RICHLING, Barnett, 2012 In Twilight and Dawn: A Biography of Diamond Jenness, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 413 pages.

If people today are at all aware of New Zealand-born Diamond Jenness (1886-1969), it is likely for The People of the Twilight, his moving account of a 1914-1916 stay among the Copper Inuit. A few will also have heard of his Dawn in Arctic Alaska or the five-volume Eskimo Administration composed late in life. To make the ethnologist’s “many accomplishments” (p. ix) better known in Canada, his adopted country, Barnett Richling, University of Winnipeg senior scholar in anthropology, has written In Twilight and Dawn, a cradle-to-grave academic biography. A half-dozen chapters concern mainly Jenness himself: South Seas youth; studies at Oxford; World War I soldiering for Canada; over 20 years of work in Ottawa for the federal government’s Anthropology Division (including the National Museum of Man) with two stints as director; de facto transfer at the onset of WWII to other functions until retirement in 1948; and the period to his death. Admixed are expansions on Jenness’s stays among various Indigenous peoples: the Papuan of the D’Entrecasteaux Islands (1911-1912); Alaska’s Inupiat and Canada’s Copper Inuit, both while with the Stefansson-led Canadian Arctic Expedition (1913-1916); Alberta’s Sarcee (1921); British Columbia’s Wet’suwet’en, Sekani, and Carrier groups (1923-1924); Ontario’s Ojibway (1929); and the West Coast Saanich and Katzie (1935-1936). Throughout, Richling covers local history, prior studies by others, and theoretical issues. In addition, 50 pages present the early archaeology of pre-contact Inuit cultures, Jenness’s search for buried artifacts on the Diomede Islands (1926) and in Newfoundland (1927), his review of thousands of Arctic items dug up by others, and his identification thereby of the Dorset people. New Zealand’s liberal treatment of the Maori appears when Richling asserts that this attitude to Native people infused Jenness and shaped his career (p. 18, 292), when Jenness drew on the Maori example to criticise Ottawa’s handling of Treaty Indians (p. 279, 293), and in 1948 when he was made a one-man commission to find in Maori status what might be applied in Canada (p. 295-297). Richling uses the term “applied anthropology” (p. 263) for Jenness’s thoughts, expressed as advisor to Indian Affairs and in public formats, on improving Native lives. That expertise presumably arose from on-site visits, but it is hard to get a sense of that happening. His tribal stays between 1921 and 1936 tend to blur in the mind, given the recurrent themes of haste, item acquisition, interrogation of elders (Old David, Old Cyrus, etc.) (p. 269, 270) and disappointment with people who had adopted new ways. Seldom during these years is there an image of Jenness interacting with families at the real level of day-to-day life. The author deserves credit for decades of research, including a visit with Jenness’s New Zealand family, but the product is not so much a book to read as a fine one to consult. Context pieces that mention Jenness only briefly, if at all, occupy much print. No detail, it seems, has been left out (Victoria, B.C.’s past, for example, when Jenness stays in nearby Sydney, p. 269) and the overload exhausts. One of biography’s traps is to let it become other forms of history, and when Richling veers into the history of institutions, or of anthropology in higher education, with lists of who was appointed when, one wishes much had gone into endnotes. Non-events—expositions of plans by Jenness or others that did not come about—also break the flow. Often, the author cannot wait to tell what happened years on, adding “later” to a list of frequently used words (e.g., p. 64-65). “Exceedingly” makes seven appearances: once on the dustcover to describe the author’s fine writing, …