Dr.Catharine McClellan

Dr. Catharine McClellan, an anthropologist and educator, died on March 3, 2009 at RiverMead, a Continuing Care Retirement Community in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Born in York, Pennsylvania, on March 1, 1921, to William S. and Josephine N. McClellan, she is survived by numerous nieces and nephews. Her husband, Dr. John T. Hitchcock, a fellow anthropologist, died in 2001.

After graduating from Bryn Mawr College in 1942, she joined the first class of the U.S. Navy Waves, serving until 1946, when she went to the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a Doctorate in Anthropology in 1950. Alternating field work with teaching, she then taught at the University of Missouri and the University of Washington at Seattle. In that period, she took a year off and served with the U.S. Public Health Service in Alaska, living and working with the Eskimo population. After serving as Chairman of the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College from 1956 until 1961, she moved to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where she was named John Bascom Professor in 1973 and where she became emeritus in 1983. She also held visiting positions at Bryn Mawr College and at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

Dr. McClellan wrote numerous scholarly papers plus articles in the Handbook of North American Indians Vol. 6 and in the Canadian Encyclopedia. She was the editor of Arctic Anthropology from 1974-1982, and was a past president of the American Ethnological Society. Her several books about the Indians of Alaska and the Yukon Territory include My Old People Say, an Ethnographic survey of the Southern Yukon Territory and Part of the Land, Part of the Water (1987) A History of the Yukon Indians, which was written at the request of the Council for Yukon Indians and of which she was the principal author. Her last publication was the three volume My Old Peoples Stories, A Legacy for Yukon First Nations, published in 2007. A student of and frequent research collaborator with Dr. Frederica de Laguna, Dr. McClellan received international recognition for her work on western sub-arctic Tlingit and Athapaskan culture. To those in the Yukon Native communities who came to know her during her extended field trips there, she was our Kitty, and today her work forms much of the baseline for present research in the Yukon by anthropology students and young Native people.

Contributions in lieu of flowers may be made to the University of Wisconsin Foundation, John T. Hitchcock Fund #12543261, 1848 University Avenue Madison, WI 53726

There will be no calling hours

Services will be private.