife, but also taking his most valuable source of information. Schoolcraft continued his studies of the Indians, but with far less sympathy toward them than he had shown in his writings while she lived. He reversed his earlier position in support of Indian land claims. He sided openly with the anti-Indian policies of Andrew Jackson, and with publication of an article titled “Our Indian Policy” in the Democratic Review in 1844, he supported removal of the Indians from their land.

As a prominently established academic and specialist in Indian culture and history, the elderly Henry Schoolcraft married again. Avoiding the mistakes of his first marriage, Schoolcraft chose a self-avowed racist white woman from South Carolina. Mary Howard Schoolcraft proved much more amenable to the religious and moral demands of her husband, but she also managed to outshine him as a writer in her lengthy defenses of slavery, which she published under the name of Mrs. Henry R. Schoolcraft. Through her written criticisms of her husband’s first wife, Mary Howard Schoolcraft helped to minimize the achievement and contributions of the Ojibwa Jane Schoolcraft while maximizing the originality and genius of Henry Schoolcraft.

Her magnum opus appeared as a thinly disguised autobiographical novel, The Black Gauntlet, which she dedicated to her husband, whom she called Ne na baim, which she said was an “Indian word meaning husband.” The main achievement of Musidora, the main character in the novel, came when she “immortalize[d] the family by marrying a world-renowned genius, whose works could never die” (M. H. Schoolcraft). In order to maximize the importance of this second marriage, she had to explain away the husband’s first marriage to an Indian woman and their resulting mixed-blood offspring.

She characterized the genius’s first marriage as an impulse of his romantic nature. He “idolized his Pocahontas wife with that patronage that a man feels for a woman who is a child in character and impulse, though he was, nevertheless often obliged to leave her, month after month, in his scientific explorations of various countries, and even when at home, he lived in his library fascinated with antiquarian and ethnological research; so that he only associated with his family at meals.” (M. H. Schoolcraft).

The marriage with an Indian woman so distressed the “fictional” professor’s mother that she died of a broken heart, and the professor himself soon regretted the romantic, impulsive marriage of his youth. According to the second wife’s account, the Indian wife died totally insane from opium addiction, a vice she shared with her son.

In conclusion, Mrs. Mary Howard Schoolcraft described the first marriage as something the professor had done in “ethnological enthusiasm” to unite “the American aborigines with the noble Anglo-Saxon” (M. H. Schoolcraft). His marriage was a “suicidal … experiment to amalgamate in marriage with a race as inferior to his own as an ape is to Napoleon Bonaparte, or a Skenandoah is to an African cannibal negro (Mumbo Jumbo)” (M. H. Schoolcraft).

Fortunately for historical accuracy, we do not have to depend solely on the descriptions and evaluations of Mary Howard to evaluate the genius of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. She may have been able to obscure the contributions of Schoolcraft’s Ojibwa wife, but she could not obscure the work of his second Indian assistant, a young Seneca, Ely Parker, because Parker quickly surpassed Schoolcraft in fame and respect.

In 1846, Schoolcraft published Notes on the Iroquois: Or, Contributions to the Statistics, Aboriginal History, Antiquities and General Ethnology of Western New York. Much of the information he gathered for the book depended heavily on the words and letters of Ely Parker, who obligingly wrote out answers to the incessantly demanding questions of Henry Schoolcraft. In keeping with his style, Schoolcraft neglected to make explicit his debt to Ely Parker. Perhaps if Schoolcraft had known then how prominent his young assistant was to become, he might have been more generous in allotting him credit for his early ethnographic work.

In a particularly Indian way, Ely Parker’s mission in life began well before he was born in 1828 on the Tonawanda Reservation of the Seneca nation, near Buffalo in western New York state. His mother, Elizabeth Parker, was deeply troubled by a mysterious dream while pregnant with her future son. In the dream she saw a rainbow connecting the Seneca land with the white community at Buffalo, and beneath the rainbow hung the kinds of name placards that white merchants hung over their doors and put in shop windows. In traditional Seneca fashion, Elizabeth Parker took this troublesome dream to an elder for interpretation.

The elder explained that the “son will become a white man as well as an Indian, with great learning.” He explained that the boy would become a chief among the Indians as well as the whites, and that “his name will reach from the East to the West—the North to the South, as great among his Indian family and the pale-faces” (Armstrong).

