Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin

Who was Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin?

Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin was an anthropologist, folklorist, and ethnohistorian.

She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1923, and returned there after working for a newspaper in Florida, to pursue a master's degree in anthropology. Her master's thesis was entitled "Mythological Elements common to the Kowa and Five Other Plains Tribes." She married linguistic anthropologist Charles F. Voegelin, with whom she jointly conducted fieldwork among Native American tribes. In 1938, fieldwork among the Tübatulabal people of northern California led to her first book, Tübatulabal Ethnography published by the University of California Press in 1938.

She holds the distinction of being the first woman to receive a doctoral degree in anthropology from Yale University when she received her degree in 1939 with a dissertation entitled "Shawnee Mortuary Customs," published five years later by the Indiana Historical Society. In the 1940s, she worked in the upper Great Lakes conducting linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork among the Ottawas and Ojibwas living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. A specialist in Native American folklore, she founded the American Society for Ethnohistory in 1954 and was its first editor of the journal Ethnohistory until 1964.