by Nick Estes
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has given new license to the killing of Indigenous people in Brazil. Before he came to power in 2019, it wasn’t clear
Tag Archives: UN Declaration
Native American History Month: 2019
Every November since 1990, cultural and educational institutions across the US recognize the Indigenous peoples of this country with programming dedicated to celebrating Native American History Month. For The Repatriation Files, it is a good time to reflect on the past year in Indian Country—this highs and the lows—and to reacquaint readers with news and events from the more than 500 Native Nations recognized by the federal government.
The year 2019 began with a confrontation between high school students wearing MAGA hats and Native activist Nathan Phillips—an event chronicled in a January issue of this blog (“Nathan Phillips: An Elder for All Americans”).
“as the non-Indian struggles in solitude and despair, he curses the Indian for not coveting the same disaster.”
August saw the last edition of News from Indian Country, a Native owned and operated news outlet from Hayward, Wisconsin. Longtime editor, Paul DeMain recalled the early days of the publication:
News From Indian Country started publishing in 1987 and all three of these men [Pipe Mustache, Archy Mosay, and Richard LaCourse], along with Indigenous women like Janet McCloud, Rose Mary Robinson and Wilma Mankiller, and even a young woman named Winona LaDuke could be found in the pages of our earliest newspaper, the one now putting its last hard copy to bed.
We have survived the controversies of the last 40 years, a written testament to opinions of the widest dimensions. Treaty rights, taxing authority, identity, spiritualism, healing, war, trauma, battles between relatives, nations and international personalities (“33 Years of Publishing”).
Out west, the Yurok Nation was successful in its quest to have the Klamath River, the lifeblood of the Yurok homeland, the rights of personhood under the law. Following the example of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, who used the concept to designate wild rice (manoomin) as deserving the same protections as human beings.
“From New Zealand to Colombia, the powerful idea that nature has rights is taking root in legal systems.”
Following the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, more tribal communities have sought to rethink how they might protect sacred sites and their environment. According to High Country Times, “Legal personhood provides a different framework for dealing with problems like pollution, drought and climate change, though no case has yet been brought to put the Whanganui, Manoomin or Klamath rights to the test in court. The crucial aspect to establishing these legal frameworks, Indigenous lawyers say, involves shifting relationships and codifying Indigenous knowledge — in other words, recognizing non-human entities not as resources, but as rights-holders.
2019 was also the year that the Ponca leader Standing Bear was honored as a civil rights pioneer with a statue in the US Capitol building. As the Washington Post and the Smithsonian Magazine have reported, the statue commemorates the efforts of Standing Bear to overturn US law that in 1879 ruled that “an Indian was neither a person nor a citizen.” Standing Bear, the first Native person to offer testimony in federal court, argued that he and his community had the right to remain in their homeland, rather than be removed to Oklahoma. The presiding judge eventually agreed, ruling that “an Indian is a ‘person’ within the meaning of the laws of the United States” and that “no rightful authority exists for removing by force any of the relators to the Indian Territory.”
“That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours. I am a man. The same god made us both.”
Read more: Standing Bear
In the next post, we will explore Native American history month from the perspective of a recent presidential declaration that has overlaid this commemoration with something called “National American History and Founders Month.”
The Laissez Faire Ethics of Global Culture Brokers
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.