John Wesley Powell's linguistic classification of Native American tribes

Classification of Native American Tribes Into Cultural Families

Native American Considerations

Contrary to some citizens of the West who considered the Indians to be savages, John Wesley Powell saw the Native Americans as people. Powell perceived these people as part of a culture that had experienced a long human history, a culture of people who had to struggle to survive.

Powell subscribed to the message in the words by William Dwight Whitney, the leading American academic linguist of the 1800s; noted at this paper's start. Whitney asserted that rather than stigmatizing the Indians, those who considered themselves civilized should learn everything they could from the Indians. Whitney's words "foreshadowed the theoretical perspective that Powell would pursue later by means of the method of testing mutual intelligibility statements with lexical data."

To better understand how the current classification of Native American Tribes into cultural families evolved, this paper explores John Wesley Powell's work as the Head of the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology.

Prior to the establishment of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), Secretary Joseph Henry, from the start of his tenure, encouraged/supported systematic efforts by the Smithsonian Institution to develop a linguistic classification. For Henry, language merited a vital status in constructing human history. Along with Henry R. Schoolcraft, who in 1855 wrote "A letter on the affinities of dialects in New Mexico" (in Vol. 5 of Information respecting the history, condition, and prospects of the Indian tribes of the United States), Henry perceived comparative philology to be the key to unravel the origins of native groups. Languages, according to Henry's understanding, evolved from instinctive, mental, physical, and environmental factors, and consequently were able to proffer clues to universal, as well as these groups' particular characteristics.

Ethnology Defined Ethnology or Cultural Anthropology constitutes one of the four subdivisions of anthropology. The other subdivisions include:

Physical anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics.

Traditionally practiced by socio-cultural anthropologists embraces the study of cultures in their traditional forms, as well as their adaptations to changing conditions in the contemporary world.

Ethnography, the observational branch of ethnology, describes each culture, including its language, the physical characteristics of its people, its material products, and its social customs. In describing a particular tribe, for example, ethnographers gather information about its location and geographical environment. They also investigate all aspects of its culture, including food, shelter, dress, transportation, and manufacture of the tribe; its customs regarding government, property, and division of labor; its patterns of production and exchange; its customs regarding birth, adulthood initiation rites, marriage, and death; its religious ideas relating to magic, supernatural beings, and the universe; and its artistic, mythological, and ceremonial interpretations of its natural and social environment.

John Wesley Powell, a major in the military, lost his fight arm in the Battle of Shiloh. In 1869, he led a boat expedition through the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. During his tenure as the first director of the BE, which he headed until he died in 1902, Powell, along with his colleagues serve as a primary force for the protection of antiquities on federal lands.

Figure 1 portrays Powell during 1886.

Figure 1: John Wesley Powell at His Desk in 1886.

Life Synopsis in 1860, during the Civil War, Powell enlisted in the 20th Illinois volunteers; entering in as second lieutenant. For a time, stationed at Cape Girardeau, he served as captain of battery F. Of the 2nd Illinois artillery. Here, he engaged in the battle of Shiloh, and then lost his right arm at Pittsburg Landing. After his wound healed, Powell returned to the service, and fought in the battles of Champion Hill and Black River Bridge. Emma Dean, his wife, obtained permission from General Grant to accompany Powell on the battlefield to nurse him. When operations about Vicksburg closed, Powell underwent the second operation on the remaining part of his amputated arm. He later returned to his post in season to take participate in the raid at Meridan. Later, Powell was promoted to major, and chief of artillery, first, of the 17th army corps, and "subsequently, of the department of Tennessee, taking part in the operations before Atlanta and in the battle of Franklin." After the end of the Civil War, Powell left the service with the title of "major" in 1865. Powell became a professor of geology and curator of the museum of the Illinois Wesleyan University at Bloomingto. He later received the degree of Ph.D. from Heidelberg, Germany, and that of LL.D. from Harvard University. As he worked with the Illinois Normal University, Powell became well-known by his lectures and addresses relating to scientific subjects.

Native American Race the American Anthropological Association 2000 "Statement on 'Race'" contends that to Powell, "race" evolved as a worldview, a collage of prejudgments that distort a person's perceptions about human differences, and/or group behavior. "Racial beliefs constitute myths about the diversity in the human species and about the abilities and behavior of people homogenized into 'racial categories.'"

