A young Viola Edmundson, too frightened to walk alone past a field of cows on the way to the schoolhouse, soon abandoned her first attempt at grade school. By the time she had turned twenty-two, however, the timid girl had grown up into an adventurous young woman. In August of 1922, Viola accepted a job from the Bureau of Indian Affairs teaching Tsimshian Indian children in a remote Alaskan village. Years later she described that “my first view of the Tsimshian was of rows of houses spaced along the meandering shores of New Metlakatla, Alaska. Approaching the island in a late August afternoon, Purple Mountain and Yellow Hill with their brilliant colors dwarfed the weathered homes and churches.” Accompanying her were five other teachers and the superintendent. Viola was one of only two in the group who had met an Indian previously, and her interactions with a few Salish Indians on Whidbey Island while growing up had been very limited. And regardless of prior experience, “none of us had known such people as the Metlakatlans.” The nine-month teaching assignment would define her life and work from that moment forward.

Born on December 5th, 1899 in Iowa, Viola moved with her family to Whidbey Island in 1905. Once an added year and the company of a younger sister provided the courage to brave the frightening gauntlet of cows, she thrived in school--gaining back the lost year by skipping the fourth grade--and graduated valedictorian of her high school class. She worked and saved for a year, and entered the University of Washington in 1919. Unfortunately, her money ran out during her second year, necessitating a transfer to the Bellingham Normal School. Shortly after earning a teaching certificate, she left for New Metlakatla.

When she arrived, many adult Metlakatlans had been among those who had helped build the village, and only the youngest had no memory of its founder. These settlers had left their ancestral homeland, and vowed to renounce their ancient customs in favor of approximating the white man’s culture. For this reason, they had a reputation among whites as being the most “progressive” of all Northwest Coast Indian tribes. Despite the sincere effort to assimilate, she noted that “in many ways the Metlakatlans displayed attitudes, beliefs and behavior that were foreign and incomprehensible to the teachers.” The Indian children, for example, would not compete for attention or for rewards because, she realized, they thought in terms of group, and not personal, interest. The uniqueness of the Indians and their culture fascinated the young Viola. Despite the superintendent’s injunction, she refused to punish children who spoke Tsimshian.

This initial immersion in Indian culture ended with the school year the following spring. She returned to Seattle and worked as a stenographer for the city’s Chamber of Commerce. Here she met Charles Darwin Garfield, an Alaskan who had founded the Seattle Fur Exchange, and they married on her twenty-fifth birthday. Her curiosity about Indian culture slumbered dormant until 1927, when she was able once again to attend the University of Washington. She majored in sociology, and renewed her interest in the Tsimshian under the influence of newly-arrived anthropologist Melville Jacobs. She returned to New Metlakatla to study Tsimshian marriage patterns for her Master’s Degree, which she received in 1931. For the next several years, she would alternate between spending summers at Columbia University in pursuit of doctoral studies and the rest of the year teaching at the University of Washington. At Columbia, she studied under Franz Boas, generally credited with being the "father of American anthropology." Like many other early Northwest anthropologists, she maintained throughout her long career the Boasian dedication to ethnographic detail and native texts. At the time Columbia required the publication of the dissertation before granting a Ph.D. Even though Garfield finished hers in 1935, she had to wait until the 1939 publication of before receiving her degree. Once she had the Ph.D., she joined the University of Washington as a full faculty member, where she would teach until her retirement in 1970.

Garfield formed a crucial part of the nucleus of a department internationally famous for its specialization in Northwest Coast Indian culture. French anthropologist Claude Lévy-Strauss, for example, relied upon Tsimshian examples drawn from Garfield in his early studies of kinship and mythology. Outside academia, Garfield was most famous for her work on totem poles. She worked with the United States Forest Service (U.S.F.S.) to restore many Alaskan totem poles, and together with Linn A. Forrest, a U.S.F.S. regional architect and supervisor of the restoration project, wrote in 1948. She also wrote a history of the famous Seattle totem pole in Pioneer Square. Garfield’s research illustrated how the poles are not just intricately crafted, beautiful works of art, but sophisticated symbols created by the Indians to tell of family, history and mythology.

Viola Edmundson Garfield died in 1983, after spending a life studying, promoting and trying to preserve the art and culture of Northwest Coast Indians.

Biographical note written by Rich Bellon, 1995.