Frederica de Laguna, 98, Early Ethnographer of Eskimos
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Frederica de Laguna, who died of heart failure October 6 at age 98, was an anthropologist who performed groundbreaking work studying early Alaska native peoples.
De Laguna, 98, had just finished editing a book on the Eyak Indians of Prince William Sound despite failing eyesight. She was also preparing her epic work on the Tlingits of Yakutat, “Under Mount Saint Elias,” for reprinting.
Working in Alaska in the 1930s and 1940s, de Laguna produced groundbreaking work on the Athabascan, Eyak, Chugach, and Tlingit peoples. Her early-1930s archaeological dig on Yukon Island in Kachemak Bay uncovered an early Eskimo culture that reached the Cook Inlet region 3,000 years ago.
De Laguna approached her fieldwork with a spirit of adventure. She said she was drawn to the academic field in part by her love for the outdoors. She saw herself as an old-school generalist, combining archaeology and oral history and working in several different cultures.
“It’s the modern age that’s overspecialized,” de Laguna said in 1993 during a boat tour to her old digging sites on Kachemak Bay. “They pick a theory like deconstructionist literary theory and do a little work and apply their theory. I could smack ’em! I’m the old-fashioned one. There aren’t many of us left, I might add.”
As a student of Franz Boas, considered the father of American anthropology, de Laguna represented a direct link to a holistic vision of anthropology, that it should be the science that represents the whole of the human experience.
De Laguna was born in 1906 to parents who were both philosophy professors at Bryn Mawr College. She early became infatuated with arctic exploration, and at age 13 wrote a letter to the explorer Donald MacMillan offering to “chew his boots” if he would let her go north with him.
Her parents suggested she pursue anthropology as a way of linking her love for the humanities and the outdoors. After studying with Boas at Columbia, De Laguna studied cave art in the south of France and spent six month on an archaeological dig in Greenland.
De Laguna’s delight at working in Greenland, where she helped unearth a previously-unknown Norse-era culture, led her to break off an engagement, and she never married.
She financed subsequent fieldwork in part with the proceeds of two mystery novels she wrote.
She next turned her attention to Alaska’s Cook Inlet, where her life’s work with Eskimos began.
De Laguna’s work on the vanished Kachemak Bay Eskimos was a pioneering effort at combining contemporary fieldwork with archaeological evidence to reconstruct ways of life in in the past. Later, she worked with Athabascan, Eyak, Chugach, and Tlingit cultures.
She also encouraged young native writers to tell their own stories, becoming one of the first to foster what would become a wave of self-written ethnography.
De Laguna taught at Bryn Mawr until retiring in 1975. She was a president of the American Anthropological Association in 1966-67, and was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 1975 along with her contemporary, Margaret Mead.
In her later Alaska research she worked with elders to collect stories, particularly in Southeast Alaska. She was honored years later with a potlatch in Yakutat, the potlatch being a days long party featuring spectacular oratory and gift-giving. The event that became the basis for a 1997 documentary about her work, “Reunion Under Mount Saint Elias.”