Harry Hawthorn; UBC anthropologist who started world-famous museum
Hyfler/Rosner
He started off as a teacher in New Zealand, where his Maori students
sparked an interest in anthropology, writes SANDRA MARTIN. It resulted,
too, in Vancouver's world-famous museum of anthropology at UBC
SANDRA MARTIN Globe & Mail
The first anthropologist hired on the faculty of the University of
British Columbia, Harry Hawthorn established the department of
anthropology and served as its head for a dozen years. With his wife,
Audrey Hawthorn, he created and built UBC's museum of anthropology,
which is justly famous both for its collections of Northwest Coast
First Nations art and artifacts and its spectacular design by architect
Arthur Erickson.
"He had an ability to spark an interest in students and to evoke
ability in them, said Michael Kew, a professor emeritus of anthropology
at UBC. "He was very influential as a teacher, but he didn't do it by
pounding a drum and dancing up and down. He had a great respect for
students."
A quiet man with a wry sense of humour, Prof. Hawthorn could see beyond
the obvious and cut through pretense and red tape to identify key
issues and hidden abilities in students. As an academic, his gift was
not so much as a brilliant theorist or the discoverer of unknown tribes
or cultures. Instead, he was an extremely hard-working academic and an
astute administrator who knew how to bring scholars from varying
disciplines to work together on complex projects.
"Yes, he was an academic," said Carol Mayer, head of the curatorial
department at the UBC's Museum of Anthropology, "but he wasn't bound by
his own discipline, so whatever he did had a practical application. He
and Audrey never thought of building a museum just to put stuff in
vitrines, they were building a museum because they could see the value
of objects in teaching. That was the sensibility that he had."
Harry Bertram Hawthorn was the second child and elder son in a New
Zealand family of five children. His father, Henry Hawthorn, was a
civil servant in the New Zealand treasury department. His mother,
Louise (née Hanson) Hawthorn, who came from a small village and was
one of the first women in the country to write (and pass) the civil
service exams, met her future husband after she, too, went to work for
the treasury department in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand.
In looks, Harry, who was blond and blue-eyed, hearkened back to his
mother's Scandinavian heritage; in his appellation, he followed the
Hawthorn tradition of alternating Harry and Henry as the name of the
eldest son. He went to Wellington College, a boy's school, and then
studied physics and mathematics at Victoria University (now the
University of New Zealand), aiming to become a civil engineer. After
completing a BSc in 1932, he earned a master's degree in mathematics in
1934. He met and married his first wife, Aileen Davidson, at
university.
Unable to pursue his original career ambitions during the Depression,
he and his bride accepted jobs with the Native School Service as a
"teaching couple" in Whatawhiwhi, a remote Maori community on the North
Island. The four years working in a primary school sparked a huge
switch in his academic interests. He began studying history part-time,
went back to university to earn a BA in 1937, and accepted a fellowship
to study anthropology at the University of Hawaii the following year.
In those days, New Zealand had a small and largely rural population.
Typically, ambitious academics went abroad for further training and, in
the moribund days of the British Empire, they mainly headed to Britain.
Mr. Hawthorn was different, partly because of the nature of
anthropology, and partly because he didn't share the common perception
that Britain was the "Mother country," said his son Henry Hawthorn, a
retired architect. "He was one of those Anzacs who grew up with a sense
of being an oppressed colonial."
According to his daughter, Margaret Hawthorn, a retired librarian, as a
scholar Mr. Hawthorn was greatly influenced by Sir Peter Buck. Maori on
his mother's side, Prof. Buck was an expert on Maori and Polynesian
cultures and held academic appointments in Honolulu, Hawaii and at Yale
University in New Haven, Conn., in the 1920s and 1930s. Mr. Hawthorn
followed in his mentor's academic footsteps by earning a second masters
degree in anthropology from the University of Hawaii and then
transferring to Yale with money from the Carnegie Foundation to do his
doctorate on the Maori community in his homeland. By now, the Hawthorns
had two children: Margaret was born in 1936 in New Zealand, and Henry
was born in 1939 in Honolulu.
