Washington Matthews

Washington Matthews (June 17, 1843 – March 2, 1905) was an Irish-born American surgeon in the United States Army, ethnographer, and linguist known for his studies of Native American peoples, especially the Navajo. It was there that Matthews came to know the people who would become the subject of his best known work, the Navajo. Matthews has been credited with carrying our this research with "unprecedented objectivity". He was also said to have been initiated into various secret Navajo rituals.

Matthews also published a number of other books on his research amongst the Navajo, including Navaho Legends (1897) and Navaho Myths, Prayers and Songs (1907).

In his work he reported that the Navajo were ichthyphobic, having a taboo on eating fish. He theorized that "Living in a desert land where water is so scarce and so obviously important to life, [coming to regard] water as sacred, it is an easy step for them to regard as sacred everything that belongs to the water…. Hence it becomes a sacrilege to kill the fish or eat its flesh." Dr. Matthews discovered that they had a multitude of legends, so numerous that he never hoped to collect them all: an elaborate religion, with symbolism and allegory, which might vie with that of the Greeks; numerous and formulated prayers and songs, not only multitudinous, but relating to all subjects, and composed for every circumstance of life. The songs are as full of poetic images and figures of speech as occur in English, and are handed down from father to son, from generation to generation. However, his research has been credited with creating through "careful and thorough fieldwork ... a monumental bequest for future generations of the Navajo people and scholars".

Recognition In 1895 Matthews served as president of the American Folklore Society. He was a member of a number of other societies such as the American Anthropological Association, the National Geographic Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Papers Matthews's papers were initially left to the University of California at Berkeley. In 1951 they were transferred to the then Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art, now Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. In 1985, a microfilm guide to these papers was published.

Selected works