R. H. Barnes
Emile Durkheim once referred to the revolutionary importance of ethnography to sociological knowledge, despite a tendency in his day, still alive today, to dismiss it disdainfully as dull and irrelevant to everyday human concerns. The United States in the nineteenth century produced a lively and influential body of such descriptive studies of cultures and institutions, carried out by persons with strikingly varied backgrounds and purposes. One of the central and enduring questions of anthropology was born from this work, indeed largely and unconsciously from the pages of a single rather unprepossessing and fairly dry report on the Omaha Indians of Nebraska.
In anthropological habit, the issue is known by the union of two ethnic names. The “Crow-Omaha problem,” as it is called, is a topic which has grown up with the academic discipline of anthropology and which shows no signs of going away. Initially the phrase referred to the similarities in social classification and unilineal descent groups within the context of certain culturally recognized marriage preferences in many native ethnic groups of North America.
The Crow and the Omaha both belong to the Siouan family. They differ in that the Crow are matrilineal and the Omaha are patrilineal. These differences carry through in kinship terminology, descent group formation and at least partially in marriage preference. The problem as initially conceived was how to explain the similarities. Does social classification determine group structure and marriage preference, or is the reverse true? Alternatively, is it possible that there is no causal relationship and that the similarities are no more than expressions of the same collective attitude.
Many North American peoples have social forms similar to, and no doubt historically and ethnologically related to, the Crow and Omaha. Anthropologists were content for a time to let the names “Crow” and “Omaha,” and the associated social systems, stand for types of societies. Why the Crow and Omaha proper were singled out in this way is explained in part by fortuitous historical circumstances and in part by the personal preferences of the anthropologists involved. In an early phrasing of the problem the contrast was drawn between the Choctaw and the Omaha. Robert Lowie, who in the early years of the twentieth century was making important contributions to the debate, happened also to be working on the ethnography of the Crow of Montana. Perhaps for this reason anthropologists picked up the habit of referring to the Crow and Omaha as a shorthand way of alluding to what were really a constellation of related analytic questions.
Unfortunately for particular theories, the similarities identified in Crow, Omaha and other societies of the kind were not constant throughout the range of peoples with the features in question. This circumstance had the effect of opening the possibility of elaborating further theories of an essentially speculative and historical nature attempting to account for how societies supposedly once identical had come to differ so much. It also tempted other anthropologists to claim that the similarities in social classification were entirely illusory and of no consequence whatsoever. Another development was that anthropologists began to identify Crow and Omaha systems not just in the limited area of North America where we can be sure that all cultures have some sort of shared background, but all over the world. This trend brought its own reaction, so that one anthropologist for example declared that, “there really is no such thing as an Omaha terminology, except that of the Omaha themselves, and it leads only to confusion and wrong conclusions to suppose that there is” (Needham 1971:15).
The history of these debates has been competently summarized by several authors, the most recent being in Barnes (1984). For present purposes, the point to be made is that shifting conceptions of the Crow-Omaha problem resulted from the healthy willingness on the part of the profession to reconsider established positions and to adopt new perspectives. Unfortunately, as time went by references to Omaha systems became increasingly casual and speculation increasingly remote from its descriptive base, the original ethnographic record.
For the Omaha, this record includes two ethnographic monographs that deserve to be regarded as anthropological classics. The first is the Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington, D.C.), called Omaha Sociology, by the Reverend James Owen Dorsey, published in 1884. The second is the Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the same bureau, published in 1911 by Alice Fletcher and Francis La Flesche and called The Omaha Tribe. These books when taken together helped to make the Omaha one of the best and most fully described of North American peoples in their day. Naturally, they attracted attention of anthropologists working on comparative problems. What most distinguished Omaha Sociology was its very full description of the Omaha relationship terminology and a less satisfactory description of the sociology of Omaha clans. It also gave a rather elaborate account of Omaha marriage prohibitions, which frankly is very hard for the unprepared reader to digest and which was largely ignored until Claude Lévi-Strauss stimulated interest in it in 1965 (Lévi-Strauss 1966). The Omaha Tribe presented a good deal more information on descent groups as well as a rich general coverage of the culture.
