The first person to collect and analyze a large body of American Indian folklore. While
serving as an Indian agent at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, Schoolcraft married into a
Scots-Irish and Ojibwa family, the members of which served as an invaluable key to the
culture.
The import of Schoolcraft’s study of Indian folklore came from his use of native
informants, his attempt to maintain at least some of their oral style in the translations, and
his efforts to make a thorough collection of oral narratives. In his two-volume Algic
Researches (1839), Schoolcraft published the narrative folklore he had collected among
the Ojibwa. At a time that predated the establishment of folklore as a discipline,
Schoolcraft emphasized the importance of understanding the language and of rendering
exact translations. He discussed the Ojibwa narratives as reflectors of cultural values,
religious beliefs, cosmology, history, child-rearing practices, and political perspective. As
A.Irving Hallowell remarked: “Historically viewed, Schoolcraft was a pioneer in the
collection of the folklore of any nonliterate people anywhere in the world. No other
material of any comparable scope, obtained directly from American Indian informants,
was published until several decades after Algic Researckes” (Hallowell 1946:137).
Schoolcraft’s work was, Hallowell added, the first comprehensive collection of the myths
and folktales of any Algonquian speakers. Thus, Schoolcraft provided a stimulus for
subsequent collections of American Indian folklore.
Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt
References
Freeman, John Finley. 1959. Pirated Editions of Schoolcraft’s Oneota. Bibliographical Society of
America Papers 53 (3):252–254.
——. 1965. Religion and Personality in the Anthropology of Henry Schoolcraft. Journal of the
History of the Behavioral Sciences 1 (4):301–303.
Hallowell, A.Irving. 1946. Concordance of Ojibwa Narratives in the Published Works of Henry
R.Schoolcraft. Journal of American Folklore 59:136–153.
Zumwalt, Rosemary. 1978. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, 1793–1864: His Collection and Analysis of
the Oral Narratives of American Indians. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 53–59:44–
57.