"In 1878, in the formative period of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) as part of the Smithsonian Institution, the director John Wesley Powell engaged Dorsey to return to Nebraska to compile dictionaries of the Omaha and Ponca languages.In 1880, Dorsey returned to Washington to work with the BAE at the Smithsonian as a specialist in Siouan languages, a position he held for the rest of his life.