John Adair

    In 1938 Adair began his first research studying the Pueblo and Navajo silversmiths.  He went to many different communities and observed silversmiths at work.  He was intrigued by how the artisan’s craft and culture was related.  In 1944 he published his book about his findings.  The book was titled: The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths.  Rene d’Harnoncourt, manager of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, asked Adair to do a survey in 1940.  He was chosen to do the survey because of his extensive knowledge about silversmiths.  Directly following the conclusion of his study, he began working as the manager of the Navajo Arts and Crafts Guild in Window Rock, Arizona.

    In the fall of 1939 Adair began graduate school at the University of Michigan.  During the same year he married Caroline Helmer, who Adair nicknamed Casey. From 1942-1945, he was called upon to serve in the Army Air Corps in California during World War II.  After the war, he moved to the University of New Mexico to finish his graduate studies.  He became the University’s first doctoral candidate in anthropology. Adair than moved to Zuni with his pregnant wife Casey and their son.  His sole purpose of moving to Zuni was to gather information that he could use in his dissertation:  The Veterans of World War II at Zuni Pueblo, which was never published.

    Adair received his PhD and was hired by Cornell University in 1948.  He was asked to teach a series of field seminars in the Southwest.  The studies done in the Southwest were published as First Look at Strangers in 1959.  Adair joined the Cornell-Navajo Field Health Research Project at Many Farms, located on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona.  He, along with many other anthropologists, played an important role in this project.  They were asked to “provide anthropological insight, perspectives, and methodologies.”  Adair and two other anthropologists published a report of the project in The People’s Health in 1970 and later revised the report in 1988.

    Adair joined the National Institute of Mental Health; he worked there from 1961 to 1964.  At the conclusion of his work in the NIMH, he became Professor of Anthropology at San Francisco State University.  He remained a professor here until his retirement in 1978. 

    Along with two other professors, Adair began a Navajo filmmaking project in Pine Springs.  They taught a group of young Navajos how to use movie cameras and how to cut and edit films.  The point of this project was to let Navajo students who had never been exposed to film culture, present stories they had chosen.  They were allowed to write in their own style and point of view without outside influence.  A description of the project was published in 1975 and revised in 1997.  They titled it: Through Navajo Eyes. 

    John Adair soon became ill and was later confined to a wheelchair.  He came to Pine Springs in May of 1997 with friends and family to talk about how his archives may be useful to the community.  He, along with Benjamin Kahn, a Pine Springs community leader, began to put his papers and photos into the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  He wanted to make all of these documents accessible to the people in Pine Springs, of where he did most of his work.  Because Adair knew that his time was coming to die, he felt that this project was necessary because of his love of Pine Springs and of the Southwest.  This was Adair’s last contribution as an anthropologist before he died in 1997.
References

Powers, Robert American Anthropological Association, John Adair Obituary 101 (1999):  611-614

Through Navajo Eyes, 15 Oct. 2001

Written By:  Courtney Muth, 2001