Concurrently, with the time of the Bureau's inception, the Indians of the United States were subjected to an intense amalgamation process into late-nineteenth century American life. For the sake of preservation, science, and advocacy, ethnologists from the Smithsonian, the quasi-federal umbrella organization of the Bureau (which changed the name of the Bureau to the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1894) went among the Indians to record, preserve, to organize, and to analyze Indian cultures and histories. As the United States government would have it, Indians were understood as a single race, without distinction, and fell under the category of savages that desperately needed an "abiding place for him" in the new country (Judd 1967:145).As an Irish-American of recent-immigrants to the united States, James Mooney, felt especially tied to their plight. Joining the Bureau in 1885, Mooney left the job of a journalist to contribute to the inchoate ethnological work of anthropology, a slowly rising professional science, growing from different directions, one of which rooted in the birth of the Smithsonian Insititution. Mooney's political consciousness, along with a reformist perspective claimed by his birthright, motivated his interest and commitment to studying the lifeways of American Indians, a lifetime of work culminating in many ethnological reports, which mark his contributions as a Bureau Ethnologist and to the rise of professional anthropology. Through the work of James Mooney, this web presentation will take you through the shifting and emerging analytical, theoretical, and methodological terrain of the discipline of anthropology at the turn of the Century, a time that welcomed the foundation of insitutions of science, such as the Smithsonian Institution and the Bureau of Ethnology, and one that hosted the construction of a community of the competent, that neighborhood of academics and professionals that sifted through the charalatans of amateur investigation to shape anthropology into a discipline and a profession. To situate James Mooney in the science, the anthropology, the politics of his time--the turn of the nineteenth century--follow the next section's discussion about the rise of science in the United States at the turn of the Century, the construction of science within the Community of the Competent. The Community of the Competent
The latter half of the nineteenth century saw broad shifts in the conceptual and methodological approaches in the professional and academic sciences. In movements to establish authority in the face of profoundly disruptive changes in habits or causal attributions, in the criteria of plausibility, in the relation of the man of knowledge to his clientele, nineteenth century intellectuals set about constructing and reinforcing professional institutions that would establish a secure authority and deference to the sciences. This movement expressed itself in myriad ways, one that is most apparent is that within the natural sciences. As Thomas Haskell describes the natural sciences in Emergence of Professional Social Science, "In this field, there occurred the most successful of all nineteenth-century professionalizing efforts-efforts to build an institutional framework that would identify individual competence, cultivate it, and confer authority upon individuals who possessed it" (Haskell 1977:65). Such a framework was built within the notion of the "community of the competent," (a term coined by Francis Abbott, a member of "The Metaphysical Society" and crony to Charles Peirce and other pragmatists of the time) an institutional apparatus that would function to reestablish authority and designate the professional scientists from the charlatans. The community of the competent buttressed efforts to transform the mid-nineteenth century vocational man of science into a recognized professional role as scientist. And its ideas were manifested and communicated through the articulations and project of a leading scientific figure of antebellum America, Joseph Henry. Anxious for the future of scientific authority, Joseph Henry struggled to conceive of an institutional device that would function to discredit charlatans and deny incompetent practitioners an authoritative place in the public eye. Struggling with the notions of authority, Henry declared in 1846,
To put his ideas into action, Henry first suggested a significant shift in scientific inquiry of the individual, that is to become learned in a single field of science as no man can be learned in all branches of thought. According to Haskell, recoiling against the rise of false and pretentious claims to authority, Henry proposed as his strategy for the establishment of authority: insulate the practitioner of science from those persons least competent to judge him, and simultaneously bring him into intimate contact with those most competent to judge him. Independence from the general public was to be purchased at the nominal expense of intense and competitive dependence upon one's certified peers. The aim was to regularize competition. "By thus changing his affiliations, the individual practitioner would enhance his own authority in the eyes of the general public, assuming that he survived the rigorous judgment of his professional peers. The community would now certify and guarantee the soundness of his views. Even more important, by orienting himself to the trans-local community of the competent, the individual practitioner would contribute to the defense of merit, the preservation of the very principle of authority. Indeed, he would help insure the triumph of truth itself at a time of growing intellectual crisis" (Haskell 1977:67). Joseph Henry mobilized his ideas for a community of the competent into an actual physical community through an institutional apparatus that would grow to become the largest repository of scientific collections in the world, the Smithsonian Institution. Joseph Henry and the Smithsonian Institution In 1846, the Smithsonian Institution was founded in Washington, DC. Serving as its first secretary at its founding in 1849, was Mr. Joseph Henry. This institution was formed at the bequeath of an English …, James Smithson, who, as word has it around the Institution today, saw the United States as consumed by the work of the rogue-scientists and a place unfit without any culture (that is, Culture) . Having never set foot on the soils of the United States, James Smithson, in his Last Will and Testament, bequeathed his fortunes to the United States, for the establishment of an institution in Washington, DC, to be called the Smithsonian, with a specific mission to serve as an insitution "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge." As the Institution's first secretary, Henry deployed this mission of James Smithson's to motivate the emergence of a professional scientific community in the United States that resonates today. A part of this mobilizing vision of this campaign toward establishing and routinizing a community of competent scientists that Henry conceived of the elevation of ethnology to a rigorous science.
