Frank Gouldsmith Speck was an American anthropologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples among the Eastern Woodland Native Americans of the United States and First Nations peoples of eastern boreal Canada.
18 Facts About Frank Speck
1.
2.
Frank Speck was surprised to encounter a group of Mohegan Indian young men about his own age.
3.
Frank Speck took a particular interest in Fidelia Fielding, an elderly widow who still fluently spoke the Mohegan Pequot language.
4.
At Columbia University, Frank Speck found his direction for life study as an anthropological ethnographer.
5.
Frank Speck was assigned to teach the introductory course in Anthropology.
6.
Frank Speck headed the department for four decades, stepping down only after his health failed in 1949.
7.
Frank 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.
8.
Frank 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.
9.
Frank Speck began his efforts among Native Americans in New England, and soon expanded to regions as far afield as Labrador and Ontario in Canada.
10.
Frank Speck sponsored a few Native American students at Penn: his research assistant Gladys Tantaquidgeon and, for a brief time, Molly Spotted Elk.
11.
In 1924, Frank Speck arranged to enroll Tantaquidgeon in Penn's College Courses for Teachers.
12.
Frank Speck especially loved fieldwork and typically camped and traveled with the people he studied.
13.
Frank Speck was particularly interested in how family and kinship systems underlay tribal organizations and relations to homelands and natural resources.
14.
Frank Speck credited Long as co-author of his 1951 book Cherokee Dance and Drama, along with his colleague Leonard Bloom.
15.
Frank 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.
16.
Frank Speck conducted work for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
17.
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 American Museum of Natural History, Museum of the American Indian, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Penn Museum and Peabody Essex Museum.
18.
Frank Speck's papers were collected and archived by the American Philosophical Society, of which he was a member.