Hinsley (1981:175) has remarked how the Director of the Bureau of American Ethnology, John Wesley Powell, managed to mold Dorsey’s ethnographic findings into “appropriate shapes,” which means in particular in conformity with the theories of Lewis Henry Morgan, one of the nineteenth century “inventors of kinship” (Trautmann 1987). Dorsey had spent 1871-1873 living as an Episcopal missionary among the Ponca, whose language he learned to speak and who had in prehistoric times formed part of the Omaha community. He was a good practical linguist, having learned as a child to read Hebrew. When the Bureau of Ethnology (later Bureau of American Ethnology) was formed in 1879, Dorsey joined it. Powell had already sent him to collect linguistic and anthropological material among the Omaha for the Smithsonian Institution, and Dorsey lived with the Omaha from July 1878 until April 1880.
Dorsey’s writings are indeed characterized by what Hinsley calls his modest and sympathetic temperament. Powell, who was unhappy with Dorsey’s lack of a formal background in anthropology, asked him to read Morgan’s Ancient Society. Dorsey (1884:215) dutifully begins his discussion of Omaha social organization with a quotation from Powell defining the state, followed by a definition of a descent group (gens or clan) which was lifted almost straight from Morgan. Indeed coming as it does at the head of the opening paragraph of the relevant chapter, the reader might suspect that the Director’s guiding hand extended well beyond strictly editorial considerations.
Dorsey had it that a gens (patrilineal descent group) or clan (matrilineal descent group) was composed of a number of consanguinei, claiming descent from a common ancestor, and having a common taboo or taboos. Dorsey’s comments later brought an implicit refutation from Fletcher and La Flesche (1911:195), who denied that Omaha descent groups were political organizations and observed that, unlike the Latin gens which was Morgan’s starting point, its members did not claim to be descended from a common ancestor. Hinsley says that, “while he obediently adopted Morgan-Powell structures and terminology, Dorsey refused to theorize from his data, which as often as not contradicted Powell’s expectations.”
In fact, he did speculate in ways that were clearly his own, but here too his data undermined the theory. The Omaha tribal circle, as Dorsey encountered it, consisted of two moieties, each containing five named descent groups. These groups (gentes in Dorsey’s terminology) were usually further subdivided. When describing descent group segmentation, Dorsey’s informants often referred to the number four, an archetypal classifier in Omaha culture, as in many other North American peoples. Dorsey inferred that, “There are strong reasons for believing that each gens had four subgentes at the first; several subgentes having become few in number of persons have been united to the remaining and more powerful of their respective gentes.” Though some changes of the kind mentioned did occur in the historical period, Dorsey’s conclusion is probably best regarded as the result of his inexperience and the general state of anthropological sophistication of his day. Omaha attitudes and descent group division were far less uniform and systematic than this picture implies, and Dorsey may well have interpreted some Omaha statements incorrectly, believing them to be imbued with the same academic desire for clarity and simplicity as his own thought. Be that as it may, the idea that Omaha descent groups were, at least in the past, uniform, substantial, homogeneous structures (which the evidence now available shows they were not) continued to confuse anthropological arguments well into the twentieth century.
Perhaps the crowning achievement of Omaha Sociology is Dorsey’s record of the relationship terminology. Though obviously incomplete in some respects, in other ways it might almost be said to be too complete. Like the rest of his work, Dorsey’s discussion of the terminology is accompanied by little or no analysis. What he provides is essentially just a set of tables showing the genealogical positions to which terms are applied. It was not until Bowers published books on the Mandan (1950) and Hidatsa (1965) that comparably thorough descriptions became available for any other Siouan peoples.
This aspect of Dorsey’s ethnography has generally been admired at a distance. The way he presents it does not make it easily accessible, and for most students the less said about kinship terminologies the better. It is ironic that the better known analytic accounts of Omaha terminology (Radcliffe-Brown 1941 and Lounsbury 1964) have been carried on at a remove, since they actually refer to Tax’s material on the Algonquian Fox. Thus when anthropologists say that some people in Africa or Asia have an Omaha terminology, the reader may reasonably doubt that they have bothered to make a point by point comparison with the actual Omaha system. Dorsey’s information has recently been reorganized to facilitate consultation (Barnes 1984:132-137).
After Omaha Sociology was published, a German jurist, Josef Kohler (1897), gave it extensive attention in a monograph on primitive marriage. Kohler focused on similarities between features of the terminology (what may be called patrilineal equations) and the Omaha preference for taking as a second or later wife, the first wife’s sister, father’s sister or brother’s daughter. All these women belong to the same patrilineal group, and Kohler noticed this fact, as well as the fact that the rather different terminological features and marriage preference of the Choctaw were compatible with their matrilineal groups. Durkheim’s review (1897) of Kohler’s book set the issues forth more plainly, and the “Crow-Omaha problem” was born, what before Lowie, Kohler would have called the “Choctaw-Omaha problem” had he chosen to express matters that way.
