Gladys Reichard at the Frontiers of Navajo Culture

T HERE WAS LIMITED KNOWLEDGE ABOUT the Navajo people until the investigations of Washington Matthews, in the 1880s. Later the Franciscan Fathers at the St. Michaels Mission published a wide ranging study of Indian culture in 1910 in their Ethnologic Dictionary. It was not until the 1920s that university anthropologists, with their rigorous scientific methods, began to intensively investigate the culture of native people. One of these academic anthropologists to study Navajo society was Gladys Reichard. Born a Quaker in the state of Pennsylvania, she had not planned to become an anthropologist, or a student of Navajo culture, or for that matter a university trained scholar. She taught elementary and secondary school before she entered Swarthmore, where she won a scholarship for further graduate study. She earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University under the tutelage of Franz Boas-Papa Franz to her. She secured an appointment at Barnard College, a position she held for the rest of her life. Late in her life she noted that chance had played a role in the great decisions of her life. A fateful turn for her had been the graduate scholarship, then the selection of linguistics for her field of study. Another chance dcision was a field trip to the Navajo Reservation in 1923, with money (at least in part) provided by Elsie Clews Parsons, the wealthy feminist scholar who became a great authority on Pueblo cultures.' The next year she accompanied Pliny Earle Goddard, curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, on a second Navajo field trip, which resulted in the publication of Social Life of the Navajo Indians (1928), the first university anthropological study of the Navajo.2 However, she did not yet concentrate on Navajo life. Having already published on the Wiyot language, she now turned to a study of Melanesian Design, financed by a Guggenheim fellowship to Hamberg, Germany, in 1926-1927, and to the study of the Coeur d'Alene language. Unexpectedly, Reichard inherited Goddard's Navajo text upon his untimely death (1928), a document provided to him by Father Berard Haile-the so-called Blue Eyes manuscript after its Navajo informant-which led to a life-long study of the Navajo

Linguistics · Navajo · Archaeology and Natural History · Canadian Identity and History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Philosophy

• Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty

  Open Access•Jay Youngdahl•New Labor Forum•2012

  Add to list

• Genre, Methodology and Feminist Practice

  Open Access•Lessie Jo Frazier•Critique of Anthropology•1993

  Add to list