George Gustav Heye

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy E. Wilson. Before we get started, we'll do a little reminder at the top of this one that we have a live show coming up. Yeah, very exciting. Yeah. This is at the Indiana History Center, the Eugene and Marlyn Glick Indiana History Center. It's going to be on Friday, July nineteenth. You can come to the show and buy a ticket just for that, or you can buy a ticket that includes a meet and greet with us beforehand. We would love to see you there. It's as I said, Friday July nineteenth. It's going to be very fun. We have been there before, we really loved it. They have some exhibits I'm real excited to see this time. If you would like to come and see us and see the many cool things they have going on, you can check out Indianahistory dot org slash events and get all of your info and register. And now we'll hop into the episode, which is about George Gustav High, who is a person that came across my zone of interest a while back, and I kept tiptoeing around him and thinking, do I really want to talk about this guy? And I do. His work in curating a collection of Native American artifacts has been really important because it has enabled many people to learn about indigenous cultures. But there's, of course the raft of problems involved. His collecting practices and his relationship to those cultures are very complicated. He sounds like a very interesting person to know, but also not without his foibles and problems. So we're going to talk about him today and how we're still living in a world influenced by what he did. Yeah, it was not a name I was familiar with until you told me that you're working on this episode. Yeah. George Gustav Hi was born September sixteenth, eighteen seventy four, in New York City at two ninety eight Lexington Avenue. Specifically, this was the family home. His parents were Carl Friedrich Gustav High and Marie Antoinette Lawrence High. Carl had been born in Germany and made his fortune in petroleum and started a company called Economy Refining Company. That business was eventually bought out for a very large sum by John D. Rockefeller, who made it part of Standard Oil. We have a whole podcast about that. He kept carl On in an executive position after that. So George, Gustav and his sister also named Marie Antoinette. Like their mother, they were both born into wealth. George's youth sounds fairly idyllic and carefree. He grew up with other wealthy boys as friends, and the High family spent summers at Lake Hapetcong, New Jersey, and the rest of the year Georgia attended Berkeley School. He often traveled to Europe with his father on business from the time he was a very young boy, so he was really very well traveled in comparison to most people living in the United States, certainly in comparison to other children. He graduated from the Berkeley School in eighteen ninety one. While he was still a student, George had joined the National Guard and served in Company one, seventh Regiment of the New York Guard from eighteen ninety to eighteen ninety six. He enrolled at Columbia for his undergraduate work and maintained active status in the Guard during his studies there. In eighteen ninety two, High started studying electrical engineering that was a new course at Columbia and that was part of the School of Minds there. While there he assisted Professor Michael Poopa in work that he was doing in long distance telephony. High senior thesis was a collaborative project with another student and friend, Paul McGann, on the use of organic oils as lubricants. I have a fun story about the thesis from behind the scenes. On Friday Great during his senior year, George was called up as a guardsman for the first and only time when a street trolley strike led to concerns of riots. And this strike, which involved five thousand workers walking off the job under the umbrella of the group Knights of Labor, tied up Brooklyn's transportation completely and it started out peacefully, but within a day pockets of violence had started to erupt as scab workers were brought in and the striking laborers physically restrained trolleys from moving. After a week of escalating tension, the National Guard had been brought in, and although George and his colleagues got the trolleys moving again, there were still many incidents of violence between strikers and the scab workers that had been hired in from other cities. As well as between strike workers and the militia. One striker was shot by the guard. George, though appears to have been pretty unscathed in the month long con and he went back to school when it was all over. In eighteen ninety six, High graduated with his electrical engineering degree. He'd already been taking engineering jobs before graduation. Although there's not a whole lot of information on the specifics, we do know that he was contracted with the White Crosby Company and often traveled for his jobs, and it's during that travel that he found the focus of his life's work. We have his own account of this experience. It includes some outdated language. We're reading it because it's such a formative moment in his story. Quote in eighteen ninety seven, I was sent to Kingman, Arizona as assistant superintendent of construction for a