THE AUGUSTUS THORNDIKE JR. INTERNSHIP | 2011 RESEARCH PAPER
William Jones r $MBTT PG
Rich w with Vision CZ & (JWFOT 1BSS CZ & (JWFOT 1 Dr. William Jones puzzled a local official when he Luzon, Philippines arrived in Portagee La Prairie, Maninitoba, to study the he Ojibway Indians. Jones mused in a diaryy entry, “[He] was dumbfounded founded to see me talking away to the Indians in a tongue ue unknown to him. I doubt if he understands me yet. He has learned that I was brought up on a cow ranch, among Indians, at Harvard and Columbia, and I am sure he does not understand.� Indeed, Jones—Indian, cowboy, student, scholar, and anthropologist—was an enigma. His Native American grandmother, daughter to the Fox chief and medicine woman to her people, raised him as “Black Eagle� on the Sauk and Fox Reservation in Iowa. For the first nine years of his life, Jones spoke his guardian’s native tongue and watched her care for the community with her healing hands. After his grandmother’s death, Jones enrolled in an Indian boarding school in Wabash, Ind., where he spent three years learning English and the disciplines of a white man’s world before returning to the Indian Territory. Living as a cowboy on the open plains, Billy found peace in the out-of-doors life. But, at his father’s urging, he headed East in the fall of 1889 to enter the educational program for Native Americans at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Virginia. Ignoring his longing to return to the West after Hampton, Jones entered Phillips Academy in 1892. His time as, in his words, “a little prep at Andover� was strenuous, but began the period of formal scholarship that would shed a new light on his relationship with the people who knew him as Black Eagle. At Andover, he wrote to his old Hampton classmates saying of the Native Americans, “Because we have seen and have been taught, this should make us all the more willing to help them on to the better way.� A diligent student, Jones pored over his texts but never lost his appetite for roaming outside. He kept fit and even played on the English 40
Andover | Spring 2011
Commons footb football team. To meet his expenses, he helped maintain main Andover Cottage and tutored the youn younger boys in Latin. Jones found refuge in the Classics Cla when geometry induced “all kinds of tired tire feelings� and his western colloquialisms hindered his English studies. Yet in spite of his frustrations, it was du during his time at the Academy th that he became a prolific letter writer and developed his writing as a significant mode of self-expression. As a Native American and a scholarship student, Billy was unique, yet not exceptional. Dr. Cecil F.P. Bancroft, who served as Phillips Academy’s headmaster at the time, was a true proponent of “youth from every quarter.� He valued the diversity within the student community and maintained a fond mentorship with Billy even after the young scholar graduated in 1896. Jones entered Harvard with his sights set on the medical profession. He hoped to justify his forays into academia by returning to the Native Americans as a doctor, offering healing as his grandmother once had. But F.W. Putnam, Peabody Professor of American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard, advised him to apply his aptitudes and interests in the emerging discipline of anthropology. Putman suggested that perhaps Jones could best serve his people by preserving their culture, by being a professional collector of stories and language. And so, near the end of Jones’s first year at Harvard, he cast aside any medical school aspirations and set out to employ his unique understanding of Native Americans to define that which first defined him. From Harvard, Jones entered a doctoral program at Columbia and eventually published his dissertation, “Some Principles of Algonkin Word Formation.� After receiving a PhD degree, he continued his field research among the Sauk, Fox, and Ojibway people. His early publications received much acclaim, and one coworker wrote him that his Fox texts “are the first collection of Indian stories I have ever been able to read through at a sitting merely for the fun of the thing. You have certainly set a new standard of rendering.� Jones reflected in his
diary, “My Ojibway will be much better if I ever finish that work.� His pessimistic “if I ever�was prescient; he never returned to his research among the North American Indians. In 1905 Jones’s temporary commissions dried up, and he failed to find a permanent position of employment in Algonkin research. Without funding, he could not continue the work he was so uniquely equipped to do. Reluctantly, in 1906, he signed on with the Chicago Museum of Natural History to embark on an assignment in a largely unmapped, unexplored region of the Philippines. Studying the Ilongot tribes, Jones made many allies and indeed referred to the locals consistently as “friends� in numerous letters home. However, the arrival of the springtime head-hunting fever unraveled several of the fickle friendships, and, after living with the indigenous Filipinos for 19 months, Jones became the target of tribal antagonism. An unexpected assault brought the 38-year-old anthropologist to his death on March 28, 1909. Even as he lay dying in the moments following the attack, Jones put the wounds of his native servant, Romano, before his own, trying his best to tend to the boy’s pain. In his short life, William Jones exemplified the Andover traditions of non sibi, knowledge, and goodness. These virtues not only shaped his plans for the future, but also his present. He said himself, “Whatever your notion of me, I am still a colt and green pastures and still waters are good to my sight and ever alluring. You know what someone has said about—‘You go this way but once.’ My gait is never fast, but I like it rich with vision.� Givens Parr, a three-year senior from Greenville, S.C., is the seventh recipient of the Thorndike Internship, which annually supports an upper’s research and writing of a biographical sketch of an alumnus. Funded by John L. Thorndike ’45 and W. Nicholas Thorndike ’51, the award honors their brother Augustus “Gus� Thorndike ’37who had a lifelong passion for history. History instructor Victor Henningsen ’69 shepherds the student effort. Parr hopes to pursue a career in writing. As for college, she reports that though her options are good, her plans are undecided.