From the Archive – Southwest Center Researchers / Joseph C. Wilder
Bernard L. “Bunny” Fontana, esteemed editorial advisor to Journal of the Southwest and retired University of Arizona Field Historian, died April 2, 2016, in Tucson, Arizona, at age 85. For those working in the regional Southwest intellectual community, his death is akin to the burning of the classical library of Alexandria: an incredible font of wisdom and knowledge is gone forever. For those of us at Journal of the Southwest it is an epochal loss, felt daily.
Bunny (as he was universally and affectionately known) was born in Oakland, California, in 1931, raised in Yuba City, and attended the University of California, Berkeley, as an undergraduate. In 1955, he began his graduate work in anthropology at the University of Arizona, finishing his Ph.D. in 1960, and subsequently spent his entire career at the UA, working first in Special Collections in the UA Library for two years as Field Historian, then hired by Emil Haury to be the Arizona State Museum’s first ethnologist, and finally, after appointment in 1978 by president John Schaefer and Library director David Laird, as Field Representative in the UA Library. He retired, after more than thirty years’ service, in 1992 to assume the life of independent scholar, which he pursued with rigorous discipline. Some of his well-known publications include Tarahumara: Where Night is the Day of the Moon (1979), Of Earth and Little Rain: The Papago Indians (1981), and Entrada: The Legacy of Spain and Mexico in the United States (1994), as well as dozens and dozens of scholarly articles, popular essays, reviews, bibliographies, and commentaries. Bunny was the recipient of many honors, including the UA Library’s inaugural Library Legend Award in 2015 and the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008 from the Southwest Literature Project of the Tucson-Pima County Library and the Arizona Historical Society. He was one of the leaders of the academic movement in the 1970s that resulted in the formation of the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona, and was the guiding light of numerous organizations like the Southwestern Mission Research Center and the Patronato San Xavier. But it was informally that Bunny really left his mark. Whenever students and scholars would converse about the greater Southwest or wonder about a source or place or forgotten detail of history, invariably someone would say, “Well, let’s ask Bunny!” We did, always, and we always got our answer. […]
