From manuscripts obtained from Iroquois Indians.

Baker argues that polysynthetic languages - in which verbs are built up of many parts and where one verb can act as a whole sentence - are more than an accidental collection of morphological processes; rather they adopt a systematic way of ...

Much of his studies concerned the history of the Iroquois Confederacy, and was tutored in their oral history by Iroquois Chiefs. The Iroquois Book of Rites , published in 1883, was in part the result from his study of wampum belts.