Sealaska Heritage Institute and the Alaska State Library Historical Collections will sponsor a lecture next week on a well-known anthropologist who did field work in Southeast Alaska.
Professor Marie-Francoise Guedon of the University of Ottawa will speak on working with the late anthropologist Frederica de Laguna in Alaska and share early findings from her ongoing research into matrilineal societies around the world.
de Laguna was an American ethnologist, anthropologist and archaeologist influential for her work on Paleoindian and Alaska Native art and archaeology in the American northwest and Alaska. She repeatedly visited the Tlingit community of Yakutat for the monumental ethnographic work she is best known for. “Under Mount Saint Elias: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit,” her ground-breaking holistic study of the archaeology, ethnohistory and ethnography of one culture, was published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1972.
The lecture is scheduled from 12-1 p.m., Jan. 6 in the Living History Center at the Walter Soboleff Building. Attendees are invited to bring their own lunches. The talk also will be videotaped and posted online.
For more information, contact history and culture director Chuck Smythe at 586-9282.
