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Mary Lee Stearns
Dr. Mary Lee Stearns, Associate Professor of Anthropology (March 2019). Mary Lee was a member of the Department from 1975 until her retirement in 1993.
“Mary Lee was my PhD supervisor in 1978-1985, when I carried out research in the Old Massett community in Haida Gwaii for my dissertation on Haida symbols of social life and connections with the spiritual world during that time. This was a community where she had previously carried out field research in 1962 and 1965-66 with several of the elders I came to know. While at times we had different perceptions and interpretations of what people told us, I deeply appreciated how she was willing to listen; I also deeply appreciated her willingness to share ethnohistorical materials she had gathered, along with her own field-notes. Her 1977 ethnographic documentary Those Born at Masset, co-produced with her daughter Eileen Stearns, and currently being digitized at the Royal BC Museum, leaves a legacy of Haida life in the early 1970s, and of oratory and discourse among the generation of adults and elders who still spoke Xaad kil, the Haida language, but were just beginning to re-claim the visual and performance aspects of Haida culture which we now, 45 years later, take for granted.”
Dr.Marianne Boelscher Ignace, Linguistics and First Nations Studies, SFU, and Associate Member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology