George Gustav Heye

George Gustav Heye (* 1874 † 20 January 1957) was a collector of artifacts of American Indians. His collection became the core of the National Museum of the American Indian.

Life

George Gustav Heye was born as the son of Carl Friederich Gustav Heye and Marie Antoinette Lawrence of Hudson; his father was a German immigrant who had arrived in the oil industry assets. George studied at the time of his Columbia College in New York, now Columbia University and graduated as an electrical engineer from 1896. From 1901 to 1909 he worked in investment banking.

In 1897, he came through the acquisition of a deer-skin shirt for the first time with the Navajo indigenous culture as a collector in contact. By 1903 he acquired another individual pieces to acquirieren from then on in the largest scale. 1915 he worked together with Frederick W. Hodge and George H. Pepper on Nacoochee Mound in White County in the state of Georgia. Their work was funded by the Heye Foundation and the Bureau of American Ethnology and was considered one of the best-documented excavations of their time. 1918 published the excavators its report under the title The Nacoochee Mound in Georgia.

Heye amassed one of the largest private collections of indigenous art. At first he collected the objects in his apartment on Madison Avenue in New York, but he soon had to rent the premises. From 1908, he referred to his collection named "The Heye Museum ," and he soon gave individual objects to the later University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. In 1916 he bought JE Standley from Ye Olde Curiosity Shop in Seattle, the collection alaskanischer artifacts from.

The Heye collection has now been relocated to the Heye Foundation 's Museum of the American Indian at 155th Street and Broadway; The museum was opened in 1922 after six years. Heye itself was its first director until 1956. Soon It encompassed more than one million objects, which he bought in part to European auctions. From 1919 he published the magazine Indian Notes and Monographs. In 1994, the Smithsonian Institution, the house and opened the Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian in the former Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in Manhattan.

Heye was a member of the American Anthropological Association and the American Museum of Natural History, and he was also a Fellow of the American Geographical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in addition, honorary fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain. In 1929 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Hamburg. Of the Iroquois Seneca, he received the honorary title of " O'owah " ( Screeching Owl | Screech ), the Hidatsa of North Dakota in 1938 gave him the name " Isatsigibis " ( slim shin ). The Hidatsa believed that a stolen by a missionary medicine bag, which was in Heyes collection, the cause of the severe drought this year was. They therefore called for the return. Heye handed the 84 -year-old Foolish Bear and the 75 -year-old Drags Wolf the bag.

Works

• George G. Heye, Frederick W. Hodge, George H. Pepper: The Nacoochee Mound in Georgia, New York, 1918.