James Mooney

James Mooney (1861–1921) was an American ethnographer who spent his career with the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution. The son of Irish immigrants in Richmond, Indiana, and largely self-taught, he worked among the Cherokee of North Carolina from 1887, learning their language and recording the sacred formulas of their medicine men, and later among the Kiowa, Cheyenne and other peoples of the plains. His Myths of the Cherokee (1900) and The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, a sympathetic study of the movement that ended at Wounded Knee, are foundational works of American anthropology.