(1858-1942) is called the "father of modern anthropology" for his pioneering work on race, culture and lanuage. Boas trained the first generation of American anthropologists including Ruth Benedict, Alfred L. Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, and Edward Sapir. Boas designed the Jesup Expedition as an ambitious comprehensive project on the cultures and history of the North Pacific region focused on the question of human migration from Asia across the Bering Strait. Between 1897 and 1903 Boas secured funding, fielded research teams, and over the next three decades, edited and supervised Expedition publications in addition to his other writing.
(1865-1936), a populist revolutionary whose ethnological interests developed during exile is Siberia, worked among the Chucki, Even, Maritime Koryak, and Yup'ik. He also collected material from the "Russified Natives" as examples of cultural borrowing and assimilation. His expedition publication, "The Chuckchi", is considered an enthnographic classic. After the Russian Revolution, he became the director of the Institute of the Peoples of the North, an agency concerned with education and developmental work among the northern tribes of Siberia. He also published widely as both an ethnographer and novelist.
(1867-1939) of Columbia University accompanied Boas on the initial thrust of the expedition in 1897 and subsequently wrote on the Chilcotin and Quinault and the basketry designs of the Salish.
(1854-1933), the child of a Tlingit mother and an English Hudson's Bay Company factor, was raised in the Kwakwaka'wkw community of Fort Rupert. Much of Boas's Kwakwaka'wkw research depended on Hunt's knowledge of the Kwakwaka'wkw language and community. Boas trained him to transcribe Kwakwaka'wkw texts. He was also Boas's principal collector and made many remarkable purchases for the museum.
Morris K. Jesup
(1830-1908)rose from humble origins to become a millionaire in the railroad banking business. He helped found the American Museum of Natural History in 1869 and as its President, financed the expedition which bears his name, the most ambitious American ethnological expedition of all time.
A medical scholar who worked with her husband, Waldermar Jochelson, in Siberia. Brodsky handled all of the anthropometric and medical work and most of the photography during the field work conducted by her husband. She used some of her anthropological measurements for her doctoral dissertation at the University of Zurich and also wrote of the women of northeastern Siberia.
Waldemar Jochelson
(1855-1937), with Bogoras, took up ethnology during Siberian exile for political activities. Jochelson was in change of the Siberian leg of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. Under Expedition auspices, he worked with Even, Koryak, Yukaghir (including "Russified Natives") and Yakut. He later led the Aleut-Kamchatka expedition of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society in 1909-11. From 1912 to 1922, he was division curator of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Science in St. Petersburg/Petrograd, and spent the remainder of his life as an exile in the United States.
(1874-1934), born in Germany and trained in philology, would one day be hailed as the premier Sinologist of his generation. For the Expedition, Laufer researched and collected among the peoples of Sakhalin Island--the Nivkhi (Gilyak), Evenk (Tungus), and Ainu--and the Amur River Region--the Nanai (Goldi) and Evenk. His subsequent career was spent in extensive research of China and the peoples of China's rim.
(1872-1940)served at the American Museum until 1911 and eventually became chief archaeologist of the National Museum of Canada. He established his reputation with a series of excavations in British Columbia and Washington, notably the Great Fraser Midden and Fort Rupert. Contributing his archeological expertise to the Expedition's study of the Northwest Coast peoples. Smith also photographed extensively.
(1873-1953), who was to produce a prodigious number of publications on the North American Indians, participated in the Jesup Expedition early in his career while a member of the Bureau of American Ethnology, with the Bureau and the AMNH dividing both the financing and the information he collected on the Haida.
(1864-1922)A Scotsman, was married to Lucy Artko, a Nlaka'pamux. He impressed Boas with his detailed knowledge of Northwest Coast peoples. Teit wrote on the Nlaka'pamux, Lillooet, and Shuswap groups.