She named the boy Ha-sa-no-as-da, which meant “Leading Name” because he was to be an important leader, but she also gave him the name Ely (rhymes with freely) for use in the world outside the Seneca lands. His father, William Parker, had assumed the name Parker in honor of a British officer, Arthur C. Parker, who had been adopted into the tribe. Despite this English surname, Ely Parker grew up in the traditional Seneca cabin, speaking only the Seneca language.

The high expectations placed on young Ely Parker must not have seemed too strange for him, since he came from a family of illustrious achievement. His mother sat in caucuses as ho-ya-neh, an honored woman who nominated or impeached sachems of the Iroquois Confederacy. One of Ely’s ancestors, Handsome Lake, started a spiritual and anti-alcohol movement in 1799 that became known as Gai-woo or “the good message.” His mother’s grand-uncle was Red Jacket, a great orator and leader during the War of 1812 (Armstrong). Ely’s own father served under Red Jacket in the war, and then became a chief of the Tonawanda Seneca.

True to the mission foreseen in her dream, Elizabeth Parker ensured that her son would receive both a white and an Indian education. She taught him much of the history and myths of her people, and she sent him to a Baptist mission school off the reservation. To ensure that he learned the masculine crafts of woodworking, archery, gunnery, spear fishing, canoeing, and tracking, she sent him to live with another group of Iroquois in neighboring Ontario.

Even though Ely showed little interest in English, he gradually began to master it, and then his mother sent him to learn Greek and Latin, which came much easier to him since he already knew one European language. By the age of fourteen, Ely was being used by the Seneca chiefs as a translator and scribe. Thus, at this young age he came into contact with high government officials and began, on behalf of the chiefs, to correspond with United States senators, cabinet secretaries, and even the President of the United States.

In April 1844, the elders called him out of school once again to accompany them to Albany for a conference with Governor William Bouck. Because the Indians had to wait many days for appointments and conferences, young Parker used his free time to roam the city. He particularly enjoyed the bookstores. While browsing through one of those bookstores, he met a young lawyer named Lewis Henry Morgan, who had come to Albany to do research in the state archives.

Morgan belonged to a lodge of young professional men in Aurora, New York. Under Morgan’s leadership, the group had changed its classical name, the Order of the Gordian Knot, to the Grand Order of the Iroquois, and had elected Morgan sachem. Morgan wanted the practices of the order to follow as closely as possible those of the true Iroquois, but none of the young men knew any Iroquois. As a lawyer not adverse to research, Morgan made the trip to Albany from Aurora to examine the state archives and ferret out accurate information on the organization of the Iroquois Confederacy.

It was while browsing through the bookstore for information on the Iroquois that Morgan fortuitously encountered Ely Parker, a member of one of the nations of the Iroquois. Parker was the first Iroquois whom Morgan had met, and Parker agreed to spend most of the next two days talking with Morgan at his hotel and translating as Morgan talked with the chiefs whom Parker had accompanied. In Morgan, who was ten years older than he, the young Parker found an eager student who wanted to know everything about Iroquois ritual and formal organization.

For Parker, this was the first time he had met a white man who showed a genuine interest in the Iroquois. After years of studying the white man’s ways and culture, the time had finally come for Parker to begin teaching the Indian ways to the whites. He was beginning to fulfill the other part of his mother’s prenatal dream. Parker and Morgan formed an eager partnership in which Parker taught Morgan and the other white members of the Grand Order of the Iroquois, and they in turn helped to finance his continued education at the Cayuga Academy in Aurora, where Parker would be close to them for continued interaction.

In 1845, Parker took Morgan and the other members of the Grand Order to visit his home reservation. The Indians wore a mixture of traditional and modern clothes. In addition to planting traditional crops of corn and beans, they also grew barley, peas, oats, wheat, and apple trees. Most of their meat came from the hogs, sheep, and cows they now raised, since they no longer had access to the deer and other animals of the great forests of their ancestors. The visitors experienced some disappointment at the poverty of the reservation and at seeing that the Seneca lived in cabins much like those of the whites. To appease Morgan, William Parker agreed to construct a traditional longhouse of the kind in which he had been reared.

This fateful visit could easily have been the end of the romantic dream of some young men who, having lost that dream, would settle into marriage, family, and a style of life appropriate to the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie of small-town America. Despite the disappointment, the interest did not lessen in Morgan. In his conversations with Parker he met someone who made him understand that no matter how much the Seneca grew to resemble the whites in the materials of their lives, they retained a substantially different culture. Their beliefs, ceremonies, practices, language, and whole way of life was based on principles different from, and often conflicting with, the larger society around them.

