William Jones (anthropologist)
American linguist
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ToursExplore Lably’s 3D toursJones is known as a specialist in Algonquian languages, particularly known for his extensive collection of Algonquian texts. In 1908, while employed as an assistant curator at the Field Museum, he went to the Philippines to do fieldwork.
Early life
William Jones was born to Henry Clay Jones and Sarah Penny Jones on March 28, 1871. His ethnicity is a mix of Meskwaki, Welsh, and English. Jones' mother, Sarah, died when he was an infant. From the age of one to nine, Jones lived in a wigwam where his maternal grandmother and medicine woman, Kitiqua, took care of him. Jones' great-grandfather, Kitiqua's father, named Wa-shi-ho-wa, taught Jones the tradition, language, and customs of their Meskwaki ancestors.
Jones attended two of the more than 400 American Indian boarding schools that were dedicated to removing indigenous cultural heritage. When he was ten, Jones was taken to the Indian school at Newton, Kansas. Later, he was taken to White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute that was run by Quaker missionaries in Wabash, Indiana. After leaving them, he worked as a cowhand in Indian Territory.
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Career
At 18 years old, he went to Hampton Institute, where he was considered a prize pupil. There, he and other indigenous children joined black students for their education. After Hampton, he attended the Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, a predominantly white school.
In 1896, Jones went to Harvard, where he wrote for and was editor for The Harvard Monthly; studied the Sauk and Meskwaki near Tama, Iowa; and received his A.B degree. He then continued his studies at Columbia University where he held a fellowship and later became an assistant in anthropology. In the summer of 1900, Jones went to study the Sauk and Meskwaki of the upper Mississippi, under the direction of his Columbia mentor Franz Boas, who said to benefactors “the work must be pushed more energetically on account of the rapid disappearance of the material.”
Once Jones received his PhD from Columbia in 1904, he commenced investigations along the northern Algonquian tribes. Jones wrote short stories about Native Americans and the American West, magazine articles, and gave lectures.
Fieldwork in the Philippines and death
Jones was unable to find a permanent position working on Algonquian languages due to bias against Native Americans. As a result, he accepted an offer from the Field Museum to gather information and articles about the Ilongot people (now called the Bugkalot) of the Philippines.
At the age of 38, Jones was killed on March 29, 1909, at Dumobato on the east side of Luzon in an altercation with some of the Ilongot among whom he was engaged in fieldwork. It is debatable as to whether or not his death was actually a murder, as his diary entries and correspondences in the last months of his life revealed feelings of peace and belonging with the Ilongot people. He was also valued within their community for his skills as a medical practitioner. Within a few weeks following the event of his death, the United States burned twenty Ilongot villages in retaliation.