Department of Anthropology founder dies at age 89
[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/slobodin.jpg” caption=”Richard Slobodin”]Richard Slobodin, one of the finest ethnographers to work among the First Nations peoples of the Canadian north, and one of the founders of the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University, passed away in Hamilton on Jan. 22, 2005. Born in New York City on March 6, 1915, he was just short of his 90th birthday.
Professor Slobodin attended the City College of New York where he completed a B.A. in comparative literature in 1936, and an M.S. in education in 1938. During and after his studies he worked as a teacher, mainly of English, in New York City high schools.
After completing his Master's degree he took a break from teaching and made a career-altering trip to the Northwest and Yukon Territories in Canada, adjacent to Alaska. He and a friend traveled and did research in the Mackenzie Delta area and among the Gwich'in people of the Fort McPherson region through the winter from September 1938 to May 1939.
The trip and his decision after to turn to a career in anthropology, probably flowed from his early upbringing. He wrote of his career that, “My best preparation consisted of belonging to a family wherein both parents and many associates had broad humanist interests, which led to an early exposure to the literature, folklore, and art of many cultures. I was also fortunate enough to have some excellent teachers . . . . These influences were much more important than formal majors and minors.”
After returning to New York he registered in the Ph.D. program at Columbia University in 1940 and began his career as an anthropologist. But his career was interrupted more than once, and it took a quarter-century before he had a continuing academic position.
In 1942 he enlisted in the US Army, but he was then accepted for officer training in the Navy where, although he sought and earned his qualifications as an aircraft carrier-based fighter pilot, he was assigned to be an intelligence officer in the Pacific. After he left military service in 1946 he returned to Columbia to complete his Ph.D., going to the Fort McPherson region for doctoral research from August 1946 to May 1947 with support from the Social Science Research Council and a Research Fellowship from the Arctic Institute of North America (1947-48).
His return to the Gwich'in was a mutually happy one. He commented that being a returning visitor meant that he was not treated as “a formidable official sort of person.” And he reported that chief Julius remarked of him on one festive occasion, that he was the fellow whom the people had previously “taken in when he was just a poor boy” (Slobodin, 1969: 57).
Following his doctoral field research he began his university teaching career with assistant professor appointments at the University of Southern California (1947-49) and Los Angeles State College (1950-51). But in 1951 he was notified by the latter institution that he was not eligible for reappointment. His career was interrupted by his being named in the U.S. Congressional investigations into “Un-American Activities” headed by senator Joseph McCarthy. The McCarthy hearings used innuendo and guilt by association with colleagues and friends to accuse people. The unfounded accusations besmirched the reputations, and sought to bar from employment, many academics and intellectuals of the early Cold War era in the United States.
Dick, as he was called, did not speak frequently about this period in later years, but he described his activities during the next eight years in one of his curriculum vitae without bitterness but with poignancy, as “jobs outside anthropology, mostly in California and Mexico.” For part of the period he worked with several social work agencies in California (1954-58). In the decade following 1948 his first three children were born.
In 1959 he was able to complete his doctoral dissertation and his degree, and he started to get employment in anthropology. In 1959-60 he was a research associate with Cornell University, the next year on a child-rearing study in Washington, D.C., and in 1960 he was hired for two years as a lecturer at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He moved to Canada in 1962 for an 18-month contract as a senior research officer with the research center in the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources. During his time in Ottawa he also took contracts with the National Museums of Canada, but it was made clear by immigration officials that he was not to be given any work related to national security.
The positions in Ottawa afforded him the opportunity to continue doing the research he obviously loved in the north. He had returned to visit First Nations communities in the Yukon in 1961, with a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and in 1962 he did research among the Gwich'in of Arctic Red River with support from the National Museum of Canada. His first monograph, based on his dissertation about the Gwich'in, appeared in 1962, Band Organization of the Peel River Kutchin (National Museums of Canada). In 1963 he did a path-breaking social and economic survey of Metis in the Mackenzie District of the Northwest Territories, which provided the basis for his second book, Metis of the Mackenzie District (Canadian Research Centre for Anthropology, 1966). He returned to north western Canada and adjacent parts of Alaska in 1966 (for the National Museum of Canada), 1968 (with a Canada Council research grant) and 1977 (as an Associate of the Northern Yukon Research Program, University of Toronto). During these periods he spoke Gwich'in “with fair fluency,” and although he was still hoping to improve his competency he noted that he was one of only three researchers “with any appreciable knowledge of the language,” the other two being linguists. (He knew French, Russian and German as well).
When McMaster University sought to introduce an anthropology program he was highly recommended by his colleagues and McMaster invited him to take up an appointment as associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology, soon to be Sociology and Anthropology, with a mandate to develop the program. At the time of his initial appointment to McMaster in 1964 the question of his receiving permanent residency status in Canada had become an issue with the government. It was an odd question, for he had already spent nearly five years in Canada including his northern research trips. His application received support from the University and the Faculty Association, and after some worrisome delays he became a permanent resident of Canada in 1964. He took up citizenship in 1970.
