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Mary Cabot Wheelwright
Mary Cabot Wheelwright (October 2, 1878 – July 29, 1958) was an American anthropologist and museum founder. She established the museum which is now called Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, in 1937[1] along with Hosteen Klah.[2] Early life and familyWheelwright was born on October 2, 1878,[3][unreliable source?] the only child of Andrew Cunningham Wheelwright and Sarah ("Sadie")[4] Perkins Cabot Wheelwright.[5] She was raised in a wealthy household and the Cabot family was part of the Boston upper class.[5] Her family traced its ancestry to 18th-century merchants who had become wealthy through shipping.[4] Her great-grandfathers worked as commission agents and her maternal grandfather made his wealth through "slavery, sugar, and rum," also building China's first trading outpost, where he imported silks and opium.[6] Mary's mother, Sarah, was close friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson,[4] who often visited the family's home.[2] As a child, Wheelwright was raised in the tradition of the Transcendentalists and the Unitarian Church.[4] In 1882, at the age of four years old, she posed for a portrait by artist Frank Duveneck.[7] She was well-traveled, visiting Europe, Egypt, and California with her parents, who were "protective" and raised Wheelwright as how a friend described as "growing up in cotton wool."[4] For 40 years, Wheelwright remained the "dutiful Victorian daughter."[8] She devoted herself to "good works, particularly a settlement-house music school in the South End of Boston."[8] As the heiress of a family trust, she had significant income that would support her throughout her life but lacked control of the capital, which was intended to protect her from "fortune-hunting suitors" but made her unable to endow the museum she would later found as she wished.[8] Life and work in the American SouthwestAt age 40, after both her parents had died, Wheelwright journeyed to the American Southwest, where she "found and embraced a more primitive type of civilization, more adventuresome and more exciting than the safety of Boston."[5] In Alcalde, New Mexico, she stayed on a ranch.[5] In addition, she traveled to the Four Corners region and Navajo reservation.[5] There, she developed an interest in Navajo religion.[5] In 1921, Wheelwright was introduced to Hosteen Klah, a Navajo medicine man and singer, who was worried about preserving traditional Navajo religious practices.[5] The two developed a friendship and began working together to preserve Navajo religious practices, with Klah sharing details about Navajo ceremonies with Wheelwright, who recorded and translated them.[5] While at the time, there was a taboo in the Navajo community against replicating ceremonies, Klah's fear of the knowledge of his culture's traditions being lost led him to share the information with Wheelwright.[2] Throughout the next years, Wheelwright spent time traveling the world, living in the eastern United States, and living in Alcalde.[5] In 1940, she traveled to India with the goal of finding symbols related to the ones found in Navajo art.[2] She also visited Europe, Greece, Egypt, and China.[2] She continued to record information about Navajo ceremonials given by Klah and by another 58 medicine men, and collected reproductions of ceremonial sandpaintings in various media.[5] In 1923, Wheelwright purchased the Los Luceros Ranch near Alcalde.[8] She befriended Maria Chabot, who managed the ranch for 20 years, and later gifted the ranch to Chabot.[9] In 1937, Wheelwright and Klah established the House of Navajo Religion in Santa Fe.[5] The name was later changed to the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in 1939.[2] In 1942 the museum published Navajo Creation Myth - the Story of the Emergence by Hosteen Klah, Recorded by Mary C. Wheelwright.[10] In 1977, the museum was renamed the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.[5] Wheelwright wrote an autobiography, titled Journey Towards Understanding, in 1957.[2] Ultimately, it went unpublished during her lifetime.[2] An excerpt was published in A Quilt of Words: Women's Diaries, Letters & Original Accounts of Life in the Southwest, 1860–1960 in 1988.[2] In addition to traveling, Wheelwright enjoyed sailing.[2] She spent summers on the coast of Maine and lived alone for a time in a shipmaster's cottage on Sutton Island.[2] Later life and deathWheelwright continued to serve as director of the museum for the rest of her life.[5] She died on July 29, 1958[5] at the age of 79 in her home in Maine.[6] References
BibliographyArchival collections
Primary works
Secondary works
Further reading
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