Excerpt from Symposium on Cherokee and Iroquois Culture

This symposium is a link in a long chain Of public and scholarly concern and effort which stretches back to the Colonial period of American history during which both the Cherokee and Iroquois cultures figured prominently.

Scholarly interest has been continuous since the early work Of Lewis H. Morgan among the Iroquois and James Mooney among the Cherokee. In more recent times, sustained interest in Iroquoian problems has received stimulation and support in the Conference on Iroquois Research, which met annually after 1945 at Red House, n.y., under the leadership Of William N. Fenton.

The Proceedings Of the first four Red House conferences are refer enced in a footnote to a published symposium, which was held in New York City in November 1949 during the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (fenton, cd., 1951, p. By 1950, the conferences, having returned to Red House, were beginning to produce the results Of substantive research in several disciplines. In paired articles, called Iroquois Anthropology at the Mid-century, Fenton wrote up history, ethnology, and linguistics; and Witthoft reviewed archeology at the sixth conference (fenton, 1951 a; Witthoft, The seventh and eighth conferences held at Red House in 1951 and 1952 were noticed in Science (fenton, 1951 b; Wallace, By now the group had returned to general sessions on a single theme stability and change in culture history, which the following year prompted ethnohistory, with a trend noticeable toward more formal papers on methodological problems. The conference did not convene at Red House in 1954 or 1955, but at the Detroit meetings Of the American Anthropological Association, a group interested in the field met for lunch to formulate a program for regional studies involving American and Canadian scholars and institutions. A memorandum circulated after this meeting provided the basis for a conference which was called by the New York State Education Department and held at the New York State Museum in March 1955. A direct outcome Of this conference was a proposal for a regional ethnohistorical study on cultural conservatism among the Iroquois, which failed to find foundation support. The focus of this proposal was the developing field of ethnohistory; the theoretical problem was the study of conservatism. This petition said in part.

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