Myths meld physical features and behavior regarding race into society's mind. In turn, this impedes the perception of others regarding their comprehension of biological variations, and/or cultural behavior; insinuating that genetics determines both these traits. Racial myths counter the truth regarding human capabilities, Powell purported. "Scientist today find that reliance on such folk beliefs about human differences in research has led to misconceptions."

Contemporary knowledge purports that the normal human possesses the capacity to achieve and function within any culture. Historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances produce the inequalities that separate designated "racial" groups; not biological inheritance.

The Bureau of American Ethnology

Toward the end of the summer in 1881, Powell, the director of the newly created Bureau of Ethnology hired Victor Mindeleff, a new architect to begin work on his field studies of Native American houses and "social arrangements" in the American Southwest. In 1894, the Bureau of Ethnology became the Bureau of American Ethnology or BAE. Mindeleff and his younger brother, Cosmos, focused on the architecture of Southwestern Native American peoples.

Along with serving as director of the BE, Powell also became director of the USGS and the BE (later known as the BAE).

Powell proved to be a master of the Washington practice of expanding a bureau. He began the BE staff with eight men, five of them transferred from the USGS, which enabled these men to proceed with their plans regarding e their ethnographic studies, albeit under new sponsorship. The five men transferred from the USGS included the Reverend James O. Dorsey, Albert S. Gatschet, James C. Pilling, Stephen Powers, and S.R. Riggs. In only a few months the Bureau staff totaled twenty; including an (William H. Holmes, a librarian, a stenographer, two photographers, three messengers, and four clerks. In time, the Bureau also hired two Native American scholars, J.N.B. Hewitt, a Tuscarora, in 1886, and Francis La Flesche, an Omaha, in 1910. Both these individuals contributed substantial writings for the Bureau's publications.

The Bureau experienced conflicting demands from its start. Secretary Baird, successor to Henry in 1878, stressed that Congress primarily wanted specimens for the National Museum; not in Indian languages. Powell contended that continuing to survey the Indian tribes; particularly the languages of the Indians merited the Bureau's primary priority. He argued in 1881:

All sound anthropologic investigation... must have a firm foundation in language. Customs, laws, government, institutions, mythologies, religions, even arts cannot be properly understood without a fundamental knowledge of the languages which express the ideas and thoughts embodied therein."

According to Neil Judd, Powell considered the Bureau of Ethnology entirely his private kingdom, while the Baird perceived the BE simply an adjunct of the Smithsonian.

Major Powell and Lewis Henry Morgan

During the period following the American Civil War, the U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region was established and Major J.W. Powell named Geologist in Charge. In addition to exploring the West and mapping the region and detailing its vast mineral wealth, he became extremely interested in the Native American peoples he encountered and their languages. Powell undertook both linguistic and ethnographic studies of these peoples and those interests led him to the work of Lewis Henry Morgan. By this time, Morgan had evolved in his own thinking a scheme, an explanatory theory if you will, that presented humankind's progress through three great stages, Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization. The presentation of this general theory, Classical Evolutionary Theory as it has come to be called, was made in his book Ancient Society published in 1877.

Influence of Morgan's Book

Morgan's book helped Powell better understand the Native American peoples. After Powell read Morgan's book, he wrote Morgan, again, noting that, "After reading your book and...after reviewing certain facts which I had noted among the Indians of the west, I am satisfied that the gens exists among tribes where I supposed it absent." Powell planned to further investigate social groups defined according to unilineal descent, akin to clans and lineages; groups Morgan identified as "gens" or "gentile organizations."

Mutual Nurtured Interests

As Powell and Morgan nurtured their interests in the native peoples of the West, they focused their attention to the Puebloan peoples living in the Southwest. During 1879, Morgan visited the pueblos, simultaneously directing the attention of the Bureau of Ethnology in 1879 to the pueblos. The plain historical relationship between the prehistoric Puebloan ruins and the living Pueblos captivated the interest of both Powell and Morgan.

For several years, Powell steadily collected material relating to Pueblos and ruins in the southwestern portion of the United States. During the summer of 1879, Powell sent out an expedition for the third time to the southwestern section of the U.S.; adding to parties at Zuni and other parts of the country. He also personally visited the Pueblos; noting it to be an interesting country.

