Book of the Day: a pioneering work by the Smithsonian's first Native American ethnologist

Francis LaFleche, War Ceremony and Peace Ceremony of the Osage Indians (Government Printing Office, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ethnology, Bulletin 101, 1939). Softcover, green cover w/ black titling and the seal of the Smithsonian on the cover, and a torch of learning on the back cover. 280 pp. w/index. Thirteen b&w photographs. Above the title the name “W.F. Burr” appears inscribed w/a Sharpie. HBB price: $15.

This study is perhaps the landmark achievement of Francis LaFleche (1857-1932). The Library of Congress notes,

The second son of Omaha chief Joseph La Flesche, Francis La Flesche attended the Presbyterian Mission school and participated in tribal ceremonies associated with approaching manhood. His mission education proved useful in his work as an interpreter and research assistant for James Owen Dorsey, who arrived on the Omaha reservation in 1878 to continue his studies in Dhegiha Siouan languages. In 1879 La Flesche accompanied his sister, Susette, and uncle, Ponca chief Standing Bear, on their grueling Eastern crusade for Indian land reform, and took a job a year later as a copyist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, working at night to complete two law degrees. He formally transferred to the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1910, although he had been engaged in research for the Bureau for a number of years. During his tenure at the Bureau of American Ethnology he also began his lifelong friendship and collaboration with Alice Fletcher, who became first his employer, then his tutor and colleague, and who eventually adopted him as her son. 

Between 1880 and 1910 Fletcher and La Flesche collected extensive data on the Omaha people. LaFlesche's status on the reservation, his knowledge of the language, and his early participation in tribal rituals proved invaluable in their research. He was strongly committed to preserving every detail of Omaha life because he wanted non-Indians to understand the spiritual nature of Indian culture. When Fletcher commissioned John Comfort Fillmore to study Omaha songs for the 1893 monograph A Study of Omaha Indian Music, La Flesche worked closely with the musicologist, going over transcriptions and accompanying him on a field trip to the reservation. 

Fletcher and LaFlesche's most fruitful collaboration resulted in the publication of The Omaha Tribe in 1911, the culmination of nearly 30 years of meticulous gathering, sorting, and synthesizing data on the Omaha Indians. Apart from these joint efforts, La Flesche found time to publish articles on Omaha life and a popular account of his childhood at the mission school (The Middle Five, 1900). But he is best known for his independent research on the cognate Osage people for the Bureau of American Ethnology; his massive study, The Osage Tribe, was published between 1914 and 1928 in four separate volumes of the Bureau's Annual Reports.

A leading source on LaFleche’s life and career is Joan Mark, “Francis La Flesche: The American Indian as Anthropologist,”  Isis, vol. 73, No. 4 (Dec. 1982), pp. 496-510 (published by The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society). LaFleche makes a fascinating study of the assimilation of American Indians in the 19thC, both socially and in the emerging field of anthropology. The first son of the second wife of a chief who married into the white race and spent his adulthood disengaging from his cultural roots, LaFleche tried to juggle the pressure of his father and his desire to save and interpret as much as possible of his tribe’s culture.

An additional challenge was that ethnology was in its infancy as an academic field. Aspirants with the best shots at success were those with connections to money (extraction barons looking to burnish their reputations by funding expeditions and scholarship) and either F.W. Peabody or John Wesley Powell as a mentor into the pipeline of museum jobs.

LaFleche had neither. Plucked by a US Senator from Nebraska to become  Department of Interior clerk, he was introduced by his sister to the anthropologist Alice Fletcher (1838-1923)- a Peabody protege who spent 1881 living with Sioux women on a reservation. LaFleche became a trusted assistant and translator and, over time, a collaborator and life partner of sorts.

Despite their close personal relationship (they lived together; she informally adopted him, and she left her estate to him- if only for his life, after which it reverted to her research institution), Fletcher was slow to realize LaFleche wanted to build his own career and reputation. She often viewed Native Americans as “her children” and it was well into their collaboration before LaFleche forced the issue and insisted on being listed as a co-author of their work.

Over time LaFleche developed a substantial body of work with wax recordings of Omaha and Osage tribal songs and rituals, and publications explaining them. His goal was explaining them in their own terms as the expressions of a national culture, where Fletcher’s was more one of explaining native cultures to a dominant white culture.  His recordings are held by the Library of Congress, and digitized versions of more than 60 are available online. Contemporary Osage tribal members have compared the effect of hearing the recordings of their traditional rituals to that of Western scholars reading the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls.

Obtaining a law and master’s degree at George Washington University in the 1890s, LaFleche collaborated with the composer Charles Wakefield Cadman to translate tribal music into western tonic forms, and even on an opera. In 1910, LaFleche was hired as an ethnologist by the Smithsonian, the first Native American in the field. His primary objective was to explain Osage ideas, beliefs, and concepts. He wanted his readers to see the world of the Osages for what it was in reality-not the world of simple "children of nature" but a highly complex world reflecting an intellectual tradition as sophisticated and imaginative as that of any Old World people.

Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1922, LaFleche published sixteen works in his lifetime and left a body of work that continues to be edited and published to this day. After Fletcher’s death in 1923, he continued at the Smithsonian, retiring in 1929. He moved home to Nebraska, died in 1932, and left his own will leaving his estate to his brother.

“War Ceremony and Peace Ceremony of the Osage Indians” is a fascinating collection of songs and native rites, written in a style accessible to the non-scholar as well as the expert.