Richard Slobodin (1915-2005).(Obituary)(Biography)

Richard Slobodin, premier ethnologist of the Dene and cosmopolitan scholar, died on January 22, 2005, six weeks before his 90th birthday. Born and educated in New York City, he earned BA and MS degrees from the City College of New York. While he was teaching in the city's school system, an opportunity arose for a canoeing adventure that would prove to be the start of his career in anthropology. In May 1938, two of Dick's friends left from New York City on a canoeing trip that was planned to terminate at Nome, Alaska. Dick joined them at Winnipeg and with Robert Fuller proceeded northward, "hitchhiking, freight grabbing and canoeing," arriving at Fort McPherson in September. Dick writes of this first field trip as follows:

 
    Although the trip was not undertaken for the purpose of serious 
    ethnographic work, an attempt was made, with some success, to 
    acquire the rudiments of the native language and to learn something 
    of the folk lore and obsolete and obsolescent techniques. Some 
    demographic notes were also made during this visit. (Slobodin, 
    1962:11) 

In May 1939, after spending the winter around Fort McPherson. Slobodin and Fuller travelled by dog sled and later by canoe over the mountains into Alaska. "We waded through water running with broken ice for many days." Fuller told a New York Times reporter who interviewed them in Fairbanks (Anonymous, 1939:28).

After this adventure, Dick enrolled in anthropology classes at Columbia University, but in 1942 the war brought the first of two interruptions in his anthropological career. After serving briefly in the US Army, he entered the Naval Flight Program. In a squadron of Grumman Hellcats, he flew across the country to California. Eventually he joined the crew of the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill, on which he served mainly as an intelligence officer.

In August 1946, Dick returned to the Mackenzie specifically to study the social organization of the Peel River Kutchin (now rendered Gwich'in). This research was to form the basis of his doctoral dissertation, but its completion would be delayed for more than a decade. Meanwhile, he began his university career with appointments at the University of Southern California (1947-49) and Los Angeles State College (1950-51). At this point, the widely cast net of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his committee resulted in Dick's being blacklisted and thus excluded from academic employment. For the next seven years, he had to find work elsewhere, which included jobs as a carpenter's helper, truck driver, insurance clerk, and social case worker. Finally, he was offered a chance to continue his studies at Columbia, where he completed his thesis and received the PhD degree in 1959.

Regarding this second hiatus in his academic career, those of us who knew Dick fairly well could not conceive of his advocating the overthrow of a government or any other subversive activity. He perceived socialism as a means to achieve social justice. Nevertheless, his association with Marxism would again cast a shadow over him.

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