Frederick Voget Collection

Donor Name: Kay Voget (Wife)
Accession Number: 08179901
Processor: Faith G. Bad Bear-Bartlett
Access Restrictions on Use: None. Open to public use.
Terms Governing Use and Reproduction: All publication rights for unpublished materials are held by Little Big Horn College, use for publication must be approved by archivist.
Preferred Citation of Materials: Frederick W. Voget Collection, Little Big Horn College Archives

Physical Description

Linear Feet: .5
Comprehensive Dates: 1963-1997
Materials Included: Inventory list: Voget books, Crow Misc., Maps, Newspaper clippings, Field Notes, reports on the Crow, with some written by Robert C. Kiste.
Organization of Materials: This collection consists of materials all relating to the Crow. There are several reports written by Robert C. Kiste about Crow Peyotism. Others include the Socio-Cultural Groups of the Crow, Indian Trust Land issues of the Crow, Field Notes, and Newspaper clippings on the Crow.

Biographical and/or Historical note

Frederick William Voget, well-known cultural anthropologist and American Indian ethnologist, was born in Salem, Oregon, one of six children of Friedrich A. Voget who emigrated from Germany to Oregon and Fay Isham whose grandparents were Oregon pioneers. Voget was educated in the Portland public schools, attended Reed College, and graduated from the University of Oregon. He attended graduate school at Yale University and received a PhD in Anthropology in 1947. Voget’s field work and PhD dissertation were on the Crow Indians of Montana. During his doctoral research, Voget conducted research on the Crow reservation in 1941, where he witnessed the first Sun Dance on the reservation in seventy years and returned in 1946 to conclude his fieldwork. Voget conducted further fieldwork in 1975 and his revised dissertation, The Shoshoni-Crow Sun Dance, was published in 1984 in the Civilization of the American Indians Series, University of Oklahoma Press, and is the first full-length authoritative treatment of the modern Crow Sun Dance.

An earlier book, A History of Ethnology, was published in 1975 by Holt Rinehart. Recent contributions to new books included the Introduction to Old Man Coyote and the forward to Yellowtail: Crow Indian Medicine Man. His most recent book, They Call Me Agnes, was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Spur Award for the best non-fiction book of 1995. They Call Me Agnes, the life story of a Crow Indian woman, was written with the assistance of his wife Kay. Dr. Voget was the author of many articles, notable among them “The Osage Indians: Osage Research Report I” and “Crow Sacred Numerology” published in the Plains Anthropologist in 1996. His articles were also published in the 1996 edition of the Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology published by Yale University.

Dr. Voget taught at McGill University in Montreal, the University of Arkansas, University of Toronto and Southern Illinois University. He was a visiting professor at Northwestern University and Portland State University. In 1966 he won a Canada Council Research Grant to work with the Six Nations tribes of Eastern Canada. He was a Fulbright Scholar to Germany in 1972 and returned there in 1979 as a visiting professor with the University of Munich. After his retirement from Southern Illinois University, Dr. Voget returned to Portland where he continued to write and lecture. He was adjunct professor at Portland State University and was a guest lecturer at the University or Oregon and Linfield College. Dr. Voget passed away in 1997.

Provenance

Dr. Voget collected the materials in the course of his research that detailed the diffusion of the Shoshone Sun Dance to the Crow reservation in the early 1940s. The collection includes materials generated in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and corresponded with his continued research related to Shoshoni-Crow Sun Dance. The collection resided with Dr. Voget until his wife Kay Voget donated the collection to the Little Big Horn College Archives in 1999.

Scope and Content Note

In the Shoshoni-Crow Sun Dance, Dr. Voget compares the Sun Dance that developed on the Crow reservation to peyotism that flourished for the proceeding thirty-five years. The comparative nature of his study is reflected in the material in the collection, as material generated by other scholars regarding peyote use finds its way into the collection along with his own research notes on the Sun Dance and other material related to the Crow. This collection consists of anthropological research that focuses on peyotism, the Shoshoni/Crow Sun Dance, Crow social and cultural research, and information related to reservation leases. The collections spans the 1950s to the 1970s, and reflect the research interests of Dr. Voget during this time period, particularly research themes for the Shoshoni-Crow Sun Dance.

Inventory

Box 1

Crow Miscellaneous Materials
Crow Peyotism (1962), Robert C. Kiste-Copy
Crow Peyotism (1962), Robert C. Kiste-Copy
Crow Peyotism (1962), Robert C. Kiste-Original
Crow: Maps
Crow Socio-Cultural Groups
The Diffusion of The Wind River Shoshone Sundance To The Crow Indians of Montana
Cultural and Economic Status of The Crow People U.S. Dept. of Interior-B.I.A. Missouri River Basin Investment Project (1955)
The Leasing of Indian Trust Land on the Crow Reservation (1954)
“Perseverance of Aboriginal Values as Evidenced by Crow Peyote Leaders (1961)-K.C. Kiste
Crow-Field Notes
Crow - Newspaper Clippings