Conversations on Native American Cultural Sovereignty
Getting them returned from an obscure museum outside Boston hasn’t been easy for the descendants of those slain during the 1890 massacre in South Dakota.
Source: Native Americans fight for items looted from bodies at Wounded Knee
Some Indigenous leaders meeting with the Pope this week are requesting that he return these pieces of their history
Source: Delegates view Indigenous artifacts at Vatican with mix of awe and anger
Nakia Williamson-Cloud, Director of the Nez Perce Tribe’s Cultural Resources Program.
Source: How the Nez Perce Tribe got a valuable collection of artifacts back against all odds
Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. House Assistant Speaker Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), and U.S. Representatives Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), Don Young (R-Alaska), and Tom Cole (R-Okla.) reintroduced the bipartisan Safeguard Tribal Objects of Patrimony Act, a bill to prohibit the exporting of sacred Native American items and increase penalties for stealing and illegally trafficking tribal cultural patrimony. U.S. Senators Martin Heinrich (D-N.M), the lead author of the legislation, and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced the companion bill in the Senate.
Source: Members of Congress, Senators Introduce Bipartisan, Bicameral STOP Act To Safeguard Tribal Items
After several months of study, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is said to have decided on substantially cutting down the area of lands that presidents since Theodore Roosevelt have protected through the Antiquities Act.
Two of the four monuments Zinke wishes to reduce are those established by recent Democratic presidents. Highest on the list: Bears Ears National Monument, set aside for protection by President Obama. If Zinke and the President get their way, places like Bears Ears in Utah and Gold Butte in Nevada may now be re-opened to commercial mineral and resource extraction.
In a previous post, I outlined how the Act has been implemented since Roosevelt’s administration (it was a Republican-sponsored piece of legislation) by presidents who have responded to the public’s desire to see places with culturally sensitive landmarks and archaeological features preserved for future generations.
“I want to ask you to do one thing in connection with it in your own interest and in the interest of the country—to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is.”
Certainly Secretary Zinke is right when he says, “No President should use the authority under the Antiquities Act to restrict public access, prevent hunting and fishing, burden private land, or eliminate traditional land uses, unless such action is needed to protect the object.”
The law states: “the limits of [monuments] in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” But also says that private land may be caught up in the process: “When such objects are situated upon a tract . . . held in private ownership, the tract, or so much thereof as may be necessary for the proper care and management of the object, may be relinquished to the Government.”
Yet several of Zinke’s statements regarding his decision seem to ignore this provision and suggest a highly politicized process. Instead of simply acknowledging that many citizens have written to protest the changes to the boundaries of places like Bears Ears, Zinke interpreted their disagreement as some sort of conspiracy:
Comments received were overwhelmingly in favor of maintaining existing monuments and demonstrated a well-orchestrated national campaign organized by multiple organizations (Washington Post, 8/24/17).
Where else are everyday Americans who want to preserve sacred lands and archaeological wonders to turn? We don’t have as many lobbyists on K Street. Plus, much of our lobbying is done in the open, in letter writing campaigns and blogs like this one. We don’t have access to the golf clubhouses where deals involving the public interest are now routinely made.
“When such objects are situated upon a tract . . . held in private ownership, the tract, or so much thereof as may be necessary for the proper care and management of the object, may be relinquished to the Government.”
Petroglyphs at Gold Butte. Photo by Terri Rylander.
These objects need the special protection a monument designation provides precisely because they do not easily fall under the guidelines of NAGPRA, especially if the land in question is not federal land. Those who would claim that their rights to “improvement” are being violated by such monument designations often claim an ancestral right to the land. The problem with such claims, however, is that much of land use in the west is predicated upon ignoring earlier treaties the U.S. made with Indian tribes in the nineteenth century.
In an ideal world, those of us who wish to see sacred sites and objects of cultural patrimony be protected would simply write our representatives and eventually have legislation written to that effect. There would be compromises, to be sure, but in the end, both the rancher and worshiper would have land enough to peaceably coexist.
But we live in an era of legislative “under-reach” that almost guarantees nothing will get done in this regard. The U.S. Senate couldn’t even find a way to hold hearings for a Supreme Court nominee, something the Constitution lists as part of their job. How could they possibly act on something like this, an issue that requires careful thought, historical knowledge, and cultural sensitivity?
Although it is being marketed under the guise of local autonomy, this executive action is simply a disguised form of depatriation—the clawing back of Indian homelands into the maw of corporate interests. Repatriation law is founded on the right of peoples to declare sovereignty over those objects of cultural patrimony that have been unjustly alienated from them. More fundamentally, it posits a homeland to which such items may be returned.
Under Mr. Zinke’s plan, American Indians will have fewer places to worship and less land to spare for the bones of their ancestors.
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.
