Dr. Florence Connolly Shipek
Professional Biography
Dr. Florence Connolly Shipek graduated from the University of Arizona in 1938 and received her Master’s degree in 1939 with her major in Anthropology and minors in history and art. She also has a major in geology from the University of Washington. She worked for the U.S. Navy during World War II; after the war, she settled in San Diego with her husband, Carl, a marine geologist. In 1954, at the request of some San Diego County American Indian leaders, she began working for the local reservations, on both individual and tribal problems which developed as a result of Public Law 280. The Bureau of Indian Affairs services had been removed from them as people, and only maintained the trust patent status of the land.
Over the years she has dealt with the problems the original peoples had with almost every county agency, some state and federal agencies. She has been an expert witness for them in many cases, as well as in some non-Indian historic tidelands cases. After being widowed, she obtained her Ph.D. degree from the University of Hawaii in 1977 and became a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside and continued her expert witness work for the reservations. In 1987-88 she became the First Costo Professor of American Indian History at University of California, Riverside. She is now professor emerita of University of Wisconsin-Parkside and retired to San Diego where she remains on call by the various reservations.
Among many honors, in 1986, she was named a distinguished Scholar by the Southwestern Anthropological Association; in 1992 was honored with the First Spirit of Kumeyaay award. She is the author of “Delfina Cureo: her Autobiography, An Account of the Rest of her life and her Ethnobotanic Contributions” and “Pushed into the Rocks: Southern California Indian Land Tenure 1769-1986.” She has also authored many chapters in books and articles in anthropological journals.
Both parents of Dr. Shipek were dentists. Her mother was the descendant of a long line of pilgrims, religious freedom advocates, Revolutionary War soldiers, Abolitionists and Suffragettes; her father, was the son of Irish immigrants. Both lost their mothers when they were young and both worked their way through Columbia Dental College in the early years of the century. Her father became a U.S. Navy dentist and as a result, Dr. Shipek went to a different school almost every year of her early life until she entered college at 15, by taking entrance exams.