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Concept
James Owen Dorsey
Summary
James Owen Dorsey (October 31, 1848 – February 4, 1895) was an American ethnologist, linguist, and Episcopalian missionary in the Dakota Territory, who contributed to the description of the Ponca, Omaha, and other southern Siouan languages. He worked for the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution from 1880 to 1895, when he died young of typhoid fever. He became known as the expert on languages and culture of southern Siouan peoples, although he also studied tribes of the Southwest and Northwest.
Dorsey also collected much material on beliefs and institutions, although most of his manuscripts have not been published. Some of the many stories he collected from the Ponca and Osage have been published, and are being used in an Omaha-language curriculum project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
James Owen Dorsey was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1848. He attended the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, and was ordained as a deacon of the Episcopal Church in 1871. He was a descendant of Edward Dorsey.
That year he became a missionary to the Ponca Indians in the Dakota Territory. He had a remarkable aptitude for languages, and a sympathetic and helpful personality which won the confidence of the Indians. He lived 27 months as a missionary in Nebraska and South Dakota, learning the difficult (for English speakers) Siouan language of the Ponca and Omaha Indians.
Ill health forced Dorsey to leave the West and to become a pastor in Maryland. He continued to study linguistics and to work on linguistic analysis of Ponca and Omaha. In the early years, he tried to link those languages with Hebrew, in the mistaken theory, shared by many scholars at the time, that Native Americans were among the Lost Tribes of Israel. These efforts were considered "crude and immature." But, he developed into a linguist and anthropologist who presented Indian cultures with "unsurpassed fidelity.
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