What is Theirs

This month on PBS, the film series Independent Lens features a documentary by Austin-based filmmaker Mat Hames—What Was Ours. Its something of a sequel to Lived History: The Story of the Wind River Virtual Museum (see my blog post entitled “Lived History”).

The film follows three members of the Shoshone/Arapaho community who live on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming as they try to repatriate objects of cultural patrimony. But, as with so many such cases,  their quest is framed by the larger question —who owns Native material culture collected by non-Indians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

Jordan Dresser, the young Northern Arapaho man whose repatriation efforts are at the center of the documentary, begins his own personal quest to bring his culture back to its rightful home when he is assigned to fill the display cases in the lobby of the tribe’s new casino with local artifacts. Jordan soon finds that the objects he wants to display no longer belong to the tribe. When the last elder given the responsibility to watch over these things had passed on, the community ceded them back to the local Native Episcopal parish.

“It’s frustrating for me, because it’s the idea that we as Native people always have to negotiate. We always have to compromise, and we always have to ask permission. It gets old.”

Jordan Dresser

 

 

 

Jordan is joined by Philbert Mcleod, a Shoshone elder who was a helicopter door gunner in Viet Nam. When he returned from the war, Philbert never again left the reservation. “After I got shot down three times,” he remembers, “I told myself, ‘I’m never going to fly again.’” That all changes when Jordan arranges for community members to journey to the Field Museum in Chicago to examine the hundreds of items collected from Northern Shoshone and Arapaho people that are housed there. Holding a beaded medallion in his hands, one he credits with keeping him safe in Indochina, Philbert determines to make his first trip to the outside world in 40 years for the chance to once again hold  the kinds of things his grandmother who raised him used in her everyday life.

“These younger people look at these artifacts and see what they’re used for, they might somehow work that into their own lives.”

Philbert Mcleod

 

The group Jordan helps assemble for the Field Museum visit includes Mikala SunRhodes, who was at the time the reigning Denver March Powwow Princess. As the youngest member of the entourage, she is deeply affected by what she sees. While the elders encounter objects whose use they can recall, Mikala sees all that she has lost. At the museum, she comes face to face with row upon row of shelved parfleches, bandoliers, drums, and dresses in the Field’s storage facility. The sight of all those things hidden away from the tribe makes her cry. In the museum’s photographic collections, she studies the faces of Arapahos and Shoshones wearing the regalia that now sits unused on storeroom shelves and dedicates herself to matching their determined efforts to keep their cultures alive. She casts her memory back to her own family’s past and remembers that it, too, had its culture warriors.   Mikala’s grandfather, Robert SunRhodes, was the last keeper of the Episcopal collection on the reservation, going down to the stone, cabin-like museum and spending hours with the people who came there telling stories about the meaning of all they saw. When he passed on, the Diocese moved the items into storage, fearing for their safety as the old building fell into disrepair.

“I proud of where I live and where I come from. I have to keep fighting for what I’ve been given.”

Mikala SunRhodes

Splicing together landscape footage of the starkly beautiful Wind River Range encircling the reservation with interior shots of Arapaho and Shoshone families around their kitchen tables, director Mat Hames forges critical visual connections between the modern material culture of Native peoples and the objects of cultural patrimony housed in museums, deftly reinforcing the comments of his interviewees about their intimate relationship with them.

Each of the three protagonists in What Was Ours enjoys a special connection to a material object, and it is their lived experience with these modern-day elements of Shoshone and Arapaho culture that inspires Jordan and the others to seek the return of their ancestors’ belongings. The power of pipes and roaches and drums have not left Wind River, even if most of the old-time objects themselves are gone.

Arapaho Parfleche, ca. 1890. Similar to the parfleches shown in the film at the Field Museum, this beautiful example of women’s artistry was recently sold on the website of an art gallery in the U.S.

Hames’ deft editing brings the several strands of this repatriation story to a hopeful resolution, even as it never forecloses the possibility of more progress in the future. Jordan is off to graduate school in museum studies, after being given a beaded keepsake by a reservation friend. Mikala concludes her reign as Denver March Powwow princess and returns to Wind River to help raise her sister’s kids. We last see her making a dance outfit for her niece’s first trip to the powwow arena. Philbert Mcleod, who did not live to see the film completed, offers a fine coda to the story: “Those artifacts that we saw, they’re still with me.” One thing in particular stood out, an old, especially resonant drum. “Those things were made for something,” Philbert tells us. “The reason behind them was happiness . . . The drum made me feel safe . . . Playing the drum sure helped me out.”

Before  NAGPRA took effect in 1990, the Smithsonian had some 17, 000 skeletal remains in its possession. Yet, even though the museum did the right thing and repatriated those remains, along with related objects of cultural patrimony, Indian artifacts continue to be a big business. As recently as 2015, federal agents raided eight residences in Blanding, Utah, coming away with more than 40,000 artifacts, enough to fill a 2,300-square-foot warehouse.

As What Was Ours so eloquently explains, the marketing of a people’s heritage is wrong, and unnecessarily continues a colonialist practice whose time has come and gone. The drums are there to heal, the regalia to be danced. What is theirs, the Arapaho and Shoshone of Wind River tell us, is everything they need to keep going, on and on, into the future.

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