James Murie was born in Grand Island, Nebraska to a Pawnee women and a white man in 1862 and became the foremost recorder of 19th century Pawnee culture and society. In 1883, after graduating from the Hampton Institute Boarding School in Virginia, Murie returned to Pawnee where he worked intermittently for the rest of his life in various capacities. When introduced to anthropologist Alice C. Fletcher by a Hampton classmate, Murie embarked on a quest to preserve a record of the traditional culture of his people. From 1898 to 1902, he collaborated with Fletcher on a study of the Hako, the Pawnee calumet adoption ceremony. In 1899, he began work with George A. Dorsey of the Field Columbian Museum, collecting Pawnee mythology. Dorsey and Murie also drafted a massive monograph on the society and religion of the Skidi Pawnee that was never published. In the summers of 1903 and 1905, Murie recorded Arikara mythology and ceremonies on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, while also collecting artifacts for the Field Museum. In 1910, he was hired as a part-time field researcher for the Bureau of American Ethnology, focusing on Pawnee ceremonies and in 1912, Murie began collaborating with Clark Wissler of the American Museum. From 1914 until just before his death, Murie worked on a comprehensive study, Ceremonies of the Pawnee, a monumental record of Native American ritual. Murie died in Pawnee on November 18, 1921.