James Mooney
James Mooney was an American ethnographer who worked for the Bureau of American Ethnology for thirty-six years and studied North American, particularly the Kiowa, Cheyenne and Cherokee tribes. He lived for several years among the Cherokee. Known as "The Indian Man", he conducted major studies of Southeastern Indians, as well as of tribes on the Great Plains. He did ethnographic studies of the Ghost Dance, a spiritual movement among various Native American culture groups, after Sitting Bull's death in 1890. His works on the Cherokee include The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, and Myths of the Cherokee. All were published by the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, within the Smithsonian Institution.
Native American artifacts collected by Mooney are held in the collections of the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution and the Department of Anthropology, Field Museum of Natural History. Papers and photographs from Mooney are in the collections of the National Anthropological Archives, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution.
Early life
James Mooney was born on February 10, 1861, in Richmond, Indiana. He was the son of Irish Catholic immigrants, James Mooney Sr. and Ellen Devlin. His parents came from farming families in County Meath. They left for Liverpool around 1849 and then migrated to New York in 1852. That same year, they were married at the Little Church of the Transfiguration in New York City. Their first child, Mary Anne, was born in 1853. The family soon moved to Richmond, Indiana, where James Mooney Sr. worked at a local gas company. Their next daughter, Margaret, was born in 1856. A few years later, Ellen gave birth to their son, James Mooney. James Mooney Sr. died of pneumonia when his son was only a few months old.Mooney's mother raised her children Catholic, sending them to St. Mary's Catholic Church for religious education. Mooney and his siblings were also brought up learning about their Irish roots through their mother and grandmother's stories about Irish folklore, history and traditions. His sister Mary Anne would grow up to become a nun at Mount St. Clare Convent, while his other sister Margaret would remain a schoolteacher throughout her life.
As a child, Mooney was frequently left feeling weak due to his rheumatic fever, an illness which would pose difficulties for him throughout his adult life as well. Since he was young, Mooney's family and teachers had noted his studious nature. Mooney was known to go through obsessive phases. At eight years of age, he began a project to document all the books that had ever been published. Later on, he would also try to make a list of all the different types of sewing machines and all the insurance companies doing business at the time. In 1873, Mooney discovered his lifelong interest in Indians in the aftermath of the Modoc War, after hearing someone make a comment about it. He was 12 years of age at the time, and resolved to compile a list of the names and locations of all existing Native American tribes.
Mooney's formal education was limited to the public schools of the city, and he graduated from Richmond High School in May 1879. After graduation, Mooney became a schoolteacher for two semesters. In 1879, he joined the Richmond Palladium as a staff member but continued to devote his extra time to studying Native American cultures. He also increased his knowledge of Indian anthropology by studying the works of John Wesley Powell and Lewis Henry Morgan. While in Richmond, Mooney lived in close proximity to Earlham College, which allowed him to meet people who were involved in Indian affairs. During this period, Mooney was also able to meet with some Indians themselves as many of them attended Quaker missionary schools in the area. He spent his time in Earlham's library to read books about Indians and study his interests in more depth. He became a self-taught expert on American tribes by his own studies and his careful observation during long residences with different groups. The field of ethnography was new in the late 19th century, and he helped create high standards for the work.
Career at the Bureau of American Ethnology
In 1885, Mooney started working with the Bureau of American Ethnology at Washington, D.C., after years of written correspondence with John Wesley Powell to convince him of his qualifications. It was not until Mooney traveled to Washington in 1885 to personally meet with Powell and show him samples of his work that Powell allowed Mooney to work at the bureau as a volunteer.Mooney's first major assignment was to classify Native American tribes by linguistic categories. Mooney had previously already compiled a list of approximately 2,500 tribal names, which he referred to as his "Indian Synonymy." Powell assigned Henry Weatherbee Henshaw to assist Mooney in revising his synonymy. The final list was published as a 55-page booklet under the title A List of Linguistic Families of the Indian Tribes North of Mexico, with Provisional List of the Principal Tribal Names and Synonyms. This work became an essential manual for the bureau until a more comprehensive classification appeared in 1891 under Powell's name.
