Frederica de Laguna

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Frederica ("Freddy") de Laguna (1906, Ann Arbor, Michigan – October 6, 2004) was an American anthropologist. Her parents, Theodore Lopez de Leo de Laguna and Grace Mead Andrus, were, respectively, Spanish-American and, in Frederica's own words, "Connecticut Yankee." Both received Doctorates from Cornell and would later teach philosophy at Bryn Mawr College. On her father's side she also had French, German, and Italian ancestry.

She is most noted for her work with the Tlingit and Athapaskan peoples, as well as being one of the first female archaeologists in the United States. Margaret Mead and Dr. de Laguna were the first female anthropologists elected to the National Academy of Sciences, in 1975. Later, she was also influenced by A. Irving Hallowell.

She received a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, graduating summa cum laude, in 1927. She then pursued a doctorate in anthropology at Columbia University, where she studied under Franz Boas and took classes with Ruth Benedict and Gladys Reichard. Her doctoral research in Greenland and France was initiated by Boas's suggestion that she search for possible European paleolithic sources for Eskimo (Inuit) art styles, with an eye toward proving that the Inuit were of European, not Siberian, derivation. Around this time she also took courses at the London School of Economics with Bronislaw Malinowski and C. G. Seligman. She reports that Malinowski tormented her because of her association with his nemesis, Boas.

In 1929, she assisted Therkel Mathiassen at his Norse culture archaeological excavation at Inugsuk, Greenland.^[1] In the 1930s she did archaeological fieldwork in Alaska and the Yukon with Kaj Birket-Smith and with her brother Wallace de Laguna. This led to work with the Eyak people, and their now extinct (as of January 21, 2008) language, work which brought this branch of the Athapaskan linguistic stock to the attention of Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, i.e. western academic attention for the first time (the Russians had known about them since 1783, but no information was passed on concerning it to the scholars of the United States even though Russians, e.g. Ferdinand von Wrangell (1839) and Ioann Veniaminov (1840) had published information on them).

She received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1933.

In 1936 and 1937 she did fieldwork on the Pima reservation in Arizona and with Salish, Makah, and other peoples in Washington State and on Vancouver Island.

Starting in 1938, she taught anthropology at Bryn Mawr and eventually founded the anthropology program there. She retired in 1975.

She joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1942 and taught at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School for Women at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she taught cryptography. She spent most of the Second World War working for Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C., and reached the rank of lieutenant commander.

Beginning in 1949, she did extensive fieldwork among the Tlingit of southeast Alaska, the work for which she is best known. She focused on the communities of Angoon and Yakutat and did some fieldwork with her former students Catherine McClellan and Marie-Françoise Guédon.

[edit] Works

(1956) Chugach Prehistory: The Archaeology of Prince William Sound, Alaska. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

(1972) Under Mount Saint Elias: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

(1977) Voyage to Greenland: A Personal Initiation into Anthropology. New York: W. W. Norton.

(1995) Tales from the Dena: Indian Stories from the Tanana, Koyukuk and Yukon Rivers. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

(2000) Travels among the Dena: Exploring Alaska's Yukon River. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

[edit] Sources

^ Frederica de Laguna. webster.edu. Retrieved on 2008-05-04.

de Laguna, Frederica (2004) "Becoming an Anthropologist: My Debt to European and Other Scholars Who Influenced Me." In: Coming to Shore: Northwest Coast Ethnology, Traditions, and Visions, ed. by Marie Mauzé, Michael E. Harkin, and Sergei Kan, pp. 23-52. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.