Truman Michelson (August 11, 1879 – July 26, 1938) was a linguist and anthropologist who worked from 1910 until his death for the

Bureau of American Ethnology The Bureau of American Ethnology (or BAE, originally, Bureau of Ethnology) was established in 1879 by an act of Congress for the purpose of transferring archives, records and materials relating to the Indians of North America from the Departme ...

at the

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums, Education center, education and Research institute, research centers, created by the Federal government of the United States, U.S. government "for the increase a ...

. He also held a position as ethnologist at

George Washington University The George Washington University (GW or GWU) is a Private university, private University charter#Federal, federally-chartered research university in Washington, D.C., United States. Originally named Columbian College, it was chartered in 1821 by ...

from 1917 until 1932. Michelson studied

Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...

historical linguistics at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

, completing his doctoral degree in 1904, with further study at the Universities of

Leipzig Leipzig (, ; ; Upper Saxon: ; ) is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Saxony. The city has a population of 628,718 inhabitants as of 2023. It is the List of cities in Germany by population, eighth-largest city in Ge ...

and

Bonn Bonn () is a federal city in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, located on the banks of the Rhine. With a population exceeding 300,000, it lies about south-southeast of Cologne, in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr region. This ...

in 1904–1905, followed by study with

Franz Boas Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the mov ...

. Soon after joining the Bureau of American Ethnology, Michelson began an extensive program of field research on North American Indian languages. Much of Michelson's research focused on languages of the Algonquian family. Bibliographies of his publications are available in Boas (1938), Cooper (1939), and Pentland and Wolfart (1982). He was the author of an early influential study classifying the Algonquian languages, although extensive further research has entirely superseded Michelson's pioneering effort. Much of his research focused on the

Fox Foxes are small-to-medium-sized omnivorous mammals belonging to several genera of the family Canidae. They have a flattened skull; upright, triangular ears; a pointed, slightly upturned snout; and a long, bushy tail ("brush"). Twelve species ...

people and

language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

, resulting in an extensive list of publications on Fox ethnology and linguistics. Michelson employed native speakers of the language to write Fox stories in the Fox version of the Great Lakes Algonquian syllabary, resulting in a large collection of unpublished materials. Goddard (1991, 1996) discusses the material in some of these texts. A significant text from this corpus, ''The Owl Sacred Pack,'' has recently been published. One of the texts obtained in this manner that Michelson did publish, ''The autobiography of a Fox Indian woman,'' is now available in a more complete edition, with a revised transcription of the original text and comprehensive linguistic analysis. Michelson also assisted in the posthumous preparation and publication of a number of draft manuscripts left unpublished after the premature death of William Jones. Among these were: (a) a significant two-volume collection of

Ojibwe The Ojibwe (; Ojibwe writing systems#Ojibwe syllabics, syll.: ᐅᒋᐺ; plural: ''Ojibweg'' ᐅᒋᐺᒃ) are an Anishinaabe people whose homeland (''Ojibwewaki'' ᐅᒋᐺᐘᑭ) covers much of the Great Lakes region and the Great Plains, n ...

texts with translations that Jones had obtained in northwestern Ontario at Fort William Ojibwa reserve, and near

Lake Nipigon Lake Nipigon ( ; ; ) is a freshwater lake in Northwestern Ontario. Part of the Great Lakes drainage basin, it drains through the Nipigon River into Lake Superior. It is the largest lake entirely within the Canadian province of Ontario. Ety ...

, in addition to stories collected in northern

Minnesota Minnesota ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Upper Midwestern region of the United States. It is bordered by the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario to the north and east and by the U.S. states of Wisconsin to the east, Iowa to the so ...

; (b) a volume of Kickapoo texts; and (c) an article on Fox for the first Handbook of American Indian languages. He also undertook field research on, among others,

Arapaho The Arapaho ( ; , ) are a Native American people historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Lakota and Dakota. By the 1850s, Arapaho bands formed t ...

;

Shawnee The Shawnee ( ) are a Native American people of the Northeastern Woodlands. Their language, Shawnee, is an Algonquian language. Their precontact homeland was likely centered in southern Ohio. In the 17th century, they dispersed through Ohi ...

; Peoria; Kickapoo;

Munsee The Munsee () are a subtribe and one of the three divisions of the Lenape. Historically, they lived along the upper portion of the Delaware River, the Minisink, and the adjacent country in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. They were prom ...

and Unami, the two closely related

Delaware Delaware ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic and South Atlantic states, South Atlantic regions of the United States. It borders Maryland to its south and west, Pennsylvania to its north, New Jersey ...

languages; collected notes and texts in the syllabic script from

Cree The Cree, or nehinaw (, ), are a Indigenous peoples of the Americas, North American Indigenous people, numbering more than 350,000 in Canada, where they form one of the country's largest First Nations in Canada, First Nations. They live prim ...

dialects in

Québec Quebec is Canada's largest province by area. Located in Central Canada, the province shares borders with the provinces of Ontario to the west, Newfoundland and Labrador to the northeast, New Brunswick to the southeast and a coastal border ...

and northern

Ontario Ontario is the southernmost Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada. Located in Central Canada, Ontario is the Population of Canada by province and territory, country's most populous province. As of the 2021 Canadian census, it ...

;

physical anthropology Biological anthropology, also known as physical anthropology, is a natural science discipline concerned with the biological and behavioral aspects of human beings, their extinct hominin ancestors, and related non-human primates, particularly from ...

notes on Blackfoot and

Cheyenne The Cheyenne ( ) are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains. The Cheyenne comprise two Native American tribes, the Só'taeo'o or Só'taétaneo'o (more commonly spelled as Suhtai or Sutaio) and the (also spelled Tsitsistas, The term for th ...

