Iroquois Journey: An Anthropologist Remembers

Introduction

Ascholar’s lifework is measured not only by what of lasting value was accomplished but also by how things were done, and to what end. A case in point is the extraordinary career of anthropologist William Nelson Fenton, who for more than seven decades dedicated himself to understanding , objectifying, and making plain the culture history of an American Indian people: the Iroquois. That he succeeded in this enterprise is beyond question. In the process, Bill left us with a body of literature unmatched in Iroquoian studies, all bearing his distinctive intellectual mark. At the same time, he welcomed and encouraged the diversity of approaches that have come to characterize the field. His overriding concern was with the way Indian history was written—that what was presented reflected something of the “why” behind the actions of native people in their encounter with Euro-Americans. How Bill came to study the Iroquois, and the path he took in pursuit of their history, is a story worth knowing. Introduced to anthropology in his last year at Dartmouth College, Bill in 1931 went on to graduate school at Yale University. There he was tutored by several of the field’s most eminent practitioners: Edward Sapir, George Peter Murdock, Clark Wissler, and Leslie Jack Campisi and William A. Starna introduction x | introduction Spier. His education took place during a period of significant growth and change in the discipline. Rejecting the unilineal, progressivist evolutionary theory of Lewis Henry Morgan—who incidentally had been among the first to systematically study the Iroquois—Bill’s teachers had made the shift to historicism, specifically to the historical particularism of Franz Boas, the acknowledged “father” of modern American anthropology. In fact, all but Murdock had earned their doctorates with Boas at Columbia University. The theoretical orientation of the Boasian school is characterized in the main by the collection and organization of ethnographic data derived almost exclusively from extensive, firsthand field work. Among North Americanists, including those who were drawn to the Iroquois, the favored methodology combined ethnographic, historical, archaeological, and linguistic approaches to produce generalizations about culture and culture processes. Although Bill became and remained a Boasian, his theoretical views were neither doctrinaire nor Procrustean. For him the appeal of a multidisciplinary approach lay in its utility for controlling and understanding the complex and wide-ranging data that his research on the Iroquois generated. Along the way he selected for use one or the other theory as required by the problem under study, his important work on factionalism in American Indian societies (1955) being but one example.1 As Anthony F. C. Wallace has described it: Fenton’s career also can serve as the epitome of a certain kind of professional life in anthropology. He is and has always been an Iroquoianist, allowing himself only so much time with other subjects (Taos, Klamath, Blackfoot, Maori) as to give some added perspective to his view of Iroquois. This single-minded devotion to one group, and the emphasis on ethnographic and historical description and classification (although always illumined by, and illuminating, theory) makes Fenton’s role unique among American anthropologists of my acquaintance.2 Bill’s ability to remain focused on Iroquoia is even more surprising given the uncertainty of a career in anthropology during the years of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the immediate post-war period. His professional life began in 1935 as an employee of the United States Indian Service on the Tonawanda Reservation, near Akron, New York, while still introduction | xi completing his doctorate. After receiving his degree in 1937, Bill introduced and taught anthropology for a year and a half at St. Lawrence University in New York’s north country. In 1939 he joined the Bureau of American Ethnology as ethnologist, serving with distinction in that post until 1951. There he was welcomed by the likes of anthropologists John R. Swanton, David I. Bushnell Jr., Henry B. Collins, John P. Harrington, and to a lesser extent, Aleš Hrdlička. From his office in the landmark “brownstone tower” of the Smithsonian Institution, he played an active role at the Smithsonian War Committee and the Ethnogeographic Board among other projects. Then, from 1952 to 1954, while a member of the National Research Council, he became the first to hold the position of executive secretary of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology. Beginning in 1954, and for the next thirteen years...