Frederick W. Waugh (1872–1924)

Abstract

Largely forgotten today, especially in the annals of northern science, Frederick Wilkerson Waugh was one of the very few Canadians to bridge the gap between amateur and professional anthropology during the discipline’s transitional period in the early 20th century. Waugh was a self-taught ethnologist and natural historian, and his career with the Anthropological Division of the Geological Survey of Canada, founded in 1910, lasted a mere 11 years. Yet over that brief span, he made several original contributions to disciplinary knowledge of indigenous peoples and cultures, including research in Labrador among the northern Innu (Naskapi) and their Inuit neighbours.