Frederica de Laguna

De Laguna was born to Theodore Lopez de Leo de Laguna and Grace Mead (Andrus) de Laguna, philosophy professors at Bryn Mawr College, on October 3, 1906, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was home-schooled by her parents until age nine due to frequent illness. She joined her parents and younger brother Wallace on two sabbaticals during her childhood: Cambridge and Oxford, England in 1914–1915 and France in 1921–1922. De Laguna attended Bryn Mawr College on a scholarship from 1923 to 1927, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in politics and economics. Although she was awarded the college's European fellowship, she deferred for a year to study anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boas, Gladys Reichard, and Ruth Benedict. In 1928, de Laguna traveled to England, France, and Spain, where she gained fieldwork experience under George Grant MacCurdy, "attended lectures on prehistoric art by Abbe Breuil, and received guidance from Paul Rivet and Marcellin Boule." In June 1929, de Laguna sailed to Greenland as Therkel Mathiassen's assistant on the country's "first scientific archaeological excavation." Staying a total of six months, the excavation convinced her of a future in anthropology and later became the subject of Voyage to Greenland: A Personal Initiation into Anthropology (1997). De Laguna received her PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1933. ==Career==

(right), where they presented a joint paper on Alaskan ethnology.|alt= De Laguna's first funded expedition was to Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet, Alaska, in 1930 after Kaj Birket-Smith fell ill and was unable to continue with de Laguna as his research assistant. De Laguna instead secured funding from the University of Pennsylvania Museum and brought her brother Wallace, who was a geologist, as an assistant. The following year, the museum hired de Laguna to catalog their Eskimo collections and again financed two excavations to Cook Inlet in 1931 and 1932. She co-led an archaeological and ethnological expedition of Prince William Sound in 1933 with Birket-Smith; the trip became the basis for "The Eyak Indians of the Copper River Delta, Alaska" (1938). De Laguna next explored the lower Yukon Valley and Tanana River in 1935 and published two works because of it: Travels Among the Dena (1994) and Tales from the Dena (1997). ==Selected works==

• 1930, The thousand march: Adventures of an American boy with the Garibaldi. Boston: Little, Brown. OCLC 3940490 • 1937, The arrow points to murder. Garden City, NJ: Crime Club, Inc. OCLC 1720968 • 1938, Fog on the mountain. Homer, AK: Kachemak Country Publications. OCLC 32748448 • 1972, Under Mount Saint Elias: The history and culture of the Yakutat Tlingit: Part one, pdf. Smithsonian contributions to anthropology, v. 7. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. OCLC 603795 • 1977, Voyage to Greenland: A personal initiation in anthropology. New York: Norton. OCLC 2646088 • 1991, with George Thornton Emmons, The Tlingit Indians. New York: American Museum of Natural History. OCLC 23463915 • 1994, with Norman Reynolds and Dale DeArmond, Tales from the Dena: Indian stories from the Tanana, Koyukuk, and Yukon rivers. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. OCLC 31518221 • 1997, ''Travels among the Dena: Exploring Alaska's Yukon valley''. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. OCLC 42772476 ==References==