Jay Miller

Jay Miller is an American anthropologist known for his wide-ranging fieldwork and scholarship on, as well as involvement with, a number of Native American groups, especially the Delaware (Lenape), Tsimshian, and Lushootseed Salish. He is himself of Lenape ancestry.

Personal life Miller grew up in upstate New York, where he was given a Mohawk (Iroquois) 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 was adopted and named in the Delaware Wolf clan; his clan mother being Nora Thompson Dean. His also lived in Seattle where his friendship with the anthropologist Viola Garfield led to fieldwork among the Tsimshian, where Miller was adopted into the Gispwudwada (Killerwhale clan). He was friends with Erna Gunther who lived in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle, near his house.

Career Miller wrote his PhD dissertation on the Keresan Pueblo people. While in New Jersey, he began working with speakers of the Delaware language and collaborated with Nora Thompson Dean on a publication on the Delaware "Big House" rite.

Miller was teaching at the University of Washington in the late 70s. At an anthropology symposium at Pacific Lutheran University in 1976, he was one of 4 lecturers to give papers on Indian fishing in Puget Sound.

He has also done fieldwork with the Salish people at the Colville Indian Reservation and the Snoqualmie in Washington state, as well as the Muscogee. His research around 2012, uncovered discrepancies in the Charles Roblin's Schedule of Unenrolled Indians (also known as the Roblin Rolls or the Roblin Rolls of Non-Reservation Indians in Western Washington) as a result of notations by Roblins in red ink not being picked up in black and white photocopies.