 During his career, he served as the president for the American Society for Ethnohistory, the American Ethnological Society, and the American Anthropological Association.He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1949, and from Yale University with a Ph.D. in 1955.He served first as a research anthropologist for the Bureau of American Ethnology before being appointed Curator of North American Ethnology in the U.S. National Museum (later the National Museum of Natural History), Smithsonian Institution.