Collecting Native America, 1870-1960 by Shepard Krech III

Author:Shepard Krech III [Krech, Shepard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58834-414-4
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2014-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.3. Hopi Snake Dance, Oraibi, Arizona, 1902. Photograph by Philip M. Jones. Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology and the Regents of the University of California, 15–268.

Pliny Earle Goddard (1869–1928), who had been working with related Athapaskan languages in California, agreed to assist Matthews. Goddard, a professor in the anthropology department, went to Arizona in 1904 to work with Matthews’s original Navajo consultants, but the trip was unsuccessful. Matthews continued to translate his texts, add entries to his dictionary, and annotate his previous work, but he died soon thereafter in 1905. The following year Goddard obtained the necessary information on a trip to Arizona, and their jointly written monograph was finally published in 1907.33 The rich archives of Matthews’s papers remained in Berkeley—essentially forgotten and unused after Goddard’s departure in 1909—until 1951, when they were donated to the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art (now the Wheelwright Museum) in Santa Fe. Matthews’s valuable collection of 226 photographs, however, remains at Berkeley (along with a small miscellaneous collection of artifacts). For a few years at the turn of the century, the University of California was a center for Navajo studies.

That this collection was primarily non-artifactual was not at all unusual for an anthropology museum at the time. Vocabularies, texts, and sound recordings, gathered as materials for the study of Native languages and verbal art, music, and religion, all had a material expression and could be collected as discrete objects. The California museum began to use the cylinder recording machine in 1901—only eleven years after the first recordings of American Indian music.34 Like the artifact collections, cylinders, photographs, and texts were part of the systematic collecting funded by Phoebe Hearst.

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