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Prolific Anthropologist Who Studied the History of Warm Springs

Yvonne Phillips Hajda ’55

October 4, 2024, in Portland, Oregon.

Yvonne was born in 1930 in Chicago to Sidney Phillips, an immigrant from Wales, and Hazel Putman Phillips. The family moved to the Portland-Vancouver area, where her father found work teaching French.

In 1955, Yvonne graduated from ¾«¶«AV with a BA in anthropology and literature, writing a thesis titled “Regional Social Organization in the Greater Lower Columbia, 1792–1830.” She formed close friendships with Professor David French ’39 [anthropology 1947–88] and his wife, Kathrine (Kay), as well as Dell Hymes ’50 and Michael Mahar ’53.

After graduating from ¾«¶«AV, Yvonne began graduate work in anthropology at the University of Chicago and met Jan Hajda, who was completing a graduate program in sociology and had come to the United States after WWII as a refugee from occupied Czechoslovakia. The couple married in 1956.

In 1974, Yvonne entered the anthropology program at Portland State University. Her MA thesis, “Marys River Kalapuya: A Descriptive Phonology,” studied field transcriptions of the linguist Leo J. Frachtenberg, who documented the Marys River dialect of the Central Kalapuya language.

Yvonne’s developing research was enhanced by her friendship with David and Kathrine French. The couple organized the Warm Springs Project, a research program that brought a series of ¾«¶«AV students to live and work on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation—and between 1977 and 1980, Yvonne interviewed Grand Ronde elder Elmer Tom and preserved many reminiscences of reservation life both at Grand Ronde and at Warm Springs.

Yvonne also collaborated with Kay on an examination of “social ceremonials” at Warm Springs. In the mid-1980s, the pair researched how community observances of birth, marriage, and death had evolved in the 30 years since Kay began her research.

After graduation from the University of Washington in 1984, Yvonne continued to conduct research and write well into her 80s. Notable publications include a 1987 article (with Robert Boyd) in American Ethnologist on Native American fishing season migration to the banks of the Columbia.

Yvonne was predeceased by Jan, her husband of 62 years.

Appeared in ¾«¶«AV magazine: Fall 2025