Cherokee Dance and Drama (The Civilization of the American Indian Series)
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Traditionally, the Cherokees dance to ensure individual...)
Traditionally, the Cherokees dance to ensure individual health and social welfare. According to legend, the dance songs bequeathed to them by the Stone Coat monster will assuage all the ills of life that the monster brought. Winter dance (including the Booger Dance, which expresses the Cherokees’ anxiety at the white invasion) are to be given only during times of frost, lest they affect the growth of vegetation by attracting cold and death. The summer dance (the Green Corn Ceremony and the Ballplayer’s Dance) are associated with crops and vegetation. Other dances are purely for social intercourse and entertainment or are prompted by specific events in the community.
When it was first published in 1951, this description of the dances of a conservative Eastern Cherokee band was hailed as a scholarly contribution that could not be duplicated, Frank G. Speak and Leonard Broom had achieved the close and sustained interaction that very best ethnological fieldwork requires. Their principal informant, will West Long, upheld the unbroken ceremonial tradition of the Big Cove band, near Cherokee, North Carolina.
Medicine Practices of the North-Eastern Algonquians, pp. 303-321
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(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
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The Nanticoke Community of Delaware (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Nanticoke Community of Delaware
Physic...)
Excerpt from The Nanticoke Community of Delaware
Physically the community exhibits a great lack of racial homo geneity, the types of physiognomy, color, and hair ranging from the European, the mulatto, and the Indian through all the usual gradations. Some individuals have straight hair, fair skin, and blue eyes; some have brown skin and kinky or curly hair; others have broad faces and straight, black hair, the color and general appear ance of Indians. It is common to find these characteristics divided irregularly among the members of the same family.
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(Penobscot Man is an ethnographic classic written by an an...)
Penobscot Man is an ethnographic classic written by an anthropologist trained to reconstruct traditional native American, or Indian, lifeways. When Frank Speck began his fieldwork early in the twentieth century; practitioners of the new field of anthropology witnessed the low point of native populations. Once populous groups had vanished, others were so decimated that only remnants of their traditional behavior remained. The reconstruction of lifestyles, or cultures, prior to the radical changes caused by European contact constituted a major research goal. This book is a representative example of that agenda. As Such it has been widely cited as the authority for Penobscot culture. (book description courtesy of Marketplace seller keymedia)
Frank Gouldsmith Speck was an American cultural anthropologist and ethnologist known for his work on the Algonquin Indian tribes of the eastern United States.
Background
Frank was born on November 8, 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, United States, the elder of the two sons of Frank Gouldsmith Speck and Hattie L. (Staniford) Speck. His parents came from the old seafaring, whaling, mercantile communities of the lower Hudson Valley and were descended from Dutch settlers and the Mahican peoples of the area. With the nineteenth-century collapse of the upriver economy, his father moved his business to New York City.
As a small child, Speck's health was precarious, and a rural environment was suggested. Since family removal was impossible, he was placed, about 1888, in the care of a family friend, Mrs. Fidelia A. Fielding, at Mohegan, Connecticut; she became the most important formative influence of his life. Speck's health improved rapidly.
Education
He attended a local grammar school and found companions among Indian children. Mrs. Fielding, a conservative Indian widow who had raised her own family, was one of the last native speakers of any American Indian language of southern New England, and Speck soon learned Mohegan. Mrs. Fielding was a gardener and an herbalist who lived an isolated rural life in close integration with nature. Her love of natural history greatly influenced Speck and always remained one of his lifelong passions. She introduced him to the nonconformity and social rebellion of her heritage and tutored him in both English and traditional Mohegan writing; his oldest fieldnotes which survive are Mohegan spelling exercises of 1892.
He thus acquired the basis for his later studies and also his sense of irony toward history and society, tools which he was to continue improving for the rest of his life.
After graduating from the Hackensack High School, he entered Columbia University. Beset with doubts about his own future, he embarked upon a theological program. Already proficient in French, German, and Algonkian, he plunged into the study of classical languages. As a sophomore, he enrolled in a course on philology taught by John Dyneley Prince, a noted orientalist who was studying the surviving languages of northern New England. Prince introduced his student to Franz Boas, and they both encouraged him toward a career in anthropological linguistics.
