David Heath French (May 21, 1918 – 1994) was an American

anthropologist An anthropologist is a scientist engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropologists study aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms, values ...

and

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

from

Bend, Oregon Bend is a city in central Oregon and the county seat of Deschutes County, Oregon, Deschutes County, Oregon, United States. It is located to the east of the Cascade Range, on the Deschutes River. The site became known by pioneers as a ford (cros ...

. During his lifetime he was considered the foremost academic authority on the

Chinookan The Chinookan languages are a small family of extinct languages spoken in Oregon and Washington along the Columbia River by Chinook peoples. Although the last known native speaker of any Chinookan language died in 2012, the 2009-2013 American C ...

people of the middle Columbia River, especially the Wasco-Wishram Chinooks of the

Warm Springs Indian Reservation The Warm Springs Indian Reservation consists of in north-central Oregon, in the United States, and is governed by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. Tribes Three tribes form the confederation: the Wasco, Tenino (Warm Springs) and ...

in Oregon. His research focused on

ethnobotany Ethnobotany is an interdisciplinary field at the interface of natural and social sciences that studies the relationships between humans and plants. It focuses on traditional knowledge of how plants are used, managed, and perceived in human socie ...

and language.

Education

French attended

Reed College Reed College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland, Portland, Oregon, E ...

in Portland, Oregon, for three years (1935-1939), studying under Morris Opler. When Opler moved to

Pomona College Pomona College ( ) is a private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Claremont, California. It was established in 1887 by a group of Congregationalism in the United States, Congregationalists ...

and the

Claremont Graduate School The Claremont Graduate University (CGU) is a private, all-graduate research university in Claremont, California, United States. Founded in 1925, CGU is a member of the Claremont Colleges consortium which includes five undergraduate and two grad ...

, French transferred to Pomona to continue studying with him and completed his B.A. there in 1939. (He was later made an honorary alumnus of Reed.) He earned an M.A. at Claremont as well, in 1940. Around this time he did archaeological work in Oregon under Luther S. Cressman. French's Ph.D. work at

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

involved studying under

Ralph Linton Ralph Linton (27 February 1893 – 24 December 1953) was an American anthropologist of the mid-20th century, particularly remembered for his texts ''The Study of Man'' (1936) and ''The Tree of Culture'' (1955). One of Linton's major contribution ...

and

Ruth Benedict Ruth Fulton Benedict (June 5, 1887 – September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist and folklorist. She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College, and graduated in 1909. After studying anthropology at the New School of Social ...

(he was Benedict's research assistant). He was heavily influenced by the milieu surrounding

Franz Boas Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the mov ...

, who died while French was at Columbia. Later in life French always considered himself a "Boasian," an approach characterized by meticulous and thorough anthropological research in the "recovery ethnography" mode, as well as a preference for conducting linguistic and ethnographic research in tandem. He did dissertation fieldwork at

Isleta Pueblo Pueblo of Isleta ( , ; ) is an unincorporated community and Tanoan pueblo in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, United States, originally established in the . The Southern Tiwa name of the pueblo is (Shee-eh-whíb-bak) meaning "a knife lai ...

in the Southwest (1941-1942). His dissertation on factionalism at Isleta Pueblo was defended in 1943, but he did not receive his Ph.D. until 1949.

Family and career

In 1943 French married Kathrine Story (1922-2006), whom he had met at Pomona and who was also pursuing a Ph.D. at Columbia. From 1943 to 1946, the Frenches served as relocation advisers and community analysts with the

War Relocation Authority The War Relocation Authority (WRA) was a United States government agency established to handle the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It also operated the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter in Oswego, New York, which was t ...

, monitoring conditions at relocation centers for Japanese-Americans, as part of a program to mitigate abuses.

Teaching

French taught at Reed from 1947 until his retirement in 1988 and he presided over the establishment of Anthropology as a separate department there. Given that French's father, Delbert R. French, was a member of Reed's first graduating class (1915) (French co-founded the informal children-of-alumni group, Offspring of Reed Graduates of yesteryear, or ORGY) and that French remained involved with the Reed community (living across the street from campus) until his death, he may indeed have had a longer association with Reed College than anyone else before or since. He also held visiting positions at Columbia University (1954-1955), the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

(1959), and

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

(1960-1961). In 1949, David and Kathrine French began a decades-long research involvement with the Warm Springs people. Their many contributions to Warm Springs ethnography included an exhaustive ethnobotanical inventory, numerous published articles on topics such as oral narrative and the relationship between language and culture, and a still unpublished dictionary of Wasco-Wishram (

Kiksht Upper Chinook, endonym Kiksht, also known as Columbia Chinook, and Wasco-Wishram after its last surviving dialect, is a recently extinct language of the US Pacific Northwest. It had 69 speakers in 1990, of whom 7 were monolingual: five Wasco and ...

