Peter Miller

Tape 1
Peter Miller was born in 1937 in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, and grew up an only child in Plympton. He was captain of the track team, and graduated from Plymouth High School in 1955. His father was a sculptor, and they lived with his grandparents who farmed. After one year at Tufts University in Boston, he was drafted and served four years in the air force. Miller was stationed at Lincoln, Nebraska, where he enrolled in night school at the University of Nebraska and the University of Omaha, majoring in sociology and minoring in mathematics. In 1962 he enrolled in the anthropology program at the University of Pittsburgh. He saw anthropology as outgoing and positive, where psychology was pessimistic. He studied with Warren d'Azevedo, Art Tuden, and Peter Murdock. He discusses how forensic anthropology is looked down on by anthropologists. Miller was interested in psychological anthropology and went to Woodfords, California to study peyotists among the Washoe. He developed the first American Indian MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory).

Tape 2
Miller camped in the Washoe community as a participant observer and attended their weekly religious services, which included the use of peyote. The Washoe were good hosts and welcomed a variety of visitors from many other tribes to their church service, which started on Saturday and concluded Sunday with a feast at noon. Miller wrote his notes on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. He did not interview women. He felt they viewed him with suspicion. He discusses the absurdity of drafting the Washoe for the Vietnam War. Miller began to be aware of how narrow his New England view of the world was. After his experience with the peyotists he decided to get away from psychological anthropology and do physical anthropology.

Tape 3
Miller observed that the Washoe shaman he knew was the least acculturated Washoe he had met, whereas the shaman's wife was one of the most acculturated women he had met, in that she had an administrative job in a standard company and spoke fluent, middle-class English. Miller states that he tests positive for tuberculosis, due to infected people who came to the church service for healing, with everyone eating out of a common dish. People also came for help with social and psychological problems. He talks about singing peyote-inspired songs and rattles and drums. He went to the University of Nevada to write his paper and delivered it at the Great Basin Meeting where he encountered Omer Stewart. Miller compares the Native American Church with his experience in the Episcopal Church of today, where the laying on of hands is used for healing. Miller then studied at the University of Arizona under Fred Hulse and earned his Ph.D. in 1969. During one summer session he taught Culture and Personality at the University of Nevada, Reno, and set up a physical lab to look at some skeletal material. He passed doctoral specialty exams in genetics and physical anthropology, then did two years of fieldwork. His dissertation topic was comparing the Apache of the 1960s with a study from 1937. His first teaching job was at the State University of New York at Albany. He was excited by the "new archaeology," then he transitioned from physical anthropologist to archaeological consultant doing forensic anthropology. He worked for the State Historic Preservation Office in South Dakota and studied mass-burial sites.

Tape 4
Miller did systematic excavation, storage, and attempted analysis, and became involved in the reburial issue for Native Americans, particularly the Sioux at Crow Creek. He discusses the recent discovery of Kennewick man and the issue of race identification in forensic anthropology. He talks about leaving his teaching job at SUNY for a teaching job at UCLA. From there he went to Drew, a liberal arts college in New Jersey. He left after the National Historic Preservation Act was passed and did contract archaeology for the state of New Jersey and became associated with an architectural firm. He worked for firms in Washington, D.C., and in the oil fields in Wyoming. He also taught a semester at Wichita State and consulted in New Mexico. He took a job in Hawaii in 1986 making identifications on the remains of soldiers brought there from the Vietnam War. In 1988 he started doing fieldwork in Laos and Vietnam at crash sites. His next assignment following the interview was in Bosnia identifying Serb and Croatian war dead.