Plains Indian Studies - Smithsonian Institution Libraries

14 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY
Museum was doing virtually nothing about modernizing
its exhibits; the exciting developments in
interpretation and display were going on in the
National Park Service, which had jurisdiction
over historic sites ranging from prehistory to the
present. Ralph Lewis and Jack Ewers were in the
thick of this movement.
In 1940 the Bureau of Indian Affairs decided
to build a museum of the Plains Indian in Browning,
Montana. No one in the country was better
prepared to plan, design, and execute such a
museum than Jack, who was summoned to the
task by Dr. Willard Beatty, its broad-gage director
of education, and Rene d'Harnancourt, then
manager of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board
(and afterward director of the Museum of Modern
Art).
For four years, from 1941 to 1944, Jack and
Marge lived among the beloved old people of the
Blackfeet at Browning. Here their daughters
spent their early childhood. The museum gradually
took shape. It was nearly completed in 1944
when Jack went off to serve as a Naval officer for
two years in the Pacific. Marge ran the museum
in his absence. In Browning in September of 1950,
when I was looking at factionalism in three trouble
groups selected by the then Secretary of Interior,
I briefly came to know some ranchers,
young politicians who felt obligated to share with
their kinsmen in the old pattern of generosity
expected of leaders (which the Indian Service
looked upon as graft). I interviewed and recorded
some old people, and recall names like John
Running Crane and Julia Wades-In-Water (who
made ingenious use of an autograph book for
soliciting gifts of unsuspecting summer tourists
during the winds of winter). I also met a postmaster
with the Virginia name of Taliafero. All
of them fondly remembered the Ewers family. I
also observed the drunks on main street and could
appreciate how Browning was no place to bring
up two daughters.
One day in 1945 I had a phone call from Frank
Setzler, the genial head curator of anthropology
at the U.S. National Museum who gave wonderful
parties, which we all remember. Although he
and I disagreed on the direction that anthropology
should take at the Smithsonian Institution,
we did agree on one thing—that Jack Ewers
would make a wonderful associate curator of
ethnology at the National Museum.
Jack's two predecessors in the post, though
gifted anthropologists, had interests that drew
them away from the collections. W.W. "Nib" Hill
was a Navajo specialist with strong interests in
material culture; he later published with Clyde
Kluckhohn. But Hill very much wanted to teach
and went off to Albuquerque to build a department
of anthropology. Joe Weckler was a social
anthropologist out of Chicago, whose field was
Oceania. He wrote a brilliant war background
study on Polynesia for the Ethnogeographic
Board, and he was soon commissioned as an
officer in Naval Intelligence. Their superior and
Jack's new boss at the Museum, Herbert Krieger,
had long since been passed by in the stream of
anthropology represented by his younger associates
from the universities, and he withdrew from
most coUegial activities. He had once played the
violin, however, and I dropped by one noon hour
to find a collection of instruments spread out on
table tops. I picked up one instrument and commenced
to tune it, when I sensed by the changed
look on Krieger's face that there was someone
standing at the door. I turned to be greeted by
the then director of the U.S. National Museum,
who chided me that the instruments were not to
be played lest other scientists be disturbed, and
he reminded me that I had been hired as an
anthropologist at the Bureau of Ethnology. I was
not expected to mess with collections. I relate this
incident because it says something about the
atmosphere into which Jack moved and the social
distance from the Bureau.
Jack's capacity for sustained hard work both at
writing and exhibit-planning defies imagination;
but the evidence is there in the steady stream of
publications and in the museums and exhibits
that he has created. Whenever I have dropped in
on him at the Smithsonian I found him pounding
the typewriter with four fingers, filling drawers
with cards containing notes on specimens, pas-