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3 unusual facts about Marius Barbeau


Marius Barbeau

Beginning in December of that year, Barbeau carried out three months' fieldwork in Lax Kw'alaams (Port Simpson), British Columbia, the largest Tsimshian village in Canada, in collaboration with his interpreter, William Beynon, a Tsimshian hereditary chief.

In 1913, the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, then of the American Folklore Society (AFS), convinced Barbeau to specialize in French Canadian folklore.

In 1911, Barbeau joined the National Museum of Canada (then part of the Geological Survey of Canada) as an anthropologist under Edward Sapir; he worked there for his entire career, retiring in 1949.


John J. Cove

Around the same time, he became influenced by the structuralist approaches of Claude Lévi-Strauss and, through the help of George F. MacDonald, began an intensive study of the Tsimshianic narratives collected by Marius Barbeau and William Beynon.

Wyandot language

By the time the ethnographer Marius Barbeau made his transcriptions of the Wyandot language in Wyandotte, Oklahoma, in 1911-1912, it had diverged enough to be considered a separate language.


see also

William Beynon

MacDonald, George F., and John J. Cove (eds.) (1987) Tsimshian Narratives. Collected by Marius Barbeau and William Beynon.