- Jay Miller
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 , andLushootseed 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 theKeresan Pueblo people. While inNew 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 beingNora Dean , with whom he collaborated on a publication on the Delaware "Big House" rite.Friendship with the anthropologist
Viola Garfield while living inSeattle led to fieldwork among theTsimshian atHartley Bay ,British Columbia , where Miller was adopted into theGispwudwada (Killerwhale clan).He was formerly Associate Director of the
D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at theNewberry Library inChicago .He has also done fieldwork with the
Salish people at theColville Indian Reservation in Washington State and received names among the Creek andTewa tribes.Bibliography
* Miller, Jay (1984) "Feasting with the Southern Tsimshian." In: "The Tsimshian: Images of the Past: Views for the Present," ed. by Margaret Seguin, pp. 27-39. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press
* Miller, Jay (1988) "Shamanic Odyssey: A Comparative Study of the Lushootseed (Puget Salish) Journey to the Land of the Dead in Terms of Death, Power, and Cooperating Shamans in Native North America." Menlo Park, Calif.: Ballena Press.
* Miller, Jay (ed.) (1990) "Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography." Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
* Miller, Jay (1997) "Tsimshian Culture: A Light through the Ages." Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
* Miller, Jay (1999) "Lushootseed Culture and the Shamanic Odyssey." Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
* Miller, Jay (2001) "Naming as Humanizing." In: "Strangers to Relatives: The Adoption and Naming of Anthropologists in Native North America," ed. by Sergei Kan, pp. 141-158. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
* Miller, Jay, and Nora Dean (1978) "A Personal Account of the Delaware Big House Rite." "Pennsylvania Archaeologist," vol. 48, nos. 1-2, pp. 39-43.
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