Tag Archives: archives

He’uurore hyoo’eya horuura’ Carrying Knowledge into the Future

from The Autry Museum

  The Autry and Gabrielino/Tongva Cultural Educators of the Los Angeles Basin Announce Memorandum of Understanding   After years of collaboration, the Autry Museum of the American West and…

Source: He’uurore hyoo’eya horuura’ Carrying Knowledge into the Future

UC System Announces Interim Repatriation Policy

On July 27, 2020, the University of California System of research universities announced “the issuance of the UC Native American Cultural Affiliation and Repatriation Interim Policy.”

Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, UC Berkeley.

In its press release, the UC System explained its purpose and a timeline for moving from an interim policy to a permanent solution:

The University is committed to the repatriation of Native American human remains and cultural items in accordance with the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), its accompanying regulations, and the California Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (CalNAGPRA). The fundamental importance of facilitating the repatriation of Native American and Native Hawaiian human remains and cultural items is captured in the revised Policy and President Napolitano’s cover letter, along with an apology on behalf of the University of California.

With more than 280,000 students and more than 227,000 faculty and staff, and 2.0 million alumni living and working around the world, the UC System’s decision is far-reaching. The interim policy sets up campus committees for each of those schools in the UC System that remain in “control” of Human remains and Cultural items deemed to fall under the auspices of NAGPRA. Its tone is remarkable for its insistence on “respectful consultation” with Native tribes and its effort to create supplemental inventories of campus artifacts that might now be considered items subject to repatriation. The interim policy makes clear its resolution is an ethical one:

UC acknowledges that the injustices perpetrated on Native Hawaiians and Native Americans are reflected even to the present, and that as long as Human Remains and Cultural Items remain in the University’s control, healing and reparation will be incomplete.

It is the result of hundreds of hours of labor by a workgroup composed of faculty, administrators, and community stakeholders that reviewed tribal responses and the outcomes of listening sessions sponsored by the UC Office of the President.

This policy is designed to . . . bring the ancestors home.

Dr. Amy Lonetree

 Amy Lonetree (Ho-Chunk) Associate Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz, and a member of the workgroup comments, “the UC System does not have the best track record, with some of our campuses remaining steadfast in their opposition to repatriation. This policy is designed to remedy this and bring the ancestors home.”

The final implementation of the policy is expected by December, “in order to allow tribes that have not been able to review due to the COVID-19 pandemic additional time to comment, while at the same time, going forward with a significantly improved process of repatriation.”

SOURCE

https://www.ucop.edu/research-policy-analysis-coordination/policies-guidance/curation-and-repatriation/index.html?fbclid=IwAR34CMAP0ZOwprkUTvNhMsMmCWhLkt5bV0K2FejV4P98RyRPhHRyixaq7OU

Native Survivance and Visual Sovereignty: Indigenous Visual and Material Culture in the 19th and 20th Centuries

The Repatriation Files wants its readers to know of this special issue of Arts! Edited by Sascha Scott and Amy Lonetree. 

Crescencio Martinez, Two Drummers (1918). Courtesy of Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, NM. 24157/13.

Special Issue in journal Arts: Native Survivance and Visual Sovereignty: Indigenous Visual and Material Culture in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Source: Native Survivance and Visual Sovereignty: Indigenous Visual and Material Culture in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Table of Contents

Scott, Sascha T.; Lonetree, Amy. 2020. “The Past and the Future Are Now.” Arts 9, no. 3: 77.
Stevens, Scott M. 2020. “Collecting Haudenosaunee Art from the Modern Era.” Arts 9, no. 2: 55.
Hawk Polk, Dyani W. 2020. “The Long Game .” Arts 9, no. 2: 67.
Scott, Sascha T. 2020. “Ana-Ethnographic Representation: Early Modern Pueblo Painters, Scientific Colonialism, and Tactics of Refusal.” Arts 9, no. 1: 6.
Moore, Emily L. 2019. “The American Flag and the Alaska Native Brotherhood.” Arts 8, no. 4: 158.
Shannon, Jennifer. 2019. “Trusting You Will See This as We Do: The Hidatsa Water Buster (Midi Badi) Clan Negotiates the Return of a Medicine Bundle from the Museum of the American Indian in 1938.” Arts 8, no. 4: 156.
Chavez Lamar, Cynthia. 2019. “A Pathway Home: Connecting Museum Collections with Native Communities.” Arts 8, no. 4: 154.
Penney, David W. 2019. “Siyosapa: At the Edge of Art.” Arts 8, no. 4: 148.
Burns, Emily C. 2019. “Circulating Regalia and Lakȟóta Survivance, c. 1900.” Arts 8, no. 4: 146.
Chavez, Yve. 2019. “Basket Weaving in Coastal Southern California: A Social History of Survivance.” Arts 8, no. 3: 94.
Deloria, Philip J. 2019. “T.C. Cannon’s Guitar.” Arts 8, no. 4: 132.

