Ernest S. ("Tiger") Burch, Jr.
Anthropologist

Dr. Ernest S. Burch, Jr. is a social anthropologist specializing in the early historic social organization of Eskimo peoples. Geographically, his primary interests are northwestern Alaska and the west coast of Hudson Bay. Dr. Burch was born in New Haven, CT on April 17, 1938. The next day some of his father's bachelor buddies started calling him "Tiger." Except for a few brief interludes, that is what he has been called ever since.

As a child, Tiger dreamed of becoming a naturalist, or what we now known as a wildlife biologist. With that in mind, he applied to become a junior member of Donald B. MacMillan's 29th arctic expedition in 1954, and was accepted. When he returned after a three month trip to Labrador, Greenland and northern Baffin Island on the schooner "Bowdoin," he decided to become an anthropologist. That led him to Princeton University, where he majored in sociology, graduating cum laude in 1960. After a year as a researcher in an environmental impact study in northern Alaska, he attended the University of Chicago. There he majored in anthropology, receiving his M.A. in 1963, and his Ph.D. in 1966.

In the fall of 1966 he was appointed to the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manito-ba. He resigned from that position in 1974, and has been an independent scholar ever since, supported by research grants and contracts. He has been a Research Associate of the Smithsonian Institu-tion since 1979.

Initially, Tiger was interested primarily in studying contemporary Native life in the arctic. However, he soon became more interested in reconstructing life as it had been during the early contact period, which ranges from the late 17th century to the late 19th, depending on the region. This change in focus was stimulated by his rewarding experience working with elders in northwestern Alaska, and by his research in the archives of the Hudson's Bay Company. Both the oral and the documentary sources yielded more and better new informa-tion on early 19th century Eskimo life than he had previously believed could be found a century and a half later.

Currently (early 2002), he is working on the following projects: (1) a book on war and trade in early 19th century Northwest Alaska; (2) a reconstruction of the early 19th century social organization of the Iñupiaq Eskimos of the Kotzebue Sound region, Alaska; (3) a reconstruction of the early 19th century social organization of the Iñupiaq Eskimos of the Arctic Slope of Alaska; and (4) a study of changing caribou populations and herd management in northwestern Alaska between 1850 to 2000. Two other projects, one dealing with the world view of the Iñupiaq Eskimos of Northwest Alaska, the other with the social history of the Caribou Inuit of the west coast of Hudson Bay from 1717 to 1960, are temporarily on the back burner.

Tiger has been an advisor to the U. S. Arctic Research Commission; a member of the United States Man and the Biosphere Program, High Latitude Ecosystems Directorate; a member of the Polar Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council; and a member of the Committee on Polar Social Sciences, Polar Research Board, National Research Council. In the late 1970s, he was a participant in several Joint USA-USSR symposia on the Peopling of the New World, sponsored by the Commission on the Social Sciences and Humanities of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

To contact Dr. Burch please write to the following address:
3601 Gettysburg Road
Camp Hill, PA 17011-6816

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