Mr. Hawthorn finished his dissertation and earned his PhD in 1941, a
momentous year both personally and internationally: He divorced his
first wife; married his second wife, Audrey Engel, a fellow
anthropology student; and the Japanese bombed the U.S. Pacific fleet in
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, propelling the U.S. into the Second World War. He
tried to enlist in the armed forces, but was rejected.
Instead, after a Yale research fellowship to Bolivia, Prof. Hawthorn,
as he was now entitled to call himself, moved to upstate New York with
his reconstituted family and taught at Sarah Lawrence College for five
years. He also published The Maori: A Study in Acculturation in 1944.
Three years later, Prof. Hawthorn was invited to Vancouver by Dr.
Norman MacKenzie, then president of the University of British Columbia,
to be interviewed for a position in the department of economics,
political science and sociology. With Prof. Hawthorn's appointment, the
university added the word anthropology to the name of the existing
department, giving him a broad mandate to establish the subject as an
academic discipline and research field at UBC and to discover
"possibilities for the practical application of anthropology in the
province and the country."
The Hawthorns piled Margaret and Henry and their belongings in the
backseat of the car and drove west across the country to what was
"terra incognita," according to Henry Hawthorn. One of the first things
Prof. Hawthorn did after arriving in Vancouver was to get his camping
gear and walk the "grease trail," the trade routes that the First
Nations had established (long before Europeans arrived) between the
coast (where they caught small, smelt-like fish called eulachons or
candle fish) and the interior, where they traded the valuable oil
produced from the fish for other goods. "It was a wilderness trail and
Dad set out to walk it to get a sense of the country and the people and
what had been important to them," said his son.
And so began what would become a very significant contribution to
anthropology in terms of the students he taught, the department he
established and chaired, and the museum that he founded and directed
with his wife Audrey as a driving force and influential, but volunteer
curator. Although she had studied at Columbia in the department where
Franz Boaz had taught, and done graduate work at Yale, Mrs. Hawthorn
did not have a PhD. That alone might have disqualified her from a
teaching position at UBC. An equally significant barrier, however, was
the university dictat against hiring husbands and wives in the same
department, especially if one reported to the other.
As a couple, the Hawthorns were intellectual soulmates, romantically
devoted, and indefatigable in creating energy and excitement about the
study of anthropology and an appreciation for artifacts from the rich
and diverse world of the First Nations. They had met over learned tomes
on opposite sides of a library table at Yale and began talking after he
invited her to have tea with him. "He was the most interesting man I
ever met," she confided decades later to a friend.
"He was a very active, very intelligent and intellectual man," said his
son Henry. "Like most men of his time, he was preoccupied with his
work. It was a fairly typical family, except that both of our parents
were absorbed by their professional careers -- but that doesn't mean
that we were neglected."
Nor was Harry Hawthorn all work. Among several leisure activities, he
loved fly fishing. In 1953, Prof. Hawthorn went on a fishing expedition
to Upper Campbell Lake with seven other academics, including UBC
president Norman MacKenzie and naturalist and writer Roderick
Haig-Brown. Sitting around the camp fire one night, refreshing
themselves after a hard day of trout fishing, they began laying bets
and throwing money into a pot predicting which of them would have the
greatest catch the next day. Afterwards they couldn't agree on whether
the winner should be determined by the number of fish caught or the
weight of the accumulated catch and so they decided that the money
should be donated to a good purpose. Since Prof. Hawthorn was holding
the pot at that moment, his colleagues decided to name a foundation
after him to disperse the funds. So the Harry Hawthorn Foundation was
established "for the inculcation and propagation of the principles and
ethics of fly-fishing." The men were having such a good time that they
decided to hold a mock court, and levy fines for fishing "violations"
and so even more money was raised. Money raised on this and subsequent
fishing expeditions was turned over to the university library to
establish a unique collection of fishing books, which now includes more
than 1800 books and memorabilia related to fly fishing.