Parker taught Morgan that the main organizing principle behind the life of the Seneca and underneath all of these ceremonies was kinship. Such a notion seems deceptively simple, since most societies organize around kinship, but under Parker’s tutelage Morgan realized that kinship was more than a mere biological given. Culture, not biology, constructed and organized kinship. The Iroquois concepts of kinship were constructed much differently from those of the Europeans. For the Iroquois, for example, the concepts of brother and sister included not only siblings but also parallel cousins (cousins related through two sisters or through two brothers).

Morgan realized that in order to understand so different a culture from his own, he had to be part of their society. He could not merely study it abstractly as an outsider; he had to live it. In 1846 the Senecas agreed to adopt Morgan into the Hawk clan as the son of Jimmy Johnson, one of the chiefs, but the adoption occurred on the condition that Morgan himself pay for the requisite feast and not put the burden on his new family. As a member of the Seneca nation, albeit through adoption rather than birth, Morgan felt the need to translate his new knowledge into help for the Seneca people. As a member of the state bar, Morgan represented the Seneca in their struggle to keep their lands from the Ogden Company, which was trying to develop those lands and push the Seneca westward.

The collaboration of Morgan and Parker in understanding Iroquois society resulted in the book League of the Ho-de’-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois, published in Rochester, New York, in 1851, only seven years after the meeting in the bookstore. Parker wrote long passages of the book and did all the transcription of political speeches, as well as all translations for the book. The book listed Morgan as author, but Morgan dedicated the book to Parker, asserting on the title page that “the materials … are the fruit of our joint researches,” a point upon which he elaborates in the book’s preface.

Ely Parker’s sister, Caroline Parker, posed for the book’s illustrations of the Iroquois woman draped in finely embroidered dress and shawl, and his brother Nicholson Parker appeared as a traditional Seneca man holding a war club. Morgan also filled the book with illustrations of household objects taken from the Parker home. He later persuaded Caroline Parker to copy articles of Indian clothing that Morgan obtained for the State Cabinet of Natural History.

The book on the League of the Iroquois stands today as the first book in American anthropology, and although it was Morgan who became known as “the father of anthropology,” this first volume was very much the joint creation of Ely S. Parker and Lewis Henry Morgan. Anthropology came to life as the joint creation of an Indian and a white dedicated to helping their respective peoples better understand each other.

What we now think of as cultural anthropology or ethnology was largely invented by Morgan in his studies with Parker. It became the detailed study of a people and their way of life, and how these people connect with the whole pageant of world history. Using his newly acquired understanding of the Iroquois, Morgan reinterpreted much of classical and biblical history because he had the key of kinship analysis. He pushed scholarship to a new level by working toward a model of world history that included all peoples, not merely Western civilization as known in the European and Mediterranean world.

After publication of their book on the Iroquois, the lives of Morgan and Parker followed separate paths. Morgan moved deeper into tribal society, while Parker moved deeper into white society. Morgan continued his intellectual line of inquiry and his writing. His greatest achievement was Ancient Society, published in 1877. He became president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1879-80, and he worked to finance the Bandalier expedition to the Southwest, which opened that archaeologically rich area to American as well as international scholarly attention.

Along with his intellectual work, Morgan led a full business life as a lawyer and investor. He accumulated a large fortune, most of which was dedicated to the creation of a women’s college at the University of Rochester in New York following his death (Bohannan and Glazer).

Ely Parker seemed at first destined to follow the intellectual and academic career of his friend Morgan, but the racism of the times intervened. Parker followed Morgan’s example and studied law, but the state of New York refused to admit him to the bar because he was a Seneca and thus not a United States citizen. Lacking wealth with which to support himself and being barred from law, which was a primary entry into the legal and financial world of New York, Parker had to embark on a more practical profession. He became an engineer and worked on canal construction and designed federal government buildings in Illinois and Iowa.

When the Civil War erupted, Parker joined the Union forces and received an officer’s commission. This presented a temporary conflict. Under the traditional Iroquois system, a man could not be both a sachem and a war chief. Parker managed to hold both offices since his military appointment was with the United States and not with the Seneca. He could be a war chief for the Americans and still be a peace chief among the Seneca.

