[1] She is best known for her research of Seminole culture on the Big Cypress Indian Reservation in Henry County, Florida.
[2] During her career, she also conducted fieldwork with other Native American communities, including the Arapaho, Shoshoni, Navajo, Hopi, and Kickapoo.
[1] She attended Miss Dana's School for Young Ladies[3] before studying abroad at Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre's Academy for Girls in England.
[1] After completing her graduate studies in anthropology, she decided to pursue ethnographic fieldwork among the Seminole community in southern Florida.
[1] Freeman visited the Big Cypress Reservation twice for the American Museum of Natural History with a government representative before conducting a longer period of fieldwork with a Seminole community in the Everglades in the winter of 1940 with her two children, Condict and Leon Jr.
She recorded her discussions with Josie Billie related to Seminole religion and magic in private sessions at the Archbold Biological Station in 1954.
[1] Josie Billie also collaborated with anthropologist Frances Densmore to record traditional Seminole folk songs, as well as Robert Greenlee.
[9] Like Freeman, Sturtevant studied changes in myths related to acculturation and contact with surrounding white settlements.
Freeman first presented a paper at the 5th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Philadelphia in 1956 titled, "An analysis of a remarkably stable culture now being forced into rapid change.
"[11] Freeman also delivered a paper, "The Correlation between Directed Culture Change and Self Determination," at the 7th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Moscow in 1964, and delivered another talk, "Lawlessness in an Indian Tribe as a Microcosm of a World Trend" at the same conference in Kyoto and Tokyo in 1965.
In 1968 and 1972, the American Museum of Natural History funded Freeman to travel to Portugal to study traditional Portuguese clothing.