In an address just one year following his election as first Secretary in 1846, Henry wrote, "'The most prominent idea in my mind'", Joseph Henry wrote in 1847, "'is that of stimulating the talent of our country to original research-in which it has been most lamentably difficient [sic]-to pour fresh material on the apex of the pyramid of science, and thus to enlarge its base….' Anthropology occupied a prominent place in Henry's vision" (Hinsley 1981:34). Because of anthropology's unique place on the fringes of science, it presented an opportunity for Henry to make a science, to elevate the investigator from amateur by training him as a professional, insisting on a rigorous inductive ethnology, purged of "speculation and based on systematic observation (Hinsley 1981: 37). He outlined in his Programme of Organization a proposal to increase the knowledge of man in North America through surveys and explorations of mounds and remains and to diffuse discoveries relating to particular histories, comparative philology, antiquities, etc., of a population, he believed, to be teetering on the brink of extinction from the ever-increasing stretch of Civilization. Seeing the Smithsonian as "a clearinghouse of American scientific inquiry", Henry mobilized a new anthropology through the establishment a section of ethnology at the Smithsonian. He tasked it with a program of survey, mapping, and collecting artifacts and information from Indian tribes across the United States. This task was huge in its conception and certainly, in its operation. It grew even larger in its responsibilities because Henry believed past scientific inquiry and collections involving Native Indian tribes was spurious and amateur; and therefore, he charged his staff with a new rigor and coherent system of data-gathering. This, of course, overwhelmed its small staff but developed an inchoate network of reliable resources outside of the Institution. In turn, this ultimately furthered Henry's quest for an authoritative science vis-à-vis anthropology, and led as the impetus for the adoption of the most voluminous of work of ethnographic research done at the time, the projects of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), under the direction and vision of John Wesley Powell.
John Wesley Powell's ideas of collecting and generating a science that increased an understanding of the American frontier of Native cultures mirrored that of Henry's. He had served as director of Geological Survey and had conducted over ten years of ethnographic research among North American Indians. His work had recently been reorganized and consolidated by the establishment of a Geological Bureau in the Interior Department, and his past work, that by clerical error, ended up in the collections of the Smithsonian rather than with Interior, was transferred to this department in 1874. Because the Smithsonian operated according to a policy of doing nothing with its income which can be equally well done by other means, Joseph Henry, at that same time, transferred the Smithsonian's collection of linguistic collections of American Indian languages over to Powell to match the work he had done in his past survey, the Geological and Geographical Survey of the Rocky Mountains Region. Henry directed Powell to prepare the collections for publication. This suited Powell's interests, for as Moses notes, Powells' primary task of the ethnologist "was to bring order to the chaos of Native American linguistics" (1984:14). He could accomplish this through reorganizing the ethnological data, but only vis-à-vis federal government funds and staff support, an initial resource for which he would have to create a convincing argument. In combination with this modus operandi, and a later appointment as special commissioner of Indian Affairs to investigate conditions and needs of the peoples of the Great Basin, Powell carried enough responsibility to build an argument to put forth to Congress for the founding of a permanent research bureau that would facilitate research of Indian affairs but also establish the methods for the science of ethnology. "From such a science the people of the republic would be served" (Moses 1984:15).
