Plains Indian Studies - Smithsonian Institution Libraries

NUMBER 30 13
heavy doses of material culture. The other inspiration
was Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter H. Buck), the
Maori scholar who, as Bishop Museum visiting
professor, was to acquaint us with the intricacies
of lashing adzes and pounding tapa cloth. Not
only did Te Rangi Hiroa make the Polynesian
cultures come alive in class, but the Bucks also
gave great student parties in which we all learned
to perform the Haka. Buck was the first to demonstrate
for us the uses of a 35-mm camera in
studies of museum collections. In fact, he was
about to visit London that summer to seek out
the materials that Captain Cook brought back
from his voyages and that now repose in several
museum collections. Jack, having already begun
research on museum collections, was to master
the Plains collections of the world, which are
extensive and demand unique talents of the investigator.
Leslie Spier in his "Methods of Ethnography"
course insisted that if one of us would take up the
pursuit of material culture and technology as a
career interest, he would make a name for himself
At least one person heard and remembered, but
the great concentrations of student interest at
Yale in our day were in Sapir's seminars in linguistic
science, which required special aptitudes
and background that most of us lacked. Others
of us were gaited for his offerings in "Primitive
Society" and "Primitive Religion and Art,"
where students who were headed for fieldwork in
ethnography had a chance to present a whole
culture. Many of the persons who later made
names for themselves came out of these sessions,
including Ewers, Hill, Hudson, La Barre, Rainey,
Mandelbaum, and Kennedy.
Sapir's even more fashionable seminar on the
"Impact of Culture on Personality," to which
foreign fellows and local psychiatrists flocked,
displacing us ethnographers to the outer row of
chairs, touched aspects of the relation of the
individual to his culture that lay beyond the
interest of still other students. Jack wisely concentrated
his efforts where he had special talent: the
field of primitive art. Working with Wissler, he
completed the research for his master's thesis and
departed without going on to the doctorate. None
of us who stayed on in New Haven to complete
the doctorate has contributed more to the literature
of American ethnology.
The following year Jack was in New York,
taking courses at Columbia, studying collections
of painted robes at the Museum of the American
Indian and at the American Museum of Natural
History, consulting with Wissler, dropping in at
the Art Students' League, and getting married.
The pleasant affliction of falling in love had
overtaken him two years previously, when in the
summer of 1932 he made the grand tour of
Europe. Few persons today experience the pleasures
and amenities of a trans-Atlantic crossing
as it was in the hey-day of the great Cunard
liners. For Jack it was especially pleasant because
he met Margaret Elizabeth Dumville, then a
student at Columbia; they married two years
later. Forty-six years is something of a record for
an anthropological marriage, and those of us who
know them cannot imagine Jack without Marge,
or vice-versa. Their two daughters, Jane (1938),
class of '61 at Mary Washington College, and
Diane (1944), are both married and have children
of their own. One pair of grandchildren lives in
nearby Arlington; the other on a ranch in Montana.
While some of us were off chasing Indians for
John Collier, conducting (and losing) elections on
the Indian Reorganization Act and serving as
members of the applied anthropology unit of the
Indian Field Service, which brought unwelcome
information to the attention of the commissioner,
Jack was laying a solid foundation in muscology
as field curator in the National Park Service. He
worked for five years at such sites as Morristown,
New Jersey; Berkeley, California; and Macon,
Georgia. When I arrived in Washington in February
1939 to join the Bureau of American Ethnology,
I stayed a few nights with Ralph and
Dorothy Lewis. Ralph was also with the Museum
Division of the National Park Service, which had
a workshop or studio in the old Ford Theatre.
Jack was at work there, at least temporarily. This
was at a time when the Smithsonian's National