branch track to a mine about seventeen miles distant. I obtained a number of Navajo Indians for use as laborers for grading the right of way. I lived in a tent on the work, and in the evenings I used to wander about the Indians quarters. One night I noticed the wife of one of my Indian foremen biting on what seemed to be a piece of skin. Upon inquiry, I found she was chewing the seams of her husband's deer skin shirt in order to kill the lice. I bought the shirt, became interested in Aboriginal customs, and acquired other objects as opportunity offered, sending them back from time to time to my home at eleven East forty eighth Street. In fact, I spent more time collecting Navajo costume pieces and trinkets than I did superintending road beds. That shirt was the start of my collection. Naturally, when I had a shirt, I wanted a rattle and moccasins, and then the collecting bugs seized me and I was lost. When I returned to New York after about ten months in Arizona, I found quite an accumulation in articles. These I placed about my room, and I began to read rather intently on the subject of the Indians. So, okay, I never find anyone commenting on this, but I wanted to talk about it, because this idea of chewing leather seems to combat lice seems like it must have been some sort of misunderstanding. I could not find any mention of this practice. There are tales of leather hides being chewed to soften the seams, but even that is considered kind of an old wives tale and it's not really substantiated. Also, lice doesn't really tend to cling to leather. I went down a whole rabbit hole about that. So there are some mysteries in this account that I wrote, And likely this sort of strange thing is informed by a bit of otherism in trying to characterize the Navajo that he came into contact with as having these difficult to understand practices from a white person's perspective, and also just as part of exoticizing them. But he really did have a fascination with North American indigenous cultures from this moment on, and as he continued to travel work, he made it a point to indulge his hobby everywhere he went. As he mentioned in that account, kinda was doing more of that than his actual job at times. Professionally, George Gustav High next moved to the business of banking. In nineteen oh one, he formed an investment firm known as Battles High and Harrison. During the years that followed, he was able to make a lot of connections that would further his work in collecting indigenous artifacts, although he also had a hand briefly in entertainment. In nineteen oh four, he financed the construction of the Hudson Theater on West forty fourth Street. High sold the Hudson Theater after running it for a few years, but it's still there and it's still actively part of the Broadway scene. Yeah, I think as we're recording this, it is currently in the middle of a run of Merrily We Roll Along. Some of the people that George meant in his early years of collecting, both before and after he started the banking firm, included Joseph Kepler Junior, Marshall H. Saville, and George H. Pepper. Joseph Kepler Junior is pretty interesting. He was born Udo Kepler on April fourth, eighteen seventy two, in Saint Louis, Missouri. He studied at the Columbia Institute and abroad before stepping into his career in the same line of work as his father, that was political cartooning. Joseph Kepler Senior was the founder of Puck Magazine, and Udo became a contributor to it in eighteen ninety and then when Joseph Senior died in eighteen ninety four, Udo inherited his position and became part owner of the magazine, and at that point he also changed his name to Joseph Kepler Junior. And it was while he was helming Puck that Kepler met George Gustav High, and the two men shared this passion of Native American object collecting and study. Kepler's specific area of interest was the Iroquois, and he and II traveled together on trips to reservations during their friendship, and their first was in eighteen ninety nine when they visited the Cattaraugus and ti on Awanda reservations in western New York State. Unlike Kepler, who was an ardent but amateur collector, George Pepper was a professional ethnologist. He was born February second, eighteen seventy three, in Tottenville, New York, on Staten Island. He was interested in archaeology from an early age and spent time studying at the Peabody Museum at Harvard before getting a job at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, working as an assistant curator of Southwestern collections. Next he moved to Columbia University. Pepper's expertise further expanded High's interest and understanding of the bigger picture of Native American cultures of North America. Marshall Seville was also a professional. He had attended Harvard University and became particularly fascinated with Mexican history, and when Hi met him, he was a professor at Columbia and a founding member of the Explorers Club. He was also a few year older than High, Pepper, and Kepler, and he took on something of a mentor role with High in particular, and those two men would work together for decades. Through Kepler and especially Seville and Pepper, Hi realized that his haphazard approach to collecting was doing a disservice to the items that