Dr. Mary Black Rogers is an ethnographer and ethnohistorian, and a major contributor to Algonquian studies. She combined intensive fieldwork, linguistic analysis, and archival research as a scholar of the Ojibwa people. With her husband, Edward Sylvester Rogers, they collected data, both contemporary in the Round Lake community, and historical in repositories such as the Hudson's Bay Archives, to produce orignal ethnographic research for a core area of Northwestern Ontario. The Rogers/Black research team produced a unique record of a cultural pattern moving rapidly to extinction. Edward Rogers died in 1988, and Mary Black-Rogers continued her research through the mid-1990s. She is retired and now residing (as of 2007) in Minneapolis.

Edward S. Rogers was born in Vermont (1923) and received his PhD from New Mexico in 1958, but spent almost all of his working life in Canada, devoting himself to the study of Canada's aboriginal peoples. As Chief of the Department of Ethnography at Toronot's Royal Ontario Museum from 1959/1960, he was acknowledged as a leading authority on Canada's northern Cree, and was the author of dozens of books, articles, pamphlets and films. During 1965-1970 he taught part-time at Toronto and from 1970 on at McMaster University. His focus for his studies was the subsistence patterns and ecology of the Algonkin peoples of sub-arctic eastern Canada. His relationship with the Ojibway and Cree was much more than that of an ethnologist, he was also a friend and associate. Rogers is buried in the Weagamow Lake Indian Reserve Cemetery; the only outsider and non-Indian accorded this privilege. His wife is the anthropologist Mary Black-Rogers, who conducted joint research with Ed Rogers.