Harriet Arnot Maxwell Converse
Harriet Arnot Maxwell Converse (Ya-ih-wah-non) was a notable advocate for Native American rights and a significant figure in the preservation of Iroquois culture. Born in Elmira, New York, she was the daughter of Thomas Maxwell, an attorney deeply connected to the Seneca people. After marrying Frank Buchanan Converse, she became a central figure in New York City’s Indian community, providing maternal support and assistance to many Native Americans facing legal challenges. Her involvement with the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy led her to collect and preserve numerous Native artifacts, which she donated to various museums, including the New York State Museum and the American Museum of Natural History.
Converse was also an active lobbyist, successfully advocating against legislation that threatened tribal land ownership. She was honored by the Seneca people, becoming the first white woman to be named a chief within the Six Nations. In addition to her philanthropy, she contributed literary works, including poetry and essays, which highlighted Iroquois mythology and culture. Harriet Converse passed away in New York at sixty-seven, leaving behind a legacy of advocacy and cultural preservation that continues to be recognized in the history of American Indian affairs.
Subject Terms
Harriet Arnot Maxwell Converse
- Harriet arnot Maxwell Converse
- Born: January 11, 1836
- Died: November 18, 1903
Supporter of Indian rights, was the last of seven offspring of Thomas Maxwell and Maria (Purdy) Maxwell, his second wife. She was born at Elmira, New York. Her father was an attorney whose ancestors were Highland Scots. His own father had been a highly respected trader with the Indians. Thomas Maxwell, who grew up among the Senecas and was adopted into their Wolf Clan, retained his interest in them through a long career of government service as county clerk, assemblyman, and Congressman, and acquired from them a valuable collection of Indian artifacts.
Harriet Maxwell was reared by relatives in Ohio after her mother’s death and there married George B. Clarke, who owned part of Congress Spring in Saratoga, New York. On his death and that of her father, who was a vice president of the Erie Railroad, she inherited a considerable amount of money. In 1861 she married Frank Buchanan Converse, an inventor and musician, who had lived with Indians in the West and was a skilled athlete and bowman. After touring Europe for five years, where Frank Converse did research for a book on musical instruments, they moved to New York City, where their house became a center for visiting Indians. Harriet Converse took a maternal interest in them and in the city’s colony of nearly a hundred Indians, frequently getting them out of difficulties with the law.
Through a Seneca, General Ely S. Parker, who served as aide to General Ulysses S. Grant and later as his Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Converse became reacquainted with the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. She made frequent trips to their reservations in New York and Canada and took a great interest in their festivals and folklore. Like many scientifically trained ethnologists of the period, she believed it imperative to preserve Indian artifacts in museums for the benefit of future scholars and the general public. She gave her father’s century-old collection to the New York State Museum, and with museum grants and her own funds she bought many pieces found in private collections and from the Indians. She also acquired collections for the American Museum of Natural History, the Peabody Museum in Boston, and the Museum of the American Indian in New York City.
Converse also devoted much time to helping the Indians preserve their lands from encroachment. In 1891 her lobbying and testimony before the New York State legislature were instrumental in defeating a bill to end tribal ownership and apportion lands to individuals, and her many letters of protest helped thwart a government bill that would have cost the Senecas $200,000 to defeat a dubious land company claim. Much of her art collection came from grateful Indians, who also bestowed upon her every honor in their gift. She was adopted by the Senecas and was the first white woman to be named a chief of the Six Nations.
Converse contributed essays and verse, some in Old Scottish, to American and British periodicals, and her 1882 collection, Sheaves, praised by Whittier and Tennyson, went through several editions. In 1884 she published The Ho-de-no-saunee, an ode to the Iroquois in the style and meter of Hiawatha. Her posthumously published Myths and Legends of the New York State Iroquois (1908), which was edited by her friend the Seneca anthropologist Arthur C. Parker, is somewhat amateurish and sentimental. It was not her ethnography but her philanthropy that earned Converse a place in the history of American Indian affairs. She died in New York at age sixty-seven, two months after Frank Converse.
Her papers are in the Ely S. Parker collection at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and the Keppler collection of the Museum of the American Indian. The annual report of the New York State Museum, 1900, includes her article on “The Iroquois Silver Brooches.” An article written in 1895, “The Seneca New Year Ceremony and Other Customs,” appears in the New York State Museum’s Indian Notes, January 1930. Biographical material is included in A. C. Parker’s introduction to Myths and Legends of the New York State Iroquois, and in an article by L. E. Eyres in the publication of the Chemung County Historical Society, December 1957. See also Notable American Women (1971).