Truman Michelson

Truman Michelson (August 11, 1879 – July 26, 1938) was a linguist and anthropologist who worked from 1910 until his death for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution. He also held a position as ethnologist at George Washington University from 1917 until 1932.

Michelson studied Indo-European historical linguistics at Harvard University, completing his doctoral degree in 1904, with further study at the Universities of Leipzig and Bonn in 1904-1905, followed by study with Franz Boas.

Soon after joining the Bureau of American Ethnology, Michelson began an extensive program of field research on North American Indian languages. Much of Michelson's research focused on languages of the Algonquian family. Bibliographies of his publications are available in Boas (1938), Cooper (1939), and Pentland and Wolfart (1982). He was the author of an early influential study classifying the Algonquian languages, although extensive further research has entirely superseded Michelson's pioneering effort.

Much of his research focused on the Fox people and language, resulting in an extensive list of publications on Fox ethnology and linguistics. Michelson employed native speakers of the language to write Fox stories in the Fox version of the Great Lakes Algonquian syllabary, resulting in a large collection of unpublished materials. Goddard (1991, 1996) discusses the material in some of these texts. A significant text from this corpus, The Owl Sacred Pack, has recently been published. One of the texts obtained in this manner that Michelson did publish, The autobiography of a Fox Indian woman, is now available in a more complete edition, with a revised transcription of the original text and comprehensive linguistic analysis.

Michelson also assisted in the posthumous preparation and publication of a number of draft manuscripts left unpublished after the premature death of William Jones. Among these were: (a) a significant two-volume collection of Ojibwe texts with translations that Jones had obtained in northwestern Ontario at Fort William Ojibwa reserve, and near Lake Nipigon, in addition to stories collected in northern Minnesota; (b) a volume of Kickapoo texts; and (c) an article on Fox for the first Handbook of American Indian languages.

He also undertook field research on, among others, Arapaho; Shawnee; Peoria; Kickapoo; Munsee and Unami, the two closely related Delaware languages; collected notes and texts in the syllabic script from Cree dialects in Québec and northern Ontario; physical anthropology notes on Blackfoot and Cheyenne; Eskimo texts from Great Whale River, Québec, and others. A comprehensive list of all of Michelson’s archival materials in the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution is available online.

Michelson was involved in a prominent debate with Edward Sapir because of his rejection of Sapir's proposal that the Algonquian languages were related to Wiyot and Yurok, two languages of California, through common membership in the Algic language family. Although he strongly criticized Sapir's proposal, the historical links between Algonquian, Yurok, and Wiyot are now accepted as being beyond dispute.