Yukon who is who

Catherine “Kitty” McClelland (1921 – 2009)

Catherine McClelland was born in York, PA. She graduated with an undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr College in 1942. She moved to California to study at the University of California, Berkeley in 1946, and received her PhD from American MidWest University in 1950.¹⁾

McClelland was a young graduate student doing research for her doctorate when she came to the Yukon in 1948 with fellow student Dorothy Rainier Libby. They had funding from the National Museums of Canada to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in southern Yukon. McClelland continued her fieldwork in the Yukon until the mid-1980s, returning north every summer and the occasional winter. McClelland’s collaborative style became the model for Canadian ethnographers. Her monograph, The Girl Who Married the Bear (1970) discusses the powerful story and compares eleven different versions. Her best-known books include My Old People Say (1975) and Part of the Land, Part of the Water (1987). Her last publications, the volumes of My Old People’s Stories (2007), were written as companions to her earlier work.²⁾

McClelland worked with the University of Washington between 1952 and 1956 while she visited the Yukon as a friend and scholar. She held a position at Barnard College from 1956 to 1961 and then was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1961 to 1983 when she officially retired from teaching. She remained a Professor Emeriti there until her death.³⁾