James Mooney
James Mooney (born February 10, 1861 – died December 22, 1921) was an American anthropologist, most famous for his work on Cherokee Indians.
Life
'James Mooney was born February 10, 1861 in Richmond, Indiana, into a family of Irish immigrants to the United States. His father, James Mooney, died soon after his son’s birth, and so Mooney’s mother, Ellen Devlin, had to raise her son alone. James graduated from high school in 1878, and continued to teach public school for one year, after which he joined the staff of Richmond Palladium as a newsman.
Mooney became interested in American Indians as a child, and started to study their culture. In 1884 he tried (unsuccessfully) to get employment at the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology (later the Bureau of American Ethnology). However, after the mayor of Richmond sent a letter to John Wesley Powell, the director of the Smithsonian, in which he introduced Moody as a “devoted anthropologist”, and after Powell saw the work of Mooney in which he compiled a dictionary of tribal names and their synonyms, Mooney was immediately hired. He moved to Washington, D.C. and married Iane Lee Gaut in 1897, with whom he had six children.
Mooney started his field studies among Cherokees in 1887, on which he spent several years. It led to the publication of his seminal works – Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (1891), Myths of the Cherokee (1900), and The Swimmer Manuscript: Cherokee Sacred Formulas and Medicine Prescriptions (1932). These publications are often regarded as one of the best records of Cherokee culture ever compiled.
In late 1890, while visiting Indian Territory, he witnessed the Ghost Dance – the religious ritual that became a center of the messianic religious movement among the Native Americans in 1890s. Mooney spent three years in study of this social phenomenon, which resulted in his The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 in 1896. This work is considered a masterpiece, which earned Mooney fame among fellow scholars.
Mooney continued to work among Kiowa and Comanche Indians throughout 1890s, compiling his second greatest work - The Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians, in 1898. The calendar recorded Kiowa’s pictographic art, which represented a history of their tribe. Mooney’s work proved falsity of the belief that Native Indians are people without a written history.
Mooney spent next twenty years in studying Peyote Religion. His support for the use of peyote in religious practices, however, draw negative attention on his work. In 1918 he assisted in the chartering of the Native American Church of Oklahoma, an act that ignored federal attempt to ban peyote. The Secretary of the Interior issued a ban on Mooney’s research, which Mooney unsuccessfully tried to lift for the remaining of his career. He died in his home in Washington in 1921.
Work
Mooney started to study American Indians as a hobby, but his passion for them later turned into a long and successful career. As a young man he compiled a list containing 3,000 tribal names and their synonyms, what eventually turned into the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (1907). After he started to work for Smithsonian, his dream came true and he Mooney soon became expert in Native American culture.
Great influence on Mooney left Washington Matthews, curator of the Army Medical Museum, and Mooney’s personal tutor at Smithsonian. He taught Mooney that in order to understand Indian culture, one has to totally immerse in it. Mooney thus learned to speak Cherokee, Kiowa, and Comanche, and lived with the tribes he studied.
Mooney became famous after his research on the Ghost Dance movement. Living among Cherokees, Mooney noticed the conflict between traditional Indian culture and the culture of the white man. He witnesses the resistance toward forceful assimilation, especially exhibited by some shamans and traditional healers. When in 1890s Ghost Dance movement swept across United States, uniting numerous Indian tribes under the common denominator of nonviolent resistance to Euro-American expansion, Mooney became advocate for Indian cause. Through his writings he tried to expose Indian culture in a light understandable to a white man. He even made comparison, in one of his writings, between the Ghost Dance Religion and other religions, including Christianity. On that way he tried to bridge the gap between the cultures.
Legacy
Mooney’s study on Ghost Dance movement is sometimes regarded as his greatest work. That was the first accurate historical account of the movement, which was later used by generations of anthropologists as a source of information about the background of the Sioux rebellion.
Regarding methodology, Mooney can be considered one of the true pioneers of ethnological research. His immersion into the Indian culture led him not only to understand it, but to became important advocate for the Indian cause.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- American Council of Learned Societies (2002). Biography of James Mooney. Oxford University Press
- Hodge, Frederick W. (Editor; 2003). Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico. Digital Scanning. ISBN 1582187487
- Moses, L.G. (2002). The Indian Man: A Biography of James Mooney. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0803282796
Bibliography
- Mooney, J. (1891). Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology
- Mooney, J. (1896). The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, part 2.
- Mooney, J. (1898). Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians. Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, part 2
- Mooney, J. (1898). The Messiah Religion and the Ghost Dance
- Mooney, J. (1900). Myths of the Cherokees. Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology
- Mooney, J. (1932). The Swimmer Manuscript: Cherokee Sacred Formulas and Medicinal Prescriptions. Reprint Services Corp. ISBN 0781240999
- Mooney, J. (1982). Myths of the Cherokee and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Charles & Randy Elder Publishers. ISBN 0918450055
Credits
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