Amskapi Pikuni: The Blackfeet People

6. About Clark Wissler

six About Clark Wissler Clark Wissler was born September 18, 1870, on an Indiana farm, and died August 25, 1947, in New York City. Between 1902 and 1905, he traveled to several northern Plains reservations to record cultural practices and collect representative materials for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, his employer. When he met the gifted half-Piegan David Duvall in Browning, Wissler concentrated his ethnographic research on the Montana Piegan, training Duvall to systematically interview elders and organize their memories of pre-reservation life. Duvall’s tragic suicide, at age thirty-one, on July 10, 1911, cut short this fruitful collaboration . Wissler wrote up their material for a series of monographs published by the American Museum, the first listing Duvall as co-author, the succeeding with only Wissler as listed author. Twenty years later, Wissler decided to prepare a study of “The History of the Blackfoot Indians In Contact with White Culture.” A partial manuscript, dated 1933, is among the papers left after his death. Why he did not complete this study, he did not indicate. Wissler’s 1933 manuscript is unusual for its time, not a political history but one focusing on, as he put it, “human ecology,” relationships between people and their environment. Piegans’ “standard of living,” he noted, changed through the three centuries of European intrusions into their country. A people who more perfectly than any other represented nomadic bison hunters, the quintessential Plains Indians, Blackfoot led bison herds into corrals for slaughter for at least two millennia, then in the 18th century added care of horse herds to their way of life. Bison and the “Indian ponies” bred by Blackfoot were very well adapted to Blackfoot country, the northwestern Plains and Rockies foothills. Wissler believed that a history of the Piegan needed to understand the bison economy, the incursions of fur traders, and the nation’s adjustments to 229 230 AMSKAPI PIKUNI the catastrophe of bison extinction. His student John C. Ewers wrote a history, after Wissler’s death, titled The Blackfeet: Raiders of the Northwestern Plains (1958). Perhaps the title attracted Western lore aficionados; it certainly does not do justice to the Amskapi Pikuni. We think Wissler’s manuscript, with narrative summaries and an outline drawn from annual reports of the Blackfeet Agency superintendents, deserved completion. His perspective on political economy and its ecological base clarifies the issues with which the Piegan had to deal. Clark Wissler’s Life Clark Wissler’s father’s family, originally from southern Germany, and his mother’s, from England, both emigrated to America in the early 18th century, and to the Midwest—Indiana—a century later when Midwestern First Nations were being dispossessed of their lands. Wissler grew up familiar with the struggles of farmers and lingering echoes of the frontier . His father worked for a time as a school superintendent and edited a county newspaper. Clark graduated from high school in 1887, taught for five years in rural Indiana schools, and then for a year served as principal of the high school he had attended. By 1893, he had saved enough to enter Indiana University, with some credits earned summers from Purdue University. Majoring in experimental psychology, Wissler obtained his BA in 1897 and a Master’s degree two years later while supporting himself by teaching psychology and education at the Ohio State University. In 1899, he received an assistantship in psychology at Columbia University in New York, where he completed a PhD in that field in 1901. It happened that Wissler’s major professor, James McKeen Cattell, had an office adjacent to that of Franz Boas, and encouraged Wissler to take courses in anthropology from him. For two years, Wissler continued to work in experimental psychological research with Cattell until there was an opportunity for a job at the American Museum, where Boas was Curator of Anthropology. A classmate at Columbia remarked that at that time, there were more jobs for young anthropologists than for young psychologists. His boyhood tramping through farm fields collecting Indian artifacts, guided by a local enthusiast, infected Wissler with an abiding appreciation of First Nations cultures. He became experienced in scientific method during his studies in experimental psychology, and was, Boas wrote when recommending him for the American Museum position, “very adaptable and highly efficient” (quoted in Freed and Freed 1983:804). Initially , Wissler went to the Dakotas and Montana for ethnography with About Clark...