In addition to marriage preferences Dorsey described an alarmingly elaborate list of marriage prohibitions. Until recently readers of his book have left these passages strictly alone. Indeed on the basis of published information it is almost impossible to know what to make of them. During the 1950s and 1960s, stimulated by Lévi-Strauss’s classic The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949 and 1969), anthropological interest in systems of positive marriage alliance grew to the point that they became one of the central topics of the profession. The climate was appropriate for asking whether there were comparable structures based on marriage prohibitions, as Lévi-Strauss did in fact in 1965 referring specifically to the Omaha. However, adopting his characteristically distanced, if not disdainful, attitude toward the empirical record, as opposed to the intellectual play with imaginative models, Lévi-Strauss did not attempt to crack the code of this aspect of Omaha Sociology.
Being more empirically minded and frustrated with not being able to understand what Dorsey meant, I tried my hand at it. I concluded that the Omaha in fact did not have an alliance system of the kind Lévi-Strauss attributed to them. I also inferred that the Omaha may not have been burdened with quite so severe a set of limitations to choice as at first appeared because, so it would seem, only relationships which are actually remembered are effectively barred and the Omaha have fairly brief genealogical memories. To come to these conclusions, however, which of course are no better than the records on which they are based, I found to my surprise and actual relief that I had to give a good deal of attention to the relations between the ethnographers and between them and the Omaha. I say relief because there were some genuine mysteries affecting the evidential base, and these mysteries, being personal, were a welcome distraction from abstract analytic concerns.
Dorsey died unexpectedly of typhoid fever in February 1895 at the age of forty-seven. In 1890, six years after the publication of Omaha Sociology, Dorsey announced that he was preparing a monograph on Indian personal names that would also contain Ponca and Omaha genealogical tables. These genealogies were to illustrate not only personal names, but the kinship system and marriage laws as well. Completion of the project was prevented by his early death, but manuscript dictionaries of Omaha and Ponca personal names, together with complete Omaha genealogies up to the 1880s and partial Ponca genealogies survive in the National Anthropological Archives, Washington, D.C.
Dorsey may have begun compiling Omaha genealogies while he was in the field, but evidently he had not finished the work by the time he published Omaha Sociology. Two Omaha, Samuel Freemont and George Miller, visited Dorsey in Washington in 1888 and 1889 to help him revise the genealogies. A consequence of this chronology is that when Dorsey published his monograph he may well not have had crucial information now available in the genealogies for testing statements about marriage prohibitions.
Dorsey’s specifications of marriage restrictions are more elaborate than anything of the kind ever published on related American Indian groups, and no other authority on the Omaha has given information of comparable extent. In a few pages Dorsey set out such a list of constraints that he was led to ask how it was that an Omaha could ever find an eligible person to marry. Internal evidence suggests that this crucial section derives almost entirely from two informants, Joseph La Flesche and Lewis Morris (or Two Crows), who visited him in Washington in 1882 to help him revise the book for publication. In keeping with his open, but somewhat uncritical, attitude toward information given him, Dorsey frequently recorded in the book statements by La Flesche and Two Crows in which they correct or disagree with information from other Omaha. Both Edward Sapir (1938:7) and Frederica de Laguna (1957) later commented on the possible implications of this evidence of disagreement among informants. When taken together with the fairly ample published and unpublished information about Omaha personalities now available, they provide an opportunity for going behind the surface of published ethnography, giving it a critical extra dimension and potentially greatly increasing our understanding both of the Omaha and of how ethnography and anthropology work—but not without a great deal of effort.
What has not, until recently, been attempted is to examine the statements of these two men about marriage in light of their own lives to gauge just how sound is their information. Joseph La Flesche, or Iron Eye, is one of the most well known Omaha of his era. Having been adopted into the Elk clan and the Omaha tribe by a principal chief named Big Elk, Joseph La Flesche himself became for a time a head chief of the Omaha. His father was French Canadian and his mother was variously reported to be a Ponca with family connections to the Omaha or actually an Omaha. He had several wives simultaneously, and three illustrious children, including a woman medical doctor (Dr. Susan Picotte), as well as Susette “Bright Eyes” La Flesche who became nationally known through campaigning for the welfare of the Ponca tribe (Clark and Webb 1988), and Francis La Flesche, joint author of one of the classic Omaha monographs.
