Viola Garfield

Viola E. Garfield (December 5, 1899 – November 25, 1983) was an American anthropologist best known for her work on the social organization and plastic arts of the Tsimshian nation in British Columbia and Alaska.

Viola Edmundson was born in Des Moines, Iowa. Her family moved a few years later to Coupeville, Washington, on Whidbey Island, where she attended local schools.

She enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle beginning in 1919, transferring for financial reasons to what is now Western Washington University in Bellingham, where she became certified as a teacher. She started a position in the 1920s teaching Tsimshian children in Metlakatla, Alaska, on Annette Island. This experience sparked her interest in Pacific Northwest Coast ethnology.

While working at the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, she became the typist for Charles Garfield, an Alaskan former miner and fur trader. They married in 1924.

In 1927 Garfield re-enrolled at the University of Washington. She earned a B.A. in 1928 and an M.A. in anthropology in 1931, with a thesis on Tsimshian marriage patterns, based on fresh fieldwork in Metlakatla. At the U.W. she studied under Erna Gunther. For her Ph.D. work (1931–1933), she transferred graduate courses she took at Columbia University in New York City with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict.

Through the early 1930s Garfield conducted immensely productive fieldwork in Lax Kw'alaams, B.C., or Port Simpson, as it was then known, the largest of the Canadian Tsimshian communities. Her chief facilitator was William Beynon, the hereditary chief and a trained ethnographic fieldworker. Their work in Port Simpson covered every facet of Tsimshian culture, including especially social structure—this at the instigation of Boas, whose own Tsimshian monograph had been upstaged by Beynon and Marius Barbeau's published Tsimshian research. She more than met Boas's expectations. Her 1935 dissertation, published in 1939, was Tsimshian Clan and Society, still a masterful and eminently useful monograph.

...
Wikipedia