Natives to Know: Bertha Parker

Seneca with Abenaki descent

1907 was a boom time for the young United States, with capitalism on the rise, along with tuberculosis and vaudeville entertainment. That year, an Abenaki woman and a Seneca man welcomed a child who would become the first Native woman archaeologist, Bertha “Birdie” Cody.

Cody’s mother came from a line of professional actors, and her father was the first president of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA). A child of divorce, Cody would go on to make major contributions in both her parents' fields.

Cody's early life revolved around performing alongside her mother’s family in Hollywood as well as for traveling acts including the Ringling Brothers’ “Pocahontas” show. She transitioned into a career in archaeology by way of a kidnapping incident involving her first husband, which ended in her archaeologist uncle rescuing her and bringing her back to his dig site. 

Cody served as the cook for the site by morning. But she’d rush through her work so she could spend the afternoons learning the art of archaeology. Cody had a natural talent for spotting man-made objects in natural surroundings, and soon became her uncle’s assistant.

Eventually, Cody became an archaeologist in her own right. She discovered and excavated several sites on her own, including the Scorpion Hill pueblo site. And in 1930 she made one of the most significant discoveries of her time, 15 miles east of Las Vegas in the Gypsum Cave. 

There, Cody unearthed the bone of a giant sloth from the Pleistocene era near a set of human tools. This indicated that humans had been on the continent for at least 10,000 years, contradicting the prevailing “Bering Strait” theory of human migration and confirming that the Indigenous people of Turtle Island had been there long before academics supposed.

Later, Cody worked with Indigenous people in Northern California as an ethnologist before marrying her third husband — the Italian actor from this famous anti-littering ad — and returning to the film industry. She and her husband worked together advising films on Indigenous representation and creating their own TV series on the history of Indigenous people before Birdie passed away in 1978.

In 2020, the museum Cody had worked for partnered with the SAA to create a scholarship for Native American archaeology students in her honor.