Liberty (1978) has written of Francis La Flesche as “the first professional American Indian anthropologist,” but she has also devoted an article to his role as an “informant” (1976). Francis La Flesche grew up speaking Omaha and was born early enough to participate in Omaha rituals and the annual buffalo hunt. During Dorsey’s period on the reservation he was a trusted and reliable informant, having been educated in the Presbyterian mission school, about which he later wrote a book. His relationship with Alice Fletcher was considerably more complex.
Alice Fletcher had trained in anthropology as a private student of Frederic Putnam, who was director of the Peabody Museum of Harvard University. Thomas Henry Tibbies and his wife, Susette La Flesche, came east in 1879 seeking support for the Ponca who had been forced to move to Oklahoma. Fletcher persuaded Tibbies to guide her on a tour of the Omaha, Winnebago, Ponca and Santee Sioux reservations. She later spent much time carrying out allotments of land for the Omaha, the Winnebago and Nez Percé. During the Omaha allotment, at which she was assisted by Francis La Flesche, she also began her study of Omaha culture. Mary Copley Thaw endowed a lifetime fellowship at the Peabody Museum for her in 1891 and also helped her to purchase an apartment in Washington, D.C. In the same year Fletcher adopted Francis informally.
Francis had begun working as a copyist in the Office of Indian Affairs in 1881. In 1891 he attended the National University, earning the LL.B. in 1892 and the LL.M. in 1893. In 1910 he transferred to the Bureau of Ethnology, which sent him to work in Oklahoma. From 1920 until retirement in 1929, he was officially employed as an “ethnologist” of the Bureau. He published a distinguished series of anthropological articles and monographs of entirely his own production, including four annual reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology on the Osage. The Omaha Tribe seems to have been set to paper by Fletcher, but the substance is plainly mostly due to La Flesche.
Mark (1982) has given an unusual interpretation to their relationship. Instead of simply emphasizing how their mutual support and cooperation led to their individual and joint achievements, she sees as well an element of mutual competition. For Mark, Francis La Flesche struggled as a Native American for recognition as a professional anthropologist, while Alice Fletcher, who was striving toward a similar goal against the professional restrictions then placed on women, for a considerable period held him back. At this distance in time, it is difficult to judge the accuracy and fairness of this view, for Mark is clearly reading more into their circumstances than the evidence strictly warrants.
Francis La Flesche enters into the Omaha case therefore in three principal ways: (1) partly as a participant and therefore subject, (2) as an informant, like his father, both to Dorsey and to Fletcher, and therefore as a native interpreter of culture, and (3) as a professional ethnographer and analyst. In all three respects, he had something to say relevant to understanding his father’s account of the marriage rules.
Dorsey (1884:255-256) begins the passage in question by describing the people whom Joseph La Flesche, Two Crows and some of the relatives of Two Crows could not marry. Dorsey says that Joseph’s mother belonged to the Black Bear group of the Ponca tribe. He also names the Ponca descent group of his mother’s mother and even of his mother’s mother’s mother. All three Ponca descent groups were prohibited to Joseph, though Dorsey writes that the Omaha Black Bear group was not prohibited, because it belonged to a different tribe from that of his mother. In several places Dorsey referred to the fact that Joseph was Ponca by birth, only having become Omaha by virtue of adoption. His younger brother Frank, namesake of Francis La Flesche the son, remained with the Ponca and became a chief of the tribe. Frank La Flesche’s mother was also Ponca, but a different woman than Joseph’s mother.
Dorsey intended that this information merely illustrate the rules, and it looks substantial enough. Unfortunately, the question of Joseph’s mother’s tribal membership was a sensitive family issue with political implications. When Dorsey was preparing his study of personal names he requested information from Francis concerning the rights in children following divorce, tactlessly phrasing the question in terms of occurrences within the La Flesche family. Francis wrote back a short letter refusing to cooperate and complaining that Dorsey had already published too many personal details in Bureau of American Ethnology reports. “Some things you have published about me which I did not wish published but you took the liberty to do so.”
