Jay Miller

Who is Jay Miller?

Jay Miller is an American anthropologist who is known for his wide-ranging fieldwork with and scholarship about different Native American groups, especially the Delaware, Tsimshian, and Lushootseed Salish. He is himself of Lenape ancestry.

He grew up in upstate New York, where he was given a Mohawk name.

As an undergraduate, he was influenced by the anthropologist Florence Hawley Ellis.

He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University, for a dissertation on the Keresan Pueblo people. While in New Jersey, he began working with speakers of the Delaware language. In this context he was adopted and named in the Delaware Wolf clan, his clan mother being Nora Dean, with whom he collaborated on a publication on the Delaware "Big House" rite.

Friendship with the anthropologist Viola Garfield while living in Seattle led to fieldwork among the Tsimshian at Hartley Bay, British Columbia, where Miller was adopted into the Gispwudwada.

He was formerly Associate Director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

He has also done fieldwork with the Salish people at the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington State and received names among the Creek and Tewa tribes.