Gary J. Witherspoon (July 27, 1943 – June 16, 2022) was a professor of Native American studies at the University of Washington. His area of expertise was the Navajo language and Navajo culture.[1]
Born in 1943 in a Mormon family of Baltimore, Maryland, he attended Ohio State University then served on a Mormon religious mission to the Navajo beginning in 1962 for two years. He married in 1964 and became part of a Navajo family. He received his BS degree in political science from Brigham Young University in 1966.
While working on the Navajo Reservation he attended Arizona State University until 1968. At the University of Chicago, he earned his MA and Ph.D. in anthropology in 1970, two years after enrolling. After one year at Yale University, Witherspoon returned to the Dine and focused on research and teaching. His publication record in the early 1970s caught the attention of anthropologists, and he was hired in 1975 by the University of Michigan. In 1979 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. From 1982 to 1987 he lived among the Navajo. He taught at, and was director of, The Navajo Language Institute, part of the Navajo Academy near Farmington, New Mexico. In 1987 Witherspoon accepted an offer from the University of Washington, where he chaired the American Indian Studies Department.
His book Language and Art in the Navajo Universe is his most significant work. Sheep in Navajo Culture and Social Organization was placed in the centennial version of American Anthropologist as an example of one of the best articles in the field of anthropology in the last 25 years.
He died on June 16, 2022, in Kingman, Arizona, and was buried in Naschitti, New Mexico. He is survived by his wife, Rosette Kisitu Sims; sons, Dwight, David and Johnny; daughter, Deanna; and 16 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.