Career
In 1927 Garfield re-enrolled at the University of Washington, earning 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, but her Ph.D. work (1931–1933) was largely guided by transfer graduate courses she took at Columbia University with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. Through the early 1930s she 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 the hereditary chief and trained ethnographic fieldworker William Beynon. Their work in Port Simpson covered every imaginable 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.
While in Port Simpson she was adopted into the Laxsgiik (Eagle clan) and given the Tsimshian name "Diiks."
Her later work focused on art and music and also included work with the Tlingit in Alaska, facilitated by her husband, who spoke Chinook Jargon.
For decades until retirement she taught at the University of Washington but never rose above the rank of Associate Professor or received tenure. She died in 1983.
In 1984 a Festschrift in her honor was published by University of Washington Press, edited by Jay Miller and Carol M. Eastman.
Her extensive papers are housed in University of Washington Special Collections.
Read more about this topic: Viola Garfield
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