Powell collected a massive amount of material that he estimated would develop into at least two quarto volumes with an atlas. "To give you some idea of what has already been done," Powell wrote Morgan, "let me state that I have over 6000 articles of pottery all of different patterns and shapes - no two alike" (Longacre, 1999).

Powell referred to his own work as the study of the languages of the Pueblos; living among them to be able to discern their customs and habits, particularly the customs to their house life. As Morgan's health began to fail, he still determined to revise an earlier manuscript intended to be the second part of Ancient Society, previously published during 1877. Morgan referred to this work as the Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines. He incorporated a great deal of the new material from the Puebloan Southwest, and included materials sent by Adolph Bandelier, a man he mentored on the Aztecs of Mexico.

During this time, Powell offered to have the U.S. Government Printing Office print Morgan's book. Consequently Morgan sent Powell the manuscript Morgan in mid-June 1880. The book, which was not published until the year after Morgan died in 1881, however, still continues to significantly impact anthropology, as it explores the link between social organization and architecture.

The Interior Department's Instructions

As Powell served as director of the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain, the Interior Department instructed him to complete ethnographic research through surveys conducted from 1867 to 1874. The Interior Department also directed Powell to "undertake the classification of American Indian tribes."

On March 3, 1879, Congress pooled the four completed, competing western surveys into a solitary organization, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). At the same time, Congress created the Bureau of Ethnology (BE), incidentally almost identical to the USGS, to further the anthropological fieldwork of the old surveys.

Conviction to Capture Changes for centuries in America, the lifestyles of Native Americas remained unaffected by the changes taking place all around it. The common conviction scholars, government officials, and the general public held that the settling of the West would begin to adversely affect, and ultimately end the Native America's primitive life ways contributed to Powell's most powerful motivation to organize the BAE research program. Powell subscribed to the notion that one may "tame continents, make deserts bloom, [and] rear monumental cities... but...cannot make antiquity."

He and his colleagues understood that whatever information could be obtained regarding about the Indians had to be retrieved quickly; otherwise the "timeless" information would dissipate without being recorded.

Baird pressured Powell to collect museum specimens, which consequently contributed to the parties James Stevenson led to in 1879, 1880, and 1881 collect 3,905 specimens from the pueblos of Arizona and New Mexico. The individuals who retrieved these specimens briefly described each of them briefly with the descriptions related in the Bureau's Second and Third Annual Reports during 1883 and 1884. Later, Walter Hough confirmed the value of this effort, estimating the Bureau had collected and contributed a third of the museum's collections.

Controversy over Builders of Mounds

During Powell's time in history, controversy consumed conversations regarding the origin of the great earthen mounds located in the United States, in the Midwest, southeast, and parts of the east. As some debated the origin of the mounds, the "lost race" theory evolved, with some arguing a vanished race or mythical beings erected the mounds. Some did not consider the American Indians to be capable of erecting the massive mounds. Some mounds lie heavily concentrated along major river systems, floodplains and minor tributaries, while an estimated 10,000 decorate the Ohio Valley landscape. Clusters of mounds rim almost every major waterway in Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri. A massive number of mounds dot the southeast, where concentric, semi-circular ridges frequently encompass huge platforms.

A number of the larger mounds prove imposing, such as the vast display of earthworks like Cahokia, Illinois; Moundville, Alabama; or Poverty Point, Louisiana. Other mounds may be smaller; less impressive, not so distinguishable from hills. Others, on the other hand, display elaborate geometric designs. When viewed from the air, these mounds portray forms of serpents, birds, panthers, or esoteric configurations that contradict classification and/or mere rational understanding. The mounds testify "to the creativity, ingenuity, architectural acumen and engineering prowess of ancient Native Americans, lost now to the hazy passage of time." The mounds once served as home to complex tribal societies and chiefdoms, including the Adena, Hopewell, and Mississippian. It is estimated that around AD 1100-1200, the ceremonial center of Cahokia contained approximately 30,000 to 40,000 people distributed among rigid social classes.

Garlinghouse reports:

The largest earthwork at Cahokia, Monk's Mound, a series of four terraces that rise over 30 metres to form a large, Hat-topped platform took 2,000 people nearly 200 days to complete.... The smaller but no less impressive earthworks at Moundville -- twenty mounds build around a central plaza -- show evidence of a high degree of centralised political power that was able to organise impressive engineering feats. Meanwhile, Poverty Point, situated on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi floodplain, near the confluence of six rivers, was calculated by one authority to have been built over a period of three years, taking 1,350 adults labouring for seventy clays a year. That these types of structures were constructed without elaborate technology, beyond baskets, digging sticks and human hands suggest a sophisticated understanding of engineering and geometry.

