Having recently left the heat and humidity of tropical New Guinea where he had led an Oxford University expedition to study the d’Entrecasteaux islanders, Diamond Jenness first arrived in Canada in 1913 and immediately travelled north to join the Canadian Arctic Expedition as an ethnologist, under the leadership of the renowned Arctic explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Even though the expedition met early disaster with the loss of their flagship, Karluk, and the death of his fellow anthropologist, Henri Bouchat, he was to spend the next four years recording Inuit songs on wax cylinders and collecting poems and legends while living, learning, and observing the ways of the Inuit. Later, in 1923, he published The Copper Eskimo and, in 1928, The People of the Twilight, both publications based on those years of living with the Coronation Gulf Eskimo of Bernard Harbour. Even today, The People of the Twilight is regarded within academic circles as one of the foremost records of the everyday life of a nomadic, indigenous people.

Because the members of the Arctic expedition lived an isolated existence, they did not learn, until 1916, that the world was at war. Jenness immediately returned south and joined the Canadian field artillery as a gunner, serving overseas from 1917 to 1919. After the war, he returned to complete the reports on his Arctic research. He became a Canadian and remained a Canadian for the rest of his life.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, on February 10, 1886, Diamond Jenness graduated in 1908 with an M.A. from Victoria University College in Wellington. He then travelled to England to study anthropology at Balliol College, Oxford University, receiving an Honours B.A. in 1911 and an M.A. in 1916. Although this was the end of his formal education, Jenness was to spend the rest of his life studying, learning, and writing about the aboriginal peoples of Canada. Later in life, he was to be the recipient of six honorary doctoral degrees as well as other honours and awards from learned societies and institutions throughout the world.
 

1. Diamond Jenness explored the traditional life of the Copper Inuit. Even today, his 1928 publication, The People of the Twilight, is the best single publication about the Canadian Inuit. His 1932 classic, The Indians of Canada, based on numerous field trips across Canada, has been a standard reference work on Canada’s native peoples for over half a century. His excavations in Alaska defined the prehistory of Alaska’s Bering Strait. Just before his death, in 1969, he was awarded Canada’s highest honour – Companion of the Order of Canada. [Photo, courtesy Canadian Museum of Civilization/ J-51236] 2.Canada’s most distinguished anthropologist, Diamond Jenness, came to Canada shortly after graduating from Oxford University. This 1910 graduation photo depicts six budding anthropologists including Jenness, standing, top row, middle. Next to him, right, is classmate Marius Barbeau, Canada’s most famous ethnologist/folklorist. [Photo, courtesy Canadian Museum of Civilization/J-5337]

Jenness returned to Canada after the war, married Frances Bleakney, and started a truly remarkable career as a field researcher and international scholar, publishing books and articles covering a broad range of topics in archeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, music, ethnology, and applied anthropology. Employed by the National Museum of Canada, Jenness undertook archeological excavations, in the early 1920s, near Cape Dorset in the Northwest Territories. It was here that he discovered and identified the remains of an early stone-age culture, the progenitor of contemporary Inuit, which he named the “Dorset Culture.” In 1926, an expedition to the Bering Strait resulted in his identification of the Old Bering Sea culture, a fundamental discovery in explaining migration patterns from Asia to North America via Alaska. During this period he also undertook the compilation and publication of a Comparative Vocabulary of the Western Eskimo Dialects (1928).

In 1926, Jenness was appointed chief of the anthropology division of the National Museum of Canada, a position he held until his retirement in 1948. During the early part of this period, he undertook ethnological research across Canada and, in 1932, published The Indians of Canada, still the only comprehensive ethnographic survey of the aboriginal peoples of Canada. In the late 1930s, he developed antiquities legislation to protect the archeological resources and heritage of the Northwest Territories.

Jenness spent his entire professional life representing Canada at numerous international scientific conferences. In 1937, he was elected the president of the Society for American Archeology and, in 1939, president of the American Anthropological Association. He also served as vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. During World War II, the Canadian government appointed him as Deputy Director of Intelligence for the Royal Canadian Air Force and then later as Chief of the Inter-Service Topographical Section of the Department of National Defence.

In his later years, Diamond Jenness was the recipient of numerous international honours and was associated with many learned institutions throughout the world. In 1956, he published the popular The Corn Goddess and Other Tales from Indian Canada which consists of representative legends from various First Nation groups across Canada. In Canada he was honoured with the Massey Gold Medal in 1962 and, in 1969, he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada, his country’s highest honour.

During the course of his life, Jenness made an invaluable contribution to a better understanding of Canada’s aboriginal peoples, compiling a bibliography in excess of 100 titles, and was recognized as Canada’s foremost pioneer anthropologist. Diamond Jenness died in Ottawa on November 29, 1969.

Wayne Getty