He rose quickly and became the secretary and chief assistant to General Ulysses S. Grant. In this capacity, Parker wrote the terms of the surrender of Confederate forces at the end of the war. Parker appears clearly in many photographs of Lee’s solemn surrender to Grant’s forces at Appomattox Court House, but despite Parker’s broad face and darker complexion, he looks much like any other union officer in the pictures.

Ely Parker rose to the rank of brigadier general in the United States Army, and he followed Grant on into public life in Washington. After the grant of citizenship to all taxpaying Indians at peace with the United States, Parker became an official citizen and thus qualified for public office. In 1869, Grant appointed him Commissioner of Indian Affairs—the first commissioner who actually was an Indian. During his two years in office, he opened a peace initiative to the Indians of the West, but after only two years in office he was brought down by one of the many procurement scandals that plagued the Grant administration. Parker was found not guilty of any offense, but he left public service disappointed.

Until his death, in 1895, Parker divided his time between homes in Connecticut and New York. A small income from a job as a clerk permitted him to pursue his interests in Indian history and culture, which he made better known to the larger society through public lectures, work with the Seneca, and collaboration with the author and poet Harriet Maxwell Converse, whom he described as “the best posted woman on Indian lore in America” (Armstrong).

Harriet Maxwell Converse, like her husband and father before her, shared a strong interest in the Seneca and was herself adopted into the tribe. Despite their work together and their apparent affection for one another, the mundane demands of earning a living still prevented Parker from devoting himself seriously to intellectual pursuits.

Schoolcraft and Morgan are today recognized as the pioneers of modern anthropology. One can see in their early work the subsequent division of the field into field workers and synthesizers. Schoolcraft obtained a wealth of information through his wife Jane and subsequently through other Indian assistants, such as Ely Parker. Like many great gatherers of information, however, he never put it in good order. His major creation, the six-volume Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects on the Indian Tribes of the United States, published between 1851 and 1857, was so chaotic that subsequent researchers could hardly use it until the Bureau of American Ethnology finally published an extensive index to it in 1954.

In contrast to Schoolcraft, Morgan’s theoretical clarity helped to move Western thought to a new plane of international dimensions. For him, the history of all humans formed part of the same story, and all humans participated in a psychic unity of humankind. In this world history he included the tribal peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Asia in a synthetic and universal theory that had profound impact on the second half of the nineteenth century.

Morgan was a true intellectual’s intellectual, and he had a greater impact on other scientists and philosophers of the nineteenth century than any other American. Morgan met with Charles Darwin, who used his work, although he disagreed with some minor parts of it. Karl Marx studied Morgan’s works carefully, and Friedrich Engels wrote about them extensively in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan, The German philosopher Johann Jakob Bachofen dedicated one of his books to Morgan for having given Bachofen a perspective on the reputed prehistoric era of mother-rule. A generation of classical scholars found in Morgan’s work new insights on the tribal organization of the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and Germans.

Even though Morgan’s name has been forgotten by many, he continued to inspire thought around the world in the twentieth century. Through his influence on Bachofen, Engels, and Marx, Morgan became a staple in Soviet and Chinese thought. In America he survived mostly within anthropology, but in France he continued to exert a greater influence through Claude Levi-Strauss.

In 1949, Claude Lévi-Strauss started modern French structuralism with his book The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which he dedicated to Morgan in recognition of the importance of Morgan’s ideas in Lévi-Strauss’s own work. Lévi-Strauss gave three reasons for this dedication: “to pay homage to the pioneer of the research method modestly adopted in this book; to honour the American school of anthropology that he founded … and perhaps also, in some small way, to try to discharge the debt owed to him, by recalling that this school was especially great at a time when scientific precision and exact observation did not seem to him to be incompatible with a frankly theoretical mode of thought and a bold philosophical taste” (Lévi-Strauss).

Ethnological work such as that done by Henry Schoolcraft and his wife Jane Johnston Schoolcraft had a broad influence on other thinkers in the nineteenth century. Matilda Joslyn Gage, one of the major feminist writers and activists of that century, used the works of Schoolcraft to formulate her discussion of the importance of women in American Indian society. In Woman, Church and State (1893), a radical attack on nineteenth-century society, she quoted from the work of Schoolcraft and other ethnologists among the Indians.

Gate began her analysis with a look at the role of women in Native American society, with special attention to the League of the Iroquois. According to her analysis, American Indian society represented a more equitable society for women than did her contemporary American society. She held the Indians up as models and inspiration for women in the suffrage movement to move beyond mere attainment of a vote at the ballot box to a genuine sharing of power with men in all aspects of modern political, economic, and religious life.