Mooney was then given a second assignment to build upon the work of Otis T. Mason, the curator of ethnology at the National Museum since 1884. The task was to review the bureau's library to determine its usefulness for ethnological research and create thorough files on Indian tribes by their linguistic affinity. Under Henshaw, who assigned several staff members to each linguistic group, Mooney, alongside Garrick Mallery, expanded on his original synonymy project and focused on the Algonquian and Iroquoian families.
After officially being sworn in as an ethnologist by the bureau in 1886, Mooney decided to embark on his first fieldwork among the Eastern band of the Cherokee, mostly in North Carolina. He worked closely with them for three consecutive seasons from 1887 to 1889, learning their language and daily life while collecting enough material to produce several important ethnographic studies. The extended length of time he spent amongst them allowed him to document sacred narratives, ritual practices, and historical traditions that were rarely shared with outsiders. This culminated in one of his most acclaimed publications, Myths of the Cherokee.
In the fall of 1890, Mooney was on his way to conduct fieldwork for his research on the Cherokee, authorized by the bureau, when the Ghost Dance began to draw public attention. He asked the bureau for permission to go observe the Ghost Dance instead, and was awarded it with the additional task of investigating the phenomenon thoroughly. His book, The Ghost-dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 included a balanced historical account drawing on unpublished government records, newspaper reports, and interviews with Native American people. Mooney's analysis was different from most of his contemporaries' analysis as he treated the Ghost Dance as a legitimate religious response to colonial dispossession rather than as a political conspiracy or delusion.
In his later bureau career, Mooney devoted increasing attention to the peyote religion. He viewed peyotism as one of the most significant Indigenous religious developments of the modern period and sought to document it comprehensively. His work in this area, however, eventually caused him trouble with federal Indian policy and led him to be met with suspicion and doubt by government institutions.
Writing career
Mooney's writing style was widely considered as evocative. His sympathetic treatment of Native Americans is attributed to his upbringing and ethnic heritage. Although he wrote as a scientist, his objective attitude toward Native Americans contrasted with other writing, which was often either romantic or discriminatory. He largely accepted the goal of Indian assimilation as outlined by reformers of the era. But, he was a witness to what the costs were to the traditional peoples and reported on issues and changes with objectivity.During the late 1800s Native Americans were under harsh attack in many areas, and essentially subjects of genocide by the United States of America. The Indian Wars, intended to suppress tribal resistance to European-American settlement of the West, was generally presented as required because Native Americans made unjustified attacks on pioneers. Mooney wrote more objectively about issues in the West.
Mooney took the time to observe various Native American tribes in the way they lived on a daily basis. Prior to his work, most people outside reservations learned about issues only from a distance. He wanted to learn and to teach other Americans about their culture. He published several books based on his studies of Native American tribes.
''The Ghost-dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890''
Mooney spent twenty-two months living among roughly twenty Plains tribes. His ethnographic writing provides a preface with a historical survey of comparable millenarian movements among other American Indian groups. In response to the rapid spread of the Ghost Dance among tribes of the western United States in the early 1890s, Mooney set out to describe and understand the phenomenon. He visited Wovoka, the Ghost Dance prophet, at his home in Nevada. He also traced the movement of the Ghost Dance from place to place, describing the ritual and recording the distinctive song lyrics of seven separate tribes. In his book, Mooney gave a vivid and detailed picture of a major revitalization movement and showed that the Ghost Dance is an Indian nativist movement which shared key similarities with other cultural renewal efforts and religions found across many societies, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Mooney compares Wovoka and his Ghost Dance to Messianic themes found in other religions and writes:The doctrines of the Hindu avatar, the Hebrew Messiah, the Christian millennium, and the Hesunanin of the Indian Ghost dance are essentially the same, and have their origin in a hope and longing common to all humanity.He argued that the Ghost Dance was meant to help Native American people cope with forced cultural change, not threatening war, as government agents and newspapers had claimed.
Chapter XIII of the text also investigated the background to and circumstances which resulted in the massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in December 1890.