With 18 autobiographical accounts and biological sketches from Nunivak Island in east Bering Sea, the book reveals the strains and complaints felt by the small community of approximately 200 Inuit.
To both non-anthropological scientists, and to anthropologists not specifically concerned with Eskimos, the Nunivak life histories present certain intriguing features that may help other field studies.
[6] By comparing everyday situations such as going to a bus station or an after football game event, Lantis argues that there are behaviors expected or expressed in any given scenario.
[6] In the article she demonstrates a list of components such as: values and goals, appropriate time or place, common knowledge, attitude and relationship systems and finally communication.
[1] Over the course of her tenure with the University of Kentucky Lantis published several significant pieces of literature including books and articles on the social organization and religious characteristics of Nunivak Island culture.
[1] Topics she covered during this time include social organization[1] which she wrote about in Factionalism and Leadership: a case study of Nunivak Island.
[1] Her work on the Alaskan Earthquake helped the University of Kentucky gain notability on a national scale for its focus in applied anthropology as noted by the chairman of the university's anthropology department in 1971 "the department has achieved national visibility as one of the few in the country focusing on the applied area," referring to Lantis's research on disaster and nutrition in Alaska and among American Indigenous Peoples.
[citation needed] Considered a "specialist in Arctic and Subarctic anthropology"[20] her life's work became an important contribution to knowledge of Alaskan Native people's personality and culture.
[11] The article discusses the manufacture and use of items associated with sea and land hunting, fishing, transportation, shelter construction, household activities, food prep and skin working.
[11] The paper's success is based on the extraneous detail put into the descriptions of the above-mentioned material culture and the insight into division of labour and women's activities offered by Lantis's notes and attributed to her own gender and length of stay on the island.
She never married instead dedicated herself to her work as a professional anthropologist and later in her life served the discipline through her continued interest in current events related to Alaskan natives.
She was inspiring generations of arctic scholars and applied anthropologists by sharing her experiences and offering advice well into her nineties before her death at the age of 100.