His winning words with Congress and his savvy as an administrator won his argument before Congress in 1877. In 1879, the successful transference of all ethnographic researches that had been once transferred to Major Powell in 1874 were transferred back to the Smithsonian, only this time, they came along with Congressional funding that would support Powell's charge over them in a permanent research branch. Through an act of Congress, The Bureau of Ethnology, was founded as an adjunct of the Smithsonian Institution on March 3, 1879 (when Congress combined four independent government surveys to create the United States Geological Survey and, at the same time, transferred to the Smithsonian the results of diverse anthropological field work previously pursued by those surveys under instructions from the Department of the Interior) (Judd 1967:6). Though Joseph Henry had seceded his position as Secretary to Professor Spencer F. Baird, and died one year after the formation of the Bureau, its formation forwarded Henry's mission for the progression of a professional science. Powell's vision aligned with Henry's and at the formation of the Bureau, Secretary Baird, immediately summoned John Wesley Powell, to head the Bureau. Powell, accepted this enforced appointment but listed the priorities of the Bureau as those on which he had been focused before the appointment.
In 1880, John Wesley Powell wrote to Secretary Baird (BAE File 4677, p.51):
The Smithsonian, through the work of the Bureau became the repository for the National Institute collections and for Indian information previously received in Washington from government explorers, administrative officers, and interested amateur anthropologists (Judd 1967:16). Under the direction and undergirded by the ethnographic research history and reputation of Major John Wesley Powell, "Early members of the bureau considered themselves and their institution to be representative of a new kind of anthropology, one which would grow and mature under the influence of the Smithsonian Institution" (Moses 1984:13). Powell, willingly took on job as his own way of putting a new department "especially one wholly concerned with American Indians" on its feet and establishing themethods for the science of ethnology. He asserted in a written address as the Bureau head in 1880,
He organized the Bureau toward an anthropology of survey, specifically toward survey work that maintained the autonomy of the individual ethnographer while collecting and assembling the inventories of Native Indian languages for an eventual publication, a motivation that clashed with Congressional intentions. Powell's focus was not presentation, or the diffusion of knowledge to the general public, as it was for Congress. As Baird warned him, members of Congress were more interested in specimens for the National Museum-specimens, which could be seen by the visitors to the capital city (Judd 1967:18). Powell feeling very much like the BAE was his own, was agitated by such interference from Congressional agendas as well as the Smithsonian's modus operandi, driven by their mission toward increasing knowledge and diffusing it through Baird's "give and take policies". Specifically, he saw the Smithsonian as using the BAE as a means to gain more information, and artifacts. Powell's objectives were toward fighting for autonomy and struggling to put the BAE on the map while Baird and the Smithsonian saw it as just an adjunct.Urging autonomy and his own priorities in science, Powell pushed along his own agenda within the BAE, primarily through research agendas whose vision was carried out through the work of the men of the United States Geological Survey who had joined him at the BAE through a joint-appointment. "In his first two annual reports as director of this Bureau, Major Powell emphasized the scientific importance of the linguistic and ethnographic studies he had brought with him from the Survey of the Rocky Mountain region" (Judd 1967:19).And, in his twenty years at the Bureau, he managed to place very little focus on producing information available to the public. Much ensued in the politically steeped-relationship between Powell and the objectives of the federal government, but Powell maintained that from his science the people of the republic would be served (Moses 1984:15). The Indian Problem and the Answer of Science at the BAE
It is important to see the dimensions of Powell's motivation and work in the context of a war-torn antebellum America where the choice between extermination and civilization of the Indian was merely an outgrowth of a driven, unilinear society.
