George Horse Capture, Sr.

We have learned from Jill Norwood at the National Museum of the American Indian that "we have lost a friend and a champion of the early movement to promote tribal museums, George Horse Capture, Sr. on April 16."

Below is the obituary submitted by his family:

GREAT FALLS, MONTANA- The Creator has called George Paul Horse Capture Sr., “Nay Gyagya Nee” (Spotted Otter), 75, to the Big Sands on April 16, 2013. He was born and raised in Montana, a proud member of the A’aninin (Gros Ventre) tribe. He passed away from acute renal failure, complications of diabetes and congestive heart failure at his home in Great Falls, Montana surrounded by family. A family wake will be held at Mark and Elizabeth Azure's home at Fort Belknap Agency on Friday April 19 at 5 PM. The community wake will be held at the Red Whip Center, Fort Belknap Agency, Montana on Saturday April 20th at 5 PM and his funeral service will be held at the same location on Sunday April 21 at 11 AM. Burial will follow at the Fort Belknap Agency Cemetery. A feed will follow the burial.

George was born in a log cabin in Little Chicago on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation on Oct. 20, 1937. He lived there with his grandmother and cousins, attending school in Harlem, and then continuing his education in Butte while living with his mother. He served in the U.S. Navy as a Ship-fitter for 4 years and after being honorably discharged he enrolled in welding school in the San Francisco Bay area. After working as a welder’s helper for 5 years he applied for and became the youngest State Steel Inspector and only minority person at that time for the State of California. Indian activism was a strong topic in the late 1960’s and George participated in the Alcatraz occupation. That experience prompted his enrollment at the University of California-Berkeley where he obtained his Bachelors in Anthropology.

After graduating from Berkeley, he moved to Montana and taught at the College of Great Falls from 1974-77, attending Montana State University-Bozeman from 1977-79; where he received his Masters of History degree.

He became one of the first Native American curators in the country when he accepted the position of Curator of the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center Cody, Wyoming in 1979. During his tenure, George organized important exhibitions like "Wounded Knee: Lest We Forget" and "PowWow." He also organized the Plains Indian Seminars that allowed Indian people and Anglos to exchange ideas and present new scholarly material. George worked closely with Indian tribes throughout the Northern Plains insuring that their voice was heard in a museum setting. He founded the first powwow grounds associated with a museum in the country. Annual celebrations continue to be held at the Joe Robbie Powwow Gardens.

In 1994, he became the Deputy Assistant Director for Cultural Resources at the National Museum of the American Indian-Smithsonian Institution, and later, Senior Counselor to the Director. During his ten years at NMAI, he was instrumental in the organizing and presentation of the new facility on the Mall in Washington, D.C. He was also an advocate for repatriation that resulted in the returning of many sacred objects to the appropriate tribes. He retired in 2004 but continued to consult for many museums, lecture, publish, and powwow.

He has received numerous awards and honors for his work, including: Honorary Doctorate of Letters, Montana State University-Bozeman; Humanities Award, Montana Committee of the Humanities; Presidential Appointee to the National Museum Services Board; and a member of the Montana Committee for the Humanities.

He is widely published and known as an international expert on Native American art, culture, and history. He also produced a film and television program. His work includes "I'd Rather Be Powwowing" and "Indian Country." He took great pride in completing his life-long work of creating the Tribal Archive Project, a database that includes information from worldwide museum sources about the A'aninin. Throughout his career, he firmly believed in empowering Indian people. He was close to the A'aninin's tribal brothers, the Northern Arapaho. He was a keeper of tradition and knowledge in the Horse Capture family, and fulfilled his Sundance vows. He was a mentor to many.

He was also a man of dichotomies. He loved to travel as long as he didn't have to walk too far. He loved great simple Native American food and French cuisine.

George has four children from previous marriages, George Jr. (Theresa), Joseph (Lisa), Daylight (Mike), and Peter. He married the love of his life, Kay-Karol, on March 28, 1984. His was known as "Grandpa Braids" by his many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His grandchildren include Elizabeth (Mark), William, Sage, Valerie, Etanan, Dasah, White Bird, Singer, Cameron, and Red Willow. His surviving sisters include Carol Chandler, Caroline Yellowrobe, and many other loved ones. He made many great friends over the years.

George was preceded in death by his father and mother, Joseph Horse Capture and Carmen Falcon Deane; stepfather, Peter Deane; brothers, Joseph Rael Horse Capture, Gary Horse Capture, Emery Gray; sister Carmen-Jean Falcon; and grandfather and grandmother, Paul and Clementine Horse Capture.

Powwowing was in his soul. He truly loved to powwow and danced as much as he could. He enjoyed eating snow cones, greasy hamburgers, and Indian tacos. He loved to visit friends and relatives at celebrations. His emotions would swell when he heard the emcee announce during the Grand Entry, "All the dancers have entered the arena."

