- Date Of Birth: March 26, 1943
- Date Of Death: September 14, 2009
- State: Indiana
John, 66, professor emeritus of geography at Indiana University and internationally reputed scholar, died unexpectedly from complications of colon cancer. John’s memory is cherished in the hearts of family, friends, and colleagues. He was respected for his honesty, fairness, and sense of personal responsibility; admired for his analytic powers and wide learning; enjoyed for his keen wit and calming presence; loved for his kind, affectionate heart. John directed his standard of excellence first toward himself, then toward others.
He had the gift of being of service, as he was to so many, without drawing attention to himself. John, a naturalized American citizen, was born in Aneroid, Saskatchewan, Canada. His maternal great-grandfather was a ship’s captain who served as a blockade runner during the American Civil War. John’s father, John Arnold Odland, a son of Norwegian homesteaders but forced to give up the family farm, worked as a carpenter building dams along the Columbia River. John’s mother, Cecilia Scarth, of Binscarth, Manitoba, Canada, descended from Orkney Islanders on the paternal side and an English mother. Cecilia was a farmer’s daughter and for many years a valued nurse in the newborn ward of the general hospital in the The Dalles, Oregon, where she and John’s father settled after living in Minot, North Dakota, Poplar, Montana, and Shelby, Montana. John first gained understanding of the world on the American High Plains, a region of extreme climate, few inhabitants, contentious labor history, and Populist democratic values.
He came to know members of several Indian peoples, first as schoolmates in Montana, later as fellow Oregonians whose salmon-fishing methods and other skills John felt privileged to witness. Working his way through college primarily as a road and bridge surveyor, John earned Bachelor and Master of Science degrees at Oregon State University, 1966-1967. He earned the Ph.D. in geography at Ohio State University in 1972, taking part in pioneering research in economic geography and quantitative modeling. He widely published this research, as well as studies in migration, the labor market, and economic inequality, and remained a rigorous innovator in research methods. In the IU geography department 1970-2007, John rose to Professor in 1989 and served as Department Chair 1989-1993. He mentored numerous graduate students now successful as geography professors in the United States and abroad, and guided a full crop of IU Geography’s junior professors to tenure.
John was chosen to review grant applications as a National Science Foundation panelist, 2000-2002, and was noted for a collaborative NSF-funded study of 17-year cicadas, 2002-2003. John met his wife, fellow geographer Eliza Steelwater, when she made a presentation to the IU geography department, and they married on May 31, 1997. In retirement, John found peace, leisure, and enjoyment of nature. He relished traveling and photographing the byways of America by automobile. John is mourned and missed beyond words by friends and by his wife, his sister Mary Bennett, brother-in-law Douglas Bennett, nieces Alison Bennett and Erica Lucas (husband Ben), children by marriage Michael Sebastian and Alice King, daughter-in-law Dana Sebastian, son-in-law Jacques Mathias, and grandchildren Kallen and Trent Sebastian and Camille and Céline King. Bloomington Hospital provided John’s care in his last few days.
