ARCTIC
before his 90th birthday. Born and educated in New York City, he earned BA and MS degrees from the City College of New York. While he was teaching in the city’s school system, an opportunity arose for a canoeing adventure that would prove to be the start of his career in anthropology. In May 1938, t...
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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2005
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.668.1830 http://arctic.synergiesprairies.ca/arctic/index.php/arctic/article/download/468/500/ |
| Summary: | before his 90th birthday. Born and educated in New York City, he earned BA and MS degrees from the City College of New York. While he was teaching in the city’s school system, an opportunity arose for a canoeing adventure that would prove to be the start of his career in anthropology. In May 1938, two of Dick’s friends left from New York City on a canoeing trip that was planned to terminate at Nome, Alaska. Dick joined them at Winnipeg and with Robert Fuller proceeded northward, “hitchhiking, freight grabbing and canoeing, ” arriving at Fort McPherson in September. Dick writes of this first field trip as follows: Although the trip was not undertaken for the purpose of serious ethnographic work, an attempt was made, with some success, to acquire the rudiments of the native language and to learn something of the folk lore and obsolete and obsolescent techniques. Some demographic notes were also made during this visit. (Slobodin, 1962:11) In May 1939, after spending the winter around Fort McPherson, Slobodin and Fuller travelled by dog sled and later by canoe over the mountains into Alaska. “We waded through water running with broken ice for many days,” Fuller told a New York Times reporter who interviewed them in Fairbanks (Anonymous, 1939:28). After this adventure, Dick enrolled in anthropology classes at Columbia University, but in 1942 the war brought the first of two interruptions in his anthropological career. After serving briefly in the US Army, he entered the Naval Flight Program. In a squadron of Grumman Hellcats, he flew across the country to California. Eventually he joined the crew of the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill, on which he served mainly as an intelligence officer. In August 1946, Dick returned to the Mackenzie spe-cifically to study the social organization of the Peel River Kutchin (now rendered Gwich’in). This research was to form the basis of his doctoral dissertation, but its comple-tion would be delayed for more than a decade. Meanwhile, he began his university career with appointments at the |
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