The choice between barbaric power and various milder forms of domination, parameters established and unalterable after the Civil War, left only issues of style and procedure open to discussion. Powells' Bureau of Ethnology was originally founded to address such questions. There were bitter Indian wars in the seventies and Powell was set to contribute to the continuing Indian problem by contributing to it the science of a Survey tradition and its structures and procedures for dealing with anthropological survey. Through survey, Powell sought to develop an understanding of the Indian that required total comprehension of savagery, which could only be accomplished through systematic stuffy of aboriginal populations; Powell also aimed through this work to trace the historical migrations and contacts between tribes and stocks, thus combining a historical and classificatory orientation that coexisted for decades within American anthropology (Hinsley 1981:150). To politicians in 1878, Powell expressed the utility of anthropology, in this case, a science of a moral enterprise:
Powell served for twenty years as the director before he died in 1902. It was through the moral and political import of this notion that Powell led BAE scientific endeavors until his death and contributed to the Indian problem with the answer of science. And, it was through this objective that James Mooney joined the scene of prominent bureau ethnologists in 1885.
The BAE's Impact on Anthropology The BAE passed into history July 29, 1964, when it was merged with the United States National Museum, to form SI's Office of Anthropology. But, in its short-lived existence, it was through this history of Powell's organization, by intention or otherwise, that fostered patterns of research, communication, personal identity, or institutional growth that are recognizably professional in a modern sense. As Hinsley notes, " In order to address the issue of the Bureau's status in the professionalization of anthropology, the question must be rephrased so as to place the insitution in historical context: The final judgment here is that Powell's organization was root-and-branch a nineteenth-century institution—the product of conditions and assumptions of another age" (1981:151). Powell's organization laid the empirical foundation of the new ethnology, one which would be taken up by Boas in his appointment to the BAE- which ended in 1919-and his subsequent move toward establishing the academy as it developed in the 1920s and 30s. To better seat the BAE as a marker for the culmination of trends in nineteenth-century science, including anthropology, let us now turn to the work of one of its leading ethnologists, Mr. James Mooney. The Indian Man: A Sketch of the Life and Work of James Mooney
"The BAE, like the early Smithsonian, became a haven for some individuals to whom restlessness or idiosyncracy permitted no comfortable home in society. In their searches for alternative modes of understanding, these individuals contributed, not to the professionalization of American anthropology, but to the richness of its heritage" (Moses 1984:17). In the age of a scientific movement, when Mooney first applied to the Bureau of Ethnology, and encountered these notions of academic competency, his efforts to earn a spot at the Bureau were shortlived. He went on hiatus as a school teacher and journalist, and went to Washington, D.C. to "promote a romantic private ambition: to go to Brazil to study the Indian tribes" (Moses 1984:47). There, he met Major John Henry Powell, who had just founded the Bureau of Ethnology. Mooney begged for job, and as history will tell, he managed to convince Powell of his potential, and in 1885 won a spot as an ethnologist. Mooney worked according to the context of the Bureau as defined and shaped by the direction of Major John Henry Powell, bureau leader at the time of his appointment. Work was steeped in that of the nineteenth century expansion era, the Smithsonian often called in to set up government exhibits. The BAE, as often delegated the tasks to take charge of the Indian alcoves, appointed Mooney to set up exhibits at 1892 Spanish Columbian Exposition in Madrid; the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893; the Tennessee Centennial Exposition at Nashville, 1897; the Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha, 1898; the LA Purchase Expo in St Louis in 1904, among others. Beyond his exhibition-work, Mooney delved into ethnological studies of American Indians, an area of work "Political consciousness came to Mooney as a birthright. While most of his colleagues explained the demise of the American Indian in racial or developmental terms, human fate for Mooney was the product of history and relative power" (Hinsley 1981:207) Mooney, as a child of Irish-immigrants was conscious of that unilinear, mainstream America and what it meant to be separated from it. For this, he developed a strong reformist thought. He saw necessity and importance of Indians to assimilate, but also saw that with that, came obligations by the Federal government. When concerned with the high death rate among Cherokees, Mooney, along with Dr. Washington Matthews, US Army (who was later detailed with help of Major Powell to the Army medical Museum located east of the Mall, for studies of vast skeleton collection—a collection later transferred to the National Museum of Natural History (which is now being repatriated), protested federal neglect of Cherokees of North Carolina and called for remedial measures to their check abnormally high death rate, an inchoate move toward measures of public health as a discipline!.
