Marjorie Halpin

Marjorie Halpin (February 11, 1937 – August 30, 2000) was a U.S.-Canadian anthropologist best known for her work on Northwest Coast art and culture, especially the Tsimshian and Gitksan peoples.

She earned an M.A. from George Washington University in 1963. She worked for five years for the Smithsonian Institution and in 1968 moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, to begin doctoral work at the University of British Columbia, where she worked closely under the anthropologist Wilson Duff.

Her 1973 Ph.D. thesis, The Tsimshian Crest System: A Study Based on Museum Specimens and the Marius Barbeau and William Beynon Field Notes, is considered an important early structuralist study of Northwest Coast culture. It was also the first monograph based on systematic and theoretically engaged analysis of the unpublished Barbeau-Beynon treasure-trove of ethnographic data, for which Duff had compiled a voluminous set of summaries.

Also in 1973, she was appointed to UBC's anthropology faculty, where she served for the remainder of her career, and eventually became curator of the Northwest Coast collection at UBC's Museum of Anthropology, a collection which she helped bring to international prominence. In that capacity she worked closely with Northwest Coast artists such as Bill Reid and Robert Davidson.