he had acquired in his early years of interest. High wasn't systematic in cataloging things or making sure to have careful notes about their providence. But he was mentored by his more experienced acquaintances to start taking more care when it came to records and to consider his collecting with more purpose instead of just picking up interesting things when he came across them. He started to consider how they fit into a larger collection to tell a story or enhance the narrative that might be told about the indigenous cultures they had come from. This led to High acquiring larger and sometimes already curated collections rather than collecting them piecemeal. And the first of these was one that Kepler and Seville had suggested. It was a bunch of pre Columbian pottery that had been found in New Mexico. So his collecting suddenly became a lot more serious, But this also often meant that he was buying from some other collector, whereas his small, one at a time purchases had generally been directly from Native Americans or indigenous people he had interacted with. He started purchasing these larger groups of objects in nineteen oh three, which is noted as a time when his interest transitioned from being a hobby to being his life's work. One part of this shift in his focus was that he started to put his considerable financial assets into financing trips and expeditions for and with various researchers to study and collect indigenous artifacts. This was not just a matter of George High opening his checkbook to make these trips happen according to a biography of High written by Jay Alden Mason in nineteen fifty eight, which was shortly after Hig's death. Hi's mother, Marie Antoinette, paid for a lot of these efforts. She had family money in addition to her fortune that her husband Carl had amassed, and she was happily willing to support her son's interests with it. In the course of just a few years, High funded trips were mounted to Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Ecuador. German American anthropologist Franz Boas was the source of an important acquisition for High. Boas was at the time teaching at Columbia University. He's credited with working to make anthropology a field of academic study while he was there, and BoA's, who had items he wanted to sell because he needed money to pay for his own research, hit a brick wall when he was trying to sell those to museums, and then he offered parts of his collection to George High. Hi also started to finance the research work that BoA's was doing that the university would not fund. Remember, this was still a relatively new field for academia and certainly for Columbia. So at this point Hi was paying through his mother for Marshall Seville, George Pepper, and Franz Boas to all Mount Field research expeditions. Coming up, We'll talk a bit about what was going on in High's personal life at this time, but first we will pause for a sponsor break. Another development in George's life was unfolding at the same time that he made his pivot to professional collector. On January fifth, nineteen oh four, he married Blanche Agnes Williams, who was from Massachusetts, and the pair moved to a new apartment at six sixty seven Madison Avenue. But George's collection quickly became too large to keep in their living space, and so he rented another space on thirty ninth Street, and when his acquisitions outgrew that space, he moved them to another space on East thirty third that he renovated to have an extra floor. And sometime during all of this movement and growth, he and others started referring to his growing collection as the High Museum, not of course, to be confused with the High Museum in Atlanta, spelled differently. George's name is Hye, but also not a museum in the sense that it was a place people could go visit. I also had this high museum confusion when you first told me you were working on this. Yeah, because I had only heard his name said out loud. I had not read it on anything. It is spelled h eye, not high. One of Georgia's most important acquisitions in the first decade of the twentieth century was a Hidatza medicine bundle. The Hidatsa people are part of the Three Affiliated Tribes nation of North Dakota. George acquired this piece in nineteen oh seven, and we are mentioning it here in the timeline of when he took possession of it. This becomes important decades later, so keep in mind, Yeah, he acquired it from a missionary who had gotten it in some way. In nineteen oh eight, George hired Mark Raymond Harrington, who had just graduated from Columbia with a master's degree in anthropology, as a full time collector for him, so basically someone he could just send out into the field to collect whenever he needed it. Harrington was instrumental in rapidly expanding the collection as he traveled along the North American East coast, and then across the South and acquired items from tribes everywhere he went. Although High had moved into progressively bigger spaces with his collection, it was never enough either, as Hi kept on buying up artifacts and now had people working under him to find even more. He made a deal with the University of Pennsylvania to house a large chunk of the collection from North America as a long term loan. This deal also