Frank Speck

"Anthropologist and ethnographer Frank Gouldsmith Speck was unique among Franz Boas' early graduate students at Columbia University. Unlike other ethnographers of his time who focused their studies on the Western Indian tribes, Speck chose to study the cultures of the Eastern Woodland Indians. Becoming the self-appointed salvage ethnographer for those tribes, Speck was regularly with the Indians he studied, collecting all aspects of their culture."

from American Philosophical Society.

He visited Bear island on lake Temagami in summer of 1913 where he recorded local folklore tales in his Memoirs.

Resources:

"This material, may, moreover, prove to have some value in the field of Indian administration should it ever be possible to reconstruct the boundaries of the Indian family claims in Ontario and Quebec. It becomes apparent by means of our study how, through misunderstanding between the colonial authorities and the nativesm large tracts of the land were sold by chiefs or by individuals who, from the Indian standpoint, had absolutely no claim to their ownership nor rights of disposal." - Frank Speck
Prepared by Neodim Kollobok, . Last modified: November 2005.
Photograph is used with the permission from American Philosophical Society.