Martha Warren Beckwith

Early life and education

The family moved to Maui, Hawaii, where relatives descended from early missionaries lived. There she befriended locals, including members of the Alexander family who later sponsored her folklore work, and developed an early interest in Hawaiian folk dancing. She earned a Bachelor of Science from Mount Holyoke College in 1893, then taught in Honolulu. After moving to Chicago in 1896, she taught English and Anthropology at the University of Chicago before instructing English at Elmira College.

Following her father's death in 1898, she studied Old English, French, and German at Cambridge University and the University of Halle. She later taught English at Mount Holyoke. Her formal anthropology training began in the 1900s; she earned a Master of Arts in anthropology from Columbia University in 1906 under Franz Boas, with a thesis on Hopi and Kwatiutl traditional dances, and received her PhD from Columbia in 1918.

Academic career

Beckwith joined Vassar College's English Department as an instructor in 1909, recommended by William Witherle Lawrence. She left Vassar in 1913 to collect Hawaiian folklore in Hawaii. In 1915 she took a position at Smith College's English Department and began publishing on hula and Tsimshian mythology. Her work engaged with Boas' Tsimshian Mythology, which influenced her dissertation on the mythological figure Laieikawai.

Boas encouraged her to stay at Smith, but she shared concerns about the lack of academic folklore positions with childhood friend Annie Alexander, who anonymously funded the Folklore Foundation at Vassar College. In 1920 Beckwith was appointed chair of the Foundation, becoming the first person to hold a folklore chair at any U.S. college or university. The Foundation published monographs on Jamaican, Native American, and Hawaiian folklore by alumnae and hosted American Folklore Society lectures and meetings.

She served as AFS president from 1932 to 1933 and was on the Committee for the National Folk Festival in 1934. She became a full professor at Vassar in 1929 and retired in 1938.

Research and travel

Beckwith conducted research in Europe and the Middle East, but her most extensive work focused on Hawaii and Polynesia, Jamaica, and the Sioux tribes of North and South Dakota. She carried out fieldwork in Jamaica from 1919 to 1922, often including music recorded by Helen H. Roberts. Her book Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folklife (1929) was one of the first folkloric studies of Black communities in the New World, presenting Black culture as a rational system.

Melville J. Herskovits reviewed it in the Journal of American Folklore, praising her detailed descriptions and identifying African origins such as Yoruba or Ashanti. Beckwith's work emphasized cultural and historical influences on folklore rather than racial or mental characteristics. At Vassar she collected folk songs from descendants of Dutch settlers in the Hudson Valley and beliefs of modern college women. In 1926 she gathered folktales at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and spent summers with the Mandan-Hidatsa tribes on the Fort Berthold Reservation, where she was adopted into the Hidatsa's Prairie Chicken Clan.

During a 1926–1927 sabbatical she did fieldwork in Goa among Portuguese settlers and traveled to Italy, Greece, Palestine, and Syria. These travels shaped her methodology, outlined in Folklore in America (1931). Her most recognized work was on Hawaiian culture, including translations of creation chants and myths drawing on 19th-century Hawaiian historians Kepelino and Samuel Kamakau. Hawaiian Mythology (1940) represented more than thirty years of research.

Selected bibliography

Martha W. Beckwith published her first work, "The Hawaiian Hula-Dance," in 1916. She then turned her attention to Jamaica, producing a series of studies. In 1922, she released "Folk-Games of Jamaica," with field-recorded music by Helen H. Roberts. The following year saw three publications: "Signs and Superstitions Collected from American College Girls," "Christmas Mummings in Jamaica" (again with Roberts), and "Polynesian Analogues to the Celtic Other-World and Fairy Mistress Themes."

Her 1924 volume "Jamaica Anansi Stories" also included music from Roberts, and that same year she wrote "The English Ballad in Jamaica: A Note upon the Origin of the Ballad Form." She compiled "Jamaica Proverbs" in 1925, followed by "Notes on Jamaican Ethnobotany" in 1927. "Jamaica Folk-Lore," another collaboration with Roberts, appeared in 1928, and her comprehensive study "Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life" came out in 1929. Beckwith then shifted her focus to Native American traditions.

In 1930, she published "Myths and Hunting Stories of the Mandan and Hidatsa Sioux" and "Mythology of the Oglala Dakota." Her work "Mandan-Hidatsa Myths and Ceremonies" followed in 1937. She returned to Hawaiian subjects with "Hawaiian Mythology" in 1940. Later in her career, she contributed "An Old Song" in 1948, and in 1949 wrote "Function and Meaning of the Kumulipo Birth Chant in Ancient Hawaii." Her final major work, "The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant," was published in 1951.

Did You Know?

• She published her final major work on the Kumulipo at age 80.
• She is buried on Maui in Makawao Cemetery alongside her parents, brother, sister, and childhood friend Annie Alexander.