 For her Ph.D. work (1931–1933), she transferred graduate courses she took at Columbia University in New York City with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict.Through the early 1930s Garfield conducted immensely productive fieldwork in Lax Kw'alaams, B.C., or Port Simpson, as it was then known, the largest of the Canadian Tsimshian communities.Her chief facilitator was William Beynon, the hereditary chief and a trained ethnographic fieldworker.