Arthur C. Parker

For other people of the same name, see Arthur Parker (disambiguation).

Arthur C. Parker

Arthur Caswell Parker (April 5, 1881 – January 1, 1955) was an American archaeologist, historian, folklorist, museologist and noted authority on American Indian culture. Of Seneca and Scots-English descent, he was director of the Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences from 1924 to 1945, when he developed its holdings and research into numerous disciplines for the Genesee Region. He was an honorary trustee of the New York State Historical Association. In 1935 he was elected first president of the Society for American Archaeology.

Background

Arthur C. Parker was born in 1881 on the Cattaraugus Reservation of the Seneca Nation of New York in western New York. He was the son of Frederick Ely Parker, a multiracial Seneca, and his wife Geneva Griswold, of Scots-English-American descent, who taught school on the reservation. As the Seneca are a matrilineal nation, the young Parker did not have membership status at birth, as his mother was not part of the tribe, but he was descended from prominent Seneca through his father. As his father was also multiracial, Parker was three-quarters European by heritage.

In 1903 Arthur was adopted into the tribe as an honorary member, when he was given the Seneca name Gawaso Wanneh (meaning "Big Snowsnake"). His grandfather Nicholson Henry Parker was an influential Seneca leader. As a youth, Arthur lived with Nicholson on his farm and was strongly influenced by him.

His grandfather's younger brother (Arthur's great-uncle) Ely S. Parker was a Seneca life chief. As a young man he had collaborated with Lewis Henry Morgan on his study of the Iroquois. He served as a brigadier general and secretary to Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War. After the war, Ely Parker was appointed the first Indian Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

Arthur Parker was influenced by both the Seneca culture and the Christian missionary culture of his mother’s family, and his social status of bridging peoples. He explored his Seneca lineage as a way of connecting himself to a powerful, symbolic past and integrating into twentieth-century American life. Although his own family was Christian, he also witnessed followers of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, who was resurrecting traditional Seneca religion.

Education

Parker started his formal education on the reservation, but in 1892, his family moved to White Plains, New York. He entered public school at around age 11 and graduated from high school in 1897. Before going on to college, he spent considerable time at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He was befriended by Frederick W. Putnam, its temporary curator of anthropology and a professor of anthropology at Harvard. Putnam encouraged the young Parker to study anthropology.

However, Parker followed the wishes of his grandfather, and attended Dickinson Seminary in Williamsport, Pennsylvania from 1900 to 1903 to study for the ministry. He left before graduating and became a reporter for the New York Sun.

He worked as an apprentice to archaeologist Mark Harrington (1882–1971), digging at sites in New York State and learning techniques. He volunteered at the Museum of Natural History in New York in his spare time.

Career

In 1904, Parker was given a two-year position as collector of cultural data on the New York Iroquois. Then in 1906, he took a position as the first archaeologist at the ([1]) New York State Museum.

In 1911, together with the Native American physician Charles A. Eastman and others, he founded the Society of American Indians to help educate the public about Native Americans. From 1915 to 1920, he was the editor of the society’s American Indian Magazine.

In 1925 Parker became director of the Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences, where he developed the museum holdings and its research in the emerging fields of anthropology, natural history, geology, biology, history and industry of the Genesee Region. During the 1930s and the Great Depression, he also directed the WPA-funded Indian Arts Project, which was sponsored by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.

In 1935, Parker was elected the first President of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1944, Parker helped found the National Congress of American Indians.

Legacy and honors

• Honorary trustee of the New York Historical Association*1935, first president of the Society of American Archeology
• Since 1998, the Society for American Archaeology has annually awarded the Arthur C. Parker Scholarship, which provides funds to Native Americans for training in archaeological methods.

Retirement

After retiring from directing the Rochester museum in 1946, Parker became very active in Indian affairs. He moved to Nunda-wah-oh, near present-day Naples, New York, where he felt his ancestors had lived. There he overlooked Canandaigua Lake. He died there on New Years Day, 1955, aged 73.

Publications

• Excavations in an Erie Indian village and burial site at Ripley, Chautauqua Co., New York State Education Dept, Albany, 1907
• Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Food Plants, University of the state of New York, 1910
• The Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet, University of the state of New York, 1913
• The Constitution of the Five Nations, University of the state of New York, 1916
• Life of General Ely S. Parker: Last Grand Sachem of the Iroquois and General Grant's Military Secretary Buffalo Historical Society, Buffalo, New York, 1919
• The Archaeological History of New York, University of the state of New York, 1922
• An Analytical History of the Seneca Indians, New York State Archeological Association, Rochester, 1926
• The Indian How Book, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co. Inc., 1931
• Seneca Myths and Folk Tales, Bison Books
• Skunny Wundy: Seneca Indian Tales, Syracuse University Press
• New York History: Sources and Range of Cooper's Indian Lore, New York State Historical Association, 1954
• The History of the Seneca Indians, Port Washington, NY: I. J. Friedman, 1967
• Parker on the Iroquois, Edited by William N. Fenton, Syracuse University Press, 1986

Bibliography

• "Arthur Caswell Parker", Houghton Mifflin: Encyclopedia of North American Indians
• Museum of Arts and Sciences
• "Arthur C. Parker", Famous People of the Western Southern Tier
• Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip. (2009), Inheriting the Past: The Making of Arthur C. Parker and Indigenous Archaeology, University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
• Hazel Whitman Hertzberg, "Nationality, Anthropology and Pan-Indianism in the Life of Arthur C. Parker (Seneca)", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
• "Arthur C. Parker", Native American Authors Project, Internet Public Library
• Joy Porter, To Be Indian: The Life of Seneca-Iroquois Arthur Caswell Parker, 1881-1955, Oklahoma University Press, 2002
• "Arthur Caswell Parker Papers", University of Rochester Library