Voodoo Priests, Noble Savages, and Ozark Gypsies: The Life of Folklorist Mary Alicia Owen by Greg Olson (review)

Greg Olson has given Americanists a unique biographical portrait of one of the first and most famous women folklorists, Mary Alicia Owen (1850–1935). An archivist at the Missouri State Archives, Olson clearly is a regionalist at heart, sensitive to the state’s continuing appreciation of Owen’s contributions as a strong-willed, intellectually inquisitive writer who lived her entire adult life in a St. Joseph home shared with her similarly unmarried sisters, equally devoted to artistic and scientific endeavors. However, Olson also illuminates the wider context of Owen’s life as a Vassar-educated, southern woman of the Gilded Age, raised in a slave-holding family and still racist in her sentiments, yet committed to producing literary representations of the multiethnic borderlands of early Missouri for the world.

Owen is most recognized for her creative stories and descriptions of African American hoodoo practices and amateur salvage ethnography of local indigenous peoples. Mentored by fellow amateur folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, she conducted fieldwork with local Black conjurers by attending ceremonies, collecting charms and fetishes, and acting as a hoodoo apprentice. Her book, Old Rabbit, the Voodoo, and Other Sorcerers (1893), established her as an international authority on these religious practices, and served to promote transatlantic intellectual fascination in “voodoo” and related African American traditions, even as her unpublished letters reveal contempt for her “superstitious” Black consultants, and acceptance of racial hierarchies and corresponding social practices of the times. Owen’s depictions of Native American history and culture were decidedly more sympathetic, if typical in their romantic characterizations. Here, too, she relied on fieldwork, routinely visiting Sac and Fox communities, soliciting stories and purchasing artifacts directly from Native consultants, culminating in Folk-Lore of the Musquakie Indians of North America (1904). Through this quasi-ethnographic monograph, and separate fictional melodramas of forced removal and tragic mixed-race affairs, she crafted a regional version of noble savagery and the vanishing Indian—a usable past that continues to influence St. Joseph today, perpetuating white legends and promotional iconography of the area as a paradisiacal Indian burial ground while rendering invisible the persistence of Native people.

One strength of this biography is the author’s description of Owen’s fictional oeuvre—usually published under a pseudonym in nationally prominent magazines—that served as an outlet for her unease with changing gender and social conventions. However, there is only faint attempt to configure her writing into a larger critical framework of how imperialist nostalgia works, or how the emergent professionalization of folklore struggled to confirm cultural differences but resist racial divides and primitivist preoccupations. Particularly glaring is the author’s missed opportunity to connect Owen to Zora Neale Hurston’s later efforts to reclaim a Black perspective on hoodoo from the white imaginary Owen helped create. Nevertheless, Olson’s biography is a noteworthy effort to limn the contributions of an early American folklorist to the history of race and region.