included George becoming a vice president and his friends George Pepper and Mark Harrington being given positions so they could oversee the collection and continue to curate it for the university museum. He also paid for the university to do its own research projects in the field, as well as higher additional staff. In the book Collecting Native America, Clara Sue Kidwell notes in her biography of High that because of his ability to finance scholarship and anthropology privately, he was this very unique figure who was able to set up deals like this just as a private collector. This isn't like a case of institutions making some sort of trade agreement. He was just a guy who could throw money at things. This gave him so much power. According to Kidwell, he was able to dictate the University Museum's research and project planning because of it. Additionally, Georgia gustav Hi was a huge figure, both literally and figuratively. He was six foot three and waiter reported three hundred pounds. He was jovial with people, and he had this big personality and was really good at gaining people's trusts when he wanted so. His stature and personality, combined with his financial power, made him really formidable when he wanted something. In nineteen oh nine, High had stepped back from the banking firm, although he stayed connected to it for another five years, but in nineteen fourteen he made the decision to leave banking completely to focus on his collection. He had continued to hire staff to help him collect and things. We're moving so quickly that he really couldn't make time for anything but his collection. He also shifted his focus back to being more personally involved in excavations and research trips. We'll talk more about an incident that happened on one such trip in just a bit. And just to be clear, High's work was not a case where people didn't appreciate what he was doing until after his death. He made headlines all the time. For example, on February seventeenth, nineteen thirteen, the Daily Arkansas Gazette ran a story into the headline New York broker loses his yacht in making the discovery, but doesn't care much. That story shares how George was at the time financing three different expeditions in the West Indies and how one of the teams had located a pre Columbian paddle that was very valuable in a cave on Moore Island. The story goes into great detail about how paddles like it were described in writing about Columbus's travels in the area, and that it's believed that such paddles had not been seen since the late fifteenth century, and that the collected four foot long specimen was believed to be more than five hundred years old. And in the course of that find, a yacht called the Bessie J began taking on water during a storm and was lost. That was a yacht that was George's, and the write up mentions that four of the crew members aboard got into a dinghy and they were picked up later, but that one member of the crew might have been lost while they talk a lot about this boat. There's no further comment on that man's fate. But at the same time High's work was being written about with admiration, a very different sort of article about him was also populating its way through the North American press. Missus High had filed for divorce, and it seemed like everybody wanted to talk about it, especially about the couple's finances. The Washington Post wrote all about it, including the information that High's work was part of what drove the pair apart. Quote. The differences between mister and Missus High were set in the published report to be due to incompatibility of temperament, which had increased as mister High had become more and more absorbed in his scientific researches and as Missus High had become more devoted to her social duties. Coverage of their split escalated, and by the time the couple had their first hearing, it was covered in the papers every single day. A detail had emerged that kept readers of papers engrossed. A woman who was not named publicly had been named in the suit as well, suggesting that George had been having a fear. But while that might have caused a scandal, more attention was paid to the amount of alimony that Missus High was seeking. A brief blurb that ran all over the country and even internationally read simply quote, twenty one cents a minute, or seventy eight thousand dollars a year is the amount of alimony asked here today by Missus Blanche, a High, wife of George Gustavhi. The correspondent is characterized in Missus High's divorce complaint as a person of no prominence, And it seemed that most of the press just started going after Blanche, noting that that alimony that was requested was believed to be the highest ever on record. In a response, George's lawyers chose to accuse Blanche of bleeding George's fortune dry. One newspaper report quoted counsel as saying, quote, Missus High's sole idea was to come to New York and shine in society. By reason of his wife's extravagance, his estate has dwindled to three hundred and sixty thousand dollars, and his income is now only twenty nine thousand dollars a year. This was in contrast to a previous number given for George's worth of one million dollars. The judge in the case, named Aspinall, gave the following quote on the