In 1949, the B.C. government commissioned Prof. Hawthorn to undertake a
study of the problems confronting the Doukhobors in the province. He
assembled a team of experts and produced Report of the Doukhobor
Research Committee (1952) that recommended increased co-operation among
the Doukhobors, non-Doukhobors and the government (which didn't sit
well with the Social Credit government of the day) and edited The
Doukhobors of British Columbia (1955).
By then he was working on the Totem Pole Restoration program, and found
funding to make a survey of coastal villages that had standing totem
poles and sculptures, arranging to buy many of them, cut them down and
crate them up for storage. He was also working with Haida artists Mungo
Martin and Bill Reid, and was instrumental in finding a position for
Mr. Martin to work on totem pole restoration and to teach carving
skills to other artists. Although there has been controversy in
retrospect about whether this was the correct thing to do, it did mean
the poles were salvaged and people came to know and revere First
Nations art.
He also undertook a comprehensive study of B.C. Indians that the
federal Department of Citizenship and Immigration had commissioned in
1954, and which in turn led to The Indians of British Columbia, with
C.S. Belshaw and S.M. Jamieson (1958). He directed a third major
interdisciplinary research project in 1963 with The Survey of
Contemporary Indians of Canada (1966, 1967). As a side benefit, this
project influenced the development of native affairs and supported
anthropology by providing practical and research experience for a
number of young scholars graduating from UBC. The university had
established its own department of anthropology and sociology in 1956,
with Prof. Hawthorn at its head -- a position he held until 1968.
UBC had been collecting artifacts and other ethnographic material since
the late 1920s, when the university had been given the Frank Burnett
collection of Polynesian artifacts. The task of evaluating these
materials and determining what to do with them became another of Prof.
Hawthorn's duties on his appointment in 1947. He and his wife
immediately recognized their value and began devising plans to
establish a museum. The first step, which was executed scarcely a year
later, was the organization of the first major conference on aboriginal
art and crafts in the province. Prof. Hawthorn invited participants
from B.C. First Nations as delegates and speakers. In 1949, the Museum
of Anthropology was opened in the basement of UBC's main library with
Prof. Hawthorn as director and his wife Audrey as "honorary" curator.
Their fundraising, proselytizing and determination (including a display
of West Coast native art and artifacts that Mrs. Hawthorn organized for
Expo 67 in Montreal, and a pitch that she made personally to Pierre
Trudeau) helped secure a grant from the Canadian government (in
celebration of the centennial of B.C.'s entry into Confederation) for a
free-standing and purpose-built Museum of Anthropology. The university
provided the site, on the cliffs of Point Grey overlooking the Coast
Mountains and the Georgia Strait, and matching funds to complete the
installations and to organize the necessary academic components.
Architect Arthur Erickson designed the building, taking inspiration
from Northwest Coast post-and-beam construction and giving it a
contemporary twist with soaring glass walls.
The museum opened in 1976, the same year Prof. Hawthorn retired from
UBC and was given an honorary doctorate by the museum, in addition to
the Order of Canada, which he had received in 1972. In retirement, the
Hawthorns spent half the year in New Zealand -- thus avoiding winter --
and Canadian summers at their home in Vancouver or their cottage on
Salt Spring Island. He was a serious gardener and a former secretary of
the Rhododendron Society of Canada, and a keen photographer. After his
wife died in 2000, he continued to live in their home and tried to
console himself for her loss by mounting and framing the watercolours
she had painted until her eyesight failed. He was in good health until
a few weeks ago, when he suffered a fall and had to be hospitalized and
then moved into extended care.
Harry Bertram Hawthorn was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on Oct. 15,
1910. He died in Vancouver on July 29, 2006. He was 95. He is survived
by his daughter Margaret, his son Henry and daughter-in-law Jane, two
grandchildren, and a great grandson. A memorial service will be held in
Vancouver in September.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006