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Contents : Diamond Jenness (1886-1969) HENRY B. COLLINS and WILLIAM E. TAYLOR Jr. Canada'smost distinguished anthropologist Dr. Diamond Jenness formerly Chiefof the Division of Anthropology National Museums of Canada and Honorary Associate of the Arctic Institute of North America died peacefully at his home in the Gatineau Hills near Ottawa on 29 November 1969. He was one of that rapidly-vanishing virtually extinct kind - the all round anthropologist who working seriously turned out first-class publications in all four major branches of the discipline : ethnology linguistics archaeology and physical anthropology. One must also add a fifth: applied anthropology a fitting designation for theseries of monographs on Eskimo administration in Alaska Canada and Greenland which he wrote after his retirement and which were published by the Arctic Institute between 1962 and 1968. Diamond Jennesswas born in Wellington New Zealand on 10 February 1886 and attended Victoria University College one of the four branches of the University ofNew Zealand wherehe graduated withfirstclass honours in classics in 1908. Later he studied at Balliol College Oxford under one of the outstanding ethnologists of the time Professor R. R. Marett. He received both a B.A. in Lit. Hum.and a diploma in Anthropology at Oxford in 1911. In 191 1-12 he was designated Oxford Scholar in Papua and was sent by the University to make anthropological studies among the Northern d'Entrecasteaux a primitive tribe dwelling on the islands of the D'Entrecasteaux Archipelago off the east coast of New Guinea. The results of this first field-work were published by Oxford University (1 920a). His New Guinea work completed Jenness had just recuperated from yellow fever in New Zealand when he received a cablegram from Edward Sapir Chief of the Division of Anthropology National Museum of Canada Ottawa: "Will you join Stefansson Arctic Expedition and study Eskimosfor three years Reply collect." In the spring of 1913 in response to this unexpected invitation Jenness found himself headed for Victoria British Columbia to join Stefansson and the twelve other scientific members of the Canadian Arctic Expedition. The Expedition was planned to operate as two more or less distinct units. A Northern Party under Stefansson's direction was to carry out geographical explorations in the Arctic Archipelago and Beaufort Sea while a Southern Party under the direction of Dr. R. M. Anderson was to conduct biological geological and anthropological investigations onthe arctic mainland and adjacent islands. Jenness was a member of the Southern Party and his assignment was a threeyear study of the Copper Eskimos around Coronation Gulf. Karluk under command In June the Expedition's flagship the old whaling vessel of Captain Bob Bartlett steamed northward to Nome where Stefansson bought two 60-foot schooners the Alaska andthe Mary Such to supplement the 72 DIAMOND JENNESS (1886-1969) Karluk. The three vessels were to rendezvous at Herschel Island near the mouth of the Mackenzie River. These plans however were not tobe realized. Throughout the summer the windsblew continuouslyfromthe west and northwest driving the pack ice close inshore imprisoning the Alaska and Mary Sachs in Camden Bay midway between Point Barrow and the Mackenzie and carrying f f the the Karluk drifting helplessly in the ice to her eventual destruction o Siberian coast near Wrangell Island. Jenness' colleague the French ethnologist Henri Beuchat was one of those who perished on the ice or on Wrangell Island in an attempt to reach the Siberian coast after the Karluk had been crushed in the ice. On 30 September Stefansson with his secretary BurtMcConnell Jenness two Eskimos and the expedition's photographer G. H. Wilkins (later Sir Hubert Wilkins) left the Karluk near the mouth of the Colville River to hunt caribou and lay in a supply of fresh meat when it had become apparent that the ship immobilized in the ice could proceed no further. With two sleds twelve dogs and food for twelve days the party set out for themainland but they never saw the Karluk again for a week or so later the unfortunate vessel began her final drift westward. This was the inauspicious beginningofJenness' arctic career. Few young anthropologists have faced such difficulties in beginning field-work in a new and unfamiliar area yet none surely has emerged from thetest with a more brilliant record of work accomplished. With no signs of habitation nearby and with the first permanent settlement to the east Herschel Island 300 miles away the stranded partyset out forBarrow 150 miles to the west to obtain provisions and some news of the whereabouts of their three vessels. On 12 October they reached Barrow where the trader Charlie Brower supplied them with new skin clothing and provisions to carry them over the winter. On27 October before the outfitting wascompleted Jenness and Wilkins with two Eskimos and two dogteams were sent east again to lay in a supply of fish from a lake near Cape Halkett and obtain meat for dog food fromtwo stranded whales. They were joined by Stefansson McConnell and two Eskimos on 21 November. Two days later Stefansson and the rest of the party including Wilkins left for Camden Bay where they had learned that the Alaska and Mary Sachs had found refuge and which was therefore to be the expedition's winter base. Jenness remained behind to spend the winter with an Eskimo family at Harrison Bay to learn the language and obtain