matter, quote, you may be absolutely certain that I shall not allow seventy eight thousand dollars alimony to any woman. These New York society women make me tired. They live too high. They go to fashionable hotels and drink highballs and smoke cigarettes instead of staying home and trying to make their husbands happy. They ride up Fifth Avenue in their fine automobiles with poodle dogs in their laps. And when they are married to a poor man unfortunate enough to have a million dollars, they come for it in court and say their social position requires an exorbitant amount of alimony. It will take me very little time to decide this motion. I feel like if a judge gave a quote like that ahead of a decision today, there might be some problems. Gossip columns started reporting that Blanche spent five hundred and eighty one dollars a month on alcohol and another forty nine dollars a month on cigars. Some even started to falsely report that George had been the one to file for divorce, showing a full turn of the press against missus High. There were some paper so that offered a counter argument. The Cincinnati Post noted, in a write up detailing Blanche's expenses, quote, nothing is said about what the husband spent, but it is a safe guess that if he had been trying like a man to live simply and wholesomely, the wife would never have been encouraged or allowed to form these ridiculous, wasteful, and extravagant habits. The Post also says that the judge probably should find for a lower alimony, but also that quote, we wish that he would say something fitting about the rich men of New York who make it a practice to spoil the women with whom they associate. They are the real profligates. This whole thing is very hard to read because it's all real, sexist and weird. But in the end, Judge Aspinall awarded Blanche just fifteen thousand dollars a year, as well as custody of the couple's two children. As for George, despite the seeming likelihood that he had possibly cheated on his wife, he seemed to emerge from the divorce with an unscathed reputation. In the years. Following the divorce settlement, High threw himself even more into his work. Before we talked about Blanche and George's divorce, we mentioned an incident that we said we'd return to. That was a trip he had made with his team to New Jersey where they excavated a Native American cemetery. During their excavation, George and his assistants found themselves in hot water. According to the Hudson Observer on July twenty second, nineteen fourteen, quote, Sussex County invoked the majesty of the law this week to stop George G. High of New York, a well known scientist, and his laborers from digging up the skeletons of Indians in the old Menacing burying ground in Sandytown Township. Berson Bell, who owns the land, had sold the right to excavate and remove the bones, and he was satisfied, but it appears that a lot of other folks were not so. Criminal proceedings were brought under a sanitary code, and a Justice of the piece imposed fines ranging from ten dollars each on the laborers to one hundred dollars on their employer. In the Hope of stopping the sacrilege, so even then people knew that this was wrong. George appeeled those fines. He felt that if he let the judgment stand, it was going to create a precedent for archaeology efforts to be hampered by legal issues going forward. He did get that ruling overturned, and he also felt that the skeletons that he had unearthed were important, and he sent them to the Smithsonian along with a paper that he wrote about the excavation, undoubtedly to kind of bolster it as something that was academically important. Nineteen fifteen was a significant year for High died in February, which meant he had direct access to his family money and no longer had to go through her to get it for his furious projects. He also went on an excavation trip to North Carolina, where he had to do some maneuvering to convince a landowner to let him dig up a burial mound on his property. And George also remarried in nineteen fifteen to Dorothean cown Page, who went by THEA and how the two met is reported a little differently from source to source, but a lot of them suggest that they met on that North Carolina dig. What's clear, though, is that they very much shared an interest in archaeology. The couple honeymooned by going on a dig at the Nakuchie Mound in White County, Georgia. Hi's visions for his collection evolved in the nineteeneens, and he made the decision that he wanted to open a public museum in New York. There were arguments made to him by existing institutions that such a collection would be more effective elsewhere, perhaps tied to those existing institutions, but High was adamant that he wanted to give New York the resources that he had found lacking when he first became interested in anthropology. He wanted people to be able to go somewhere and learn about indigenous cultures outside of academia. But to be clear, he was envisioning this as a place for people like him, wealthy businessmen with time and money. And a letter to Franz Boas about it, he specifically mentions quote men in New York that are placed as I was when discussing the people whose interests he was hoping to serve. So in nineteen sixteen he established the High Foundation