Notes on the Caddo

Supplement to AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Volume 43, No. 3, Part 2
Memoirs Of The American Anthropological Association

The following data were recorded in New York City in the winter of 1921-22 with the cooperation of White Moon, a recent Caddo graduate of Carlisle who in New York shrewdly called himself Chief Silver Moon. In Oklahoma he was generally known as Mike Martin. In December, 1927, at Anadarko, Oklahoma, while collecting folk tales from the Kiowa, I had opportunities to check up on some of White Moon's data and to add to them, as I worked with two middle-aged men, James Ingkanish, a Caddo; and Grayson Pardon or Ninnid, whose mother was a Delaware, his father, Caddo, and his father's father's father, a Frenchman.

     Dr. Gladys Reichard worked with White Moon in language and checked some of the terms he gave me. My thanks to her, also to Dr. Erminie Voegelin for comparative notes, for reading manuscript and encouraging publication. I have worked so little with broken cultures that it was hard to estimate the value of this contribution. It seemed quite negligible, but Dr. Voegelin opines that in view of the dearth of information about the Caddo it will be welcome. Comparatively little may be known about the Caddo, yet had I known as much about the ethnology of Southeastern tribes as is to be known today I might have secured fuller Caddo records.

In my ignorance lay one advantage, I was not consciously or unconsciously seeking survivals. Now, in editing the notes, I am all the more impressed by the persistence of Southeastern traits in these fragmentary groups of the once large Caddo confederacies. How little the Caddo seem to have been affected by recent Indian neighbors in Texas and Oklahoma is another general impression. Probably broken cultures thrown together helter-skelter borrow little from one another.

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Notes About the Book:

Source: Notes on the Caddo, Memories of the American Anthropological Association, Elsie Clews Parsons, 1921.

Online Publication: The manuscript was scanned and then ocr'd. Minimal editing has been done, and readers can and should expect some errors in the textual output.

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