Brooke Mordy

Tape 1
Brooke Mordy was born in Seattle and had an older sister and a younger brother. Her father was an accountant, and her mother was a housewife. Her high school encompassed several ethnic neighborhoods in Seattle-Japanese, Chinese, and Jewish-and this diversity was the beginning of her interest in anthropology. She was impressed with Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest by William Henry Hudson. She went to Scripps College in 1938, studying a core curriculum of humanities, and physiological psychology and art interested her. Her junior year she decided to study anthropology, and she met Wendell Mordy that year. He was a musician and was interested in science and art, as well. After Pearl Harbor, Wendell Mordy went to UCLA for a meteorology training course for the military. Brooke Mordy went to graduate school at Columbia, where Ruth Benedict and Ralph Linton were impressive teachers. She became interested in Lloyd Warner's work in community studies in an urban setting. She left Columbia after three months to marry Wendell Mordy in 1942. She went with him to Connecticut, and he was shipped out in June for two years. Brooke went to Chicago to do research work with Lloyd Warner on two projects: first, Indian education, and second, human relations and industry. After her junior year of college, she went to Mesa Verde and worked as a waitress and traveled around the Southwest. In Chicago she was trained in participant observation and did not take notes during conversations but went home and wrote down all she could remember. She wrote a paper about the social organization of a packing-house union local. After a year Mordy was offered a job at the United Electrical Workers office, then she went to work at the United Office of Professional Workers in New York.

Tape 2
Wendell Mordy came home when the war ended and decided to go to graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. Brooke Mordy taught in public school day care for a year, then worked for the telephone company. Wendell Mordy got a job as a meteorologist with United Airlines and then with Pan Am, and they moved to Honolulu, where they lived for nearly ten years and where their two daughters were born. Brooke Mordy began taking graduate courses in Hawaii and working with the League of Women Voters. From Hawaii, the Mordys moved to Sweden for four years, where Wendell Mordy studied for his doctorate at the University of Stockholm, and Brooke Mordy studied Swedish. The second year there she studied sociology, including a course on the United States taught by a Swedish social anthropologist. The Mordys left Sweden and returned to the United Sates, where Wendell Mordy taught a semester of meteorology at UCLA and then took a job at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, in 1961. Brooke Mordy did volunteer work at the Nevada State Museum with Dr. Richard Shutler, Curator of Anthropology, and then with Donald R. Tuohy. She also worked with the League of Women Voters. She started taking classes and learned about a graduate field training in anthropology sponsored by the National Science Foundation to work among the Washoe Indians. She discusses how, when she was in high school, she and her family drove the Pan American Highway and spent a month in Mexico City.

Tape 3
Brooke Mordy talks about her various anthropological interests. In Mexico she and her family visited crafters in their homes and saw archaeological digs. When she was in New Mexico she went to the Gallup Ceremonial and met Indians there from tribes all over the Southwest. At Columbia she was an art major with an anthropology minor and did a senior thesis on Hopi art, while her interest in linguistics began in a course in Hawaii. She does not find physical anthropology interesting. She studied anthropology at UNR when the department first started with Don Fowler and Warren d'Azevedo. She went to the Washoe field school for six weeks in 1964 and was assigned to the Carson Indian Colony at Dresslerville. She worked with Don Handelman in the field school, and her first Washoe contact was Sybil Rupert, who gave her census data. While doing her fieldwork, Brooke Mordy stayed in a dorm at Stewart Indian School. She said her approach was that she would stand in people's yards and hope they would come out to talk. John Frank was her main informant in terms of reconstruction, and he also talked about out-of-body experiences. As part of her fieldwork, she did mapping and census data and genealogies. For reasons of privacy, she later changed people's names when she did her master's thesis. Mordy taught a course at UNR and gave a lecture at UNLV in ethnohistory. She did research for the Center for Western North American Studies and did a historical site survey.

Tape 4
Brooke Mordy believes the value of anthropology is in learning how other people live and how to make our own society better. She feels it would be valuable to introduce anthropology in high school. Wendell Mordy spent one year consulting at both the University of Montana and the State University of New York in Fredonia on environmental programs, then the Mordys went to the University of Miami for two years. Brooke Mordy taught an anthropology course to freshman in an interdisciplinary block program, and she did some work for a freelancer, interviewing the black community near Coconut Grove. Later, Wendell Mordy worked for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, and Brooke Mordy attended a preparatory conference for Pacem in Maribus, an annual conference organized by the International Ocean Institute The Mordys worked together on science policy and the social implications of weather modification with grant money from the National Science Foundation. They set up the Center for the Future, their own foundation. In one project they interviewed top scientists in different fields to see if there were patterns on how decisions were made in the community. They interviewed Margaret Mead, Laura Nader, and Jim Spradley. The Mordys were invited to a conference with Margaret Mead and atmospheric scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists on the future in space. They later moved to Minnesota, where Wendell Mordy ran the Science Museum of Minnesota. Brooke Mordy is currently doing a paper on the indigenous populations of Canada.