Jay Miller is an American anthropologist who is known for his wide-ranging fieldwork with and scholarship about different Native American groups, especially the Delaware (Lenape), Tsimshian, and Lushootseed Salish. He is himself of Lenape ancestry.
He grew up in upstate New York, where he was given a Mohawk (Iroquois) name.
As an undergraduate, he was influenced by the anthropologist Florence Hawley Ellis.
He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University, for a dissertation on the Keresan Pueblo people. While in New Jersey, he began working with speakers of the Delaware language. In this context he was adopted and named in the Delaware Wolf clan, his clan mother being Nora Thompson Dean, with whom he collaborated on a publication on the Delaware "Big House" rite.
Friendship with the anthropologist Viola Garfield while living in Seattle led to fieldwork among the Tsimshian at Hartley Bay, British Columbia, where Miller was adopted into the Gispwudwada (Killerwhale clan).
He was formerly Associate Director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at the Newberry Library in Chicago. [1]
He has also done fieldwork with the Salish people at the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington state and received names among the Creek and Tewa tribes.
The Lenape, also called the Lenni Lenape and Delaware people, are an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands, who live in the United States and Canada.
The Tsimshian are an Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. Their communities are mostly in coastal British Columbia in Terrace and Prince Rupert, and Metlakatla, Alaska on Annette Island, the only reservation in Alaska.
Lushootseed, formerly known as Puget Salish, Puget Sound Salish, or Skagit-Nisqually, is a Central Coast Salish language of the Salishan language family. Lushootseed is the general name for the dialect continuum composed of two main dialects, Northern Lushootseed and Southern Lushootseed, which are further separated into smaller sub-dialects.
The Coast Salish languages, also known as the Central Salish languages, are a branch of the Salishan language family. These languages are spoken by First Nations or Native American peoples inhabiting the Pacific Northwest, in the territory that is now known as the southwest coast of British Columbia around the Strait of Georgia and Washington State around Puget Sound. The term "Coast Salish" also refers to the cultures in British Columbia and Washington who speak one of these languages or dialects.
Twana is the collective name for a group of nine Coast Salish peoples in the northern-mid Puget Sound region. The Skokomish are the main surviving group and self-identify as the Twana today. The spoken language, also named Twana, is part of the Central Coast Salish language group. The Twana language is closely related to Lushootseed.
The Gitga'at are one of the 14 tribes of the Tsimshian nation in British Columbia, Canada, and inhabit the village of Hartley Bay, British Columbia, the name of which in the Tsimshian language is Txałgiu. The name Gitga'ata in the Tsimshian language means "people of the cane". The Gitga'ata, along with the Kitasoo Tsimshians at Klemtu, B.C., are often classed as "Southern Tsimshian," their traditional language being the southern dialect of the Tsimshian language. Most Tsimshian-speakers in Hartley Bay today, however, speak the form of the language shared by villages to the north. Their band government is the Hartley Bay Indian Band, aka the Gitga'at First Nation.
The Kitkatla or Gitxaala are one of the 14 bands of the Tsimshian nation of the Canadian province of British Columbia, and inhabit a village, also called Kitkatla, on Dolphin Island, a small island just by Porcher Island off the coast of northern B.C. Because of their location, the Kitkatla have sometimes been called Porcher Island Indians. They were also, in the early contact period, called the Sebassa tribe, for their paramount chief at the time, Ts'ibasaa. The name Kitkatla derives from the Tsimshian name Gitkxaała, from git- and kxaała, since they are the farthest from the mainland of the Tsimshian tribes. Another name for themselves is Git lax m'oon in recognition of the land they lived on: the islands and inlets of this rugged piece of coastline.
William Beynon (1888–1958) was a Canadian hereditary chief of the Tsimshian Nation and an oral historian; he served as ethnographer, translator, and linguistic consultant to many anthropologists who studied his people.
Viola E. Garfield was an American anthropologist best known for her work on the social organization and plastic arts of the Tsimshian nation in British Columbia and Alaska.
Frederick Alexcee was a Canadian carver and painter from the community of Lax Kw'alaams with Tsimshian ethnicity.
Marjorie Halpin was an American-Canadian anthropologist best known for her work on Northwest Coast art and culture, especially the Tsimshian and Gitksan peoples.
Louis Situwuka Shotridge was an American art collector and ethnological assistant who was an expert on the traditions of his people, the Tlingit nation of southeastern Alaska. His Tlingit name was Stoowukháa, which means "Astute One."
Sergei A. Kan is an American anthropologist known for his research with and writings on the Tlingit people of southeast Alaska, focusing on the potlatch and on the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in Tlingit communities.
Anthony Francis Clarke Wallace was a Canadian-American anthropologist who specialized in Native American cultures, especially the Iroquois. His research expressed an interest in the intersection of cultural anthropology and psychology. He was famous for the theory of revitalization movements.
Frank Gouldsmith Speck was an American anthropologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples among the Eastern Woodland Native Americans of the United States and First Nations peoples of eastern boreal Canada.
The Coast Salish is a group of ethnically and linguistically related Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, living in the Canadian province of British Columbia and the U.S. states of Washington and Oregon. They speak one of the Coast Salish languages. The Nuxalk nation are usually included in the group, although their language is more closely related to Interior Salish languages.
The Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast are composed of many nations and tribal affiliations, each with distinctive cultural and political identities. They share certain beliefs, traditions and practices, such as the centrality of salmon as a resource and spiritual symbol, and many cultivation and subsistence practices. The term Northwest Coast or North West Coast is used in anthropology to refer to the groups of Indigenous people residing along the coast of what is now called British Columbia, Washington State, parts of Alaska, Oregon, and Northern California. The term Pacific Northwest is largely used in the American context.
William D'Arcy McNickle was a writer, Native American activist, college professor and administrator, and anthropologist. Of Irish and Cree-Métis descent, he later enrolled in the Salish Kootenai nation, as his mother had come to Montana with the Métis as a refugee. He is known also for his novel The Surrounded.
Nora Thompson Dean, also known as Weenjipahkihelexkwe, which translates as "Touching Leaves Woman" in Unami, was a member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians. As a Lenape traditionalist and one of the last fluent speakers of the southern Unami dialect of the Lenape language, she was an influential mentor to younger tribal members and is widely cited in scholarship on Lenape culture.