Harvey Mack Sutter

Harvey Mack Sutter (1906–1997) was employed by the Department of the Interior’s Indian Field
Service from 1938 until 1942. Known as Mack to friends and family, Sutter was born in
Louisiana and received his college degree from the University of Wichita, Kansas in 1932. He
married Julia Genevieve Wright in 1936 and they had four children: James, Robert, Julia, and
John (my stepfather). From 1936 to 1938, Sutter was a design and production engineer at
Boeing Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas. In 1938, he applied for employment in the Indian Field
Service, where he served for four years, taking almost 500 photographs and amassing a
collection of about 100 handmade objects.
Sutter began his employment for the Indian Field Service in the summer of 1938 with an
appointment at the Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota. At Flandreau, Sutter’s initial title
was Marketing Specialist for Indian Arts & Crafts. After a year there, he was transferred to
Denver, and his assignment changed to Teacher at Large with duties to “supervise work in
Indian arts and crafts, marketing Indian products, cooperative associations, and business
organization.” In 1941, still headquartered in Denver, Sutter was promoted to the position of Arts
& Crafts Specialist, the role he held until his transfer to the War Production Board in April of
1942. He wrote that his “new work was to travel to the many reservations throughout the United
States and to assist with the organization of production units and the designing of new types of
saleable merchandise.” It was during this time that Sutter spent time at the Blackfeet Agency in
Browning, the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota reservation in South Dakota, and San Ildefonso Pueblo
in New Mexico.
At the outset of American involvement in WWII, Sutter, like many other Indian Field Service
employees, left the agency for a more lucrative wartime job, but he would remain a federal
employee for the rest of his career. Sutter was also a renowned wood carver, taught carving for
forty years, and co-founded the Western Woodcarvers’ Association in 1973, now known as the
Oregon Carvers Guild. Sutter died on June 19, 1997 in Portland. After his death, his children
and grandchildren decided to return as much of his collection of photos and objects as possible
back to the Tribes.