Lewis Henry Morgan and the Question of Knowledge

The relationship between Ely Parker and Lewis Henry Morgan represents one of the more complicated episodes in Parker’s biography — one that has received increasing scholarly attention as historians have paid more careful attention to the dynamics of knowledge production between Native communities and non-Native scholars in the nineteenth century.

Morgan was a Rochester attorney with an interest in the history and social organization of the Haudenosaunee.

He had been introduced to Parker in the early 1840s, when Parker was in his mid-teens and Morgan was in his early twenties.