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On August 2, 2026, Michael Eugene Harkin passed away in Laramie, Wyoming. Born in Muncie, Indiana, on August 16, 1958, Harkin received a BA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he majored in international studies and English. He then pursued a graduate degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, receiving his PhD in 1988. His doctoral thesis, which was published in 1997 as a book, Heiltsuks: Dialogues of History and Culture on the Northwest Coast, focused on the period 1880–1920, when Heiltsuk society underwent a remarkably rapid transformation, Harkin effectively demonstrated how Indigenous societies change under settler colonialism without simply ceasing to be themselves. In other words, the Heiltsuks did not survive colonialism by remaining unchanged; they survived partly by transforming themselves—appropriating colonial institutions and ideologies while reworking them through Heiltsuk concepts of identity, power, spirituality, exchange, and social order.
In 1993, having served as a visiting professor of anthropology at several universities and having done postdoctoral research at Emory University, Harkin secured a position of assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology of the University of Wyoming in 1993. Four years later, he was promoted to associate professor, and in 2003 to full professor. A gifted teacher, Michael offered a variety of interesting courses and mentored numerous undergraduates as well as graduate students. He retired from the university in 2023.
Harkin is the author of numerous seminal articles and the editor of several important collections of essays. The latter include Coming Shore: Northwest Coast Ethnology, Traditions and Visions (with Sergei Kan and Marie Mauzé), Reassessing Revitalization: Perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands, and Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian. He also made a significant contribution to ethnohistory by authoring such groundbreaking papers as “Feeling and Thinking in Memory and Forgetting: Towards an Ethnohistory of the Emotions,” “Ethnohistory’s Ethnohistory: Creating a Discipline from the Ground Up,” and “Ethnohistory: The First Sixty Years.” Not long before his death, Michael and the author of this obituary co-edited and published a volume of the major papers of their University of Chicago mentor entitled Keeping the Faith: the Selected Papers of Raymond D. Fogelson. An acute observer of contemporary American culture, he also authored such provocative essays as “What Would Franz Boas Have Thought about 9/11?” and “The Reddest of States: Fieldnotes from Trumplandia.”
Over the years, Harkin served as the president of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and the American Society for Ethnohistory. He also served as the editor of Reviews in Anthropology and associate editor of Ethnohistory. With his peculiar sense of dry humor, Michael was a funny, kind, and caring man who enjoyed brining happiness to others and helping his numerous friends and colleagues who will miss him greatly. He is survived by Alison, his wife of forty-two years, and their three children: Caroline, James, and William.
Sergei Kan, Dartmouth College