Phonology to the rescue: Nez Perce morphology revisited

Minimalist Morphology predicts that allomorphy is conditioned inward and locally, and that the domains of morphosyntactically and phonologically conditioned allomorphy selection are identical. Amy Rose Deal and Matthew Wolf have put forward two cases of allomorphy in Nez Perce that appear to be conditioned by an outward phonological context. I present an analysis of Nez Perce morphology and phonology which supports the conclusion that the first case is not outward-conditioned, and the second case is not allomorphy but phonology.

Black Robes and the Book of Heaven

Protestant and Catholic sources tell different stories about four Nez Perce emissaries from beyond the Rocky Mountains who arrived in St. Louis in the fall of 1831. Although their respective historical accounts reveal little about why native peoples would find it advantageous to send a delegation to an American frontier town asking for help, they reveal much about the contrasts between these rival groups of American Christians in the nineteenth century as well as their common objectives in Christianizing the American west. A third version of Christian missionaries arriving in the intermountain west from an indigenous oral tradition offers a different interpretation of Christianity’s consequences for the native peoples of the region.

“JUST A YOUNG TOURIST IN OUR COUNTRY”: ARCHIE PHINNEY, A NEZ PERCE LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGIST

Born in Culdesac, ID, Archie Phinney, a Nez Percé, was the first Native American to receive an undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas. He collaborated with prominent Smithsonian anthropologists J. N. B. Hewitt and T. Michelson as well as the great Franz Boas; visited Leningrad after being invited by Vladimir Bogoras in the context of an academic exchange program; defended his candidate thesis at the Institute of Anthropology, Archeology and Ethnography (MAE); and returned to serve as an Indian agent in different reservations in the USA. The USSR scholarship of Phinney fell on a difficult yet crucial period in the history of Soviet ethnography, when it was not yet completely closed and remained receptive to the influences of Boas’ School. Through Phinney and other American researchers like him, who visited the Soviet Union at that time, the Soviet practice of “indigenization” had a reverse effect on J. Collier’s liberal Indian New Deal. Phinney collaborated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, when the latter was on the Indian Commissioner’s post. Today, Phinney’s figure again attracts interest after some oblivion. The department of anthropology at the University of Idaho, Moscow, occupies a building named in his honor. The scope of the paper is based on the Boas Paper collection — his correspondence with Phinney, Bogoras, Averkieva, Barton and others, stored at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. The analyzed materials, representing the general atmosphere in the 1930s Soviet academic community, are still little-known to the Russian-speaking reader.