Joyce Anne Belle Wike Thieme Holder

Courtesy of Jay Miller

Though born in Spokane (22 April 1918 at 12:30 AM), Joyce was a child of Cusick, where her father, John Adam Wike, owned the grocery store with his brother. It was managed by her mother, Mildred, whose family came from Denmark. A booster encouraging the planting of many trees, Adam was mayor, county commissioner, member of the school board, and chairman of county fair.  Both parents had been school teachers when younger. 

Cusick, in Pend Oreille County northeastern Washington, was founded in 1902 by Joseph W. Cusick on the site of largest Pend Oreille/Kalispel community (Interior Salish: čmq̓ʷoqnú), 1,000 strong, and still the home of a Kalispell reservation. A Diamond Match mill sustained the logger economy, rebuilt after it burned in 1923, until it closed 12 May 1960.  

Graduating high school (1935), Joyce had a scholarship at Whitman College in Walla Walla, where she was unhappy because “not the type one takes to a prom.” She found solace in the arts, writing poetry and fiction she published on campus. She left in her second year when put on probation for being absent during a dorm fire drill.  Her family convinced her to return to college in Seattle, where she discovered anthropology. 

She had an arts scholarship at Cornish, where she danced and befriended, later world famous, modern dancer Merce Cuningham and painter Morris Graves (and his dog Edith), among others. During her M.A. fieldwork, Graves had a ramshackle cabin near Swinomish where she sometimes stayed, and college friends, Gen and Perry Baker, were at Shelter Bay within the Swinomish community.  In time, Preston’s son Tony went to New York to dance with Merce, before going on to degrees in medical anthropology at Berkeley and New School, as well as careers as an artist, Happenings planner, and earthquake retrofitter. After her 1939 University of Washington (UW) graduation, she studied modern dance at Bennington School of the Dance at Mills College, California. 

When she returned for graduate school, anthropology told her to stay in the drama department. She was earning 35₵ an hour working in the pots and pans department of Sears Roebuck, Seattle.  Undaunted, she reached out to the Swinomish reservation intent on studying their sacred Winter dance. Convinced of her seriousness, the anthropology department gave her one hundred dollars as she connected with the Williams Family in January 1940.  Her diligence led to her becoming a bona fide graduate student in anthropology, gaining funds to expand her research among Coast Salish in Puget Sound and on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. 

Her M.A. is a rich and intimate ethnography that can never be repeated. It was intended for publication in 1941, but WWII intervened. Dancer’s Spirit songs were transcribed by Otto Gombosi, with whom Joyce studied. Her M.A. and faculty recommendations earned her a scholarship to Columbia University during the last years of Franz Boas.  His protégé Ruth Benedict was her advisor. With Sula Benet she translated PP Efimenko's Primitive Society, a Russian classic on Paleolithic archaeology, for the American Museum of Natural History but, again, publication was thwarted. She edited for Ruth Benedict and the Office of War Information. 

In 1941, Joyce married Frederick Patton Thieme, a professional mountain climber also involved with mountain ski rescue, then a salesman for International Trucks, later production manager for military skis and lifeboats. Fred joined the Navy in WWII.  By 1946 they were divorced as Fred was earning a Ph.D. in physical anthropology at Columbia, specializing on the human spine and developing ergonomic airplane seats before becoming dean at various colleges, and then President of the University of Colorado, expanding it to four campuses and admitting minorities.  Joyce later said Fred was the kind of man she assumed her mother wanted her to marry, though she personally thought him an unsupportive male chauvinist. 

In 1944, Columbia (during Culture and Personality studies) sent Joyce to do psychological testing among Yakama and Kwakiutl. In 1946 in New York City, she taught anthropology and the works of Ruth Benedict at the Katharine Dunham School of the Dance, then began visiting ship archives at Massachusetts Historical Society, Library of Congress, and New York Public Library for her Ph.D. dissertation, Effect of Maritime Fur Trade on Northwest Coast Indian Society, 1785–1825.   

Meeting at the 1946 annual anthropology meeting in Philadelphia, Joyce began a romance with Preston Holder, twice divorced with a son. Yet unmarried, they lived in Columbia’s Veteran housing at the mental hospital at Orangeburg, New York, and, in May, Joyce was elected to the town Council. 

During WWII, Preston had been a Lt. Commander on the staff of an admiral in the Pacific, where he played cribbage, photographed, and did field work at Espiritu Santo, the largest island in Vanuatu, where he convinced these men to resume head hunting—of invading Japanese. At Berkeley, Preston had become firmly bohemian, a founder of the famous photography club (f/64) with Willard Van Dyke, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Imogene Cunningham. However, Berkeley denied him deserved honors at graduation, judging him too radical (!) because of his advocacy of socialism, justice, and peace.  With his B.A., he did archaeology throughout the South (Irene, St. Simons, Cahokia), and worked closely with Antonio Waring, an amateur archaeologist and Savannah pediatrician, defining the Southeast Ceremonial Complex. He was hired (1940–1942) to study and number the dismantled bricks of McLean House, where Lee surrendered, in the town of Appomattox Court House, intended for the Chicago World Fair of 1893, left in piles, and finally rebuilt in 1948 as a welcome center. 

In 1946, they agreed in 1946 to lead the Motilon/Motilone [Endnote 1] Expedition of American Museum of Natural History into Colombia and Venezuela. On the way, they married in the Panama Canal Zone, then U.S. territory, in the interests of respectability.  In all, they received arrows shot into their canoe, but never made contact. 

Joyce received tentative job offers but decided to join Preston when he accepted a job at the University of Buffalo (1947), where she taught part time. They taught school on Unalaska Island (1949), and joined Washington University in St. Louis (1952), where they pioneered Cahokia research.  While a motel was built around them, they systematically excavated Kunneman Mound, one of the northern boundary markers. Joyce is especially noted for excavating burials with very delicate hand and fingers, while pregnant. As he had learned while working for the WPA, Preston brought in heavy equipment to strip off the plow zone and save time for more detailed troweling.

Between Buffalo and Nebraska, Preston was Social Science Analyst (1957–1958) for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) at Nespelem on the Colville Reservation, close to Cusick for Joyce to visit her parents. They then moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, for Preston’s faculty and chair positions. 

In 1967, Joyce became tenured at Nebraska Wesleyan University in a sociology and anthropology department under a chauvinistic chair who kept adding to and changing her workload. Other departments, such as English, economics, and history had better colleagues. She persisted until she retired in 1983 and moved to Seattle, three houses down from her daughter and grandson. 

While on Wesleyan staff she told an interviewer about Kalispel at Cusick, "They were the nicest people I knew when I was a child," she said.  "My father wanted to play baseball and there weren't enough farmers and loggers so the baseball team was half-Indian." She lauded, "What we get from knowing about other life ways can be all kinds of insights, solutions and different approaches to problems.... It's the only academic discipline that spans the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences all at once." 

Throughout her life, Joyce kept contacts with Kalispel, who received some of her Cusick land after she passed, and Swinomish, especially the Williams family.  A memorial was held a year after she died at Daybreak Star and her ashes joined the Pond Oreille Kalispel at Cusick. 

Such were the times that the FBI, with the personal interest of J. Edgar Hoover, assembled an inch-thick, double-sided file on Preston as a “Red,” but not on Joyce, though note was made of her unconventional but comfortable practice of wearing Marine fatigues kept from her time in Colombian jungles. Younger archaeologists knew Preston as a strong advocate for justice and “a somewhat eccentric anthro professor with a single tweed suit and a ponytail.” 

In all, Joyce is remembered as intrepid and endlessly interested. Even with dementia, she continued to find life intriguing rather than threatening. She remained connected to the Cusick Kalispel and Swinomish community, driven to events by her daughter Teresa as she herself had driven Emma Williams and her son for home visits. In the Bay Area, her son Marcus (Ned) married a woman with an absent Indien father, and they adopted Sioux, Tlingit, and Navajo children, raising them in the Oakland Native Powwow community. Marcus retired as a skilled mechanic of heavy equipment, eventually a member of the highly political Longshoremen Union. 

Joyce’s publications are pithy, insightful, well-argued distillations of important Northwest Coast concerns which have well withstood tests of time. 

Wike Writings and Publications

Modern Spirit Dancing of Northern Puget Sound (UW M.A., 1941) earned her anthropology graduate school and funding for fieldwork a few months each at the beginning and end of 1940 among Coast Salish at Swinomish, and then Vancouver Island. The draw was dance, a distinctive, grounded dancing in bare feet on the earthen floor of a huge long house lit by two huge bonfires fed by split trees four feet long. Her hosts were the Andrew, Mary Ann, and Emma Williams family, undisguised, as she interviewed many Swinomish, not all of them Winter initiates, to learn about the different kinds of powers (careers or curing) and participation in other religions during summer months. Consulting lists of spirits from Snohomish and Lummi, she compiled a list of Swinomish and Saanich ones. Turning to the Winter Dance itself, she describes what she witnessed during night-long sessions and was taught about their intent. A special chapter is devoted to the unconventional ordeal of Emma, the daughter, becoming a “baby” new dancer.  Her list of new dancers over the years is incomparable. Finally, she compares rites and ceremonies around the Salish Sea in British Columbia. Her conclusions note modern conditions that are exceptional, such inheriting a spirit without a quest, as well as conventional, proliferating warrior powers, sustaining this faith and practice to today. 

Wike published a series of papers in the 1950 as she settled into Nebraska. Each focused on an important contested aspect of the Pacific Northwest Coast. 

The Role Of The Dead In Northwest Coast Culture (1952) looked at the slighting of religion and discussed the role of ancestors in supporting the rank and class system, especially in prayers and rituals intended to continue the supply foods and gifts. Eventually, consensus has argued that chiefs who oversaw economic activities in summer became priests who lead winter ceremonies heavily in contact with spirits and powerful forces. 