and the Museum of the American Indian As part of this new venture, in nineteen seventeen, the collection that was on loan to the University of Pennsylvania was moved from the school's museum to its new home in New York. And while there have been rumors over the years of some sort of big fallout between High and the organization and they were disappointed, to be sure, there is also plenty of correspondence between George and the leadership of the university and its museum that seems quite cordial and appreciative. In both directions that was written after the fact, it truly seems that more than anything from George's position, it was just a matter of space finally being available for him to once again manage it himself, though it is one hundred percent truth the university would have rather than it stayed there. Hi gave the university museum other artifacts in return for the withdrawal of his collection, although they were by all estimations, much less valuable, and at least some of them seem to have been replicas and not original pieces. Coming up, we'll talk about the delayed opening of High's museum and a really reprehensible deception that he was part of. First we will hear from the sponsors that keep stuffiness in history class going. Once High's museum was founded, a number of his wealthy longtime friends from New York started donating their own collections to it, as well as supporting it with financial donations. Marshall Seville became the museum's director, and though this whole project had a great deal of support, it took six years from the time that construction began to when it finally opened, and that was because of the outbreak of World War One. But in nineteen twenty two, the Museum of the American Indian opened its doors to visitors. While setting up the structure of his museum, George also hired Frederick Webb Hodge, who had been at the Smithsonian, to edit a periodical for the Museum of the American Indian, knowing that it was important to publish scholarly works if he wanted to have his museum taken seriously in academic circles. One of the men that High hired was Amos E. One Road, who was a Dakota man and a minister who had studied at Columbia's Divinity School. Had started working with anthropologist Allenson B. Skinner several years before High started working on his museum, and one wrote in Skinner worked on a series of stories about Amos's experience growing up as a Native American. The published anthology of these stories that Skinner was planning got shelved when Skinner died in nineteen twenty five. That book, In Case You're Interested, was published finally in two thousand and three under the title Being Dakota, but the museum's publication, Indian Notes, started being published in nineteen twenty four. As planned. The museum, of course, took up a lot of High's time, but not so much that he stopped mounting research trips. Hi had a veritable army of archaeologists dispatched throughout the Americas hunting for objects to expand the collection. But what's interesting is that he also paid for other museums to mount expeditions, and the trips he financed were a mix of archaeological efforts to uncover cultural artifacts of the past and research into contemporary cultures. In nineteen twenty six, his museum moved to the Bronx because, just as when he had been a private collector, George had continued to acquire more than his space could fit. The new museum they built was larger, and it also had a garden of indigenous herbs, and his wife Thea oversaw that in nineteen twenty eight, George's good fortune and running this museum took a sharp turn. First, two of his most prominent supporters died the same week. Hi believed there would be a provision for the museum in their wills, and there were, but it was not enough to keep High's work going, at least not to the level that he had been. Following on this, the nineteen twenty nine stock market crash further damaged High's financial standing enough that he had to make serious cutbacks. He laid off the majority of the museum's employees, choosing to run things himself. Eventually he would sell off pieces of the collection to keep the building going. He did continue to acquire items when he could. The museum wasn't really flat broke, it was just on a much tighter budget than it had been in its operational heyday. A decade into the museum running with its skeleton crew, George was contacted by the Headatsa tribe. Remember that medicine bundle we mentioned oile back. They wanted it back, and this wasn't a case where they were simply asking for repatriation, although that would have been entirely within their rights. But this was a request because the Hedatsa tribe needed their bundle back. It was what was called a waterbuster, meaning that it was part of their cultural practices to bring rain when it was needed, and at that point, the land that the Hadatsa lived on was experiencing a serious drought. Hi didn't want to give this back. He tried to barter for it, saying that if he could get a different item in return, he would consider returning it. He finally acquiesced, and there was apparently some fan unfair over returning this bundle. But when two members of the tribe traveled to New York for it, what they got were a couple of loose