CANADIAN HONOURS

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 68, 22 March 1937, Page 5

CANADIAN HONOURS

N.Z. ARCHAEOLOGIST.

ADVENTURES IN ARCTIC. DR. JENNESS, OF WELUHGTON. < i (From Our Own Correspondent.) ' i MONTREAL, February 23. ] A New Zealander who has distinguished himself in Canada is Dr. Diamond Jenness, of the National Museum at Ottawa, on whom the Society of American Archaeologists has just conferred its presidency. Widely known as author of both scientific and popular works dealing with the Canadian Eskimos and Indians, he strongly upholds the theory that Canada's oldest families came to this continent from Asia bv wav of the Bebring Straits. Dr. Jenness was born in Wellington. New Zealand, on February 10, 1886, the eon of Mr. Gaorge Lewis and Mrs. Hannah (Heayns) Jenness. He received his early education in his native city, and later attended Victoria University College, Wellington, where he obtained the degree of master of arts in 1908. He later went as Rhodes echolar to Balliol College, Oxford, where he received his B.A. honour in 1911. He obtained the degree of master of arts from that historic seat of learning in 1916. " In 1911 he was the leader of a party organised under the auspices of Oxford University that made an expedition to remote islands in New Guinea in order to make first-hand study of their primitive inhabitants, and in 1913 lie accompanied the Canadian Arctic Expedition as ethnologist, under Stefansson. when he spent three winters in the Far Xorth. sharing the daily life of the natives in their precarious struggle for existence. He wae adopted into an Eskimo family, and ha* since given a delightful account of his stay with these primitive people in his book. "The People of the Twilight." <:reatb- to the surprise of Dr. Jenness and the rest of the party,

in November, 1915, they heard of the outbreak of the Great War, fifteen months after ite commencement, not even rumours of the momentous conflict having reached them in their isolated outpost. Upon his return to civilisation, Dr. Jenneee enlietecl in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, later serving in France with the 58th Field Battery. Dr. Jenness conducted an archaeological expedition to the Behring Straits in 1926. He was an official delegate to the Pacific Science Congress held in Java in 1929, and he was chairman of the anthropological section of the congress held in Vancouver in 1933.