 

 

The Art of Sovereignty

Incised Tablet. Date: ca.1450–1700 Medium: Catlinite (red pipestone). Sanford Museum and Planetarium, Cherokee, Iowa (521-69-m)

Even as questionable auctions of indigenous art continue unabated in Paris, some American museums have begun to make an effort to “mainstream” similar (but responsibly collected) objects into their exhibits. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has led the charge, making it a top priority “to display art from the first Americans within its appropriate geographical context” alongside artworks by non-Natives (NYTimes, 4/6/17).

In the fall of 2018, the Met will debut a major exhibition of indigenous art that will be shown in conjunction with its Euro-American counterparts in the museum’s American Wing. The show was made possible by a generous gift of some 91 Native American works by Charles and Valerie Diker, New Yorkers who have been collecting American art—both Native and non-Native—since the 1960s. This year they loaned a few pieces of their collection to be arranged among the more typical works found in the American Wing as a preview to this fall’s unveiling of the whole exhibit.

19th-century Iroquois/Haudenosaunee pouch donated by the Dikers and displayed in the Met’s American Wing. Credit Joshua Bright for The New York Times

The Dikers’ generous gift is part of a trend that really got underway in 2015, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky. The New York Times’ reviewer, Holland Cotter, called it “an exhibition that has to be one of the most completely beautiful sights in New York right now.”

But the exhibition also raised many questions about the ethics of displaying uprooted objects (the show was comprised of items collected from mostly European institutions) without proper context. In her review for Hyperallergic, Ellen Pearlman traced this flaw to what she called “the cult of the aesthetic object.”

Patricia Marroquin Norby, Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History and Indigenous Studies, and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, assistant professor of history at George Mason University wrote an in-depth analysis of the Plains exhibit’s reviews and concluded, “taken together, these reviews show the persistence and power of that language. They tell us that as a society, we’ve made little progress in moving beyond worn out stereotypes bequeathed from centuries past.” Their essay, “How We Still Look At and Talk About Indians and Their Art,” explores the language of romanticism that still pervades how such works of art are discussed by reviewers and the public at large. Time and again, Marroquin Norby and Genetin-Pilawa uncover phrases that could have appeared in 19th-century dime novels of the American West, leading them to conclude: “To accept outdated language is historical laziness that does broad damage. It’s a cavalier attitude, one that helps explain prevalent cultural appropriations like hipster headdresses, Hollywood Indians, and the dogged support for racist professional sports mascots.”

To accept outdated language is historical laziness that does broad damage. It’s a cavalier attitude, one that helps explain prevalent cultural appropriations like hipster headdresses, Hollywood Indians, and the dogged support for racist professional sports mascots.

Robe with Mythic Bird, ca. 1700–40. Mid-Mississippi River Basin, probably Illinois Confederacy. Eastern Plains. Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France (71.1878.32.134)

 

 

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To be clear, neither writer is taking to task the museum’s efforts to display Native material culture and fine arts in conjunction with other work produced in the United States. They recognize that we are in an early stage of a process that will take some time to develop. After all, offering indigenous artifacts, easel painting, performance art, and digital imagery to the public view carries with it an ethical imperative. The display of indigenous arts with a clear and forceful assertion of the simple fact that underlies all efforts at repatriation— Native peoples are still here.

 

 

The Great Basin Indian Archives

In a recent blog post (Archive Journal) reviewing the American Historical Association’s recent conference in Denver, Molly Hardy, Digital Humanities Coordinator at the American Antiquarian Society, observed in passing the new digital collection of Great Basin indigenous cultural material sponsored by Great Basin College.

