HARRY B. HAWTHORN

HARRY B. HAWTHORN
HARRY B. HAWTHORN Harry Bertram Hawthorn, O.C., Ph.D., F.R.S.C., was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1910, the elder boy in a family of five. His father, Henry, was a civil servant in the Treasury Department and his mother, Louise, one of the first women to write and pass the newly established civil service exams. After schooling in Wellington, Harry paid his way through two degrees by working on various farms in the countryside. Graduating with a Masters degree in Mathematics during the height of the Depression in 1935, he and his new wife, Aileen, were hired as a 'teaching couple' in the remote Maori community of Whatawhewhe in the Northland of New Zealand. It was there that his interest in anthropology began and, in 1938, with the encouragement of Sir Peter Buck, the Maori anthropologist, he left New Zealand for the University of Hawaii, to gain a second Masters in Anthropology. From there to Yale University on scholarship to work on a PhD which he received in 1941. His thesis dealt with the Maori community he knew so well. A teaching job at Sarah Lawrence College followed and, in 1947, he travelled to Canada to be interviewed by Dr. Norman MacKenzie, President of the University of British Columbia, for a faculty position in the Department of Economics, Political Science and Sociology. He was the University's first anthropologist and is credited with developing the field of anthropology in British Columbia. In 1948, he arranged the first major conference on Aboriginal art in B.C., and included First Nations peoples as delegates and sponsors. A year later, he began a study of the Doukhobors for the provincial government which was not released until 1955 - its recommendations unfortunately not followed by the Socred government. The Canadian Department of Citizenship and Immigration commissioned an extensive report on B.C. Indians in 1954 which was published in 1958 under the title The Indians of British Columbia and is a classic in its field. In 1955, Hawthorn became the head of UBC's new Department of Anthropology, Sociology and Criminology, a position he kept until 1968. With his second wife, Audrey, he established the UBC Museum of Anthropology. From its humble beginnings in the 1950's in the basement of the UBC Library, under his direction the museum grew to be the stunning resource that it is today; a spectacular building designed by Arthur Erickson in an unparalleled location and now well-known across North America for its outstanding collection of Northwest Coast materials. Another major work was the editing of A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada published by the Indian Affairs Branch in 1966. For his outstanding contributions to Canadian Anthropology, Hawthorn received the Order of Canada in 1973.
Hawthorn retired in 1976, the same year that the Museum of Anthropology opened, a retirement that he thoroughly enjoyed, both in British Columbia and in northern New Zealand, pursuing his hobbies of serious gardening (he was, at one time, Secretary of the Rhododendron Society of Canada), photography, fishing, swimming and the companionship of his beloved wife, Audrey, until her death in 2000.
He leaves his daughter, Margaret; his son, Henry; daughter-in-law, Jane; granddaughter, Laura; grandson, Christopher; and great-grandson, Graham.