Tooker, Elisabeth

Elisabeth Tooker is an anthropologist whose research includes Iroquois culture and history. Her graduate work was on Southwestern Indians. Tooker's published works include "An Ethnography of the Huron Indians, 1615-1649"; "The Iroquois Ceremonial of Midwinter"; and "Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture."

An anthropologist and Iroquoian scholar, Elisabeth Jane Tooker was born on August 2, 1927 in Brooklyn, New York. Following an undergraduate career at Radcliffe College, from which she graduated in 1949, Tooker pursued graduate study in anthropology at the University of Arizona (MA, 1953), and Radcliffe, working on Indians of the American Southwest.

Before completing her degree at Radcliffe, Tooker was employed as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard from 1956-1957, and in 1957, she accepted a position as Instructor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Tooker remained at SUNY Buffalo for two years after completion of her dissertation, "Ritual, Power and the Supernatural: A Comparative Study of Indian Religions in Southwestern United States," in March, 1958, before joining the faculty at Mount Holyoke College as Assistant Professor. A grant from the National Institute of General Medical Science (part of the National Institutes of Health) in 1964 enabled her to spend an intensive year in Cambridge, Mass., studying North American Indian curing practices and theories of disease.

Shortly after returning from her leave in 1965, Tooker accepted a position at Temple University, where she remained for the rest of her career, earning promotion to Associate Professor in 1967 and Professor in 1977. During her stay at Temple, she continued her research through a Temple Summer Faculty Research Award and Research Grant-in-Aid in 1966, a Study Leave for the academic year 1971-1972, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1981-1982), and a Smithsonian Institution Post-Doctoral Fellowship (1989-1990). She was also a Visting Professor at the State University of New York at Albany 1978-1979.

From the time of her move to Philadelphia, Tooker began increasingly to concentrate her research on the history and culture of Indians in the Northeast, and particularly the Iroquois. Among her several books are An ethnography of the Huron Indians, 1615-1649 (1964); The Indians of the Northeast: a critical bibliography (1978), and Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture (1994), along with several edited volumes, including four volumes of the proceedings of the American Ethnological Society (1978-1981), one volume from the Conference on Iroquois Research (1965), and three volumes of An Iroquois Sourcebook. Tooker was also a contributing author and a member of the planning committee of the Northeast volume of the Handbook of North American Indians that was published in 1978.

Tooker has been a member of many professional anthropological organizations, including the American Ethnological Society (editor of American Ethnologist, 1978-1982); the American Society for Ethnohistory (Executive Committee, 1973-1975; President, 1981-1982); the Conference on Iroquois Research (Planning Committee; Program Chair); the Northeastern Anthropological Association (Secretary, 1966-1968); and the Philadelphia Anthropological Society (Vice-President, 1967; President, 1969; Treasurer, 1988-1992). Her success in the profession has earned recognition as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1960), as an alumna member of Phi Beta Kappa (through Radcliffe College, 1974), and as recipient of the Cornplanter Medal for Iroquois Research (1986).

In other professional activities, Tooker has served as a consultant to the exhibit, "American Indian Life, 1776-1976," at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania (for which she co-authored an exhibit catalog); a member of the Visiting Committee of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (1977-1981); a member of the Phillips Fund grant committee of the American Philosophical Society (1979); a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Conference on Native American Studies at Oklahoma State University (1982-1985); and a Consulting Scholar for the University of Pennsylvania's University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (1982-present). Tooker became Professor Emerita at Temple University in 1992, and she currently resides in Philadelphia.