The Kroebers traveled together to many of Alfred's field sites, including an archaeological dig in Peru, where Theodora worked cataloging specimens.

Retrospective reviews were more mixed, noting Kroeber's unflinching portrayal of Californian colonization but criticizing her perspective on Ishi's treatment.

She grew up in the mining town of Telluride, where her parents, Phebe Jane (née Johnston) and Charles Emmett Kracaw, owned a general store.

[8][9] In the same year, the family left Colorado and moved to Orland, California, since the lower altitude there was expected to benefit her father's health, although it failed to do so.

[12] She made lifelong friends during her undergraduate years, including Jean Macfarlane, whose interest in psychology drove Kracaw to select that discipline for her major.

[18] Theodora and the children made their way back to Berkeley and the home of Brown's widowed mother, who encouraged her to return to graduate school.

[13][17] While in Santa Fe, she had developed an interest in Native American art and culture, and she decided to study anthropology at UC Berkeley.

[7][13] At the time, anthropology was a new field and although women were admitted to help bolster class sizes to legitimize course offerings, they were resented.

[21][c] Male colleagues worried that women would be competition for the limited employment posts or research grants and lower the prestige of the profession.

[22] During a seminar class Theodora took with Alfred, she and Julian Steward were assigned to evaluate Native American sport activities.

[7][26] In June 1926, the Kroebers left their children with Theodora's mother and went on an eight-month field trip to an archaeological dig in Peru's Nazca valley.

[26] When they were not traveling, the Kroebers spent most of the year in a large redwood house, facing San Francisco Bay, to which Alfred was particularly attached.

[1] My tentative guess is that the budding, creating element in oral literature may well lie within the unique tale, invented by a single person, and tangential to the great, conventionalized, and channeled main stream of a people's literary corpus and tradition.

[5] In 1959, the year she turned 62, she published The Inland Whale, a retelling of California Native American legends that she had selected in the belief that they exhibited a certain originality.

[30][32] One reviewer said Kroeber had made the legends accessible to a general audience by "translating freely in her own sensitive, almost lyrical style".

Kroeber found the book's challenging subject material to be difficult to write, as it recounted the extermination of the Yahi people as part of the California genocide and Ishi's many years spent largely in solitude.

[33] This version was illustrated by Ruth Robbins: a review noted it was not another anthropological study, but discussed in simple language the cultural clashes which resulted from the Western expansion of the United States.

[33] A 1979 commentary described it as the most widely read book about a Native American subject, calling it a "beautifully written story" that was "evocative of Yahi culture".

[40] Writing in 1997, scholar Richard Pascal said the book, "to its credit", did not evade the "horrors inflicted upon the Yahi by the invading whites",[34] an opinion echoed by historian James Clifford in 2013.

[41] Pascal nonetheless argued that the narrative's goal was one of assimilation, and said it was "colonizing 'Ishi' in the name of American culture",[34] and Clifford criticized the implicit assumption that coming into the care of Alfred Kroeber was the best outcome for Ishi.

[43] Clifford wrote that the account of Ishi's life in San Francisco was written with "skill and compassion",[44] and added that "[w]ith a generous appreciation of human complexity and an eye for the telling detail, [Kroeber] created a masterpiece".

[45] Theodora published two papers in 1969, "Shropshire Revisited" and "Life Against Death in English Poetry: A Method of Stylistic Definition", which she had written previously with Alfred.

[52] She also wrote a biography of her husband titled Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration, published in 1970 by the University of California Press.

[1][53] It was widely praised by reviewers: Anthropologist George W. Stocking Jr. wrote that her "gift for [evocative] and moving descriptive writing" was frequently evident,[53] and Buzaljko called it a "sensitive biography with her inimitable phraseology and setting of mood".

[4] Kroeber notes that the images included therein were poor, but defended their publication, writing "Why offer so flawed and partial a record?

[7] Ten years later, when Kroeber's health was declining, Quinn encouraged her to write a short autobiography, which was printed privately after her death.

[4] Elsasser wrote that Kroeber did not have an inclination for "any discipline that stressed dry prose or statistics", and notes that it was not clear whether she wished to pursue a career in academia.

Critics wrote of The Inland Whale that Kroeber had broken ground in getting oral traditions recognized for their literary worth.

[65] Buzaljko's 1989 biography of Kroeber stated that her "great strength was as an interpreter of one culture to another", going on to say that through her writing she demonstrated the connections between the history of California's indigenous people and modern society.