BY WILLLAIM N. FENTON

Some fifty years ago during a visit to Rochester, Arthur
Parker, then the eminent director of the Rochester Museum of
Science, presented me with a copy of his scarce Seneca Myths
and Folk Tales ( 1923) to assist me in my research among his
people. The volume carries the marginalia entered during my
field interviews with native informants; it has been read and
reread and is badly worn and coming apart at the binding. It
is high time that this treasure was reprinted and made avail-
able in a paperback edition to scholars, the native Iroquois,
and the general reader. I am glad to examine it once more and
share my knowledge of the author and of Iroquoian folklore.

Arthur Caswell Parker ( 1881-1955) was a man of two worlds
and two cultures. Genetically of Seneca sires through his father
and father's father, both of whom had married New England
missionaries and teachers of Anglo-Saxon descent, he was not
more than one-quarter Seneca by "blood." Yet early and late
in life he identified readily with Iroquoian culture and values,
even while he rose through the ranks of American society by
sheer achievement as ethnologist, folklorist, archaeologist, and
museologist (a term he invented). In appearance and in pho-
tographs, Parker looked as much Indian as his Seneca contem-
poraries, although well-tailored, and his English speech retained
the resonance of Iroquoian languages. But, with the rule of
matrilineal descent, politically he was an "outsider" and not
an enrolled Seneca.

The men who carried the English name of Parker in the
third ascending generation--principally Nicholson, who was

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