whatever information hecould on Eskimo customs and folklore. What he was able to record on these subjects was later described in various Reports of the Canadian Arctic Expedition1913-191 8 : Eskimo folk-lore Parts A and B (1924a b) Eskimo language and technology Parts A and B (1928b 1944) and in half a dozen shorter papers such as The Eskimos of northern Alaska: a study in the effect of civilization (1918) and Eskimo music in northern Alaska (1922b) published in technical journals. Jenness' first winter's field-work on the Arctic coast of Alaska that led to this impressive list of publications was conducted under conditions that many an ethnographer would have found intolerable. The people he lived with most of DIAMOND JENNESS (1886-1969) 73 the time were inland Eskimos from the Colville River who spent the winter on the Arctic coast trapping white foxes to trade for ammunition and other necessities their food consisted mainly of whitefishand troutcaught in nets set under the ice in coastal lakes supplemented by ptarmigan waterfowl and an occasional caribou. Food wasnever plentiful indeed often insufficient for their needs and it was frequently necessary for the group to pack its belongings on sleds and set out for some other locality where the prospects for food were more promising. Jenness shared this precarious existence with his Eskimo hosts living with them in their tiny over-crowded wooden cabins and travelling with them or sometimes after he had mastered the technique of dog sledding travelling alone or with one companion over many miles of frozen tundra and sea icein the coldest and stormiest months of the arctic year. Such was the young New Zealander's introduction to the Arctic and the way of life ofits people. Scarcely a hint of these personal experiences of his first winter in the Arctic will be found in Jenness' anthropological writings. They were reserved for his retrospective volume Dawn in Arctic Alaska (1957) which he wrote while on a Guggenheim scholarship in 1954 some years after his retirement. This book however is far more than a personal narrative. It is a vivid account of how the Eskimos to the east of Point Barrow spent the late fall winter and spring hunting fishing and trapping on the arctic coast - an account all themore accurate and revealing because the narrator had himself participated in these activities. With the coming of spring Jenness set out for Camden Bay to join the other members of the Southern Party of the Expedition under thedirection of Dr. R. M. Anderson. While there he made an archaeological survey of the 100-mile stretch of coast between Camden Bay and Demarcation Point and spent about seven weeks excavating Eskimo ruins on Barter Island the first archaeological excavations that had been made east of Point Barrow. Jenness' first year in the Arctic ended in July 1914 when the Expedition's schooners left Camden Bay and sailed eastward to Dolphin and Union Strait where he was to meet with another though very different Eskimo people named by Stefansson the Copper Eskimos most of whom before Stefansson worked among them in 1910-11 had never seen a white man. The few white explorers who bad visited the country of the Copper Eskimos can be quickly enumerated: Samuel Hearne in 1771 Franklin 1819 and 1821 Richardson and Kendall 1826 Back 1833 Dease and Simpson 1838-39 Richardson and Rae 1848 Rae 1849-50 M'Clure 1851 Collinson 1851-52. The first white traveller to visit the region in modern times was David T. Hanbury in 1902 and 1903. Two whalers Captain C. Klengenberg and Captain William Mogg wintered on the west coast of Victoria Island in 1905-06 and 1906-07 and Captain Joseph Bernard in the schooner Teddy Bear wintered in Coronation Gulf and Victoria Island in 1910-11 1912-13 and 1913-14 the first white trader to reach the Copper Eskimo country. Jenness had arrived among the Copper Eskimos just in time. The few brief encounters with the early explorers and even thecontacts with the whalers who wintered among them from 1905 to 1907 had in no way affectedthe Eskimos' way of life. The coming of the little Teddy Bear however with its store of white 74 DIAMOND JENNESS (1886-1969) man's goods was an event of far more importance. Other changes were to follow. An Anglican missionary arrived in the summer of 1915 and when the Canadian Arctic Expedition concluded its work in 1916 the wood and sod building it had constructed at Bernard Harbour became the mission's headquarters. A Hudson's Bay post was established at Bernard Harbour the same year and patrols of the Northwest Mounted Police brought the white man's law to the Copper Eskimos. Fortunately these beginnings of change inthe Eskimos' economy had no serious effect on Jenness' work. The rifle was coming into use to be sure and a few of the Eskimos were beginning to trap white foxes but caribou were still being hunted with bow and arrow or speared in the water from kayaks. And in its nonmaterial aspects their culture remained unchanged. Thus in the two years that he lived among them Jenness was able to observe and record the life of the Copper Eskimos as it had existed for centuries or millennia before the white man's "civilization" had reached them. To obtain a faithful picture of the life of the Copper Eskimos Jenness chose an approach that in those days was not often employed by ethnologists. He entered into their life directly as one of them. He attached himself to an Eskimo family and became the adopted son of Ikpukhuak one of the foremost hunters and respected