Dr. Robert L. Hall, Director (1959-1961)

We received this message from Dr. Hall, Emeritus, last year:

Date: Thu, 02 Jul 1998 11:54:47
From: Robert L. Hall (rlhall@voyager.net)
To: iais@usd.edu
Cc: rlhall@uic.edu
Subject: Catching up on IAIS

Dear Dr. Bruguier,
I was fascinated to accidentally discover the IAIS web site while brousing around hoping to find a listing for the festschrift due out for Wes Hurt. I was flabbergasted to find a page under construction with my photo as a 32-year-old with a crew haircut. It was quite enjoyable tracing the history of the Institute after I left in 1961. I think fondly of those years, which were also the second and third years of my marriage.

One correction. I arrived in November of 1959 as a U. of Wis. ABD, obtaining my Ph.D. in 1960, when I was appointed Assistant Professor as well as Director of the Institute. So my tenure as director was 1959-1961 rather than 1960-1961. The accomplishment that I remember most proudly was discovering Ella Deloria's "lost" Lakota dictionary MS in a catalog of the Boas papers of the American Philosophical Society, obtaining photostats of same (Xerox had not yet been invented), and successfully writing the NSF proposal that allowed the university to retain the services of Ella Deloria to continue the dictionary project that she had begun under Boas. Ella was serving as acting assistant director of the W. H. Over Museum while Wes Hurt was on a semester leave at Berkley.

After leaving Vermillion I became Curator of Anthropology with the Illinois State Museum, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Marquette University, and from 1968 until day before yesterday, Associate Professor and then Professor of Anthropology and (for ten years) Department chairman at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I am now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Adjunct Curator of Plains and Midwestern Archaeology with the Field Museum, Chicago.

This past year the University of Illinois Press published my book AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE SOUL: NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN BELIEF AND RITUAL, which is mainly historical ethnography and heavily into Osage, Omaha, Pawnee, and Lakota, well, belief and ritual. I have a paper in the Wes Hurt festschrift in which I expand the chapters on pole ceremonialism and the Sun Dance to show ties deep into the prehistoric past and to a point where comparisons as far south as the Maya area are possible.

I have been living in Libertyville, IL (zip 60048) since 1969 at 917 Bartlett Terrace, telephone 847-680-8277. As I point out on the last page of my book, my interest in American Indian studies practically began in the cradle because my early childhood was spent in a household that included my mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, all of whom were enrolled Stockbridge-Munsee tribal members of Mohican, Menominee, and Ottawa ancestry. You can find a blurb on my book by getting into www.hotbot.com and then entering "archaeology of the soul". That will bring up the University of Illinois Press announcement as well as several reviews, one from the MiningCompany. Also check out this site.

I am currently near completion of a book tentatively called TOUCHING HISTORY that is a series of episodes in Indian/White relations over four centuries from the perspective of my Ottawa, Menominee, Mohican, and French and English ancestors. It only get into the Plains when my great grandmother's brother, an Indian himself, of course, enlists in the 7th Iowa Volunteer Cavalry around 1863 (not to be confused with Custer's 7th) and goes west to build Fort Cottonwood near present-day North Platte and in 1864 to garrison what becomes Fort Sedgwick at Julesburg, Colorado Teritory, at the unlucky moment when the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota arrive to seek vengeance for the Sand Creek Massacre. I suspect that I will conclude the book at the point in 1947 when I cleaned the clay from the bones of the Mohawk missionary Eleazer Williams before their reburial at Oneida, Wisconsin, and the next day leave for South Dakota to join the Smithsonian Institution Missouri Valley Project to survey the Fort Randall Reservoir.

If you have a mailing list, e-mail or otherwise, I would appreciate being added to it. My work in South Dakota in 1947 and 1948 and 1961-1962 were very important in giving direction to my career.

Sincerely, Robert Hall, (for the second day now) Emeritus Professor at UIC.

Thank you Dr. Hall for your past, present, and future contributions. Mitakuye Oyasin, All my relatives. Leonard Bruguier

Under construction, research continues

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4 October 1999, lrb