Diamond Jenness was Canada’s foremost anthropologist of his generation, perhaps of any generation. A biography of Jenness is therefore very welcome for an understanding of the life and the times: of Jenness as a personality and of the early development of Canadian anthropology.
There is a bit of a pattern of New Zealanders coming to Canada and taking up the study of aboriginal people. Diamond Jenness was the first, arriving just before the First World War, followed later by Harry Hawthorn who established anthropology as a discipline at the University of British Columbia. As well as compatriots, Jenness and Hawthorn were also colleagues. I arrived from Auckland at the University of British Columbia a year after Jenness passed away and, after a couple of conversations with Hawthorn, moved on to work with Wilson Duff on the history of First Nations people in British Columbia.
Robin Fisher recently stepped down as provost and vice-president academic at Mount Royal University. He has written on the history of British Columbia including Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774–1890 (University of British Columbia Press, 1977, 1992) and Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (University of Toronto Press, 1991).
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