More Puzzles on the Northwest Coast (1957) follows the lead of Verne Ray in criticizing ambiguities in the early and important work of John Swanton, who shifted from the Northwest to the Southeast for his long career in the Bureau of American Ethnology. Since Swanton was trained by Franz Boas, Wike reviews the Boas agenda to record culture from the Native (emic) standpoint, preferably in their own language. Boas’s insistence on facts over theory was due to his personal incapacity to synthesize. Joyce’s focus here is “the nature of Haida-Tlingit village organization within the context of method and theory in general anthropology.” At issue is a census of the “seventeen principal Haida towns, listing individual houses by house name, location in village, owner’s name, clan, and moiety affiliation.” Epidemic depopulations and the consolidation of survivors from several villages into one led to the rise of “the town chief.” George Peter Murdock’s interest in kinship and his own Haida fieldwork led him to propose the “avuncu-clan” as the basis of town organization in contrast to varieties of historic “clan barrio” and “clan community.” For comparison, she considers the rise of Kwakwawakw commoner Johnny Wanuku‘, fueled by ill-gotten fees to host unusual and repeated potlatching. In all, Joyce asserts basic differences in scientific approach in terms of the primacy of facts, socio-cultural complexities, and historic forces over time.   

Social Stratification Among The Nootka (1958) pays homage to Viola Garfield and her brief article on the assets provided by slavery.  Joyce’s focus is Nuchahnulth because of the wealth of fur trade sources, including eleven Spanish journals as well as verbatim AtH texts from native speakers and skilled linguists. Hereditary leadership is based on nobility’s famous names, entitling a house chief to “hunting, fishing, and gathering stations, fishtraps, house(s), and canoes.”  Marriages maintained high rank, as did arrogant demands to game and fish taken by commoners.  Often these confiscations became featured in feasts shared with these same providers. Long baffling to Boas, Drucker, Sapir, and Wike, Nootkan social structure fits that of the ramage, known throughout the Pacific, based on birth order priority so that a true noble was the child of a first born son married to a first born daughter in another noble house. 

Problems in Fur Trade Analysis: The Northwest Coast (1958) examines the “enrichment” theory as the primary benefit of the fur trade, both ship- and fort-based, as seen in three factors: new tools and weapons for technological improvements that increased Native production; increased exchange value of Native commodities via barter; and gradual incorporation of Native producers into the more productive, highly organized, extensive, and specialized world economic system. By contrast, Judge Howay called out “predatory” commerce from ships “to loot, cheat, and drive a mean bargain,” verging on extortion, over-exploitation, and Native society’s decline. Epidemics were also a deadly factor. On the Plains, by contrast, the arrival of the horse was self-reproducing and self-maintaining, a boost, not a drain, on the economy. Further, “the European trade made it easy for anyone to accumulate goods in quantity [though] the wealthy became wealthier.” Finally, Joyce proposes as an analytical alternative a labor theory of value and price within the world economy and Native communities.

A Reevaluation of Northwest Coast Cannibalism (1984) honors Viola Garfield in a festschrift. Joyce returns to the Nootka to examine the disparity between early fur trade accounts explicitly offering actual human body parts as food and later ethnographic accounts of hamatsa, dramatic but feigned corpse display and cannibalism in public rituals. In 1962 she held with the latter, but recent careful books on Spanish residence in the Northwest led her to the former. Seeking “characteristic features, meaning, historical depth, and distribution,” she turned to accounts of the Moachaht Nootkans at Yuquot, their summer home on Friendly Cove, and their high chief Tsawasep (Harpooner), also known as Maquina (Moon), a hamatsa who admitted to eating raw, fattened slaves or captive children. Lucky ransomed youngsters testified that they truly feared for their lives as the main course at each month’s lunar feast. Spanish and English crews were offered and purchased skulls as well as smoked arms and hands, ostensibly to eat, though their sellers absolutely refused to do so themselves. Regionally in the 1800s, dramatic faux cannibalism was simulated in the Klukwali Wolf Ritual, where dancers acted as these carnivores, not as humans. Yet in the 1600s and 1700s, actual cannibalism is strongly suggested, due to famine for many who survived epidemics or to epicurean interests among especially haughty and intimidating chiefs. Cannibalism was such a cultural fact in the Northwest that Christian missionaries refrained from offering communion until converts were fully and properly indoctrinated. Lastly, Joyce warned that cannibalism has long been used by the colonial enterprise to dehumanize other people, justifying their subjection, land taking, and exploitation.

[1]  Barí (Motilones = shaved heads) are now known for the “Motilones Miracle” of Indigenous-run schools, literacy programs, medical clinics, and Christian outreach funded by export of their cocoa. Traditionally they had composite fatherhood.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar%C3%AD_people>.