Career
From 1943 to 1946, the Frenches served as relocation advisers and community analysts with the War Relocation Authority, monitoring conditions at relocation centers for Japanese-Americans, as part of a program to mitigate abuses.
After David French took a teaching post at his former undergraduate institution, Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, in 1947, the couple began a decades-long involvement with the Warm Springs community. While her husband's research focused on ethnobotany and language, hers focused on naming practices and ceremonialism, in a community composed of Sahaptins, Paiutes, and—the Frenches' specialization -- Wasco Chinookans. French received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1955. Her dissertation, though unpublished, is considered an important contribution to the study of ceremonialism in the region and an innovative study in the semiotic analysis of ritual.
The Frenches' fieldwork at Warm Springs often involved mentoring the inaugural fieldwork experiences of budding anthropologists and linguists (many as Reed undergraduates) such as Yvonne Hajda, Dell Hymes, Gail M. Kelly, and Michael Silverstein.
French served on the faculty of Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland from 1959 to 1980, pursuing an interest in the intersection of pediatrics, gerontology, cultural anthropology, and public policy. From 1981 until her death, she was an adjunct member of Reed's anthropology department.
In the 1980s and 1990s French and Yvonne Hajda, a former student of David French's, collaborated in a long-term study of change and continuity in ceremonialism on Warm Springs, with Wenner-Gren Foundation funding. That material still awaits publication.
Read more about this topic: Kathrine S. French
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