In response to a hostile anonymous review of The Omaha Tribe which brought up the old charge that Joseph La Flesche was not an Omaha but a Ponca, Fletcher and Francis La Flesche (1912) spelled out the objection. They referred first to the statement that Joseph La Flesche was a Ponca and second to an account the young Francis had given Dorsey describing how Joseph’s installation ceremony as a head chief had been broken off and left incomplete because a ceremonial pipe had been allowed to drop. Fletcher and La Flesche attempted to refute their critic by offering a genealogy showing that Joseph’s mother was actually an Omaha. This genealogy, the only evidence that she was Omaha, was taken from a family friend, Samuel Freemont, in the last year of his life (1906). Dorsey’s earlier, unpublished genealogies, on which Samuel Freemont had worked in 1888, do not confirm her Omaha membership, nor the assertion that she belonged to the Black Shoulder descent group. Joseph’s wife Mary Gale said on several occasions that his mother was a Ponca. Furthermore, Joseph’s half-brother Dwight Sherman, who shared the same mother and who figures in the genealogy under discussion, gave testimony six months after the Fletcher and La Flesche letter was written in the Court of Claims in September 1912 affirming that he was one-half Ponca, his mother being a Ponca and sister to a Ponca chief.
Family sensitivity on this point relates to the circumstances in which Joseph gained and later lost the head chieftainship, the details of which cannot be gone into here, though these in no way qualify his reliability as a knowledgeable participant in Omaha culture. The uncertainty about the mother’s actual family connections derives from the fact that she tired of her French husband’s long absences while away trading and divorced him. She then married an Omaha man, but both were killed by Sioux in 1847. Joseph’s father married another Ponca woman, who became the mother of the elder Frank La Flesche. Fletcher and La Flesche attributed the genealogy of Joseph given by Dorsey to Frank, but if that were true, it would mean that Frank at least had violated the rules, for his wife belonged to one of the restricted groups. The Omaha tended to suppress memory of dead relatives, especially women. If a woman died when her children were young, “it is probable, that, at maturity, they will have forgotten even her name” (Fletcher 1883:395).
Though Joseph did not speak English, he did speak French and participated in the French world of commerce along the Missouri River. Ironically, he was a Franco-Indian Métis drawn into Omaha society where he was, through his adopted status, uneasily situated though influential. His son Francis, whose mother was entirely Omaha, moved from full participation in the declining traditional Omaha culture of his childhood eventually into full participation in twentieth-century English speaking American professional life, earning in the end (1926) an honorary LL.D. from the University of Nebraska. We misunderstand the Omaha ethnographies, not to mention Omaha history, if we view Joseph La Flesche only in terms of his assumed Native American identity and neglect the obvious fact that by traveling with his father he learned to participate in his father’s world too, eventually enabling him as trader to the tribe to secure his chieftainship, despite competition from a similar Métis, Logan Fontenelle. On the other hand, the temptation to see in Francis only the traditional Omaha can lead to grotesque results. Liberty (1976:106) has noted that a photograph taken of him in the Bureau of American Ethnology dressed in office attire with a buffalo robe draped over his shoulder was retouched for his obituary in the American Anthropologist to remove any sign of his bow tie, white collar, trousers and polished shoes. The retouched photograph visually labels him the archetypal Indian. Perhaps Francis’s interest in Pan-Indian political organization and the Native American Church (Liberty 1978:46) indicates that his life was more of a piece with his professional career than any attempt to separate his orientations into traditional and modern would suggest.
Since the evidence conclusively confirms that Joseph La Flesche’s mother was a Ponca, the assertion by Fletcher and Francis La Flesche that she was an Omaha can be dismissed, with the reservation that she clearly did have family ties to the Omaha and it is through these ties that Joseph La Flesche may have been physically related to the Big Elk who adopted him into the tribe. Therefore the evidence he gave Dorsey about marriage prohibitions can after all be taken at face value. The situation is somewhat different respecting Dorsey’s other illustration of the rules, taken from the family of Two Crows.
Dorsey lists the descent groups from which Two Crows, his father and his grandfather had taken women. Though Two Crows was free to take further wives from the same group as his first wife, he was not allowed to marry women belonging to the same descent lines as his mother and his grandmothers. His brothers shared the same prohibitions. The son of Two Crows was prohibited the same lines plus that of his own mother. All these prohibitions were passed on to the grandson of Two Crows in so far, and this is an important reservation, as living persons could remember the connection. In other words, the prohibitions would have been cumulative and increasing in number were it not for the fact that as one generation replaced another, the descent group affiliations and even names of more distant relatives were routinely forgotten.