Indians continued to play a crucial role in nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropology not merely as passive objects of study but as active researchers and analysts, major contributors to the intellectual endeavor. Franz Boas shaped twentieth-century anthropology and linguistics more than any other person, and much of his work was done with, through, and by Indian collaborators and assistants employed or cajoled into working for him. Much of the work among the Kwakiutl of British Columbia for which Boas received credit originated with George Hunt, Boas’s Tlingit-Scottish assistant. At first, Hunt acted as interpreter and collector, but after learning to write the Kwakiutl language, he began recording tales and myths. He came to New York, where he was instrumental in arranging the ethnological collection of the American Museum of Natural History.

George Hunt revised virtually all of the Kwakiutl language texts that Boas used, and he helped Boas to learn the language. Boas claimed most of the credit for this work, yet he sometimes blamed George Hunt for shortcomings. He frequently chastised Hunt in his letters, accused him of not working hard enough, and criticized him for making mistakes in the ethnographic and linguistic texts he collected.

The work pursued by Hunt among the Kwakiutl paralleled the work done by Ella Cara Deloria for Boas among the Dakota and Lakota. Her family called her Anpetu Waste, “Beautiful Day,” after her birth at White Swan on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota on the last day of 1889. As the daughter of one of the first Dakota Episcopal priests, she received a good education in both traditional Sioux culture and in the mainstream culture. After high school she attended Oberlin College and Columbia Teachers College, graduating with a B.A. in science.

While at Columbia Teachers College, Deloria met Franz Boas, and began writing translations for him in 1915. For eighteen dollars a week, she translated texts collected in 1887 by George Bushotter, one of the first Sioux students to be educated at Virginia’s Hampton Institute. With periodic interruptions, Deloria collected data and made translations for Boas until he died in 1942. Her work with him spanned a quarter of a century.

In addition to translating the entire thousand pages of the Bush-otter collection, she translated the texts left by an Oglala Sioux, George Sword, around 1908, and the texts of a Santee Sioux, Jack Frazier, written in the 1830s. She also researched and completed a Sioux-English dictionary. In 1932 she published a bilingual book, Dakota Texts, in both English and Dakota. She wrote Speaking of Indians, which the YMCA published in 1944 to introduce a general audience to the complexities and diversity of Indian life. As she described her work in a 1952 letter, “I actually feel that I have a mission: To make the Dakota people understandable, as human beings, to the white people who have to deal with them” (Deloria).

Many of Ella Deloria’s works did not find publishers until after her death. These include a novel, Waterlily, that she wrote to show the life of Sioux women, since most writings about the Sioux concentrated on the colorful and macho activities of Sioux warriors in battle. Publishers declined to publish it during her life because they felt that a novel about an Indian woman in the nineteenth century would not attract enough readers.

Other members of the Deloria family had continued the intellectual pursuits of Ella and her parents. These include her brother’s son, Vine Deloria, Jr., who wrote Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), God Is Red (1973), and Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (1974). Her niece, Dr. Bea Medicine, became an anthropologist and Ella’s biographer.

Finding the correct way to credit the Indian voice in history, anthropology, and related disciplines has remained a problem throughout the twentieth century. As early as 1913, Paul Radin published a Journal of American Folklore article called “Personal Reminiscence of a Winnebago Indian” to stress the role of the Indians in creating his work. By 1926 he had published a biography called Crashing Thunder, but with the subtitle The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian, which clearly shows the role of Crashing Thunder in creating the work. Radin also published a study of the Winnebago in 1950 in which he titled the book Culture of the Winnebago, as Described by Themselves to emphasize their role in the creation of the book.

In 1969 the anthropologist James P. Spradley removed himself one more degree from the creation of his book Guests Never Leave Hungry by listing himself as the editor rather than the author, and subtitling the book The Autobiography of James Sewid, a Kwakiutl Indian, Spradley left the text in the first person to emphasize that the words came from James Sewid himself. This marks a steady increase in the amount of credit given to Native Americans for their voices when appropriated into science.

Anthropology, linguistics, history, folklore, mythology, and literature have all borrowed heavily from Native Americans. Unlike the Pocola Mining Company that destroyed as much at Spiro, Oklahoma as it stole, the intellectuals have borrowed without destroying.