Diamond Jenness (1886-1969)

Abstract

... Jenness quickly found his curiosity about anthropology blossoming into a vocation. In 1911 he was appointed Oxford Scholar to Papua, New Guinea, where he spent twelve months studying Northern Entrecasteaux. Upon his return to New Zealand, he was asked to join Canadian Arctic Expedition, an ambitious government-funded scientific enterprise under direction of well-known arctic explorers Vilhjalmur Stefansson and R.M. Anderson. In June, 1913, Jenness found himself aboard refitted whaling vessel Karluk steaming northward to Bering Strait and beyond to Beaufort Sea. ... In autumn of 1913, small vessel became locked in sea ice off northern coast of Alaska. Unable to free itself, ship drifted helplessly westward towards Siberian Sea, where it was finally crushed in ice off Wrangel Island. Eight men perished in their bid to reach mainland. By a stroke of fortune, Jenness was not aboard Karluk when she drifted off; he, Stefansson, and several others had left ship earlier on a routine hunting trip. Abandoning hopeless task of searching for Karluk, which was lost to sight when they returned, hunting party headed for Barrow, Alaska to rendezvous with remaining two vessels of expedition, Alaska and Mary Sachs. Jenness spent his first winter at Harrison Bay, Alaska, where he learned to speak Inuktitut, gathered information about Western Eskimo customs and folklore, and experienced at first-hand precarious existence of northern hunter. In spring of 1914, he set out along coast to expedition's base camp at Bernard Harbour in Coronation Gulf region. Here he engaged in one of most important goals of Canadian Arctic Expedition-the study of Copper Eskimos of Victoria Island, a people first brought to attention of civilized world by Stefansson only four years earlier. When Jenness arrived in Coronation Gulf region, only a handful of Europeans had visited land of Copper Eskimo. Merchants had only just begun to ply their trade in area, and missionaries and Northwest Mounted Police were yet to arrive. As a consequence, Copper Eskimo remained largely unaffected by contact with outside world. Jenness, therefore, was charged with recording a virtually pristine aboriginal way of life that would change radically within a generation. Jenness spent two years with these Central Eskimo people, living for one year as adopted son of hunter Ikpukhuak and his shaman wife Higalik. During that time he hunted and traveled with his family, sharing both their festivities and their famine. The monographs and publications that resulted from this field work have been recognized by scholars as the most comprehensive description of a single Eskimo tribe ever written. ... During his tenure with National Museum, Jenness published two seminal articles on northern archaeology. The first paper identified a new prehistoric culture in eastern Arctic - Dorset Culture - which Jenness believed to have preceded Thule Culture (the ancestors of contemporary Inuit) by a millenium or more. The second paper hypothesized Old Bering Sea Culture of Bering Strait area, a complex which Jenness believed not only preceded Thule Culture in western Arctic but which was ancestral to it. Considered radical at time of their publication, these theories are now widely accepted, having been vindicated by carbon-14 dating and subsequent field research. Jeness's interest in Arctic never waned. As late as 1968 he was still articulating his concern for Inuit struggle to survive. Among his last works was a series of five volumes published by The Arctic Institute of North America that reviewed government policies toward Inuit of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. ...