0.1 Editor's introduction: on frank g. speck’s oklahoma and indian  (Page 14/4)

The essays by American anthropologist and folklorist Frank G. Speck (1881-1950) that are gathered in this collection, under the title Negro and White Exclusion Towns and Other Observations in Oklahoma and Indian Territory , were first published in The Southern Workman , a journal of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, a non-denominational industrial school “for Negroes and Indians” founded in 1868 and located in Hampton, Virginia. The institution is today known as Hampton University and, given its long and distinguished history, it can be seen as a flagship institution among what are known in the United States as the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Among such institutions, it has a distinctive history as a college that also played a key role in American Indian educational history. Because of the involvement of numerous American anthropologists in both progressive social reform and the study of African American and American Indian communities, The Southern Workman became a regular venue through which such scholars communicated with interested non-specialist audiences, particularly those Hampton alumni who graduated to become influential members of their own communities.

At the time that that he published the first of these essays--“Observations in Oklahoma and Indian Territory”--Speck was still a young Ph.D. student in anthropology studying under the supervision of Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas (Blankenship 1991; Jackson 2004, 2005). As is described in greater detail in Jackson (2004), Speck had visited the “Twin Territories” during the summers of 1904 and 1905 in order to pursue the field research that would provide the basis for his doctoral dissertation, an ethnography of the Yuchi (Euchee) people. This study was published in 1909 as Ethnology of the Yuchi Indians (Speck 1909a, 2004). Despite his special concern during these summers with the Yuchi, Speck pursued incidental but significant studies among a wide variety of American Indian communities, including the Chickasaw (1907c), Osage (1907d) and Muscogee (Creek) (1907a). This ethnographic work among the American Indian peoples of present-day Oklahoma is relatively well known to scholars and to interested members of the relevant native communities. The work from this early period in Speck’s career that remains much less known are the series of essays that he contributed to The Southern Workman (Speck 1907b, 1907e, 1908, 1909b, 1911). While listed in the bibliography compiled by his own student John Witthoft (in Hallowell 1951), these essays have been inaccessible to general readers and have gone largely ignored by scholars.

In contrast to his studious ethnographic and ethnological articles and monographs--which are valuable contributions to Americanist cultural history--Speck’s essays in The Southern Workman are lively, partisan and sometimes-biting observations on everyday realities in Oklahoma. They were made right at the dramatic and, for native peoples, very destructive moment in which the territories were being transformed into the 46th U.S. state. Oklahoma statehood occurred on November 16, 1907, the same year that saw publication of his essay “Observations.” In the Southern Workman essays, Speck does not limit himself to American Indian matters but takes in the full social complexity of Oklahoma as it was during his visits. African Americans and European Americans (in all their diversity) are just as much his concern in these essays as are the American Indian peoples whom he traveled cross-country to learn from. As the reflections of a trained social scientist actively seeking to make sense of Oklahoma at the moment of statehood, these brief essays are invaluable. Of course they are written in the language of a turn of the (20th) century scholar and they reflect the broader social and cultural world of which Speck was a part. He, for instance, adopts the language of race while attempting to critique white racism. Like Boas his teacher and like many of his classmates and contemporaries, Speck was part of an effort to systematically use the tools of anthropology to rethink race and to address the problems of prejudice, but this effort was (and is still) a work in progress. In 1907, this part of the Boasian project was still in its early stages. Boas’ students had not yet established a stable institutional framework to pursue their work and the conceptual tools that they were fashioning were still in rudimentary form. And, of course, they were people pushing against, but embedded within, the dominant social frameworks of their time.