). In the mid-1960s French facilitated the inaugural fieldwork, on Chinookan, of a young

Michael Silverstein Michael Silverstein (12 September 1945 – 17 July 2020) was an American linguist who served as the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician ...

, who was later to become a leading linguist and

semiotician Semiotics ( ) is the systematic study of sign processes and the communication of meaning. In semiotics, a sign is defined as anything that communicates intentional and unintentional meaning or feelings to the sign's interpreter. Semiosis is an ...

. The Frenches' ethnobotanical research also included fieldwork among peasants of France's Massif Central in the 1960s, accompanied by

Claude Lévi-Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss ( ; ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a Belgian-born French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair o ...

Research

Among French's unique contributions were the inclusion in ethnobotanical surveys of which plants were ''not'' named, and, in a 1955 article, "The Concept of Culture-Bondage," an exploration of the relationship between culture and individuality which, in true Reed form, anticipated many of the concerns and ideals of the

counterculture A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores.Eric Donald Hirsch. ''The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy''. Ho ...

. But his most significant publications remain a long 1961 article on culture change at Warm Springs (a monograph-length ethnographic sketch, in many ways) and several definitive articles co-authored for the

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums, Education center, education and Research institute, research centers, created by the Federal government of the United States, U.S. government "for the increase a ...

Handbook of North American Indians The ''Handbook of North American Indians'' is a series of edited scholarly and reference volumes in Native American studies, published by the Smithsonian Institution beginning in 1978. Planning for the handbook series began in the late 1960s and ...

, namely contributions on Plateau subsistence, naming practices, and the Wasco-Wishram-Cascades peoples. At one point he was the Reed faculty member with the most numerous publications to his credit. Many of French's students pursued careers in anthropology or allied fields. The most prominent of these were probably

Dell Hymes Dell Hathaway Hymes (June 7, 1927, in Portland, Oregon – November 13, 2009, in Charlottesville, Virginia) was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic ...

(anthropologist and linguist, whose research also focuses on Chinookans) and Hymes's friend the

Beat Generation The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by members o ...

poet

Gary Snyder Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate ...

. Snyder's Reed B.A. thesis (1951) was later published as a book, ''He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth'' (1979), and it is largely thanks to French that American Indian themes and concerns with folklore and language use have enriched nearly all of Snyder's work. Snyder dedicated his book ''Myths and Texts'' to French. Other students of French's included Gail M. Kelly, May Ebihara, Katherine Verdery, Robert A. Brightman, and Robert E. Moore. In 1988 French received the

American Anthropological Association The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an American organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 10,000 members, the association, based in Arlington, Virginia, includes archaeologists, cultural anthropo ...

's prestigious Distinguished Service Award, his discipline's highest honor.

Death

French died February 12, 1994, in

Portland, Oregon Portland ( ) is the List of cities in Oregon, most populous city in the U.S. state of Oregon, located in the Pacific Northwest region. Situated close to northwest Oregon at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, ...

Selected works

* (1955) "The Concept of Culture-Bondage." ''New York Academy of Sciences, Transactions, Series II,'' vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 339–345. * (1958) "Cultural Matrices of Chinookan Non-Casual Language." ''International Journal of American Linguistics,'' vol. 24, pp. 258–263. * (1961) "Wasco-Wishram." In: ''Perspectives in American Indian Culture Change,'' edited by Edward H. Spicer, pp. 337–430. University of Chicago Press. * (with Kathrine S. French) (1996) "Personal Names." In: ''Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 17: Languages,'' ed, by Ives Goddard, pp. 200–221. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. * (1999) "Aboriginal Control of Huckleberry Yield in the Northwest." In ''Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest,'' ed. by Robert Boyd, pp. 31–35. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press.

Bibliography

*Hymes, Dell. Obituary for David H. French. ''Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas Newsletter,'' vol. 13, no. 1 (April 1994), pp. 1–3. *Moore, Robert E. "Self-Consciousness, Ceremonialism, and the Problem of the Present in the Anthropology of Native North America." In: ''New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations,'' edited by Sergei A. Kan and Pauline Turner Strong, pp. 185–208. University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

References

External links

AAA news release on David French bequest
{{DEFAULTSORT:French, David H. Writers from Bend, Oregon Columbia University staff Harvard University staff 1918 births 1994 deaths Claremont Graduate University alumni 20th-century American anthropologists 20th-century American linguists Pomona College alumni Reed College alumni