Following the examples, Dorsey gives a more formal statement of the marriage restrictions. These are very elaborate and if obeyed in a mechanical way might well have made it extremely difficult for an Omaha man or woman to find an eligible partner. There is no evidence, however, that they really had trouble of this kind, although it is known that adults were careful to see to it that young people did not make inappropriate choices (as they still did in 1930, see Mead 1932:80). Elsewhere (Barnes 1984:162-175), I have discussed the formal implications of the various rules and concluded that the Omaha did not really have such extensive restrictions as anthropologists have thought. The appearance of extreme restriction results from the circumstances of Dorsey’s discussions with Joseph La Flesche and Two Crows in 1882 and the way he wrote up their information as a set of impersonal rules. What they actually seem to have been trying to tell him is that men of the same local line but of different generations ought not to marry into the same groups as long as close kinsmen in these generations are still living or the memory of the tie is fresh.
In any case the details of this rather intricate examination do not need to be repeated here. What I wish to do now is simply to draw attention to an important weakness in the evidence given by Two Crows. Although Two Crows would have been aware of the problem, Dorsey may well not have been in the position to appreciate it until he completed his work on Omaha genealogies four years after Omaha Sociology appeared. From these genealogies and scattered references in various publications, the following picture of the family of Two Crows emerges. The family belonged to the Mottled Object segment of the Leader descent group. Two Crows told Dorsey (1890:399) that his paternal grandfather had been killed during a raid on the Pawnee around 1778. His father, Fear-Inspiring Buffalo Bull, was attacked and apparently killed by an unknown tribe in 1840 (Fletcher and La Flesche 1911:99). Dorsey’s genealogies indicate that this man had several daughters, but he does not give their names nor indicate their number, which suggests that they may well all have been dead and, in keeping with Omaha habit, have been generally forgotten by the 1880s.
Two Crows was born in 1824 or 1826 and, according to his gravestone at Macy, Nebraska, died on March 4, 1894. He also had seven brothers. An elder brother, Stands-at-the-Front, died in a battle with Dakota in 1849 or 1850, while looking through a loop-hole he cut in a tent skin to fire through (Dorsey 1890:431). This man’s wife married another of the brothers, Buffalo-Bellowing-in-the-Distance. A marginal note in the genealogies laconically comments “killed by Sioux.” Of the remaining brothers, Walking-in-Groups had died by October 21, 1878 (Dorsey 1890:502, 692). I have no record of the deaths of Flying Crow and Artichoke, but infer they were dead by the 1880s. The latter seems not to have married and is noted as having had “no issue.” Evidently, therefore, the only two siblings of Two Crows alive in 1882 were the ones Dorsey mentioned as sharing the same prohibitions. These men were Standing Swan, who lived until April, 1914, when he was killed by a young man while both were drunk, and Dakota, commonly referred to as Sioux Solomon, who by 1914 had died of alcoholism.
Two Crows had a very mixed career typical of the position of the tribe during this period. He was respected in his community and thought to speak the purest Omaha. He had been a successful warrior and was a leader in the Buffalo Dance Society; but, although he was not a Christian, he was an active member of Joseph La Flesche’s modernizing group. Dorsey wrote that, “He says just what he thinks, going directly to the point,” but Fortune thought he had deliberately withheld from Dorsey important information about the Buffalo Society.
Dorsey not only stated that Standing Swan and Sioux Solomon shared the restrictions ascribed to Two Crows, but named the groups from which their wives came as proof of conformity. These facts were accurate, but the genealogies later available show that Two Crows was not telling the whole story. In fact five of his seven brothers actually married women from prohibited groups, although since two had the same wife, only four women were involved. In two other cases, the women in question were second wives. Only one of the men alive in 1882 was currently involved or becoming involved in such a liaison, and in this case the potential for embarrassment between Two Crows and Joseph La Flesche was great enough to insure that they would say nothing about it to Dorsey. Sioux Solomon’s second wife was a woman from the Black Bear segment of the On the Left Side descent group. She was named New Moon Returning, but was also known as Alice La Flesche Solomon. She had been the second wife of Joseph’s son Francis, who divorced her in 1884 for adultery, naming two prominent Omaha men as correspondents.