See also LA Times, Great Falls Tribune, Boston Globe, Indian Country Today.

Linda Cordell

Dr. Linda Cordell, a senior scholar at the School for Advanced Research, passed away unexpectedly on March 29, 2013. 

Dr. Cordell was an eminent scholar who literally wrote the book on Southwestern archaeology, with her Archaeology of the Southwest recently appearing in its third edition. Her skills as a researcher and writer were recognized over the years with many honors, from the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for American Archaeology and the A.V. Kidder Medal from the American Anthropological Association, to her election as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Perhaps even more importantly, Dr. Cordell was a great mentor to many students and colleagues over the years, all of whom mourn the loss of such a wonderful person and generous scholar. More information on Dr. Cordell's impressive career can be found on her SAR Senior Scholar page.

More from SAR including tributes to Linda here and about her scholarship here.  Her most recent book, published in 2012, is described here. 

Focusing on her role as long time Director of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, the Boulder Daily Camera also published an article about Linda here.

William L. Rathje: 1945-2012

William L. Rathje's three decades worth of landmark studies punctured many earlier assumptions of what happens when people throw things away.

William L. Rathje, a professor emeritus at the University of Arizona who pioneered the study of modern refuse as a scientific discipline, died at his home in Tucson, Ariz., on May 24.

Officials said Rathje, 66, died of natural causes. Services have not been announced.

More here

Elizabeth Brumfiel Passes

Ask someone about Aztec history, and most likely, they’ll talk about human sacrifice, warriors, priests and conquest.

But Elizabeth Brumfiel, a professor at Northwestern University, had other ideas.

She became a pioneering, world-renowned scholar on the Aztecs by examining their history and culture through women, farmers, artisans and the common folk. When other archeologists were studying the tombs and temples of the elite, she saw equally important history lessons in pottery shards.

More here

And, the AAA announcement here.

Tribute: Ivan Karp

On Saturday, Sept. 17, the Emory community lost a friend, professor and colleague in Ivan Karp.

"Dr. Karp will greatly be missed by all that knew and worked with him," said Dean Lisa A. Tedesco in a message to the Laney Graduate School community. "He was a major figure in many fields and revolutionized the study of African studies, museum studies and public scholarship. He was a dedicated scholar committed to the advancement of graduate education in service of the public good. We are proud to honor his memory and service."

More here

Edmund Carpenter Passes

Anthropologist Edmund Snow Carpenter, who gained worldwide attention as a specialist in tribal art and visual media, died at his home on Long Island, N.Y., Saturday, after a long illness. Carpenter, the husband of Adelaide de Menil, was 89.

Read more here.

And, an excellent obituary in the New York Times here.

Editor's Note: If you have not yet read Two Essays: Chief and Greed, put it on your Amazon list immediately. It's a stunning piece of writing and insight into the museum world.

Former Gilcrease Museum director Paul Rossi dies at 81

From cowboys and Indians to mountain men and cavalry soldiers, nobody ventured far in the Old West without a horse and saddle.

In creating his "Great Saddles of the West" series of miniature bronzes, the goal of Paul Rossi, a former Gilcrease Museum director and nationally known Western artist, was to tell the story of the Western horse and rider through the evolution of their equipment.

Read more here

Dee Ann Story, 1931-2010

Dee Ann Story was a trailblazer.

A professor emeritus of anthropology from the University of Texas, Story entered the field when there were few women in the profession and was one of the first to work alongside her male colleagues on sites.

She directed archaeological investigations across the state, but Story is best known for her work on the George C. Davis site in East Texas, where Caddo Indians built mounds.

Story died Sunday of lung cancer. She was 79.

[Read more here.]

Burton Benedict Passes

Anthropologist Burton Benedict dies at age 87

BERKELEY — Burton Benedict, a professor emeritus of social anthropology at UC Berkeley and former director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, died of heart failure on Sunday (Sept. 19) at his Berkeley home. He was 87.

Benedict conducted his early anthropological fieldwork in the Indian Ocean island territories of Mauritius and Seychelles. A groundbreaking 1982 ethnography, "Men, Women and Money in the Seychelles: Two Views," co-authored by Benedict and his wife, Marion, remains must reading in anthropology decades later ... [continue here]

Mary Douglas and Material Culture Studies

In recognition of her recent passing, Daniel Miller has offered a rich and valuable assessment of Mary Douglas' work, especially her important contributions to material culture studies. Find his essay on the Material World blog here.

William C. Sturtevant (1926-2007)

Warm wishes and heartfelt condolences to the many, many visitors who have come to remember our colleague William Sturtevant and to mark his passing. In addition to the biographical sketch that I posted here on Sunday, there is now a more detailed biographical essay by William Merrill (also originally published in 2002) that can be found online here. The American Anthropological Association has republished the essay given below on its website (here). Please feel encouraged to leave appropriate additions to the essay using the comments function.