Investors in indigenous art anxiously awaited last week’s auction of the Rainer Werner Bock collection of Native Hawaiian materials. Gathered over a twenty-year period, it numbers some 1000 items, ranging from pounding stones to medicine bundles.
A visit to the online auction catalog of the esteemed French auction house Aguttes yields page after page of objects, each within its own little well-lit, immaculately photographed rectangle. Here, a huge run of grinding stones dating to the 18th century; there, a “stone medicine bowl,” its dating and method of “collection,” uncertain. The sale last week contained items of great historic interest as well, including a spear said to have been collected by Captain Cook during his third expedition in 1779/80, and a flag from the Hawaiian monarchic period.
Hawaiian flag, Monarchy Period (c. 1795-1893).
But where the avid collector of “antiquities” sees bargains and objet d’art to decorate a home, others find evidence of a forced diaspora of the stuff of Kanaka Maoli life.
One item in particular caught my eye, a “ceremonial bundle” from the nineteenth century. Is a religious utensil art? How was it acquired? If one community wishes to treat their religious objects as museum pieces, must all others?
Needless to say, not everyone was happy with the proposed sale. Native Hawaiian Edward Halealoha Ayau took a day off from sightseeing with his family on a European vacation to picket the auction house. When reached by phone on Hawaii’s KITV Island News, Ayau explained, “All we are asking is for the sellers to provide us with documentation that demonstrated that these were legitimate Hawaiian objects that were collected lawfully. . . . All we asked them to do was to prove the provenance of these items, ‘prove that you had informed consent to collect them, and if you have then you are free to do with them as you please.’”
All we are asking is for the sellers to provide us with documentation that demonstrated that these were legitimate Hawaiian objects that were collected lawfully
This is not the first time that a prestigious Paris auction house has been embroiled in controversy over trafficking in indigenous cultural objects.
Back in 2013, the Néret-Minet Tessier & Sarrou auction house in Paris put into bidding a collection of rare Hopi and Navajo ceremonial masks whose provenance was unclear. When concerned tribal members tried to take the auctioneers to court, French legal authorities held that the Hopi tribe had no legal standing in France. From the point of view of some outside observers, this ruling meant that the Paris market in antiquities had become “a safe haven for any indigenous cultural property.” The auction netted $1.2 million. 70 of these masks remain in private hands.
Later that year, another Paris dealer offered yet another set of masks, but this time, as the LA Times reported, “the L.A.-based Annenberg Foundation phoned in anonymous bids, landing 21 Hopi masks and three sacred Apache headdresses for $530,000, in order to return them to the tribes.” http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-native-american-hopi-sacred-mask-auction-paris-20140627-story.html
In 2016, Indian Country Today featured an interview with Tlingit Athabascan artist Crystal Worl, who was in Paris for an exhibition of her work. Once again, art dealers in the French capital were auctioning off Hopi masks. Among the lots were also a set of Haida and Tlingit ceremonials items. Worl joined other protesters outside the auction house, explaining to ICT reporter Dominique Godrèche,
My grandmother wanted me to be there; she knew what the Tlingit items meant. So I joined the protest, standing outside, holding signs. Hoping that this protest would reach the buyers, and they would give back the pieces to the community. We want them, because we are striving, as a culture . . . . [S]tanding there, at the auction, and seeing my ancestors was frustrating . . . I went to the Northwest coast room to see the objects, and they saw me: I wanted them to know that we are there for them, and we will wait for them. Their cultural value is essential to us: stories are related to each object, passed on to the next generation. All the pieces contain the spirits of the ancestors who created them. There is no Tlingit word for art, as our ceremonial objects are living beings. So this event was unfair; the items are our ancestors, they belong to our communities.
I went to the Northwest coast room to see the objects, and they saw me: I wanted them to know that we are there for them, and we will wait for them.
Chrystal Worl (second from left) and others protesting in Paris. (Indian Country Today, Csia-Nitassin)
Yet amidst this seemly wholesale disregard for indigenous cultural sovereignty, there is still some good news to report. The April 5-7 auction did not go well for Aguttes. As Thomas Admanson of the Associated Press reported last week, “only two of the least valuable lots sold for 10,455 euros ($11,134). The auctioneers believe “buyers apparently were scared off by a protest . . .”
Because the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) does not cover items in private collections, and is not recognized outside the U.S., Article 31 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People offers guidance on how these issues should be handled in the global art marketplace:
Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs, sports and traditional games and visual and performing arts. They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions. 2. In conjunction with indigenous peoples, States shall take effective measures to recognize and protect the exercise of these rights.
When courts and ethnics guidelines fail, it becomes the work of everyday people like Edward Halealoha Ayau and Crystal Worl—really all of us—to remind others of their responsibilities to the living cultures of the indigenous world.
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)