Like Francis La Flesche, a fullblood Omaha, Mooney held that peyote was an essential element in a native religion and, as such was beyond jurisdiction of priests, Indian agents, and missionaries." (Moses 1981: 48-49) Born an Irish-Catholic of recent-immigrants, Mooney was passionately devoted to Irish causes and undertook to promote the interests of Irishmen, in America and the old country, by active participation in various nativistic enterprises.
Devoted throughout his life to such causes, he served as president of Gaelic Society of Washington—such membership roles echo Mooney's anthropological style as an advocate above all. "He favored deeply the Irish home rule and republican movements, and, despite his own personal religious loyalty to Catholicism, vigorously opposed the conservative role of the Catholic hierarchy in regard to Irish nationalism—he even came to sympathize with socialism as a political philosophy. Thus, is his approach to the Ghost dance and to the Peyote religion, which he supported against criticism in his testimony before a congressional committee, Mooney brought with him a personally experienced model of this type of event, a model which included an awareness of ancient glories, of a sense of wrong and deprivation, and a dream of a golden age returned. Outline of Mooney's publications
under the auspices of the Bureau of Ethnology
The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 "Mooney's capacity to empathize with Indian aspirations for a better, nativistically oriented way of life-particularly as it was expressed so dramatically in Ghost dance-was no doubt a function more of certain personal sentiments than of theoretical orientation" (Wallace on Mooney 1986:vi). James
Mooney had served as Bureau ethnologist for only five years when the
Ghost Dance began to attract public attention in 1890. At this time,
the American frontier had expanded to include all of the country east
of the Rocky Mountains and Oregon. Seen as a single group of savages
rather than individual tribes or peoples, American Indians had been
relegated to reservations and the few remaining fragments of Indian
territories such as the Territory of Oklahoma. Strategies and tactics
associated with the expansion movement by the United States involved
not only techniques of evicting Indians from their lands and partitioning
them into territories or reservations, but great bloody battles between
the Cavalry and Indian groups, many of which ended as massacres of large
numbers of the Indian population, and all of which bred a heated resentment
between the two groups; Custer's Last Stand is one of the more popular
among these in American history. Despite the ongoing social programs
for controlling the Indian population through processes of assimilation-vis-à-vis
missionaries, schools, establishing family farms and businesses, and
promoting literacy through media of communication between groups mediated
through the U.S. Postal Service-the government in Washington remained
uneasy at the prospect of a settled, peaceful, West. The West was hostile
and despite the "progress" of the Indian toward "civilization"-assimilation
remained a priority, a social, political, and moral imperative. Rather
than deploy coercive force, the government sought counterinsurgent measures
in the West, and one way to forward these efforts was through gain of
knowledge about the peoples it was trying to contain and and assimilate.
These objectives were best appropriated to the Bureau of Ethnology and
as Mooney was not an independent scholar but a government servant, which is a significant attribute of his position as ethnologist. In the capacity of ethnologist for a government office, Mooney was often motivated not by his and the Bureau's policy of interest in nativistic movement and lifeways but was necessitated by the federal government's interest in information necessary to further colonization of the American frontier and assimilation of the American Indian. As a professional ethnologist for the federal government, Mooney was obligated to retrieve and synthesize such information for the sake of furthering government enterprise, not for the organization and documentation of Indian lifeways for the understanding, sharing, and preservation of Indian heritage. Such as was the case with his studies of the Sioux and the connections between the Ghost dance and the Sioux outbreak of 1890; he was sent by the Bureau to satisfy the "agitation aroused in the government and in the popular press concerning the possibility of Indian outbreak among the Sioux" (Mooney 1896: vii). In effect, despite his own personal and academic motivations, Mooney was dispatched to investigate such phenomena as the Ghost dance to further the government's counterinsurgence measures.The impetus for interest in the Ghost dance by the Bureau of American Ethnology came with these motivations. Although the South Dakota Sioux with whom the Ghost dance was to become the spark of the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, the Battle at Wounded Knee, were making progress toward "civilization." However, with the inception of the ghost dance, a great deal changed, and history tells us the story of the subsequent outbreak, Battle of Wounded Knee and its connection the ghost dance.
