by Richard Green 

December Times  2003

In writing about the ancient Chickasaws’ social organization, customs and ceremonies in his book, The Chickasaws, Arrell Gibson repeatedly cited an article by a Columbia University anthropologist named Frank G. Speck. Titled “Notes on Chickasaw Ethnology and Folk-Lore,” the nine-page article had been published in 1907 (ironically the year of Oklahoma statehood) in the Journal of American Folk-Lore.

Although the article was hardly noticed at the time, it received notoriety several years later, in 1928, after another anthropologist, John R. Swanton, repeatedly cited the work himself in his much more extensive writing on Chickasaw social beliefs and customs.

To deliver such information in impressive detail, Swanton combined everything he could find in the literature with the observations of a few living Chickasaws. Speck’s article, on the other hand, was packed with social information that was based on the observations, knowledge and memory of just one informant, a person he identified as Ca’bitci.

According to him, the tribe had its own special officials and clans and he named them and gave their rank and placement in a drawing of the tribal encampment, a rectangular diagram with the council fire in the middle. All clans, he wrote, belonged into one of two groups. One was made up of warriors, the other consisted of “inferior” persons who lived under trees in the woods. The only thing this grouping had in common with the red and white division cited by earlier observers of the Chickasaws was that the tribe had two basic divisions.

Ca’bitci also described a “picofa” (pashofa) ceremony for the ill, who were said to have been laid low by some animal spirit at the “instigation of a malevolent conjurer.” Another ceremony mentioned was the training of new tribal doctors by the little people during three days in the woods.

 Customs were also included in the article. One details the segregation of menstruating women. Another mentions the practice of head flattening of infants and a third describes the prerequisites for marriage. Among them are the ability to hunt and the ownership of a log house.

Speck revealed nothing more about his informant except that his name meant “clearing,” and that he was a member of one of the warrior clans. Ca’bitci, or any spelling close to it, is not listed in the Chickasaw analytical dictionary authored by Pamela Munroe and Catherine Willmond. Furthermore, the four translations of “clearing” in the dictionary are not remotely similar to the informant’s name.

As to why he cited only one source, Speck actually had been interviewing some Yuchis in Oklahoma and had met this Chickasaw informant. At some point in his study of the Yuchis, Speck interviewed Ca’bitci and decided to take a foray into Chickasaw culture. Within a year, his paper was published.

For the most part, modern historians and anthropologists have cited Speck’s paper and reported his information uncritically, seemingly without a speck of curiosity about the source person who provided such cultural detail. I believe the main reason for this lack of critical appraisal is that Speck supplies details about the tribe’s social organization and lifestyle that otherwise would be blanks in our understanding of the early colonial period.

This is not to insinuate that Speck’s informant was not reliable. But all sources need to be evaluated. In that interest, I decided to try to find out more about Speck’s informant. Because the anthropologist was working for the Smithsonian Institution at the time, I traveled to the Smithsonian’s anthropology archives, now stored in Suitland, MD to check Speck’s correspondence. Later that day, I found letters and notes indicating that Ca’Bitci’s English name was Josiah Mikey.

In a March 26, 1906 letter to Speck, Mikey writes about a girl’s first “monthlies,” requiring no medicine man nor gathering (of people), but “she is not allowed to handle any boy child neither ride a horse.” Concerning a child’s birth, 'the navel string is corded, but not cliped for a certain time and is put away in a secret place that the same may be delivered to the prophet who may determan his or her fit subject in its future life.”

Mikey wrote the letter from Bristow, but it is not known if he resided there or was visiting. I’m asking anyone with information about Josiah Mikey to please contact me at (405) 947-5020 or . If you call, I will ask for your phone number and call you back.

Not all of the information in Speck’s and Mikey’s notes, copies of which were obtained at the Smithsonian, were used in Speck’s published article. For a nominal charge, copies of the notes as well as Speck’s article may be obtained from the Chickasaw Library in Ada. Interested persons may call (580) 436-2603, ext. 7302.