Forty-first Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1919-24

Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1928. Good. Forty-first Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1919-24, Jesse Walter Fewkes, United States Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., 1928, 11.5 x 8.5 inches, 626 pp.

Dark olive green boards with gilt stamped illustration of an Indigenous person in a feathered headdress to front, gilt stamped lettering to spine, and blind stamped border to front and back boards. Paper pocket affixed to back pastedown; inside pocket is a color printed map entitled "Distribution of Salish Dialects, and of Languages Spoken in the Adjoining Territory, Before 1800, Based On Information Collected By James A. Teit, Franz Boas, and Leo J. Frachtenberg. By Franz Boas." Spine and all corners of boards bumped and rubbed, particularly bottom edge; back board lightly scuffed; inscriptions in pen and pencil to first free endpaper. Good condition.

The United States Congress established the Bureau of Ethnology in 1879. Directed by surveyor, geologist, and U.S. Army Major John Wesley Powell, the Bureau collected European-American knowledge about Indigenous nations, motivated by the false "vanishing race" theory that Indigenous cultures and ways of life were naturally fading out of existence - though in reality they were being displaced by the westward expansion of the United States government and European-American settlers. The Bureau of Ethnology gathered thousands of photographs, illustrations, and other documentation of Indigenous cultures until it merged with other divisions of the Smithsonian Institute in the 1960s.

Jesse Walter Fewkes (1850-1930) was an American anthropologist, archaeologist, naturalist, and writer; he made the first sound recordings of Indigenous people for study, including the music of the Zuni and Hopi. He joined the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1895 and became its Director in 1918, retiring in 1928.