Thus he was 50 years old when he found an academic “home.” He immediately set out to build the anthropology program and to hire colleagues. But he also worked to make it feel like a home to the others who would join him. Dick Slobodin had a profound influence on the character not just the development of the program and then department of anthropology. He exemplified a graceful scholarly collegiality. He welcomed and encouraged thoughtful repartee, and his example of engaging in a common endeavour encouraged others to respond in kind. He carefully cultivated relationships with colleagues, students and friends, and many of those who knew him throughout the university and academia treasured their relationships with him.
Although he was a specialist on the Canadian north, he did not offer a course in the subject until 1969 because he “put my own predilections and interests aside in favor of developing the anthropology program at McMaster.” He was in effect the associate chairman for anthropology of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology during the formative years from 1964-71, although he served de facto and without formal title until the last two of those years.
His leadership by example and his subtle mentoring continued after he was promoted to professor in 1969, after anthropology became a separate department in 1973, and even after his retirement in 1981. His was an active retirement. He continued to teach courses for many years, to participate in department events, and to undertake entirely new research and publications.
When he took ill early in 2005 and was in hospital, it turned out that he was being cared for by nursing staff and visited by clergy a number of whom had taken his courses and who spoke both of their admiration for him as a teacher, and in some cases of the influence he had on their lives. The lives of many of his colleagues and students were enriched by his presence.
His courses were always thoroughly engaging, communicating his constant intellectual inquisitiveness, his exceptionally diverse knowledge, his passion for learning and teaching, and his profound respect for students. He nurtured and encouraged their intellectual and personal growth with an unpretentious but rare combination of entertaining stories, a sympathetic and judiciously critical sense of human character and foibles, a quiet but pervasive sense of humor, thought-provoking generalizations, and a commitment to standards without being rigidly judgmental. His classes and his person were memorable.
His academic interests extended to aspects of the history of anthropology and related disciplines in addition to his more than 50 years of research and publications on the ethnography and ethnohistory of subarctic First Nations. His monographs on the Gwich'in and on the Metis were analytical ethnographies of little studied places and peoples that revealed their diversity and often unexpected complexity. In 1978 he published what has become the standard biography of W.H.R. Rivers (Columbia University Press, reprinted 1997) a little studied key figure in early 20th century anthropology, psychology and psychiatry who contributed to field research methods, the study of kinship, and the first recognition and treatment of “shell-shock” victims during World War I.
After his retirement he co-edited a book with Antonia Mills on Amerindian Rebirth: Reincarnation Belief Among North American Indians and Inuit (University of Toronto Press, 1994). This is a widely cited work in anthropology and religious studies that explores its subject with the finesse required to respect Indigenous peoples and to avoid comfortable but reductionist explanations.
In addition he published nearly two dozen academic papers on topics as diverse as those of his books. He had an eye for situations and topics that seemed marginal and overlooked, and a knack for revealing their importance. This is clear in his decision to do research on Metis, and in his research on an escaped American slave who was a near mythic figure in the late 19th century NWT (1985), and on early Indian involvement with the Klondike Gold Rush (1898-1917) and how that experience ended up supporting rather than undermining “traditions” among Peel River Gwich'in (1963). His eye for the unexpected and his ability to humanize people, partly through keen character sketches, also led him to unconventional analyses. He wrote on indigenous peoples as agents and not just products of change (1964), and he studied band society warfare, survival and vengeance with clarity but not sensationalism (1960 and 1975). This recurrent attention to situations at the boundaries of cultures and categories, and to topics that could be considered “difficult,” gives much of his work a contemporary quality.
His scholarship was characterized throughout by an erudite knowledge of the literature from the classics to the most recent debates, by meticulous consideration of field and archival sources, by his sophisticated analyses, and by his capacity to draw conclusions that mattered.
During his career, he received recognition through invitations to be a summer lecturer at Dartmouth College (1967) and at Carleton University (1964), a research associate at the Cambridge University, Scott Polar Research Institute (1972-73), and a Snider Bequest Lecturer at the University of Toronto (1975-76). He was a secretary of the Northeastern Anthropological Association (1972-73), a fellow of the American Anthropological Association and of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, a member of the Canadian Anthropology Society, and a Charter Associate of the Arctic Institute of North America. He was also an active supporter and part of the response network of Amnesty International for many years.
He is survived by his wife of 35 years, Eleanor Warren (Miller) of Dundas, and by seven children: Jennifer Slobodin, Katherine Slobodin McCulloch and John Slobodin, all of California, and Lisa Miller Kjellberg of Sweden, Roderick Miller of Geneva, Rebecca Miller (Smith) of Ontario, and Peter Miller of Quebec.
An announcement of a University memorial service will be circulated shortly. Richard Slobodin's presence, friendship and repartee will be deeply missed.