The Ethnology of the Ghost Dance Religion To follow is a background set for Mooney's The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, which was published in the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1896.
In the publication, Mooney describes the lifeways of the Sioux of South Dakota, framed in a historical-writing style, and less of an anthropological ethnography. In a historical reconstruction, rather than what one may define as modern ethnography, Mooney described the consequences that led up to the adoption of the Ghost Dance by many tribes, in the case of his 1896 monograph the consequences leading up to the Sioux outbreak and the relevance of the ghost dance to the outbreak. As the BAE-appointed ethnologist, Mooney was dispatched to study the "new, and threatening, religion among the Sioux-and other affected tribes-and to report his findings. In his work, he does that, but through the systematic research and survey collection of data that speaks not only of the outbreak but the details of the dance itself, its process and its attributes. The context for Mooney's work among the Kiowa and the Ghost dance is not as immense and enormous, covering every subject of science as once had been the case, but a sweeping survey of religion, dance, music—not only the outbreak but the process and its attributes; Like Powell's three-pronged objective of serving the government with information concerning the American Indian outbreaks for the sake of control and assimilation; to preserve the quickly-disappearing American Indian culture; and to develop ethnological science through systematic survey and analysis, Mooney covered such ground in his work. He establishes his objectives accordingly, often sacrificing analysis for systematic documentation: "In the songs the effort has been to give the spirit and exact renderings, without going into analytical details." (Mooney 1896:xii) Mooney advocated for an understanding of American Indians not as a single group but as a complex assemblage of many groups with many languages and customs. This was evinces in his preface describing his work in The Ghost Dance. He assures his reading audience that the following text's main objectives are not linguistic: "…as nearly every tribe concerned speaks a different language from all others, any close linguistic study must be left to the philologist who can afford to devote a year or more to an individual tribe. The only one of these tribes of which the author claims to have intimate knowledge is the Kiowa." As Anthony F.C. Wallace notes in his introduction of Mooney's most influential work, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, "It is a fortunate coincidence that Mooney himself was motivated by some of the nativistic sentiments that inspired the Sioux dancers and political conservatives. Thus Mooney was able to take seriously the not only the personal tragedy of the Indian men, women, and children, who were killed and wounded by the Army regulars at the battle of Wounded Knee, but also the faith of the Ghost-dancers, whose religious passion inspired a reckless disrespect both for bureaucracy and bullets." (1896:vii)
"Mooney reached his opinions slowly, but once he had the come to a decision, he had the courage to defend it." (Moses1981: 49) As
an Academic. According to Hinsley, these points of advice can be surmised as follows:
Because of his systematic approach to ethno-linguistic and cultural pragmatics, Mooney had a proclivity in comparative analysis and through this recognized the Ghost dance as a charismatic event ubiquitous around the world. He related Wovoka, the prophet associated with the Ghost dance, to the prophetic roles of Joan of Arc and Mohammad. As he mentions in his preface to Ghost Dance, "the Ghost dance is…the latest of a series of Indian religious revivals, and the idea on which it is founded is a hope common to all humanity. (1896: xii).Through this comparative framework, Mooney was able to anticipate later social and religious movements, which posit a processual model despite their diversity in form and ideology. For Mooney, his concept of the Ghost dance was situated in a cultural context indicative of cultural deprivation. "Mooney regarded such movements as adaptive responses of peoples to intolerable stresses laid upon them by poverty and oppression. In the restricted sense, he was an early proponent of the "cultural deprivation" school of thought, which interests itself in the function of such movements as more or less effective expressions of social dissatisfaction." (1896:ix). This perception of Mooney's has often been associated with his Irish disposition and loyalty to Irish-freedom movement, which encouraged a comparative approach. The viability of this social movement theory is dismantled when new investigations of the Ghost dance discover its legacy to past histories of old forms of Ghost dances or where the Ghost dance was rejected despite the obvious forms of cultural deprivation associated with the group at the time. Anthony Wallace, in his review of Mooney's work, states that Mooney was not primarily a theoretician. He bases his argument of the notion that Mooney never dissected the complexity of "cultural deprivation" into subclasses, for example, in ways that would bifurcate movements according to absolute deprivation and relative (1896:ix). Although it was a doctrine that implicitly applied across all cultures but never empirically tested, this notion does not preclude Mooney from foreshadowing future theories that incorporated his empirical data on social deprivation and movements. And though his methodological prowess but theoretical weakness does not speak to his emerging and shifting thoughts about his work's contributions to the field of anthropology, his work such as that in the Ghost Dance work establishes Mooney well as a sympathizer and advocate for Indian rights. As an Advocate. "Certainly, as an ethnologists and as a federal employee, Mooney contributed to the political goings on of the time. He contributed as a voice for the Indian in government discourse associated with Indian assimilation projects (Moses 1981:162). He saw himself as voice for Indians-in his position as a federal employee and as an anthropologist. He was positioned to advocate for Indians through his ethnographic data and because he had an audience, either the one in Congress or the academic societies that often invited him for talks. He was in a unique position, straddling both world vis-à-vis his single position in the bureau. Through this, he criticized government Indian policy and deployed ethnography as a moral tool to dismantle assimilation and genocidal policy, while advocating for organized and systematic preservation projects of Indian heritage.
According to Mooney's biography, Mooney's final talk at the Nebraska Historical Society in 1910 represented his advocacy for Indian affairs, the preservation of their heritage, and his views on ethnological method. The talk was about life among the Indians. He used lantern slides to depict views of changing Indian life and the ravages of time carved into the faces of famous warriors. His final talk, "Systematic Nebraska Ethnologic Investigation," proferred a system whereby members interested in ethnology and history could organize their efforts. He advised members to lobby for state funds and to begin their study by circulating a letter to missionaries, teachers. Once the society received a good number of responses, the information could be collated and marked on a map. Sites could be visited, and if they proved to be archaeologically or ethnologically important, the society should seek state protection for it against possible vandalism, and if it was excavated every stage of the process should be photographed. "One of these days, our children and their children will want to know about their forefathers…It is still possible to fill in the record." (Moses 1981:172). In summation, Moses writes,
Mooney remained in Washington at the Bureau throughout 1908 when he closed his service. Visit the Image Gallery to read two obituart notices on James Mooney. James
Mooney's Impact on the James Mooney, although often criticized as amateur because he was self-taught and without college experience", was a trained anthropologist whose training came in the field rather than the classroom. Perhaps he has been overlooked in anthropology's history until recently because he falls within an area of study that was controversial and in fact, continues to be, in this country. It seems important, especially in government environments, to keep the American Indian, ambiguous" (Moses 1981:168). Also, in recent years, as Moses notes, "the history of American anthropology has expanded until it is now recognized as a specialty. Through the work of scholars of historical anthropology, the lives and careers of nineteenth-century anthropologists like Mooney have been restored to their proper places within the development of the anthropological profession. (Moses 1981:xiii). As Hinsley notes, Mooney's ethnology, although grounded in painstaking historical reconstruction elicits admiration and gratitude from students even today; his major monographic research on the Cherokee, the Kiowa, and the Ghost dance are indispensable classics" Certainly today, his work, organized into many volumes in a collection at the Smithsonian is admired and used by students and museum-visitors, either because researchers engage his work in the archives or attend the Kiowa exhibits in the National Museum of Natural History. The Cherokee still consider Mooney their historian, "not because he told the story of their rituals drawing on both Indian and White materials and memories, but also because he saw that history exists in the minds of the present as much as in documents. Mooney's greatest contribution, as Hinsley claims it in The Smithsonian and The American Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in Victoria America, was to expand and redefine history so as to embrace Indian experience, and to incorporate this into this ethnology" (1981:208). To run full circle, let us recall the words of Mooney's biographer, who positions Mooney among those who found a place in the community of the competent, shaping a niche for anthropology in the Smithsonian, the BAE, and in the professional world in general:
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