WALKER, JAMES R.

WALKER, JAMES R. (1849–1926) was a physician with the Indian Service of the United States government who became an important scholar of Native American religion. He was born near Richfield, Illinois, on March 4, 1849. He joined the Union Army in 1864 at the age of fourteen and was eventually assigned to the U.S. Sanitary Commission to care for the sick and wounded during the Civil War. Walker resumed his schooling after he returned to Illinois at the end of the war and earned the degree of Doctor of Medicine from Northwestern University Medical School in 1873. He joined the government's Indian Service in 1877 and first served as a physician at Leech Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. In 1893 he was transferred to the Colville Reservation in Oregon, in 1896 to the Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and later in 1896 to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. It was at Pine Ridge that Walker developed a lifelong interest in the Lakota (Oglala Sioux) Indians and ultimately became one of the foremost scholars of Lakota religion, preserving a multifaceted documentary record as important to the Lakota people themselves as to academic researchers.

When Walker arrived at Pine Ridge, he found that health conditions were abysmally low. Tuberculosis afflicted almost half the Lakota population, particularly children. The Oglalas had no confidence in white doctors, preferring to rely on their medicine men (traditional religious healers). While Walker at first felt antagonistic toward the medicine men, he soon realized that if he could win them over he would have powerful allies in combating the disease. He learned that they attributed the symptoms of tuberculosis to a worm eating away the patient's lungs. By mounting sputum samples from infected individuals on slides and inviting the medicine men to examine them under a microscope, Walker was able to demonstrate to the medicine men that their theory was correct, although the "worms" were many times smaller than they had believed.

On this common ground Walker was able to gain the cooperation of the medicine men in imposing sanitary precautions to control the spread of tuberculosis. His interest in the Lakotas' medical and religious systems grew. He decided that to be effective as a physician on the reservation, he himself must become a medicine man. In the fall of 1896, some of the leading medicine men at Pine Ridge told him, "We have decided to tell you of the ceremonies of the Oglalas.… We will do this so you may know how to be the medicine man for the people" (Walker 1980, p. 68).

Walker's scholarly investigations intensified after 1902, when he met Clark Wissler, an anthropologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Wissler was collecting objects for the museum and recording ethnographic notes. He recognized in Walker a kindred spirit and invited him to collaborate by recording vital statistics for physical anthropology studies and undertaking studies of traditional children's games, mythology, and religious ceremonies. These activities occupied Walker for the remainder of his life.

Walker's method of data collection was to transcribe interviews, commission drawings and written texts in Lakota, and make sound recordings of songs on a graphaphone, which was a device invented in 1886 that could record sound waves directly on a wax-coated cylinder. He relied on a few close consultants—Short Bull, who had been a leader of the Ghost Dance; George Sword, who wrote down many texts in Lakota and served as Walker's mentor; Thomas Tyon, who wrote texts and functioned as an interpreter—but also recorded material from more than thirty other individuals.

The study of the Sun Dance, the central Lakota religious ceremony held each summer as a ritual for renewal, was a particular challenge for Walker since the dance had been banned by the Office of Indian Affairs and was no longer performed. Of necessity Walker had to reconstruct the ritual and its meanings on the basis of interviews with the medicine men and others who had participated in the ceremony. This aspect of Walker's work complemented a series of studies of the Sun Dance among Plains tribes sponsored by the American Museum. The unparalleled richness and comprehensiveness of Walker's account of the Oglala Sun Dance, in comparison to other monographs in the series (Wissler 1915–1921), reveals his unique degree of insight into American Indian religion.

Published in 1917, Walker's "Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota" situated the ritual in its fullest social, philosophical, and religious contexts. He laid out the common people's understanding of the ritual and of the religious system it represented, then outlined the esoteric knowledge of the medicine men. The meaning of each ritual detail was explicated with references to sacred myths. To structure the description, Walker synthesized all of his data to produce a systematized account that might be considered an instructional manual for performing the Sun Dance. In the process of compiling his systematic account, he eliminated the inconsistencies that were so apparent in his interview notes. He appended accounts of the Hunka (adoption) and Buffalo (girl's puberty) ceremonies, together with some brief philosophical and religious texts, an important interview with a medicine man named Finger, and a series of longer myths and tales.

Walker retired from the Indian Service in 1914 at the age of sixty-five and moved to a ranch in Colorado. By then, most of the medicine men with whom he had worked had died. In 1916 he completed writing his Sun Dance monograph; two years later ill health forced him to retire to Wheatridge, a suburb of Denver. Much of his time in Wheatridge was devoted to writing an Oglala mythology about the creation of the world and the origin of human beings. Walker used the same method as before, systematizing conflicting versions. The many overlapping drafts that survive attest to his struggle to synthesize all he had learned about Lakota religion. He died on December 11, 1926, leaving the mythology unfinished.

Walker's work is valued in the early twenty-first century not only for his own writings, but even more for the mass of interview material and other manuscripts that he left behind. Three volumes of documents have been published (Walker 1980, 1982, 1983) that have become primary sources for the study of Lakota religion. The often conflicting and very personal voices recorded in these documents add nuance and richness to Walker's syntheses. They are part of his legacy, a historical record of an American Indian religion remarkable for its detail and depth of insight. The record of his studies fulfils the commitment he made to the medicine men that their knowledge would be preserved in writing, "that future generations of the Oglalas should be informed as to all that their ancestors believed and practiced" (Walker 1980, p. 47).

See Also

Lakota Religious Traditions; North American Indian Religions, article on History of Study.

Bibliography

Dooling, D. M., ed. The Sons of the Wind: The Sacred Stories of the Lakota. Norman, Okla., 2000. A popular edition of Walker's Oglala mythology for nonspecialist readers.

Walker, James R. "The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota." In Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 16, no. 2 pp. 51–221. New York, 1917. Walker's synthesis of Lakota religion, together with important religious and mythological texts.

Walker, James R. Lakota Belief and Ritual. Edited by Raymond J. DeMallie. Lincoln, Nebr., 1980. Includes most of Walker's interview material on religion, together with a variety of lectures and short writings. The introduction includes a biographical sketch of Walker and an assessment of his significance.

Walker, James R. Lakota Society. Edited by Raymond J. DeMallie and Elaine A. Jahner. Lincoln, Nebr., 1982. Includes a common man's account of participation in the Sun Dance, a variety of ritual practices, and material on sacred time that includes pictorial calendars (winter counts).

Walker, James R. Lakota Myth. Edited by Elaine A. Jahner. Lincoln, Nebr., 1983. Presents the fullest surviving drafts of Walker's Oglala mythology, together with mythological texts from a number of religious leaders.

Wissler, Clark, ed. "Sun Dance of the Plains Indians." Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 16 (1915–1921). Description of the Sun Dance among the Plains tribes with historical and comparative discussion.

Raymond J. DeMallie (2005)