appointment as archaeologist at the New York State Museum,
and it was in this position that Parker pursued ethnological
inquiries and collected folktales and ethnographic art among
the Senecas after 1903. He operated on a contract basis at first,
submitting manuscript reports for hire, before attaining full
civil service status. He rapidly gained the confidence of the
native people, was adopted into the Bear Clan, and was given
a clan name, Gawasowaneh, or "Big Snowsnake," a game he
described in the Anthropologist. ⁷ He was now a socially ac-
ceptable Seneca.

Parker soon found a job constraining. He wrote a plan for
a full-blown department of anthropology at the State Museum
that included folklore, but he never succeeded in getting the
director, John M. Clarke, a palaeontologist, to see the broad
picture, and was ordered to concentrate on exhibits. ⁸ But Par-
ker found a way to get back to the field. He convinced Clarke
that the authenticity of the new Indian Groups, the famous
diaramas of Iroquois life then in preparation, for which Clarke
had secured private funds, depended on further ethnological
research. Parker's field trips to Tonawanda, Cattaraugus, and
the Six Nations Reserve in Canada produced a steady stream
of publications and greatly increased the ethnological collec-
tions of the State Museum. He enlisted key people to collect
for him, and he commissioned Jesse Cornplanter, son of his
principal informant Edward, to make a series of drawings il-
lustrating various activities and themes in the traditional cul-
ture. ⁹ Several of these appear in the present volume. His most
important achievement just then was a systematic paper on
the medicine societies, written at a time when such sodalities
were a top priority with ethnologists (see Traditions, numbers
69 and 70, and Appendix E in this book). ¹⁰

Colleagues who had gone the professional route were urging
Parker to get his Seneca texts in publishable form because
J. N. B. Hewitt at the Smithsonian was about to launch the
Curtin collection. ¹¹ But Parker was already heavily committed,
which explains the delay in publishing Seneca Myths and Folk:
Tales. He was also most likely aware that his method and

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