Bureau of American Ethnology reprints

Many books about American Indians are reprints of works from the Bureau of American Ethnology, a former division of the Smithsonian Institution. The BAE turned out hundreds of book-length “bulletins” and papers between 1880 and 1965.

I've been adding information about two BAE series to Common Knowledge. The series of 200 BAE Bulletins is here. The Annual Reports (which are barely started) are here.

The Smithsonian has lists of the whole series online. The Bulletins list is this one, and the Annual Reports are right here.

Some of you probably have some BAE works in your libraries.

Thanks for starting this group! I have several books on indigenous peoples and sovereignty issues, land issues, you name it. That was one of my specialty areas in grad school some years ago and I still do some reading in that area.

more than lists, they have copies online too! thanks for the thread.

http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/37878
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/37959
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb37575968z/date

I have a personal connection to these books, the annual reports anyway. I believe I have told this story in another thread but here goes.

Until they quit publishing these an anthropology graduate student could get a full set of these for free. My grandmother rented apartments near the bus line to the University of Cincinnati and one of her tenants left his set when he graduated. I was only nine or ten but she thought I would like to see these books about Indians.

Of course I could not read them, all of them anyway. They were scholarly research and some were written nearly (then) a hundred years earlier. However, there were lots and lots of drawings and maps and even photographs. I devoured them. My younger brothers devoured them. Unfortunately our parents moved when my youngest brother was away at college or we would still have them. He studied electrical engineering but he still is interested in Americas indigenous people, he takes his vacations to visit archeological sites.

Anyway, when I went back to college in the fall of 2007 one of the books for my History 111 class was The Seminole Indians of Florida. It looked familiar so I took it to my brothers for confirmation. It did come from one of the annuals. It has plenty of pictures but it is also one of the more readable texts in the collection. It was fun to reread it after over forty years.

It was also one of the most subversive things my parents ever let me read. The Seminole shared their resources, had liberal divorce, and were racially integrated. Exposing young, white, catholic, males to ideas like that was not done where and when I grew up.

My first encounter with the BAE annual reports was through a reprint of Myths of the Cherokee and The sacred formulas of the Cherokees, both by James Mooney. Living in North Georgia at the time, I was impressed by the localized legends and explanations of place names. The long sketch of Cherokee history still intrigues me with it's multi-voiced character: Part of it is written in a filiopietist rifle/plow/Bible style, familiar from so many 19th-century histories; other parts seemed to me to hold a barely suppressed rage at the dispossession of the Cherokee people, and all the uncounted crimes associated with it. But the most significant pages in either work contained the most powerful coming-of-age story I have ever read. It's under the heading of Uñtsaiyî (in Mooney's spelling system), "Brass" — a character who strikes me as perhaps an archetypal white man — but the real meat of the story is about a boy who seeks out his absent father, Thunder, and passes through trials that lead him to fulfill his identity as Lightning. Even after being filtered through Mooney's late Victorian prose, that story is like mountaintop air. Makes you feel more alive.

I'd still like to get hold of a BAE bulletin Mooney published about the Swimmer manuscript and other primary sources in the Cherokee language.

>3 brianjungwi:

Wow. Thanks for the links!