| INTRODUCTION TO THE BISON BOOK EDITION |
| Frank G. Speck: American Ethnologist (18811950) |
| Of all of Franz Boas's students, Frank G. Speck was the most persistent fieldworker. As his contemporary Edward Sapir once remarked, Speck was forever at it. From the "Dying Speech Echoes of Connecticut," heard as a boy, to the songs of the Eagle Dance sung by the Allegany Senecas to revive him at the brink of the grave, Speck kept an ear to the wind for the voices of remnant Indian bands rising from the hills and swamps of the Eastern Woodlands. No academic appointment, no learned gathering, no university function, took precedence over the visit of an Indian colleague, the summons to a tribal council, or the call to attend a ceremony. Though qualified in every respect, and learned in fields outside of anthropology, Speck did not covet academic honors; he rather valued the good opinions of his Indian friends and esteemed them as colleagues along with academicians.* |
| In the 1930s no member of the Yale faculty except Sapir had experienced Iroquois fieldwork at first hand. Sapir knew Speck as a fellow teaching assistant at Pennsylvania, and as chief of the Anthropological Survey of Canada, Sapir had employed Speck on contract research. Sapir sent me to see Speck in the spring of 1933, a visit that marked the beginning of a professional relationship and warm friendship of nearly twenty years. |
| I had glimpsed Speck briefly at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association held in 1931 at Andover Academy, where I went to learn what it meant to be an anthropologist. We did not meet. Speck did not stay for the entire session. I recalled seeing a compact individual with graying hair, a smoker of small cigars, seated on a couch talking with a colleague. |
| My trip to Philadelphia was to consult Speck before commencing Iroquois fieldwork. On climbing the stairs of College Hall, I found an elf of a man seated with knees drawn up to his chin on a deep window ledge opposite Speck's office door. I remarked that I was hoping to meet Dr. Speck, and the man replied that so was he. My fellow visitor went on to extol Speck's virtues as a field ethnologist: no one had quite the same approach or had comparable success with native Indians. My informant allowed that he too was an ethnologist, John Swanton by name. This indeed was a banner day for a graduate student. |
 | | | | * I derive Speck's career from two previous articles, both titled "Frank G. Speck's Anthropology:" the first appeared in The Life and Times of Frank G. Speck 18811950, Roy Blankenship, ed., University of Pennsylvania Publications in Anthropology, no. 4, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1991, pp. 937; the second appeared in Man in the Northeast, no. 40, 1990, pp. 95101. By permission. |
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