Richard Slobodin (1915–2005) first visited the Gwich’in community of Fort McPherson in the winter of 1938–1939. Following Anthropology studies at Columbia University and military service during the Second World War, he returned to the region in 1946 to conduct anthropological research. In the 1960s, while a professor of Anthropology at McMaster University, he made four field trips to the western Subarctic and published several papers and a book (Band Organization of the Peel River Kutchin) on the Gwich’in.