Arthur C. Parker - Background

Background

Arthur C. Parker was born in 1881 on the Cattaraugus Reservation of the Seneca Nation of New York in western New York. He was the son of Frederick Ely Parker, a multiracial Seneca, and his wife Geneva Hortenese Griswold, of Scots-English-American descent, who taught school on the reservation. As the Seneca are a matrilineal nation, the young Parker did not have membership status at birth, as his mother was not part of the tribe, but he was descended from prominent Seneca through his father. As his father Frederick had a mother of New England Puritan stock, Parker was three-quarters European by heritage.

In 1903 Arthur was adopted into the tribe as an honorary member, when he was given the Seneca name Gawaso Wanneh (meaning "Big Snowsnake"). His grandfather Nicholson Henry Parker was an influential Seneca leader. As a youth, Arthur lived with Nicholson on his farm and was strongly influenced by him.

His grandfather's younger brother (Arthur's great-uncle) Ely S. Parker was a Seneca life chief. As a young man he had collaborated with Lewis Henry Morgan on his study of the Iroquois. He served as a brigadier general and secretary to Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War. After the war, Ely Parker was appointed the first Indian Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

Arthur Parker was influenced by both the Seneca culture and the Christian missionary culture of his mother’s family, and his social status of bridging peoples. He explored his Seneca lineage as a way of connecting himself to a powerful, symbolic past and integrating into twentieth-century American life. Although his own family was Christian, he also witnessed followers of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, who had tried to resurrect traditional Seneca religion.