Weltfish, Gene, 1902-1980

American anthropologist known for her cultural and linguistic studies of the Pawnee Indians.

Born in New York City and a student of Franz Boas at Columbia University, Weltfish began to work with the Pawnee in Oklahoma in 1928. During the summer of 1935 she focused on documenting social relations and surviving customs, and worked with her Pawnee colleague Mark Evarts to reconstruct the seasonal cycles of the Pawnee for the year 1867. She later conducted ethnological, archaeological, and historical research on the Pawnee at the University of Nebraska, and combined this study with the results of her 1935 field work to publish The lost universe (New York : Basic Books, 1965).

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