James W. VanStone

Who was James W. VanStone?

James W. VanStone was an American cultural anthropologist specializing in the Inuit people. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania and was a student of Frank Speck and A. Irving Hallowell. One of his first positions was at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois. In 1951, following completion of graduate studies, he joined the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. In 1955 and 1956, he conducted fieldwork with the Inuit people at Point Hope, Alaska. Beginning in the summer of 1960, he started field work among Chipewyan Indians, living along the east shore of Great Slave Lake in Canada's Northwest Territories among eastern Athapaskans for a period of eleven months over three years. He died of heart failure.