William C. Sturtevant (1926-2007)

Jason Baird Jackson

The field of anthropology lost a leading figure with the passing, on Friday, March 2nd, of William C. Sturtevant, Curator of North American Ethnology at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution.

William Curtis Sturtevant was born July 26, 1926, in Morristown, New Jersey, the first of three children of Alfred Henry Sturtevant and Phoebe Curtis Reed. His father was a pioneer in genetics, and in 1928 moved with his family to Pasadena, California, where he accepted a professorship in biology at the California Institute of Technology. His father's older brother, Edgar Howard Sturtevant, was a leading professor of linguistics at Yale University, where he specialized in Hittite and Indo-European languages.

Sturtevant earned his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied between 1944 and 1949. His progress was interrupted by a year, 1945-1946, in the U.S. Naval Reserve, during which he was stationed on Guam. This represented only a delay in studies that were focused and progressing well. His degree in anthropology was awarded with Highest Honors. Reflecting on his training at Berkeley, he has cited courses by John Rowe, Mary Haas, R.F. Heizer, David Mandelbaum, and Robert Lowie as particularly important (1955:3). Sturtevant's commitment to Native American studies within anthropology has been steadfast, having been initiated during third-grade lessons on Indian life and history. While an undergraduate, he participated in an archaeological field school at Chaco Canyon and a UNAM summer school in Mexico City. These experiences contributed to his later interest in Spanish ethnohistorical sources.

After graduating, Sturtevant immediately took up graduate studies in anthropology at Yale University, earning his doctorate in 1955. There he was especially influenced by anthropological linguist Floyd Lounsbury. Lounsbury's example, together with his training under Haas at Berkeley and Bernard Bloch at Yale, solidified Sturtevant's commitment to linguistic approaches within anthropology. Such methods and theories were already at the core of Americanist anthropological scholarship as consolidated by Franz Boas, but Sturtevant became an exemplar of this tradition during a period when it was transforming on some fronts and being de-emphasized on others. Sharing Sturtevant's commitment to linguistically sophisticated ethnography was his friend and fellow-student Harold Conklin. His first published article was a thorough study of Seneca musical instruments written jointly with Conklin (1953). Beyond its ethnographic significance, this paper was an early example of rigorous ethnosemantic method, an approach to which both scholars later contributed theoretical works (Sturtevant 1964). Sturtevant's interest in the West Indies derived from work at Yale with Irving Rouse (Sturtevant 1960b).

In 1950, Sturtevant began a life-long research relationship with the Seminole people of Florida. During his doctoral research, he worked most closely with Josie Billie, an important Seminole "medicine maker" (Sturtevant 1960). This early research generated a steady stream of essays in ethnography, oral history and ethnohistory that established him as a leading figure in the anthropology of the Eastern United States. Most important among these contributions is his dissertation, an ethnoscientific ethnography of Seminole medicine, ritual and botany (1955). It stands among the most comprehensive and sophisticated studies of ethnobotany produced in the twentieth century and it remains crucial to the study of Woodland Indian cultures. Sturtevant's Seminole work was complemented by a continuation of research among the Iroquois that was also begun while a student at Yale. These experiences, supplemented by briefer periods of fieldwork throughout the Eastern Woodlands and broad study of the ethnohistorical sources about it, have provided background to his comparative studies of the region. They also informed his advocacy, in congressional testimony and other forums, for federally unrecognized Indian groups in the region (Sturtevant 1983).

Soon after graduation, Sturtevant left an instructorship at Yale and a curatorship at its Peabody Museum, for a position as Ethnologist and later General Anthropologist in the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology. He held this position from 1956 until 1965, when the Bureau was merged with the Department of Anthropology in the U.S. National Museum (later the National Museum of Natural History), where Sturtevant became Curator of North American Ethnology. He remained an active participant in the work of Smithsonian anthropology right up until the time of his death.

Most prominent among his Smithsonian projects was the Handbook of North American Indians, of which he served as general editor. Published by the Smithsonian, the handbook is a major multi-volume reference work summarizing anthropological, linguistic and historical knowledge about native peoples north of Mexico. Bearing the imprint of its editor, the thoroughness of the handbook has made it the essential resource for those interested in Native American societies.

Working throughout his career in museum contexts, Sturtevant was active in the fields of museum anthropology and the study of material culture. He has advocated for the importance of museums to general anthropology (1973), developed methods for anthropological museology (1977), and conducted research on museum collections (1967). In 1979-1981, he served as president of the Council for Museum Anthropology, publisher of Museum Anthropology and its companion weblog.