items that had allegedly been in the bundle. They had not been part of it, though. This is one of those events that described very differently depending on which biographer wrote about it. One of the earliest biographies about high which is the jay Alden Mason one that we mentioned earlier, It one hundred percent paints a picture of this being a very important and momentous occasion on which High did the right thing and the drought was lifted. That is not true, though the actual item was eventually repatriated to the Hidasi, but this was years and years after this deception. Yeah, he one hundred percent knew that he was not giving them their item back. In nineteen thirty five, Thea died on her birthday. George had spent twenty years with her as his constant companion and supporter, and after her death, he chose to give up the apartment they had lived in together and he moved into the University Club. That move was really not suitable. George did not like living at the club and he was lonely. In nineteen thirty six, he remarried to Jessica Peebles, who went by Jesse. That marriage did not have the staying power of his match with THEA. Four years later, Jesse filed for divorce in Nevada. Of course, that tickled me to no end when I saw the newspaper write up and I was like, oh, this was in this within Nevada. She went to a divorce ranch. In the fall of nineteen fifty four, George had a cerebral hemorrhage. He made enough of a recovery that he was soon back at work, but he was not able to keep up the schedule that he once had, and he could only work for a few hours at a time, and reportedly he could only go in a couple days a week at most. In the spring of nineteen fifty five, he had a series of strokes, and after that he was home bound. He died at home on January twentieth, eeteen fifty seven. Over the course of his life, High had acquired pieces from cultures from the southern tip of South America all the way to the northern reaches of North America, an estimated one million artifacts, but without him to act as a steward, the future of this collection became unclear. He included a stipulation in his will that some items had to remain in New York. He also left the museum three million dollars. That sounds like a lot, but it was really not enough to keep things going. The museum struggled on for decades, constantly trying to regain its footing, until the entire collection was acquired by the Smithsonian in nineteen eighty nine, and the Smithsonian used that collection to form the National Museum of the American Indian and as part of the legislation that approved its formation, in funding, human remains in other articles that were acquired with highst collection had to be repatriated, and Native Americans had to be involved in setting up and running this museum as a partnership. The man chosen to head up the new entity was Rick West, who was Cheyenne. He had actually visited Hi'es Museum in nineteen fifty six when he was just a kid visiting New York, and according to West's account, he found the whole thing kind of disturbing because it seemed really odd to him that items belonging to Cheyenne people were sitting in a museum in New York. In a two thousand and four Washington Post article written by Bob Thompson, he makes an interesting point about Hige's collection that Holly hadn't quite considered in this way. Quote. In the early twentieth century, when George high began seriously chasing Indian artifacts, it was widely assumed that Indians themselves would soon fade from the scene. Beside's an additional layer to all the considerations to be made about a white man collecting these artifacts. We've talked about the cultural genocide that had been part of the story of colonization and indigenous cultures in North America many times. The thought that George Gustav High saw it happening and perhaps thought he was preserving something that was ephemeral is an interesting one. This has also come up in other episodes about Indigenous history and Indigenous people in the like nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yeah, and he did recognize that some of these cultures and tribes were waning, and there was kind of a clock ticking in terms of how long they might be around. But that doesn't really mean that he was doing this work from an altruistic point of view. That's evidenced by his treatment of the members of the Hidatsa tribe when they asked for their property back. George was once described by a colleague as someone who quote couldn't conscientiously leave a reservation until its entire population was practically naked. He wanted everything he could get his hands on, and that same colleague, who was quoted anonymously, also said of High, quote, he didn't give a hang about in individually, and he never seemed to have heard about their problems in present day society. George didn't buy Indian stuff in order to study the life of a people, because it never crossed his mind that that's what they were. He bought all those objects solely in order to own them for what purposes He never said so. While the idea of George High collecting these items to preserve information about a vanishing culture is certainly appealing, and on some level he might have thought he was doing that, but it's a lot more