June Helm was professor emerita and F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa. Her nearly 50 years of anthropological research in the Mackenzie Valley began in 1951 in Jean Marie River, and went on to include 25 years of work in the Dogrib communities. Her many publications on northern anthropology include several books, including: The Lynx Point People: Dynamics of a Northern Athapaskan Band (1961), The Subsistence Economy of the Dogrib Indians of Lac La Martre in the Mackenzie District of the Northwest Territories (1961, with Nancy O. Lurie), The Dogrib Hand Game (1966, with Nancy O. Lurie), Prophecy and Power Among the Dogrib Indians (1994). She was also editor of Subarctic, volume 6 of the Handbook of North American Indians (1981). The People of Denendeh: Ethnohistory of the Indians of Canada’s Northwest Territories (2000) surveys 50 years of her contributions to northern anthropology. In the 1970s she served as advisor to the Indian Brotherhood (later the Dene Nation) and as consultant to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry. Dr. Helm retired from active university teaching in December, 1999, and continued to pursue research on northern themes. In 1997 Dr. Helm was instrumental in having Bear Lake Chief’s caribou-skin lodge returned to the Northwest Territories. She donated her own files, correspondence, photographs, ethnographic audio tapes and ethnographic objects to the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre and Northwest Territories Archives. Dr. Helm passed away in February of 2004.

Nancy O. Lurie is Curator Emeritus of Anthropology with the Milwaukee Public Museum, and worked as a research partner with June Helm in the Dogrib communities in 1959, 1962, and 1967. Lurie has conducted numerous research projects and other scholarly activities, including an appointment by the governor to the State of Wisconsin Historic Preservation Review Board and serving on several National Endowment for the Humanities committees and panels. Lurie has been awarded more than twenty grants to conduct research and has also been the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Anisfield-Wolf Award sponsored by the Saturday Review, the William B. Hesseltine Award from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and an honorary doctorate of humanities from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has authored or co-authored more than 110 books, articles, and monographs, including Mountain Wolf Woman (1961) and, with co-author Stuart Levine, The American Indian Today (1968).