This seemed an impossible dream, and he was plunged into depression, but with his father's approval and support he was able to proceed. He coauthored articles on Algonkian speech with Prince. In 1904 he graduated from Columbia and received his M. A. in anthropology there in 1905. At the same time he began ethnographic fieldwork among the Yuchi of Oklahoma in 1904, eventually leading to his doctoral thesis in 1908. After further graduate study at Columbia, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 1907 when he was offered a George Leib Harrison Research Fellowship there and obtained his Ph. D. at Pennsylvania in 1908.
Career
At about the age of fourteen, Speck returned to his family's new home at Hackensack, New Jersey. Here he obtained a cedar dugout canoe and spent much of his free time exploring the salt marshes and the shoreline.
He was attached to the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, which had been constituted a department of the university in 1891. In 1908 he was appointed instructor and assistant in general ethnology, in which capacity he taught, worked in the museum, and traveled to American Indian communities at every opportunity, beginning his work with the Penobscot in 1907. His intellectual interests also attracted many visitors, the beginning of a long pattern. A wandering South African Bushman, Amgoza, visited him for several weeks in 1911, and Speck spent his spare time studying Khoisan (a southern African language group) texts, which apparently have not survived.
The Specks traveled to Labrador, where he began extended fieldwork that led to many publications and to his major book, Naskapi: Savage Hunters of the Labrador Peninsula (1935). Florence Speck always shared as much field research with him as possible. George Byron Gordon, the autocratic director of the University Museum, fired Speck in 1911 because of some unknown conflict. He put the contents of Speck's office in the museum courtyard and locked up the finished manuscript on the Penobscot which had been submitted for publication.
The manuscript was not recovered for many years and was finally published in 1940 under the title Penobscot Man. Speck was immediately rehired by the university as an assistant professor, essentially filling the place of Daniel Garrison Brinton, who had originally taught anthropology in the department of comparative religion; he held this position until 1925.
In 1913 he was appointed acting chairman of the department of anthropology and chairman in 1925. All of Speck's professional life was devoted to research and teaching.
He used recording equipment over many years for speech and song, beginning with Yuchi in 1904, and he pioneered in ethnomusicology in collaboration with the Cantor Jacob Sapir in his Ceremonial Songs of the Creek and Yuchi Indians (1911).
His last years were spent in combating the problems of a failing heart muscle compounded with the kidney disease produced by it. He continued working at compelling problems of the recording and understanding of cultural material, and at least six American Indian communities were invoking their gods and using their religious traditions for his well-being.
He collapsed in the field with his wife, at Allegheny Reservation in western New York, where he was both observer and participant in the Great Annual Renewal Ceremony of the Seneca people and a patient of their priests; he died soon after in University Hospital in Philadelphia.
Speck, who was fiercely democratic, identified strongly with American Indians and their values; while himself highly cultured, he condemned the values of the elite and always took the position of the common man.
Views
He carried Darwinism, classical philosophy, cultural relativism, social altruism, and an identification with the underdog in the most delicate balance, only seen between the lines in his publications but ever-emerging in his teaching, where he appeared to many students to be a major philosopher.
He considered the field of American Indian ethnology to be inexhaustible, seeing every stage in the culture change of native communities as presenting new challenges to anthropology, and he looked forward to a time when students might deal with communities of their own culture in the same objective manner.
Membership
He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Anthropological Association, American Ethnological Society, Geographical Society of Philadelphia, and Archaeological Society of North Carolina (honorary).
Personality
Curiosity and the compulsion to understand were his deepest drives.
He sometimes jokingly referred to himself as a vulgarian, and to some he seemed an amusing and appealing eccentric, but no intelligent person ever mistook him for an eccentric. As a scholar and as a man, he forever remained true to his family heritage of pioneer and native origin, and to the insights he gained from Fidelia Fielding. His love and respect for mankind extended everywhere. As a teacher, he touched many people with ideas and emotions that led them on to fulfillment, but none is ever likely to reach the level of understanding of the fate of man that he achieved.
Connections
On September 15, 1910, Speck married Florence Insley of Nanuet, New York; they had three children, Frank Staniford, Alberta Insley, and Virginia Colfax.