Hear about Caroline Parker, first Native American Women’s Hall of Fame nominee
On Thursday, October 2, John Maier will speak at the Morgan-Manning House about the first female Native American to attend the Brockport Collegiate Institute. She is Caroline Parker, a Seneca, who will be nominated for the Women’s Hall of Fame in the fall.
Growing up on the Tonawanda Reservation, she learned her native language as well as English in attending a missionary school. She attended Brockport Collegiate Institute in 1845. Lewis Henry Morgan met her when visiting Tonawanda and was impressed with her education at BCI.
Morgan was an American ethnologist and a principal founder of scientific anthropology. Parker’s bilingual and multicultural understanding proved to be crucial to Morgan’s ethnographic work. “His groundbreaking work the Iroquois Confederation, especially the Seneca tribe, was based almost exclusively on his friendship with Caroline, her parents, and her brother Ely S. Parker – the famous one of the family,” Maier said. “Her schooling, and later her teaching, prepared her to make the contributions, I will be arguing, that were central to Morgan’s works … which gained him an international reputation as the Father of American Anthropology.”
John Maier, PhD was a professor in the English Department of the College at Brockport for 34 years from 1971 to 2005. He taught a variety of courses at the College in literature, literary theory, and linguistics. He authored or co-authored six books and wrote over fifty scholarly essays, usually in World and Comparative Literature.
The event begins at 7:30 p.m., 151 Main Street in Brockport and is sponsored by the Western Monroe Historical Society. Admission is free and refreshments will be served. For information, phone the WMHS office at (585) 637-3645.
Provided information