Funded through a partnership among rural Nevada’s Great Basin College, the University of Utah, and Barrick North America, the Great Basin Indian Archives (GBIA) provides “a tool to engage learners of all ages and backgrounds by offering a 24/7 information resource about Great Basin’s native peoples and their rich culture. The GBIA hopes to provide a mechanism and forum for peoples of Great Basin heritage to tell/curate their story in perpetuity.”

The GBIA draws its strength  from community buy-in, the central curatorial role of Great Basin individuals, and its innovative use of the Great Basin College’s new Virtual Humanities Center (VHC), where “select assets from the Great Basin Indian Archives are now available  . . .  in an archival and fully searchable repository.”

The Great Basin Indian Archives will endeavor to provide students and researchers with easy access to primary and digital information that chronicle the history and heritage of the Great Basin Indian peoples.

The Great Basin Indian Archives was initially conceived in 2001, and the like the efforts of the Shoshone an Arapaho at Wind River Reservation (see “What is Theirs”), its goal is to reinvigorate the younger generation of Great Basin peoples by giving them hands-on access to Native language recordings and material culture objects that have played a critical role in sustaining the some 50-plus communities who still live and work as federally recognized tribes in the Great Basin.

As with their Eastern Shoshone relatives at Wind River, language is a key component to this project of cultural revitalization. The Great Basin Indian Archive sponsors The Shoshone Community Language Initiative (SCLI),  a four-and-a-half week summer program for Shoshone high school students.

But there is one component to this Native-sponsored archival project that impacts all Americans—”The intent for the GBIA program is to exist on the GBC website and to provide a “virtual linking archives” for easy accessibility to the General Public as well.”

This sharing of information is critical, the participants in the GBIA believe, so that educators—both in Nevada and in the country as a whole—have “a credible insertion point in the curriculum with a substantial reference/resource base. The archives wants to encourage term papers and projects related to the curriculum that could also become deposited in the GBIA.”

Thus this indigenous online archive was not founded on the needs of Native communities alone, but also on the idea that knowledge of Native history and all that entails is essential for all students’ preparation. American Indian history, like that of the original 13 British American colonies, or of Britain or Rome, is a core element in the humanities, which is in turn central to critical thinking. It is worth quoting at length from the GBIA’s website:

Faculty at GBC had believed for some time that humanities were not being emphasized enough in our curriculum. We realized that our students are not proficient in many of the important skills that the humanities encourage, such as the ability to think critically about what they are reading or to connect the ideas in that reading to a larger context. As teachers we work with students struggling to use facts to support their opinions — sometimes even to differentiate between fact and opinion—and to present their ideas clearly and cogently. Our students, and students in general, often cannot recognize the validity of other perspectives or value the diversity of viewpoints and ideas that surround them. 

None of this would have been possible, however, without a lot of work. Great Basin serves a rural population and a huge geographic area:

For GBC the solution to this dilemma would have to take into consideration the realities of our situation: a service area that has grown to 87,000 square miles of Nevada, a mission to serve the mostly rural residents of that vast expanse, a strong distance education infrastructure relying on interactive video and online instruction to reach our students. 

But where could a remote rural college go for help in the exploratory work needed to brainstorm and implement a virtual learning center that could bridge the gaps its students were experiencing in finding the larger context for their ideas, so that they could “differentiate between fact and opinion—and to present their ideas clearly and cogently?”

The answer is simple, they applied to the National Endowment for the Humanities:

In 2011, a group of faculty began to discuss applying for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Jeannie Rosenthal Bailey gathered those ideas into a challenge grant which was submitted to NEH in 2013 . . . The GBC Foundation had agreed to support the grant and to go beyond the 2-to-1 match to a 3-to-1 match, meaning that the $500,000 from NEH would realize a total contribution of $2,000,000 to GBC for the project over five years.

a challenge grant was submitted to NEH in 2013. We were expecting a polite refusal, but also valuable suggestions for a later resubmission. To our surprise, in July 2013 we received the news that GBC had received the grant!

A mining company dedicated “to contribute to the welfare of the communities and countries in which we operate” (Barrick North America), a state university in Utah, a rural college in Nevada—all brought together in common cause by a federal program now under attack for its supposed elitist preoccupations, its failure to demonstrate its worth beyond urban areas and left-leaning voters.

The peoples of the Great Basin might just disagree.

(Image: The Great Basin Indian Archives)