(1881-1955)
Seneca anthropologist, ethnologist, and archaeologist
Arthur Caswell Parker was born into a powerful Seneca family on April 5, 1881, on the Cattaraugus Reservation in western New York. He was the son of Frederick Ely Parker and Geneva Griswold, a white woman who taught school on the same reservation. His paternal grandfather was Nicholas H. Parker, an influential leader of the Seneca Nation who had served as secretary to the nation and as an interpreter for the New York subagency. Nicholas's brother, Ely Parker, was a brigadier general and a military secretary to Ulysses Grant during the Civil War, and later the first Indian Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Arthur Parker lived on his grandfather Nicholas's farm, and it was Nicholas Parker who, by all accounts, was the most influential figure during his grandson's formative years.
Parker spent those years moving easily between the Seneca society of his father and the white missionary relatives of his mother. Though the Parker family was Christian, its members maintained close ties with the followers of Handsome Lake, the Seneca prophet who revitalized traditional Seneca religion around the turn of the nineteenth century.
Parker began his schooling on the reservation, but in 1892 the family moved to White Plains, where Parker entered public school. After graduating from high school in 1897, Parker was undecided about his future. He delayed going to college for two years. Eventually, however, his grandfather and the reservation minister, Asher Wright, persuaded him to enroll at Dickinson Seminary in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He studied at Dickinson from 1900 to 1903, but left before graduation. After a short stint as a reporter, Parker decided on a career in anthropology.
How Parker came to be an anthropologist is instructive. In the years after his high school graduation and before entering the seminary, he spent many hours at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. There he became acquainted with Frederick W. Putnam, the temporary curator of anthropology at the museum and a professor of anthropology at Harvard. It was the beginning of a long friendship, with Putnam serving as guide and mentor to the young Seneca.
Parker was also befriended by Harriet Maxwell Converse, a journalist and poet who had a special interest in anthropology. She introduced him to Frank Speck, and through Speck he met Franz Boas. Boas urged Parker to enter Columbia University's newly established anthropology program, but Parker chose Dickinson instead. While Parker was still at Dickinson, Putnam arranged for him to apprentice with the archaeologist Mark Harrington, with whom he spent two summers (1903-4) working on sites in New York State. When not digging, he worked as a reporter for the New York Sun and volunteered his spare time at the museum.
Arthur Parker's break came in 1904, when he was hired on a temporary basis to collect data on the Iroquois in New York State. For the next two years he collected items of material culture, folklore, speeches, and stories, as well as conducting his first archaeological research. So successful was Parker that in 1906 he was offered the newly created position of archaeologist at the New York State Museum. He promptly accepted. The position had its drawbacks, however. Parker was required to spend most of his time on archaeological projects and exhibitions. His promising career as an ethnologist was thus brought to an abrupt end.
Parker's interests extended well beyond academic research. In 1911 he joined with Charles A. Eastman and others to found the Society of American Indians, a Pan-Indian organization dedicated to educating the general public about American Indians. In 1915 he took over the editorship of its journal, the American Indian Magazine, a post he held for the next five years. The nation's entry into World War I led to a split in the organization. For his part, Parker saw American Indian participation in the war as a means of advancing the acceptance of the Indian into American society. The young museum official was a strong supporter of the melting-pot ideal and a defender of Lewis Henry Morgan's unilinear model of social evolution. But other Indian leaders, largely western and more iconoclastic then the scholarly Seneca, opposed him. People like Carlos Montezuma believed that since Indians were not citizens, they should not become involved in another nation's war. Parker also rejected Franz Boas's cultural relativism because he feared it would place more emphasis on the aboriginal aspects of Indian life than on the monumental adjustments Indians were undergoing. In the end, however, he became disenchanted with politics and pessimistic about assimilation. In the early 1920s he returned to archaeology and museology.
For the next nineteen years Parker labored at the museum, conducting archaeological research when time allowed, but he never returned to ethnology. Much of his time was spent in the bureaucratic minutiae that seemed never to end or allow him to return to his central interest: the study of the Iroquois. In 1925 he joined the Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences as director.
Parker retired from the Rochester museum in 1946 to continue his writing and renew his involvement in national Indian affairs, particularly the National Congress of American Indians, which he had helped to found in 1944. He died on January 1, 1955, at the age of seventy-three.
Parker was a man pulled by two distinct cultures. Able to move easily in each, he was never fully accepted by either. His connection to the matrilineal Seneca Nation was through his father's side; he was a Christian even though the things he admired and sought to understand in the Seneca world were held and protected by the followers of Handsome Lake. He entered the museum world just at the time when basic research was shifting to the university. Although an excellent researcher, he sorely felt the lack of a doctorate and was never quite accorded the status he deserved.
It is surprising that in the course of a career that spanned more than fifty years, all of his ethnographic research was confined to the years 1905 to 1913. His contributions included Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Food Plants (1910), The Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet (1913), The Constitution of the Five Nations (1916), and The Archaeological History of New York (1922), all published by the New York State Museum. In addition, he wrote over 250 articles and several books for children.
Of possibly equal importance was Parker's encouragement of Iroquois craftsmen and artisans. While still with the New York State Museum, he collected the works of many, including the drawings of the talented Seneca artist Jesse Cornplanter, the son of Chief Edward Cornplanter, who had provided Parker with the "Code of Handsome Lake" (his teachings). In the 1930s, Parker was active in the efforts of the Works Progress Administration to recruit and finance Iroquois artists. Perhaps his most lasting contribution, however, was to the Rochester Museum, whose collection of Iroquois material was assembled in large part through Parker's energy, support, knowledge, and foresight.
See also
Cayuga;
Handsome Lake;
Iroquois Confederacy;
National Congress of American Indians;
Seneca.
William N. Fenton, Parker on the Iroquois ed. William N. Fenton (Syracuse, N.Y.: University of Syracuse Press, 1968); Hazel Whitman Hertzberg, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society "Nationality, Anthropology and Pan-Indianism in the Life of Arthur C. Parker (Seneca)," 123, no.1 (1979): 47-72.
Jack Campisi
Wellesley College
