Hope Cecelia Svinth Carpenter (September 2, 1924 – June 25, 2010) was the first historian to write in detail about the Nisqually people.
[1][2] Relying upon only primary sources and original documents, which took her to distant archival repositories such as the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C., and London, England to locate original materials,[1] she authored some 23 books.
[3] Carpenter's expertise in writing and disseminating the history of the Nisqually people as a record of and supplement to their rich traditional oral history earned her the office of Nisqually tribal historian, chief consultant on Indian history for the permanent exhibit of the Washington State Historical Society, and curator of the society's Remembering Medicine Creek exhibit at the Washington State History Museum.
[1] Daughter of Hans Svinth, a Danish-born Lutheran pastor, and Mary Svinth, a Nisqually woman, Carpenter was the twelfth of thirteen children raised on a family farm seven miles east of Roy, Washington.
[4] At age 17, she married Marvin G. Carpenter and began raising a family.