Frank Speck

Early life and education

Frank Gouldsmith Speck, son of Frank G. and Hattie Speck, was raised in urban settings (in Brooklyn, New York and Hackensack, New Jersey), with occasional summer family sojourns to rural Connecticut. He had two siblings: a sister, Gladys H. (8 years younger), and brother Reinhard S. (9 years younger). The Speck family was well-to-do, with live-in servants that included a German woman, Anna Muller, and a mixed Native American/African American woman, Gussie Giles from South Carolina. Around 1910, Frank married Florence Insley, from Rockland, New York, and they raised three children: Frank S., Alberta R., and Virgina C. Speck. The family lived in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, also keeping a summer home near Gloucester, Massachusetts.

As a young man, Frank developed an affinity for forests and swamps and wild landscapes, and for the Native people who lived in these locales. These interests inspired him to pursue anthropological studies. He was accepted into Columbia University in 1899. After working closely with professor and linguist John Dyneley Prince, who encouraged his interests in Native American Indian language and culture, he was introduced to anthropologist Franz Boas.

Around 1900, during a summer camping trip to Fort Shantok, Connecticut, while on break from Columbia. Speck was surprised to encounter a group of Mohegan Indian young men about his own age. Burrill Fielding, Jerome Roscoe Skeesucks, and Edwin Fowler introduced him to about 80 other members of their tribe living in Uncasville, near Fort Shantok, in Mohegan, Connecticut. Speck took a particular interest in Fidelia Fielding, an elderly widow who (unlike most of her neighbors) still fluently spoke the Mohegan Pequot language. Modern sources suggest that Speck was raised by Fidelia, but there is no evidence in Mohegan tribal records to support this notion. There is, however, no question that Speck's "interests in literature, natural history and Native American linguistics" were inspired by his early encounters with Mohegan people.

At Columbia University, Speck found his direction for life study as an anthropological ethnographer. He received his BA from Columbia in 1904, and proceeded to initiate fieldwork among the Yuchi Indians, receiving his M.A. in 1905 From 1905 to 1908, he continued his work on Yuchi data, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1908), with his dissertation supervised by Boas. This ethnography focused on the Yuchi people of Oklahoma, among whom he worked in 1904, 1905, and 1908.

Career

In 1907, George Byron Gordon awarded Frank G. Speck a one-year Harrison Fellowship as a curator/research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, while also recruiting him to teach ethnology at the University. The Harrison Fellowship was next held in 1908 by Speck's linguistic colleague Edward Sapir. At Penn, Speck rapidly advanced, gaining a series of ready re-appointments as a faculty member while completing his doctoral work. By 1910, he was appointed as a full faculty member in the new department of Anthropology. By 1913, after a contentious split with Penn Museum Director Gordon, Speck was appointed as chair of the Department. He headed the Department for four decades, stepping down only after his health failed in 1949.

Speck was unique among many anthropologists of his generation in choosing to study American Indians close to home, rather than people of more distant lands. The pressures of relocation, boarding schools, cultural assimilation, and economic marginalization had, however, caused many Native American people to lose traditional lands, material, and culture. Speck found that his work constituted, in effect, a "salvage operation" to try to capture ethnological material during a time of great stress for Indigenous people. He began his efforts among Native Americans in New England, and soon expanded to regions as far afield as Labrador and Ontario in Canada.

Among his students at Penn, Speck nurtured a generation of prominent anthropologists, including: A. Irving Hallowell, Anthony F. C. Wallace, and Loren Eiseley, among many others. Speck also sponsored a few Native American students at Penn: his research assistant Gladys Tantaquidgeon and, for a brief time, Molly Spotted Elk. In 1924, Speck arranged to enroll Tantaquidgeon in Penn's College Courses for Teachers. Over time, their positions evolved from teacher/student to intellectual colleagues, and he encouraged her to take charge of independent research projects among Delaware, Wampanoag, and Mohegan peoples.

Speck especially loved fieldwork and typically camped and traveled with the people he studied. During an era of extreme social stratification and white elitism, Speck did not hesitate to invite his Native informants to join him in his field research, to offer lectures in his classroom, and to stay in his home. Colleagues and students like Ernest Dodge, Carl Weslager, Loren Eisely, and Edmund Carpenter later recalled that Speck was extraordinarily accepting of, and seemed most comfortable among, Indians and other people of color. William Fenton recalled that Speck would often absent himself from academic functions when Native American informants came to visit him in Philadelphia.

During his fieldwork with the Iroquois, Speck became close to members of the Seneca Nation, who marked their relationship by giving him the name Gahehdagowa ('Great Porcupine') when he was adopted into the Turtle clan of the Seneca people. Such adoptions were a means of assigning a kinship position to outsiders who were welcome guests; they did not, however, constitute tribal membership. Speck was particularly interested in how family and kinship systems underlay tribal organizations and relations to homelands and natural resources. In Canada, he developed maps of individual family bands' hunting territories to document Algonquian land rights. These later became crucial to Native American land claims.

From the 1920s through the 1940s, Speck also studied the Cherokee in the Southeast United States and Oklahoma. Through the years, he worked extensively with tribal elder Will West Long of Big Cove, western North Carolina. Speck credited Long as co-author of his 1951 book Cherokee Dance and Drama, along with his colleague Leonard Bloom.

Speck was elected to numerous professional associations, where he took an active role on committees, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Anthropological Association, American Ethnological Society, Geographical Society of Philadelphia, and Archaeological Society of North Carolina (honorary). He conducted work for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Collections

Frank G. Speck collected thousands of Native American objects, along with many reels of audio recordings, reams of transcriptions, and photographs, which have been distributed into multiple museums, most notably the Museum of the American Indian (now the National Museum of the American Indian), Canadian Museum of Civilization (now History), and Peabody Essex Museum.

Speck's papers were collected and archived by the American Philosophical Society, of which he was a member. There are also collections of his papers at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec and at the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts

Works

Additional reading