author
Ernest William Hawkes
b. 1883
Best known for his early fieldwork in Alaska and Labrador, this American anthropologist left behind vivid studies of Inuit life, ritual, and material culture. His writing comes from years spent close to the communities he was documenting, which gives it unusual immediacy.
1 Audiobook
The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo
by Ernest William Hawkes
About the author
Born in Massachusetts in July 1883, Ernest William Hawkes became an American anthropologist whose work focused on Indigenous peoples of Alaska and northern Canada. Sources on his exact birth year are not fully consistent, but the 1883 date appears on his Wikipedia entry and in library-style records attached to his books.
He is especially associated with early twentieth-century studies of Inuit communities. In works such as The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo, The "Inviting-in" Feast of the Alaskan Eskimo, and The Labrador Eskimo, he documented ceremonies, social life, and objects used in daily and ritual practice. In one of his own introductions, he described serving as a government teacher at St. Michael, Alaska, during 1911–1912, where his ethnographic interest grew out of direct observation.
A later scholarly summary of his career describes him as more than just an anthropologist: at different times he was also a schoolteacher, professor, and poet. He died in 1957, and his books remain valuable as firsthand records from an important period in Arctic ethnography.