Introduction: In the Footsteps of a Giant

On 16 September 2010, northern anthropology lost one of its most renowned ethnologists with the unexpected passing of Ernest S. Burch, Jr., who died at his home in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, at age 72 (Fig. 1). Known almost universally as "Tiger," he was a passionate and meticulous researcher, an extremely productive and influential scholar, and a "professional" in the very best sense of the word. These traits earned him the enduring respect of his colleagues, who included not just social scientists but also wildlife biologists, Iñupiaq elders, local and academic historians, and those of us who cut our teeth reading Tiger's work and discussing our research with him at meetings and gatherings through the years.¹

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, on 17 April 1938, Tiger was the eldest of three children of Elsie Lillard Burch and the late Ernest S. Burch, Sr. After Tiger's father graduated from Yale Law School, the family moved to Harrisburg, PA and then to a small nearby farm where Tiger and his siblings grew up. Tiger's formal academic resume included a degree in Sociology from Prince ton University (BA, 1960, cum laude), graduate degrees in Anthropology from the University of Chicago (MA, 1963; PhD, 1966), and service as associate professor and chair in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Manitoba (1966-74; see Correll, this volume). After leaving academia in 1975, Tiger became a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution (1979) and its Arctic Studies Center in Washington, D.C. (1988, Fitzhugh, this volume). He spent the next 30 years of his career as an independent researcher. The majority of his anthropological work and writing was produced out of his home office and without permanent institutional support.

Burch's arctic career began at age 16 as a junior crewmember of Donald B. MacMillan's 1954 expedition to Labrador, Baffin Island, and Greenland. Following a summer of field research in Labrador in 1959, Burch began what turned out to be a lifelong relationship with the Iñupiaq peoples of Northwest Alaska. He spent 11 months in the village of Kivalina in 1960-1961 doing what was essentially an environmental and subsistence study. Accompanied by his wife Deanne, in May 1964 Tiger returned to Kivalina to conduct his dissertation research; however, in December the project came to a tragic halt when he was badly burned attempting to save his field notes from a gasoline fire. Despite severe injuries, just five months later Tiger and Deanne were back in Kivalina. He resumed his research and completed his dissertation shortly thereafter. Tiger conducted additional fieldwork in northwestern Alaska in 1969-70 and 1974-75, accumulating a large and diverse body of data. Those data provided the foundation for his most important publications and for the later encyclopedic trilogy on the Iñupiaq peoples of Northwest Alaska (Burch 1998, 2005, 2006) that has become the centerpiece of his scholastic legacy.

Burch was a master of an ethnohistorical method that allowed him to make significant contributions to the study of the Alaskan Iñupiat during the traditional and early contact era, the Caribou Inuit of Central Canada, and Inuit interactions with their Athabaskan-speaking neighbors in Alaska (Mishler, this volume) and Canada. He also compiled a comprehensive map of indigenous peoples of the Arctic ca. 1825 (Wheelersburg, this volume) and wrote several papers assessing the relevance of hunter-gatherer research (Krupnik, Stern, this volume).

Burch's work was characterized by precision, deliberation, exhaustive research using archival records, and critical attention to detail. He was entirely transparent in stating his objectives and theoretical orientations, the sources of information he consulted, and how he conducted his research. He was dedicated to ensuring that his results were accurate, verifiable, and meaningful and to improving the methods and techniques of anthropology. Tiger consistently evaluated existing concepts, both his and his colleagues', and called for their rejection if he found them unsound. He possessed great self-confidence but was also well-known for refuting his earlier work when later research revealed errors of fact or interpretation.