Francis married this woman in August, 1879. Some authors (Green 1969:177; Mark 1982:499) have confused her with his first wife Alice Mitchell, daughter of He-who-is-Brave (or Henry Mitchell) of the Pipe segment of the Black Shoulder descent group. She and Francis were married on June 26, 1877 and she died in 1878 (Dorsey 1890:692). Since Green has suggested that the death was only symbolic and that she was the same as Alice La Flesche Solomon, it should be noted that the genealogies of 1888 both show her as married to Francis and note that she was “dead,” while the second woman lived until July 3,1914. Francis petitioned for divorce on November 6,1883, but the couple were already estranged by the end of 1881. Francis had recently been appointed to the Indian Bureau and late in that year, according to Green, he returned to the mission on government business, where he ignored wife and child, while paying enough attention to a young woman teacher to cause a scandal, leading the woman to leave her job. His father-in-law, Little Prairie Chicken or Horace Cline, was affronted by his behavior and by the fact that Francis ignored Omaha custom and did not present him with gifts. He then went to the mission and took a horse belonging to Francis and several from his sister.
Possibly Sioux Solomon had not entered the picture by 1882, but it is equally possible that he had and that the whole painful affair lent an extra dimension of caution to the discussion of marriage that Dorsey, who had not been on the reservation since April, 1880, was not at all or not fully informed about. Francis later married (in 1908) and divorced a half-Chippewa woman who then settled a few doors down the street from Francis and Alice Fletcher in Washington. Even his close association and frequent traveling with the much older Alice Fletcher led to gossip on the reservation.
It is not unusual of course for people to break the rules of their society and to conceal the fact. But the present question is to establish what were the rules and to what degree they were deemed binding. No one has claimed for any other Siouan tribe that their rules were so elaborate as the Omaha, and the only evidence of that kind derives from Two Crows and Joseph La Flesche, who were possibly misunderstood by Dorsey, but who certainly were not telling everything of relevance from within their own families. The whole passage therefore is suspect. It is certainly a weak basis to sustain speculation such as that by Lévi-Strauss that representations of Crow-Omaha systems require an extra dimension or that their restrictions on marriage have the effect on a small population of resulting in a system of unconscious prescriptions. When readers come across references to “Omaha alliance” in remote places of the world, it would be well for them to remember the mystery of Joseph La Flesche’s mother, the discreet silence by Two Crows about some of his sisters-in-law, and the embarrassment about Francis La Flesche’s second wife.
Because the two classic Omaha monographs were so unusual in their day, they were widely cited and referred to by anthropologists with speculative ends in view. Thereafter they continued to attract attention as much for their academic fame as for the immediate appropriateness of the ethnographic record. As time went on anthropologists tended to consult this record less frequently, and to treat the Omaha as an established and essentially well understood social type, overlooking the fact that our knowledge of the Omaha has not advanced much beyond what was available in 1911 (the major exceptions being works by Mead and Fortune, both published in 1932) and has certainly not kept pace with developments in twentieth century ethnography. Earlier writers tended to stay closer to the facts and their speculations tend to be more accurate than those of later authors.
A thorough review of the published and unpublished information has permitted a double check, both on the evidential status of the ethnographies and on tiie current state of anthropological theory where it takes up issues of relevance to these ethnographies. On the whole the ethnographies come off better than current theory. Certainly the record does make it possible in many respects to test and correct theories in ways that had not until recently been attempted. Furthermore, despite disagreements and differing interests and styles among the three main ethnographers, not to mention their vastly different backgrounds and occupations, the basic features of Omaha culture do come through their sometimes conflicting reports.
Ironically, Dorsey’s rather deadpan reiteration of disagreements among informants allows us a century later to open up the ethnographies and see mid- to late-nineteenth century Omaha life, as it were, three di-mensionally. Of course what we see will have a lot to do with late-twentieth century preoccupations. But the main thing is that ethnography which long ago had a formative impact on anthropological understanding and then to a degree began collecting dust on library shelves has once again come alive and had an impact. There is actually plenty of scope for progress by persons who wish to learn the Omaha language and to carry the reassessment further into those other topics also richly covered by La Flesche and his two partners. It is fair to infer that the lessons for anthropology have not yet all been perceived or learned and that the profession will find occasion in future to look once more at Omaha Sociology and The Omaha Tribe.
Barnes, R. H. 1984. Two Crows Denies It: A History of Controversy in Omaha Sociology. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
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Clark, Jerry E., and Martha Ellen Webb. 1988. “Susette and Susan La Flesche: Reformer and Missionary.” In Being and Becoming Indian: Biographic Studies of North American Frontiers. James A. Clifton, ed. Chicago: The Dorsey Press.
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