Mary Ellen Blair

A Life Well Led: the Biography of Barbara Freire-marreco Aitken, British Anthropologist Mary Ellen Blair

What would inspire a proper young British woman, well-educated and devoted to the Church of England, to venture forth from a sheltered academic life of the early 20th century to cross an ocean in order to conduct investigations on a people that she considered 'uncivilized?' To answer this question, the author collected Barbara Freire-Marreco Aitken's correspondence, most of which has never been published, and with editing, annotating, and researched explanations completed the gestalt resulting in a biography that is a cohesive and interesting adventure story. This remarkable second generation British anthropologist lived with Native American pueblo people and visited reservations in the Southwest United States, contributing to the knowledge about and understanding of these people. The dearth of exposure of her experiences makes this a long overdue compilation of her life and work. Even those with little interest in her focus of anthropology and ethnology will find this life story interesting because of the period of time in which she lived, especially because she was a British woman in territory that only recently had become part of the United States.