10. Salvaging the Delaware Big House Ceremony: The History and Legacy of Frank Speck's Collaboration with the Oklahoma Delaware

The Delaware Big House Ceremony was an annual religious event of thanksgiving and renewal that involved twelve days of prayer, dance, and song. Families would travel from their homes and camp on the grounds of the Big House Church for the duration of the observance. The church building was a dirt floor, roofed structure made of wood and bark. The image of the Mising, or spirit face, was carved on its interior posts. The last Big House Church to be built in such fashion stood along the western banks of the upper Caney River a few miles west of Copan, Oklahoma.

The last ceremony held in the church west of Copan was in 1924, yet the Delaware did not give up efforts to hold the ceremony until 1945. Work continued after 1924 to revitalize the Delaware Big House Ceremony and three ceremonies held in 1944–45 were the result. In 1944, a structure of bark and canvas was erected on an allotment along Post Oak Creek just north of Dewey, Oklahoma, and celebrants performed an abbreviated ceremony. The ceremonies were organized by Charlie Webber with the help of several men among the Big House followers. The ceremony did not last the entire twelve days and the officiants lacked many of the ritual objects needed to perform the ceremony. While there were no Mising images present to witness the ceremony, the Delaware today remember those wartime Big House Ceremonies as their last.

Documented here is the way in which the Big House adherents sought to keep the Big House Ceremony viable during the ceremony's interregnum between 1924 and 1944. The early decades of the twentieth century brought difficult times for the Delaware. The impacts of land loss, poverty, and waning interest among the younger generation made it clear to the Big House leaders that something had to be done in order to preserve their traditional faith. The Big House faithful soon found a strong ally in Frank Speck and the emerging discipline of American anthropology. While Speck sought to help record Delaware religion, the Delaware hoped to employ ethnography as a means to revitalize their spiritual beliefs. This chapter describes such collaboration between Speck and the Oklahoma Delaware with a focus on reconstructing the local social context and emphasizing the Delawares' role in their own ethnographic project. Also discussed is the legacy of Speck's work with the Delaware in the anthropological literature and in contemporary Delaware society.

Frank Speck's Collaborative Approach

Speck's work produced a tremendous body of scholarship that now serves as the foundation for contemporary ethnology on the Eastern Woodlands. Speck did extensive research with the Algonquian and Iroquoian groups resident in or removed from northeastern North America (Blankenship 1991). His efforts were also responsible for enhancing the ethnographic collections of many museums in the northeastern United States (Medoff 1991). Speck's collaboration with Eastern Delaware of Oklahoma produced, among others, two foundational works on the Delaware Big House Ceremony (Speck 1931, 1937).

As a student of Franz Boas, Speck's ethnographic work was salvage oriented. Speck believed that the aboriginal beliefs and practices of the American Indians were in declining usage and searched diligently to locate, record and preserve such indigenous lifeways. He thus wrote in the ethnographic present and sought to reconstruct American Indian life-ways as they would have existed prior to European contact. Such was the approach of ethnographers working with American Indians of the early to mid-twentieth century (Berkhofer 1979:62–69).

It is not my intention to offer a critique of Speck's approach. Sufficient critical attention has been given elsewhere and the limitations of early American anthropology have been well established (Deloria 1969).¹ Instead I will show that despite the limitations of early Americanist scholarship, there were beneficial elements that often go unnoticed. Most notable in Speck's method were the collaborative relationships that he developed with his American Indian consultants (Gleach 2002).

While I see Speck's approach to ethnography as a collaboration, he did not produce what has become...