Sturtevant was also an important participant in the development of ethnohistory as an interdisciplinary field of study. He served as President of the American Society for Ethnohistory in 1965-1966 and his essays helped to solidify and frame this developing field (1968, 1971). The confluence of such interests and his training also produced a commitment to the history anthropology, an additional field with which he was engaged. In this area, he made significant contributions to the study of early encounters between Europeans and the peoples of the New World.

In addition to his presidency of the American Anthropological Association (1980-1981) and of those organizations already discussed, Sturtevant served as President of the Anthropological Society of Washington (1992-1993) and the American Ethnological Society (1977). He received numerous research grants and fellowships. Brown University awarded him the degree of L.H.D. in 1996. The Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives will house his professional papers.

In 1952, Sturtevant married Theda Maw with whom he raised three children, Kinthi D.M., Reed P.M. and Alfred B.M. (dec.). They divorced in 1986. In 1990, he married Sally McLendon, also a leading anthropological linguist and Americanist.

Sources Cited and Selected Significant Works

Conklin, Harold C. and William C. Sturtevant

1953 "Seneca Indian Singing Tools at Coldspring Longhouse: Musical Instruments of the Modern Iroquois." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 97:262-290.

Sturtevant, William C.

1955 The Mikasuki Seminole: Medical Beliefs and Practices. Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University.

1960a "A Seminole Medicine Maker." In In the Company of Man: Twenty Portraits by Anthropologists. Joseph B. Casagrande, ed. Pp. 505-532. New York: Harper.

1960b The Significance of Ethnological Similarities between Southeastern North America and the Antilles. Yale University Publications in Anthropology 64. New Haven: Yale University Press.

1964 "Studies in Ethnoscience." In Transcultural Studies in Cognition. American Anthropologist Special Publication 66(3) Part 2. A. Kimball Romney and Roy Goodwin D'Andrade, eds. Pp. 99-131. Washington: American Anthropological Association.

1967 "Seminole Men's Clothing." In Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Proceedings of the 1966 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society. June Helm, ed. Pp. 160-174. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

1968 "Anthropology, History and Ethnohistory." Ethnohistory. 13:1-51.

1971 "Creek into Seminole." In North American Indians in Historical Perspective. Eleanor Burke Leacock and Nancy Oestreich Lurie, eds. Pp. 92-128. New York: Random House.

1973 "Museums as Anthropological Data Banks." In Anthropology Beyond the University. Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings 7. Alden Redfield, ed. Pp. 40-55. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

1977 A Guide to Field Collecting of Ethnographic Specimens. 2nd Edition. Smithsonian Information Leaflet 503. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.

1978-2004 Handbook of North American Indians. 13 Volumes. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.

1983 "Tribe and State in the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries." In The Development of Political Organization in Native North America. Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, 1979. Elisabeth Tooker, ed. Pp. 3-16. Washington: American Ethnological Society.

1984 "A Structural Sketch of Iroquois Ritual." Pp. 133-152. In Extending the Rafters: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Iroquoian Studies. Michael K. Foster, Jack Campisi, and Marianne Mithun, eds. Pp. 133-152. Albany: State University of New York Press.

1998 "Tupinambá Chiefdoms?" In Chiefdoms and Chieftaincy in the Americas. Elsa M. Redmond, ed. Pp. 138-149. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

The preceding is adapted from: Jason Baird Jackson (2002) “William C. Sturtevant” In Celebrating a Century: The Presidents of the American Anthropological Association. Regna Darnell and Fredrick W. Gleach, editors. Pp. 257-260. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. © 2002 American Anthropological Association.

Also available online is a biographical sketch by Bill Sturtevant's NMNH colleague William Merrill. This essay was originally published (also in 2002) in a collection of papers composed in his honor.

Jason Baird Jackson is the editor of Museum Anthropology. He contributed to the “Southeast” volume of the Handbook of North American Indians, which was published under William C. Sturtevant’s General Editorship. He is an Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University.

Mary Druke Becker (1951-2006)

I am saddened to learn of the passing of ethnohistorian and museum anthropologist Mary Druke Becker (1951-2006), as reported in The Daily Gazette (Schenectady, NY) for July 31, 2006. Mary was a kind, thoughtful scholar and a friend to many, both in scholarly circles and in Iroquois communities. She kindly and quickly answered my call to write an obituary for William Fenton, offering a wonderful portrait of this leading figure in our field. This appeared in Museum Anthropology 29.1 earlier this year. Mary was affiliated for many years with the Iroquois Museum and was a active organizer of the annual Conference on Iroquois Research.

Mark A. Nichols has transcribed and posted The Daily Gazette obituary to the H-AmIndian Discussion list. Those interested in reading it can consult it thus online at: http://www.h-net.org/~amind/ or via the archives of the The Daily Gazette, online at: http://www.dailygazette.com/ .

Condolences are extended to Mary's many family and friends.