complicated than that. In twenty sixteen, John Hayworth wrote an article for American Indian, which is the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian magazine, and which he talked about the legacy of the work George Gustav Hi did in his life. This was part of an article for the museum's hundredth birthday. And the mixed bag of High is that he doesn't seem to have been exactly sensitive to the cultures from which he was collecting. As we mentioned, he wanted to possess their items, but he didn't it really seem especially interested in truly knowing about them as a people. It was kind of like facts on a page, but his work and collections in the hands of Native American curators have led to a much deeper understanding of a lot of those cultures. Another way, his influence is still impacting anthropology. Is difficult to quantify, but there were a number of people who, because of their experience working on digs and research trips that he sponsored, got high ranking jobs in museums where they surely impacted the direction of anthropological research for the United States. Yeah, when he let go of all of his staff, where do you think all those people went to other museums? And even people that had never worked for him as staff but were kind of like on contracts with him that went on their resume because it was really impressive at the time. And now those are the people that were making policy in other places. So I feel like we can never fully appreciate how much we're still sifting out his coach to anthropology versus what would have happened if it were strictly academic. It's a tricky and fascinating one. He's an interesting figure. Again, like hard to unpick all of the things, But yeah, we'll talk more about that. And behind the scenes, I have a really funny to me listener mail, O good from our listener Laura, who may pronounce it Lara, hold on, let me check she doesn't say. I don't know if she pronounces it Laura or Lara, but suret ty, Holly and Tracy. I just listened to your episode about Ruby Payne Scott. I got way behind during the early days of the pandemic when I no longer had a commute, which is my prime listening time, and I am slowly getting caught up. Listen. No shame in that I have the same problem with everything audiobooks and podcasts. The discussion in that episode about Paine Scott keeping her marriage a secret reminded me of one of my favorite stories about my paternal grandmother, who was born in eighteen ninety one. She was a school teacher who continued teaching after she was married in nineteen ten, even though most school districts in New York State prohibited married women from teaching. In January nineteen fourteen, she enrolled in a teacher training institute for additional training, which would allow her to have longer lasting teaching credentials, but the institute's policy was that only single women could be admitted, so she signed her name without a miss or missus in front of it, and just let people assume she was a miss even though she went by her married name. Her plan was to complete the training in the fall, but she discovered over the summer that she was pregnant, so she informed the institute that she had to take a break, although she did not reveal the reason, but would return later to complete the training. She wrote an autobiography for the family, of which I have a copy, and one of the things that stands out to me about it is how some of her thoughts come across as if they were being written now. For example, when writing about my father's birth in January of nineteen fifteen, she notes that she received a baby and not a teaching certificate that month, and while she was very happy to have the baby, she still wanted the teaching certificate and vowed to get it, which she did. My subject line, which is where did you get that baby? Reverse is something that occurred after my father was born. My grandmother was writing on the trolley in Binghamton, New York, sitting with my father in her lap. She was spotted by an education higher up. My memory was that it was a superintendent, but having reviewed her autobiography before writing this email. I think it may have been someone connected with the Teacher Training Institute. The man, noticing the resemblance between my grandmother and dad, asked a shock miss, where did you get that baby, and my grandmother simply replied, Oh, I picked him up on Chestnut Street, which is where they lived. I'm the kid from my dad's second marriage, so I'm actually a gen xer like you two. I wrote you once before about my maternal great grandparents who had trained to be nurses under John Harvey Kellogg, which, much to my surprise, ended up on listener mail. So a second time. But I love this story. Like nobody told a lie nice, they just carefully withheld information. I love that when we got it, I picked him a bunch of us. Nut Street sounds great. Thank you so much for that email. It tickled me to no end, and I love that it's a little subversive without being in any way evil. If you have fun stories or anything else you'd like to write to us about, you can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe to the podcast on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. 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