Notes on the Caddo / by Elsie Clews Parsons.

  • Elsie Clews Parsons
Date:
[1941]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes on the Caddo / by Elsie Clews Parsons. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    FOREWORD 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 uncon¬ sciously seeking survivals. Now, in editing the notes, I am all the more im¬ pressed 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 hel¬ ter-skelter borrow little from one another.
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