Fonds MG4259 - Bruce G. Trigger Fonds

Bruce Graham Trigger was born on June 18, 1937 in Preston, Ontario (now Cambridge) and died on December 1, 2006, in Montreal, Quebec. On December 7, 1968, he married Barbara Marian Welch, whom he had met at McGill University while she was in the midst of a campaign to permit women into the reading room of McGill University’s Faculty Club. They had two children, Isabel Marian and Rosalyn Theodora, who both studied at McGill. Trigger was schooled at St. Mary’s Collegiate Institute in 1951 and the Stratford Collegiate Institute in 1955. He earned his B.A. from the University of Toronto in 1959, and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1964, his Ph.D. thesis was titled “History and Settlement of Lower Nubia.” Trigger spent the following year teaching at Northwestern University and then became assistant professor with the Department of Anthropology at McGill, where he remained for the rest of his career. He published over twenty books, including the book “A History of Archaeological Thought,” which became required reading in the discipline. Trigger also conducted ethnographic research and was best known for The Children of Aataentsic, a two-volume study of the Huron peoples. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada from 1976, was awarded the Cornplanter Medal in 1979, and was made an Officer of the National Order of Quebec in 2001, and in 2005, was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Trigger wrote that his most cherished honour was his adoption into the Great Turtle Clan of the Huron-Wendat Conferedacy in 1989, where he was given the name Nyemea.