leaders of the Puivlik tribe of southwest Victoria Island and his jolly wife Higilak (Ice House) whowas not only proficient in theordinary and burdensome duties of an Eskimo wife but was also a shaman in her own right a talent that saved Jenness from a local murder charge. Jenness lived with these people in their snow houses in winter and skin tents in summer observing and recording the vastly different modes of life according to season. He joined in the hunting and fishing on which their life depended travelling by dog team and sealing on the ice in winter and sharing their nomadic existence in summer as they roamed the tundra fishing in lakes and streams and hunting caribou in the interior of Victoria Island. Jenness' first year among the Copper Eskimos is best summarized in his own words: "Thus was completed the project that I had outlined for myself the previous winter. By isolating myself among the Eskimos during the months just past I had followed their wanderings day by day from autumn round to autumn. I had observed their reactions to every season the disbanding of the tribes and their reassembling the migrations from sea to land and from land to sea the diversion from sealing to hunting hunting to fishing fishing to hunting and then to sealing again. All these changes caused by their economic environment I had seen and studied now with greater knowledge of the language I could concentrate on other phases of their life and history" The People o f the Twilight (1928f p. 191). Few now living can comprehend what a demanding dangerous and rich experience it was. The Expedition sailed from its base at Bernard Harbour on 13 July 1916. Soon after his return to Ottawa Jenness joined theCanadian Expeditionary Force as a gunner in the Field Artillery and was on active duty overseas from 1917 to 1919. At Oxford on leave from occupation duty in Germany he had completed his report on the Northern d'Entrecasteaux (1920a). In the same year Jenness returned to Canada married Frances Eileen Bleakney whom he had met DIAMOND JENNESS (1886-1969) 75 before going overseas honeymooned in New Zealand and returned to join the National Museum of Canada staff. Now began a period of intensive writing as Jenness worked up his field notes for publication in the Reports of the Canadian Arctic Expedition. The result was a flood of publications issued in rapid succession from 1923 to 1928 and two others in 1944 and 1946. Those dealing with the Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimos have already been mentioned. Two of them on mythology and string figures (1924a b) also included the Copper Eskimo data on these subjects. The first of the monographs on the Copper Eskimos (1923b c) alone was a classic which assumed its place immediately not only as the definitive work on a little known but important segment of the Eskimo population but also as the most comprehensive description of a single Eskimo tribe ever written. The anthropometric data in Part B (1923 ) consisted of measurements that Jenness had made on 82 males and 44 females belonging to 11 of the 17 groups of Copper Eskimos. The next substantial work to appear was a large volume Songs of the Copper Eskimos (1925b). The songs recorded on a phonograph were sung bymen women and children from almost all parts of the Copper Eskimo area. The musical transcription and analysis of the 137 songs were by Helen H. Roberts of Columbia University the introduction texts and translations were by Jenness. This volume represents the largest single collection of songs from any Eskimo area. The last of theCanadian Arctic .Expedition Reports dealing with the Copper Eskimos was Material Culture of the CopperEskimos (1946). A half dozen shorter papers appeared in the American Anthropologist Geographical Review etc. including The Blond' Eskimos which contested Stefansson's view that the Copper Eskimos had physical characteristics suggestive of White early Norse admixture. These articles and the volume The People of the Twilight (1928f) completed Jenness' major writings on the Copper Eskimos. Jenness' researches extended far beyond Coronation Gulf and the arctic coast westward. He made field studies amonga number of other Canadian tribes (the Sarcee 1921 Carrier 1923-24 Sekani 1924 Beothuk 1927 Ojibwa 1929 Salish 1935) and published on their ethnology and historical background. Many other papers dealt withspecial aspects of Indian and Eskimo f Canada (1931 ) is the definitive culture history and economy. His Indians o work on the Canadian aborigines dealing comprehensively with the ethnology and history of the Canadian Indians and Eskimos. The usefulness of this book is enhanced by its arrangement the first half being topical with separate chapters on language material culture economic conditions religion social and political organization archaeology interaction with whites etc. for the area as a whole whereas the second half contains a short description of each of the tribes. As Chairman of the Anthropological Section of theFifth PacificScience Congress held in Vancouver in 1933 Jenness organized and edited The American Aborigines their Origin and Antiquity (1933b) one of the basic syntheses on American prehistory. The ten contributors to the volume included some of the foremost anthropologists of the time: Franz Boas Roland B. Dixon E.A. Hooton N. C. Nelson Herbert J. Spinden Clark Wissler. Jenness' own contribution "The Problem of the Eskimo" is one of the most valuable and the

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