Cyrus Thomas and Powell's Perceptions

In 1891, when Powell wrote about the mound-building cultures, he noted:

For more than a century the ghosts of a vanished nation have ambuscaded in the vast solitudes of the continent, and the forest-covered mounds have been usually regarded in the mysterious sepulchers of its kings and nobles. It was an alluring conjecture that a powerful people... once occupied the valley.

During 1894, work by Cyrus Thomas, a scientist, employed by the BE, contributed to overturning the Mound-builder myth, at least among the academic community. Powell, who was also the first American explorer to descend the rapids of the Grand Canyon, asserted that the forebears of the North American Indians had constructed the monument; that the "lost race'" theory was bankrupt.

In one annual report for the Bureau, Powell wrote that no rationale served to substantiate the need to search for an extralimital origin of the mounds of North America; that no lost tribes crafted the arts discovered in the mounds; that the American Indians were, in fact, capable of erecting the mounds that today amaze many who see them.

Monk's Mound at Cahokia, Illinois Dating back to 1100-1400 AD, Monk's Mound at Cahokia, Illinois, located slightly east of St. Louis, near Collinsville, Illinois, constitutes the largest earth mound in the western hemisphere, as it measures 30 metres high. Monk's Mound, the most majestic mound in this group, covers 16 acres, and "rests on a base 1,037 feet long and 790 feet wide, with a total volume of approximately 21,690,000 cubic feet, a base and total volume greater than that of the pyramid of Khufu, the largest in Egypt."

Globally, in size and total volume, only the pyramids at Cholula and Teotihuacan in central Mexico exceed the Cahokia pyramid's size. In the United States, prior to the construction of airplane hangars, the Pentagon, and skyscrapers during the twentieth century, no other structure neared the size of the Cahokia pyramid

Figure 3 depicts (two as one) pictures of the Cahokia pyramid.

Figure 3: The Cahokia Pyramid.

Poverty Point, Louisiana

Poverty Point, shaped like a giant bird, consists of mounds that comprise an ancient Roman aspect, an amphitheatre. This mound consists of concentric ridges; 5-10 feet high and 150 wide. The construction of Poverty Point encompasses a 3/4 of a mile diameter; "five times the diameter of the Colosseum in Rome. The ridges were built with 530,000 cubic yards of earth (over 35 times the cubic amount of the Great Pyramid of Giza)."

One 70 feet high mound projects a base of 700 feet by 800 feet.

Figure 4 pictures Poverty Point.

Figure 4: The Poverty Point Mound Site.

The Moundville Site Moundville, once a populous town, also served as a political center and a religious center Occupied from approximately a.D. 1000 until a.D. 1450. Twenty-six earthen mounds surrounded a central plaza within the enclosure of the Moundville's mounds. The larger ones appeared to support the residences of tribe's noble men. The residences alternated with small ones, supporting buildings the Indians used for mortuary and other purposes. The Moundville site, constitutes the large settlement of Mississippian culture on the Black Warrior River in central Alabama. During the era of Moundville's heaviest residential population, the community inhabited a three hundred-acre village, constructed on a bluff overlooking the river. The town's plan, basically, was roughly square, with a bastioned wooden palisade protecting it on three sides. In size and complexity, Moundville ranks second only to the Cahokia site in Illinois. Figure 5 and Figure 6 portray the Moundville mound site.

Figure 5: Drawing of the Moundville Mound Site.

Figure 6: Photo of the Moundville mound site.

The mounds, although silent, proclaim much about the Native American's history which Powell and his colleagues sought to preserve. Narratives, spoken and visual, of the past also serve as narratives for the/a present.

Although recorded history settles some controversies, some remain debatable and continue stimulating emotional discussions throughout time. One confirmed contention, the researcher for this paper does not concede to be debatable, however, is that the work by John Wesley Powell, who contrary to some citizens of the West, saw the Native Americans not as savages, but as people. Powell's message, the researcher asserts, proves to be a positive reminder from the past, that those who now live, as well as those who may live in the future, who struggle to survive, would do well to heed, and take to heart.