Diamond Jenness
Birthday	Wednesday, February 10, 1886
Birthplace	Wellington, New Zealand
Died	Saturday, November 29, 1969
Occupation	Anthropologist
Education	Victoria University College of New Zealand Balliol College, Oxford University
Known for	Study of Copper Inuit

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Jenness, Diamond

Born Nov. 10, 1886, in Wellington, New Zealand. Canadian ethnologist, representative of the so-called historical school of American ethnology.

Jenness studied the Eskimo and Indians of the American North. He presided over a number of scholarly institutions (president of the American Anthropological Association, director of the Arctic Institute of America, head of the anthropological division at the National Museum of Canada). He first visited the North with the Stefansson-Anderson Canadian Arctic expedition (1913-16). Later, he was a member and leader of a series of joint geographic and ethnological expeditions to the American Arctic.

WORKS

“The Life of the Copper Eskimos.” Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition 1913-1918, 1923, vol. 12, part A.
The Indians of Canada. [Ottawa, 1955.]
The People of the Twilight. [Chicago] 1959.
Eskimo Administration, parts 1-5. [Montreal] 1962-68.

References in periodicals archive

Pilot, not commander: Essays in memory of Diamond Jenness. Anthropologica 13(1 -2).

James Robert Lotz (1929-2015)

In 1932, Diamond Jenness reinterpreted the Fleur de Lys site as relating to the Dorset, a Paleoeskimo culture, which he had recently identified in the high Arctic.

Mining prospects, c. 1668, at a prehistoric soapstone quarry in Fleur de Lys, Newfoundland

In this story, told by the elder Old Pierre and recorded by the ethnologist Diamond Jenness, a "half-breed Indian near Abbotsford" rather than acknowledging an animal, bird or "force of nature" as his "guardian spirit," claimed that the source of his vitality inhered in a locomotive (qtd.

The murmuring-in-between: eco-centric politics in The Girl Who Swam Forever

This article draws upon source material written by the following authors (for complete citations of source material, please e-mail the author at: mcloskey@uwindsor.ca): Jean Blodgertt (1980); Hugh Brody (1979); Helga Goetz (1993); Nelson Graburn (1967-2002); Diamond Jenness (1964); Kathy M'Closkey (1996); Marybelle Myers (1984); J.K Stager (1982); Virginia Watt (1987).

Carving a niche: arctic cooperatives serve as midwife to birth of Inuit art

In 1991, the diaries of anthropologist Diamond Jenness were published (Jenness 1991), in 2001 the diaries of Vilhjamur Stefannson (Palsson, 2001), in 2004 a biography of George Wilkins (photographer) based on his diaries (Jenness, 2004).

Gisli Palsson, Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Analysing the census, the National Post included a great quote by anthropologist Diamond Jenness who wrote in 1931, "Doubtless all the tribes will disappear.

Life as a Native is often just too interesting

Diamond Jenness, The People of the Twilight, University of Chicago, 1928.

GROUNDED ON ICE

RCMP and Geological Survey investigations failed to solve the case, although his Survey colleague, Diamond Jenness, speculated that Waugh fell from the Lachine railway bridge while attempting to reach the island of Montreal (Department of Mines, 1924; Jenness, 1924:2).

Frederick W. Waugh (1872-1924)

Both Belvin and Rompkey appreciate that the formal administration of Labrador was recent and that throughout much of its history, Labrador was actually governed by what Rompkey appropriately calls 'substitute governors.' Rompkey appears here to use Diamond Jenness's (1965) chapter 'An Experimental Triumvirate' as a templete, following Jenness's description of governance initiatives by the Moravians, the Newfoundland government, and the Grenfell mission.

Two views of Labrador