In memoriam Ernest S. “Tiger” Burch, Jr. (1938-2010)

Ernest S. “Tiger” Burch, Jr., passed away on September 16, 2010, at his home in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. He was 72. His life ended suddenly, at a time when he was still as active as ever during his extremely productive career as an Arctic anthropologist. Indeed, for more than four decades, he has been a towering presence in the community of Inuit studies, and more broadly in the community of anthropologists of the circumpolar North. His primary geographical focus of interest was northwest Alaska, but he also conducted research in West Hudson Bay and had authoritative knowledge about all Inuit, Yup’ik, and neighbouring Indigenous peoples of the circumpolar North. Ernest S. Burch, Jr., was first called “Tiger” by some of his father’s friends shortly after his birth on April 17, 1938 in New Haven, Connecticut. This is the name by which he was thereafter known and called by family and friends, and later by colleagues as well. He was the eldest of the three children of Ernest Burch, Sr., and Elsie Lillard Burch. Although a city lawyer, Tiger’s father loved the outdoors, and he communicated this passion to his eldest son. In 1954, at age 16, Tiger was accepted as a junior member on one of Donald B. MacMillan's last Arctic expeditions, during which they travelled by schooner to Labrador, Greenland, and northern Baffin Island. This experience caused him to shift away from his original intention to become a field biologist, and to study human and social sciences instead. He received a B.A. in sociology, cum laude, from Princeton University in 1960. Immediately afterwards, he was hired to conduct a one-year study of the use of local resources in Kivalina, a small Iñupiaq community in northwest Alaska. He then went on with graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago (M.A. 1963; Ph.D. 1966). During his doctoral studies, he travelled again to Kivalina, accompanied by his wife, with the intention to spend a year doing research. While there, in December 1964, Tiger was terribly burned in a gasoline fire while trying to save his field notes. He returned to the village after months of treatment but he, who had practised participant observation with such enthusiasm, found himself unable to join in strenuous subsistence activities anymore. Thus, making virtue out of a necessity, he switched to interviewing as his primary field research method; this actually coincided with a change in his orientation, from ethnography to oral history. From 1966 until he resigned in 1974, Tiger Burch was on the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. In 1969-70, he conducted what he considered to be his major Alaska research, based with his wife and two very young daughters in Kotzebue. During nine months, he relentlessly interviewed elders considered to be experts in local history, tapping into treasures of knowledge that until then researchers had ignored, and actually even scorned. With the method of historical reconstruction based on oral accounts, which he had devised and perfected, he was able to reconstruct in minute detail many aspects of life, and historical developments, in the whole of northwest Alaska, going back to the first quarter of the 19th century. As a true pioneer, Tiger Burch created social history and historical ethnography based on knowledge that he elicited from the memories of local experts. These Iñupiaq scholars, untrained in academic disciplines, provided knowledge that he was able to collect, understand, analyse, and synthesise in major publications that will remain monuments on the history of the region, as well as landmarks in the theory and methods of ethnohistory. His …