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Margaret Lantis (1906-2006)

Career and Later Life

Lantis was appointed professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky in 1965 By 1967 Lantis received tenure at the university and was appointed to the graduate school faculty where she taught until her retirement in 1974.

While teaching graduate students Lantis was also working with several committees and societies. Lantis served as the president of the American Ethnological Society 1964-65 she was on the Polar Research Committee of the National Academy of Sciences 1969-72 and was elected president of the Society for Applied Anthropology 1973-74.

She was the only woman who served on any of the seven panels of the Committee on the Alaska Earthquake which began its work soon after The Good Friday Earthquake which occurred in 1964. She contributed a paper to the second volume published by the National Academy of Sciences on the earthquake entitled Human Ecology and her report on the 1964 Alaskan Earthquake Impact of the Earthquake on Health and Mortality was significant and among the first contributions to disaster studies in anthropology..

Her work on the Alaskan Earthquake helped the University of Kentucky gain notability on a national scale for its focus in applied anthropology as noted by the Chairman of the university’s anthropology department in 1971 “the department has achieved national visibility as one of the few in the country focusing on the applied area,” referring to Lantis’s research on disaster and nutrition in Alaska and among American Indigenous Peoples. Lantis went on to publish another book on the disaster, titled When the Earthquake hits Home: Anchorage in the “Great Alaska Earthquake” which explored how households in Anchorage coped with the disaster in the immediate emergency period and household practices that existed two years later(citation).

Over the course of her tenure with the University of Kentucky Lantis published several significant pieces of literature including books and articles on the social organization and religious characteristics of Nunivak Island culture. By the 1970’s the University of Kentucky Press had published a collection of papers edited by Lantis in what they claimed as a relatively new field in anthropology-ethnohistory Ethnohistory in South Western Alaska and the Southern Yukon: Method and Content was published in 1970.

Towards the end of her career she continued to write about the people of Nunivak Island and the greater Alaskan territory as well as Southern Yukon. Topics she covered during this time include social organization which she wrote about in Factionalism and Leadership: a case study of Nunivak Island. This work explored the leadership required to steer a people from a hunting and fishing economy to a modern subsistence, commercial and industrial mixed economy in a single generation. The article summarizes the bases of and opportunities for leadership in Nunivak Alaska in the period 1940-1961. And applied topics in Changes in the Alaskan Eskimo Relation of Man to Dog and Their Effect on two Human Diseases a paper that discusses how culture change can bring about change in the health of a population and particularly how this change has influenced the incidence of several parasites among Alaskan Inuit and Yuit. The U.S Bureau of Indian Affairs also published a series of lectures given by Lantis at a workshop in Anchorage Alaska in 1968. She also contributed to the Handbook of North American Indians in 1984 (citation needed)

Considered a “specialist in Arctic and Subarctic anthropology” her life’s work became an important contribution to knowledge of Alaskan Native people’s personality and culture. After nearly nine years teaching at the University of Kentucky Lantis retired though she remained an active participant in the anthropology community at the school for many years helping generations of Arctic scholars by offering advice and sharing her research notes. One example of this was her encouragement of the publication of Nunivak Island Eskimo (Yuit) Technology and Material Culture which was written by James Vanstone in 1989 and relies heavily on Lantis’s field notes and observations of the material culture in use during her stay on the island 1939-40. The article discusses the manufacture and use of items associated with sea and land hunting, fishing, transportation, shelter construction, household activities, food prep and skin working. The paper’s success is based on the extraneous detail put into the descriptions of the above mentioned material culture and the insight into division of labour and women’s activities offered by Lantis’s notes and attributed to her own gender and length of stay on the island. Lantis also donated much of her collection of artifacts compiled over the course of her research in the Arctic region to the University of Kentucky Museum of Anthropology in 1973, 1977 and 1978. Among the artifacts is a collection of Nunivak children’s toys.

She was designated as an honorary life member of the Alaska Anthropology Association and was the recipient of the Society for Applied Anthropology’s Bronislaw Malinowski Award in 1987 In recognition of the years she spent in the public service applying her anthropological research to help people.. Addressing applied anthropologists Lantis presented a survey of characteristics of leadership in her Malinowski award presentation entitled Two important roles in organizations and communities which focused on the roles of leader and follower in those institutions.