The Ruth Underhill Collection here at the Denver Museum of
Nature & Science, is currently being processed by Archives
Technician Aly Jabrocki, with the help of a generous
Save America's Treasures grant. Aly is working with the
Anthropology and Archives Departments to process, preserve, catalog
and digitize the collection. Currently we have over 50 linear
feet of materials relating to Underhill, which is more than any
other institution in the country.
At 47 years of age, Ruth Underhill embarked on a second career
in anthropology, starting graduate school at Columbia University in
1930. Professor Franz Boas asked her to study the Tohono O'odham in
southern Arizona for a few summers and gave her a small stipend of
$500 and an old Model T. Due to her age and the fact she was a
woman, Underhill was allowed to live and study the nation much more
closely than previous anthropologists. In a 1977 interview with the
Denver Post, Dr. Underhill said,
"The Papagos [Tohono O'odham]
compose long, beautiful poems and songs on such subjects as how
corn grows and how rain falls. They thought I was a witch
because I could write those things down [using a phonetic alphabet]
and read them back to them. Often, those songs, as the old people
sang them, contained archaic words no longer used…then I would have
to have one of them tell me what the old words meant, and finally I
would translate the whole thing to English."
These field journals were donated to the museum as part of her
personal papers and contain some of the earliest known
transcriptions of their language. There is no doubt that these
field notebooks are some of her most important contributions to the
study of anthropology and nations of the Southwestern United
States.
Underhill lived in Denver from 1949 until her death in 1984. She
served as a consultant for many of the Museum's Native American
dioramas in the 1970s and donated her papers to the Museum upon her
death. Her collection also includes correspondence, publications,
motion pictures, sound recordings and photographs.
For more information on Ruth Underhill, please check out
her Wikipedia page. You
may also check out her many books from the Bailey
Library.
Back to Main Page
Calendar 