;

Eskimo ''Eskimo'' () is a controversial Endonym and exonym, exonym that refers to two closely related Indigenous peoples: Inuit (including the Alaska Native Iñupiat, the Canadian Inuit, and the Greenlandic Inuit) and the Yupik peoples, Yupik (or Sibe ...

texts from Great Whale River, Québec, and others. A comprehensive list of all of Michelson's archival materials in the

National Anthropological Archives The National Anthropological Archives is the third largest archive in the Smithsonian Institution and a sister archive to the Human Studies Film Archive. The collection documents the history of anthropology and the world's peoples and cultures, ...

at the Smithsonian Institution is available online. Michelson was involved in a prominent debate with

Edward Sapir Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguistics, linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States ...

because of his rejection of Sapir's proposal that the Algonquian languages were related to

Wiyot The Wiyot ( Wiyot: Wíyot, Chetco-Tolowa: Wee-'at xee-she or Wee-yan' Xee-she', Euchre Creek Tututni: Wii-yat-dv-ne – "Mad River People", Yurok: Weyet) are an indigenous people of California living near Humboldt Bay, California and a small ...

and

Yurok The Yurok people are an Algic-speaking Indigenous people of California that has existed along the or "Health-kick-wer-roy" (now known as the Klamath River) and on the Pacific coast, from Trinidad south of the Klamath’s mouth almost to Cresc ...

, two languages of

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

, through common membership in the

Algic The Algic languages (also Algonquian–Wiyot–Yurok or Algonquian–Ritwan) are an indigenous language family of North America. Most Algic languages belong to the Algonquian subfamily, dispersed over a broad area from the Rocky Mountains to ...

language family. Although he strongly criticized Sapir's proposal, the historical links between Algonquian, Yurok, and Wiyot are now accepted as being beyond dispute.Goddard, Ives, 1975

Notes

References

*Boas, Franz. 1938. “Truman Michelson.” ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 9(2/4): 113–116. *Cooper, John M. 1939. “Truman Michelson.” ''American Anthropologist'' New Series 41(2): 281–285. *Goddard, Ives. 1975. “Algonquian, Wiyot and Yurok: Proving a distant genetic relationship.” Eds. M. Dale Kinkade, Kenneth L. Hale, and Oswald Werner, ''Linguistics and anthropology: In honor of C. F. Voegelin,'' pp. 249–262. Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press. * Goddard, Ives. 1979. “Comparative Algonquian.” Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, eds, ''The languages of Native America,'' pp. 70–132. Austin: University of Texas Press. *Goddard, Ives, 1979a. ''Delaware verbal morphology.'' New York: Garland. *Goddard, Ives. 1990. “Some literary devices in the writings of Alfred Kiyana.” W. Cowan, ed., ''Papers of the twenty-first Algonquian Conference,'' pp. 159–171. Ottawa: Carleton University. *Goddard, Ives. 1996. “Writing and reading Mesquakie (Fox).” W. Cowan, ed., ''Papers of the twenty-seventh Algonquian Conference,'' pp. 117–134. Ottawa: Carleton University. *Goddard, Ives. 2006. ''The autobiography of a Fox woman: A new edition and translation.'' Edited and translated by Ives Goddard. University of Manitoba: Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics. *Goddard, Ives. 2007. ''The Owl Sacred Pack: A New Edition and Translation of the Meskwaki Manuscript of Alfred Kiyana.'' Edited and translated by Ives Goddard. University of Manitoba: Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics. *Jones, William. 1911. “Algonquian (Fox).” Ed. Truman Michelson. Franz Boas, ed., Handbook of American Indian languages 1, pp. 735–873. *Jones, William. 1917, 1919. ''Ojibwa texts. '' Ed. Truman Michelson. Leiden: American Ethnological Society Publications 7.1 (Vol. 1, 1917); New York: G. Stechert (Vol. 2, 1919). *Jones, William and Truman Michelson. 1917.
Kickapoo tales
'' Truman Michelson, translator. Leiden / New York: American Ethnological Society Publications 9. *Michelson, Truman. 1912. “Preliminary report of the linguistic classification of Algonquian tribes.” ''Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report'' 28; 221–290b. *Michelson, Truman. 1914. “Two alleged Algonquian languages of California.” ''American Anthropologist'' New Series 16: 261–267. *Michelson, Truman. 1915. “Rejoinder.” ''American Anthropologist 16: 361–367. *Michelson, Truman. 1925. “The autobiography of a Fox Indian woman.” ''Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report'' 40: 291–349. *Pentland, David and H. Christoph Wolfart. 1982. ''Bibliography of Algonquian linguistics.'' Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. *Sapir, Edward. 1913. “Wiyot and Yurok, Algonkian languages of California.” ''American Anthropologist'' 15: 617–646. *Sapir, Edward. 1915. “Algonkian languages of California: a reply.” ''American Anthropologist'' 17: 188–194. *Sapir, Edward. 1915a. “Epilogue.” ''American Anthropologist'' 17: 198.
Smithsonian Institution Archival Listing of Truman Michelson Materials
{{DEFAULTSORT:Michelson, Truman American anthropologists American ethnologists Linguists from the United States Historical linguists Harvard University alumni 1879 births 1938 deaths Scientists from New Rochelle, New York Linguists of Algic languages